Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 37)

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Bush Claimed Right to Waive Torture Laws

By TERENCE HUNT
The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; 4:58 AM

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration laid out its legal reasoning for denying terror war suspects the protections of international humanitarian law but immediately repudiated a key memo arguing that torture might be justified in the fight against al-Qaida.

The release Tuesday of hundreds of pages of internal memos by the White House was meant to blunt criticism that President Bush had laid the groundwork for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by condoning torture. The president insisted Tuesday: "I have never ordered torture."

But critics said the developments left unresolved some questions about the administration`s current guidelines for interrogating prisoners in Iraq and around the world. For example, a 2002 order signed by Bush says the president reserves the right to suspend the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war at any time.

"These documents raise more questions than they answer," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "The White House is better off coming clean and releasing all relevant and nonclassified documents."

The White House released Defense Department memos detailing some of the harsh interrogation methods approved - and then rescinded - by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2002 and 2003. The administration continues to refuse to say what interrogation methods are approved for use now.

Six soldiers face criminal charges for abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib complex near Baghdad. Another soldier pleaded guilty and received a one-year prison term. The Justice Department has filed criminal assault charges against a contract CIA interrogator, accusing him of beating a prisoner in Afghanistan who later died.

An Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo argues that torture - and even deliberate killing - of prisoners in the terror war could be justified as necessary to protect the United States. The memo from then-assistant attorney general Jay Bybee also offers a restricted definition of torture, saying only actions that cause severe pain akin to organ failure would be torture.

Bybee is now a justice on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Justice Department backed away from Bybee`s memo Tuesday. Senior department officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the memo would be rewritten because it contains advice that is too broad and irrelevant. The officials, who briefed several reporters in a widely publicized news conference, said department policy allowed them to demand anonymity.

The White House also released documents detailing some of the most harsh interrogation methods Rumsfeld approved for use on prisoners at the lockup at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Rumsfeld`s Nov. 27, 2002, memo approved several methods which apparently would violate Geneva Convention rules, including:

-Putting detainees in "stress positions," such as standing, for up to four hours.

-Removing prisoners` clothes.

-Intimidating detainees with dogs.

-Interrogating prisoners for 20 hours at a time.

-Forcing prisoners to wear hoods during interrogations and transportation.

-Shaving detainees` heads and beards.

-Using "mild, non-injurious physical contact," such as poking.

Prisoners at Abu Ghraib were interrogated for as long as 20 hours at a time, kept hooded and naked, intimidated with dogs and forcibly shaved. Bush and other administration officials have said other treatment at the Iraqi prison, such as forcing prisoners to perform sex acts, beating them and piling them in a naked human pyramid, were unquestionably illegal.

Less than two months later, on Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld rescinded approval for those methods without saying why. He appointed a Pentagon panel to recommend proper interrogation methods.

That panel reported to Rumsfeld in April 2003, and its recommendations included prohibiting the removal of clothes, which it said could be considered inhumane treatment under international law. Rumsfeld issued a new set of approved interrogation methods later that month, disallowing nakedness and requiring approval for four techniques: use of rewards or removal of privileges; verbally attacking or insulting the ego of a detainee; alternating friendly and unfriendly interrogators in a "good cop, bad cop" method; and isolation.

Bush had agreed in February 2002 that al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were not protected by the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war because they violated the laws of war themselves.

Bush`s previously secret Feb. 7, 2002, order also agrees with Justice and Pentagon lawyers that a president can ignore U.S. law and treaties.

"I accept the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority to suspend Geneva (conventions) as between the United States and Afghanistan," Bush wrote. "I reserve the right to exercise this authority in this or future conflicts."

Bush and Rumsfeld have said the Geneva Conventions do apply to all prisoners in Iraq.

But Rumsfeld acknowledged last week that he ordered a suspected terrorist to be secretly held in Iraq without notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld said he approved an unspecified number of other, similar secret detentions.

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Associated Press writers Curt Anderson, Robert Burns and Scott Lindlaw contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Associated Press

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Ohne eine Definition von liberal und konservativ sind diese Vergleiche wertlos.

washingtonpost.com

Bull Market for Media Bias

By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A21

We in the news business think we`re impartial seekers of truth, but most Americans think otherwise. They view us as sloppy, biased and self-serving. In 1985, 56 percent of the public felt news organizations usually got their facts straight, says the Pew Research Center. By 2002 that figure was 35 percent. In 1985 the public thought the media "moral" by 54 percent to 13 percent; by 2003 opinion was split 40 percent to 38 percent. Americans think the "media make news rather than just report it," says Pew`s Andrew Kohut. The obsession with "scandal in high places" is seen as building audiences rather than advancing the public interest.

Still, the latest Pew survey confirms -- with lots of numbers -- an especially disturbing trend that we`ve all sensed: People are increasingly picking their media on the basis of partisanship. If you`re Republican and conservative, you listen to talk radio and watch the Fox News Channel. If you`re liberal and Democratic, you listen to National Public Radio and watch "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." It`s like picking restaurants: Chinese for some, Italian for others. And everyone can punch up partisan blogs -- the fast food of the news business. What`s disturbing is that, like restaurants, the news media may increasingly cater to their customers` (partisan) tastes. News slowly becomes more selective and slanted.

Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million weekly listeners. According to Pew, 77 percent are conservative, 16 percent moderate and 7 percent liberal. Or take Fox`s 1.3 million prime-time viewers: 52 percent are conservative, 30 percent are moderate and 13 percent liberal. By contrast, 36 percent of Americans are conservative, 38 percent moderate and 18 percent liberal. The liberals` media favorites are slightly less lopsided. The audience for "The NewsHour" is 22 percent conservative, 44 percent moderate and 27 percent liberal. NPR`s audience is 31 percent conservative, 33 percent moderate and 30 percent liberal. Of course, many news outlets still have broad audiences. Daily newspapers are collectively close to national averages; so is CNN.

But the partisan drift may grow, because distrust is spreading. In 1988 Pew found that 58 percent of the public thought there was "no bias" in election coverage. Now that`s 38 percent: 22 percent find a Democratic bias, 17 percent a Republican tilt. Almost all major media have suffered confidence declines. Among Republicans, only 12 percent say they believe "all or most" of Newsweek; for Democrats the figure is twice that, 26 percent. In 1985 the overall figure was higher (31 percent), with little partisan gap. Newsweek`s numbers typify mainstream media. Only 14 percent of Republicans believe "all or most" of the New York Times, vs. 31 percent of Democrats.

What`s going on? Why should we care?

Up to a point, conservative talk radio and Fox represent a desirable backlash against the perceived "liberal bias" of network news and mainstream media. I`ve worked in the mainstream press for 35 years. Editors and reporters reflexively deny a liberal bias, even though many ordinary people find it and mainstream newsrooms are politically skewed. Here are the latest Pew figures: 7 percent of national reporters and editors are conservative (a fifth the national rate), and 34 percent are liberal (almost twice the national rate). Most reporters I know believe fiercely in being fair and objective. Still, the debate over "what`s news and significant?" is warped. Talk radio and Fox add other views.

But the sorting of audiences by politics also poses dangers -- for the media and the country. We journalists think we define news, and from day to day we do. Over the longer run that`s less true. All news organizations must satisfy their audiences. If they don`t, they go out of business. "Media bias is product differentiation," says James T. Hamilton of Duke University; his book "All the News That`s Fit to Sell" shows how economic forces powerfully shape news judgments. If liberals and conservatives migrate to rival media camps, both camps may ultimately submit to the same narrow logic: like-minded editors and reporters increasingly feeding like-minded customers stories that reinforce their world view.

Economic interests and editorial biases will converge. The New York Times is now a national paper; 49 percent of its daily circulation is outside the New York area, up from 38 percent five years ago. There`s home delivery in 275 markets, up from 171 five years ago. But if the Times sells largely to upscale readers (average household income is $90,381, almost twice the national average) with vaguely liberal views, it risks becoming hostage to their sensibilities. No less does Fox risk becoming hostage to its base.

The worthy, if unattainable, ideals of fairness and objectivity will silently erode. Many forces push that way: new technologies (cable, the Internet); the blending of news and entertainment; the breakdown between "hard news" and interpretation; intense competition; changing news habits of the young. The damage will not just be to good journalism. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism notes that respected national media develop common facts and language that help hold society together and solve common problems. It will be a sad day when we trust only the media that voice our views.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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A Global Vision for Labor

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A21

SAN FRANCISCO -- He may not have been entirely happy about it, but on Monday, Andy Stern had his John L. Lewis moment.

Addressing roughly 3,000 delegates at the quadrennial convention of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Stern, who`s been the SEIU`s president since 1996, certainly had plenty to be happy about. While the vast majority of American unions have been shrinking or barely holding their own, the SEIU on Stern`s watch has nearly doubled in size, to 1.6 million members, which makes it much the largest on the continent. In the Northeast, the Midwest and on the Pacific Coast, it has won decent wages and health care benefits not just for public employees but for janitors, hospital orderlies and nursing home workers who would otherwise be making the minimum wage and seeing doctors only in emergency rooms. With the rate of private-sector unionization having dwindled to a minuscule 8 percent, however, the SEIU is really no more than a unionized island in a non-union sea. And the tides, as they are for all American unions, are threatening.

So the SEIU is also going global -- for the simple reason that it has to.

With two like-minded unions, the clothing-and-laundry UNITE and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (soon to become one union, UNITE-HERE, next month), the SEIU is embarking on a campaign to organize such multi-service global companies as Sodexho, Aramark and Compass Group -- corporations that provide food, laundry and janitorial services in ballparks, schools and hospital cafeterias, as well as in Iraq. Combined, the three companies employ 1.1 million people globally and 330,000 in the United States. Sodexho has 110,000 workers in the United States, and the three unions are putting up $10 million and 80 organizers and researchers to unionize it. But the battle won`t only be fought stateside. In conjunction with unions in Europe, says the SEIU`s Tom Woodruff, who is running the campaign, "We are working for agreements in more than one country." The U.S. unions seek company-wide recognition, while unions in, say, Britain, want access to Sodexho`s list of workers.

This level of global union cooperation is new, but much about this campaign takes a leaf out of John L. Lewis`s 70-year-old book on industrial organizing. Like Lewis, whose United Mine Workers funded the rise of such new unions as the United Auto Workers, the SEIU and UNITE-HERE envision a new union rising for the workers in these three companies. Like Lewis, who signed the first company-wide contracts with General Motors and U.S. Steel, Stern and UNITE-HERE`s leaders, Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, believe the only way to build back union strength is to organize entire companies at a time, rather than go facility by facility.

And like Lewis, whose frustration at the American Federation of Labor`s opposition to industrial organizing led him to break away and found the CIO in 1935, Stern called on Monday for the AFL-CIO (the two groups got back together in 1955) to radically change its structure. Currently, the AFL-CIO has 65 member unions, the vast majority too small to fund organizing campaigns, though some -- or their locals -- have been known to pick up new members when employers, facing the prospect of real unionization by the likes of the SEIU, have cut sweetheart deals with them. Stern would like to see the unions consolidated into about 15, with clear sectoral responsibilities and enough resources to organize. On Monday Stern told his delegates that it was time either to "change the AFL-CIO or build something stronger." At that, the floor erupted; delegates stood and whooped for a full minute.

Stern hadn`t wanted to raise this now, when all labor is working together to depose George W. Bush, but since the SEIU`s next convention isn`t until 2008, he had little choice. Moreover, the most likely way to raise these issues would be to run a candidate for the AFL-CIO presidency next year -- Wilhelm`s name is the one most commonly mentioned -- and the AFL-CIO already has a president, former SEIU president and Stern mentor John Sweeney.

Stern made clear on Monday that the problem was the AFL-CIO`s structure, not Sweeney. Unlike Lewis in days of yore, he has not said anything about storming out. But the logic of what Stern, Wilhelm and Raynor are asking is for many of their fellow union presidents to put themselves out of a job, albeit in the necessary cause of rebuilding their rickety movement. If Stern and company don`t prevail, the same door John L. Lewis left through is always gapingly there.

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`They said this is America . . . if a soldier orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey`

We know about Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib but until now Bagram and America`s secret network of Afghan jails have come under little scrutiny. In a major investigation, Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg discovered a familiar pattern of violent abuse and sexual humiliation
Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg
Wednesday June 23, 2004

The Guardian
Syed Nabi Siddiqi, a 47-year-old former police officer with piercing eyes and a long black beard, is lying with his face pressed to the floor, his arms stretched painfully behind his back. He is demonstrating one of the milder humiliations and interrogation techniques that he says happened to him after he was arrested by the Coalition forces in Afghanistan last year as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.

During the course of the next hour he will recount how American soldiers stripped him naked and photographed him, set dogs on him, asked him which animal he would prefer to have sex with, and told him his wife was a prostitute. He will tell also of hoods being placed over his head, of being forced to roll over every 15 minutes while he tried to sleep, and of being kept on his knees with his hands tied behind his back in a narrow tunnel-like space, unable to move.

An in-depth investigation by the Guardian, including interviews with former Bagram prisoners, senior US military sources and human rights monitors in Afghanistan, has uncovered widespread evidence of detainees facing beatings, sexual humiliation and being kept for long periods in painful positions. Detainees, none of whom were ever charged with any offence, told of American soldiers throwing stones at them as they defecated and being stripped naked in front of large groups of interrogators. One detainee said that, in order to be released after nearly two years, he had to sign a document stating that he had been captured in battle when, in fact, he was arrested while driving his taxi with four passengers in it.

At least five men have died while under detention, three of which were classified as homicides. Two deaths at Bagram airbase have been classified as homicides and autopsies have indicated "blunt-force injuries". An investigation into allegations of abuse and the deaths in custody has just been completed by Brigadier General Chuck Jacoby, the second highest-ranking US officer in Afghanistan, and parts of it are due to be made public next month.

While the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has come under the spotlight of the international media as well as US investigators, Bagram and the network of 19 US detention centres and "fire bases" around Afghanistan have largely avoided scrutiny. Until recently, human rights groups investigating alleged abuses in Afghanistan were not even sure how many of the secretive facilities existed. While Bagram is visited regularly by the International Committee of the Red Cross, witness testimonies suggest that much of the abuse took place at these satellite bases. Siddiqi`s story and others like it involving incidents from the end of the 2001 war to the present day indicate that what has been happening in Abu Ghraib is not an isolated occasion of rogue junior soldiers acting independently, but part of an apparent strategy of interrogation that was in place long before the invasion of Iraq.

"In some ways, the abuses in Afghanistan are more troubling than those reported in Iraq," said John Sifton, the Human Rights Watch representative in the area. "While it is true that abuses in Afghanistan often lacked the sexually abusive content of the abuses in Iraq, they were in many ways worse. Detainees were severely beaten, exposed to cold and deprived of sleep and water.

"Moreover, it should be noted that the detention system in Afghanistan, unlike the system in Iraq, is not operated even nominally in compliance with the Geneva conventions. The detainees are never given an opportunity to see any independent tribunal. There is no legal process whatsoever and not even an attempt at one. The entire system operates outside the rule of law. At least in Iraq, the US is trying to run a system that meets Geneva standards. In Afghanistan, they are not."

A `human sifting station`

An hour`s drive from Kabul, on a dusty plain beneath the majestic, snow-topped Panjshir mountains, sits Bagram airbase. Outside the heavily guarded and sandbagged main gate is a gaggle of small boys, hustling DVDs of The Passion of the Christ and the Baywatch satire, Son of the Beach, to GIs. Fleets of trucks delivering fuel to the base wait in the sun for clearance. Built in 1976, Bagram, formerly a military centre for the Soviet forces, consists of three main hangars, a control tower and various other single-storey buildings, of which the detention centre is one.

Prisoners describe the cells as five by 10 metres, with a large bucket serving as a toilet in the corner of each cell and blankets for beds. The cells, which house between 10 and 15 prisoners, are separated from each other with wire fencing. They occupy the middle of what one detainee called a "factory-like" space, with armed US guards in corridors on each side. Prisoners are taken from there to an interrogation facility, where they are interviewed by both military and CIA personnel and, according to one detainee, they are filmed during this process and watched by other interrogators in another room.

Some of the detainees are released after a few weeks; others stay for many months; some are transferred to Guantánamo Bay; still others are subjected to what is referred to by one human rights organisation as "RPing", or "Rumsfeld Processing". These are the prisoners whom the Pentagon refuses to acknowledge, and whose names do not appear in the records kept at Bagram. Sometimes, according to this organisation, the detainees may be "rendered" to Egyptian intelligence or other foreign services for interrogation.

Well before the establishment of the interrogation facilities at Guantánamo Bay and in Iraq, there had been an acknowledgement within the Pentagon - as early as October 2001 - that America`s war against al-Qaida and the Taliban might lead to the use of torture. Soon after the start of the Afghan war, lawyers at the Pentagon - specialists on the Geneva convention, international law and interrogation - were asked to explore the legal issues involved in the prosecution of this new war.

"There was a kind of sub rosa [secret] thought process during at least the first few months of the prosecution of the war on terror," a former Pentagon official told the Guardian. Legal experts began quietly discussing what methods could be used to extract information from captured fighters in Afghanistan. "It did not include electric probes in the genitals. But there were certainly a range of psychological measures," the official said. But that was in the upper echelons of the Pentagon. On the ground, military intelligence officials were developing their own sets of rules.

In those early stages, it was never envisaged that America would preside over a large prisoner population in Afghanistan. Bagram was supposed to be a giant human-sifting station, with a swift turnover of detainees. Its primary aim was to provide immediate battlefield intelligence, and to select a relatively small number of detainees thought to have strategic information about al-Qaida, who would be sent on for more detailed interrogation to Guantánamo.

In practice, Bagram has become a more permanent facility, a repository for al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and a dumping ground for people who ended up there often because an enemy had maliciously told the authorities that they were al-Qaida or Taliban members. The gathering of intelligence has proceeded extremely slowly.

"Once we were there six months, people began saying, `We don`t have Osama bin Laden, we don`t have Ayman al-Zawahiri.` All of a sudden it was like, `We are going to pressure interrogators,` " said a retired senior military intelligence official. When America went to war on Afghanistan, it had a severe shortage of experienced interrogators, and it was desperately short of Pashtu translators. But the Pentagon demanded results. Interrogators were set a target number for completed interrogations, and advised to limit each session to under an hour. "Unless you were going to come out with a good report that you were going to find a nuclear bomb in the desert or Osama bin Laden in a cave, they really didn`t really want to devote the time," said the official.

During the second half of 2002, Captain Carolyn Wood of the 519th military intelligence battalion was the officer demanding results. Wood, who was in charge of the Bagram Collection Point, the main screening area, was redeployed to Abu Ghraib last year, where she was also in charge of interrogations. US military spokesmen have said she laid down the same procedures that had been established at Bagram.

"In Afghanistan, they had some interrogation rules of engagement. When they deployed to Iraq, she brought those rules with her," one spokesman said. "Those rules were modified to make sure the right restraints were in place." Last month, Pentagon officials described to the Senate armed services committee Wood`s instructions for interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a supposedly more moderate version of her guidelines for Bagram. The captain`s rules of engagement included sleep and sensory deprivation, stress positions, dietary manipulation, and the use of dogs.

Attorneys for soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal believe that Wood was instrumental in setting policy for interrogations at the Iraqi prison - just as she did in Afghanistan. "We do think she is an important element in this case," said Gary Myers, the lawyer for Staff Sgt Ivan Chip Frederick, who goes on trial in Baghdad this week. "She was present, and we are thinking she has knowledge."

However, a former member of the 205th military intelligence brigade, which was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison at the time of the abuse, said an officer of Wood`s rank would not have had a free hand in setting policy either at Bagram or Abu Ghraib, but would be following orders from a higher command. An army spokeswoman said yesterday that Wood was on an advanced course at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the training centre for US military interrogators. She faces no charges in connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal. She has, however, been assigned a military lawyer.

The policeman`s story

The journey to Syed Nabi Siddiqi`s home in the village of Shaikhan, near Gardez, a city about 60 miles to the south of Kabul towards the Pakistan border, takes you past the tanks of Coalition forces on the outskirts of Kabul, past the Kochi nomad camel trains, strolling languidly across the highway, past the cemeteries with their traditional fluttering green, purple and yellow banners, through almost biblical scenes of 10-year-old goatherds and their charges, past the mine-clearers whose long blue armoured tunics and helmets make them look like medieval warriors, through the Tera Pass and into the crowded, dusty chaos of Gardez, which has seen regular warfare for much of the last quarter of a century.

Siddiqi, who has nine children, had a job as a policeman - he offers proudly to change into his uniform - and had been promoted to the post of deputy head of the crime department and the deputy in charge of operational officers in Gardez at the time of his arrest. However, he had had problems with his senior officers. The day before his arrest, he said, he had a meeting with his superior that turned into an argument.

"I said that there should be no corruption," said Siddiqi, offering tea and sultanas. "I said that every week there should be a visit to the jail which is under the control of the security commander." Siddiqi said that the local commander "knew nothing of how to deal with prisoners. He was an illiterate man; he put people in prison because he got money to do so."

The following day, when he returned to work, he was told that he was dismissed and was arrested by four soldiers, two Afghan and two from the Coalition forces. He told the troops that he had a breathing problem for which he needed medicine, so he was taken to the pharmacy where the pharmacist was promptly arrested, too, for no other reason, insists Siddiqi, than that they spoke to each other. Both men were blindfolded and taken to the Coalition detention centre in Gardez, one of 20 such centres across the country.

An interpreter wearing a mask then told him to cooperate and asked him if he knew Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president of Afghanistan. He said he did, but had not seen him since he returned to his village. He was then asked if he knew Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the founder of the Islamist party, Ittehad-e-Islami. "I said I had heard about him but had not met him."

After three or four days, he was taken away blindfolded, he said, by a group of Americans. "They were kicking me and beating me and shouting like animals at me. They took off my uniform. I requested them several times - `If you don`t respect me, please respect my uniform.` I showed them my identity card from the government of President Karsai. Then they asked me which animals - they made the noise of goats, sheep, dogs, cows - I had had sexual activities with. They laughed at me. I said that such actions were against our Afghan and Islamic tradition, but they again asked me, `Which kind of animals do you want to have sex with?` Then they asked me to stand like this [he indicates being bound to a pole] and beat me with a stick from the back and kicked me. I still have pains in my back as a result. They told me, `Your wife is a prostitute.` "

"All the time I kept saying, `Why are you doing such things?` and they laughed," he said. He and other prisoners were then placed in a structure, 25m long by 2m wide. Siddiqi demonstrated how they were made to kneel with their hands handcuffed behind their back in great discomfort. "I saw many other people - young, old, different ages." After he had been detained for 22 days, an American soldier wrote the number 22 on his hand. He was told to make sure the number was not erased or he would not be released. They were taken outside, where he and other prisoners, still handcuffed behind their backs, were dumped face first in two helicopters, some piled on top of prisoners already in the helicopter, he said. "I asked for water and my medicines and they kicked me again."

They were flown to Kandahar, where, once they had been taken out of the helicopters, he begged again for water. "I was saying, `Oh, mister, give me some water!` Nobody cared. At the back of every detainee there was an American standing.

"Then they brought dogs close to us, they were biting at us," he said, demonstrating how he and the other prisoners had cowered and tried to protect themselves from the dogs. "Then we were taken into another room and they took off our trousers. Then they just beat us. They took off my watch. In another room, they took our photographs without any clothes on. They asked me, `Are you al-Qaida or Taliban?` I said, `No, I am a policeman.` Then they gave us a blue uniform." He points out the colour from part of the pattern on the carpet where we are sitting. "They blindfolded me and shackled my hands and legs. It was very painful. Again they started kicking me. Then they began to open my legs and my arms." He demonstrated being spreadeagled. He said he was beaten with a stick.

After his blindfold had been taken off, he found himself with around 15 to 20 other prisoners, aged, he said, from teenagers to the elderly. The prisoners were not allowed to converse, but one man told him that he was an Afghan soldier who had been wrongly reported as being a member of a Pakistani militia. They were told that they had to go to the toilet in front of everyone else and American troops jokingly threw stones at them while they did.

"One American soldier said, `Why are you ashamed to show your backside? Why are you so shy? See my backside.` and he showed it to us." Here he paused. "You know that we are Muslim. According to Muslim tradition, if a person tells lies, he is not a real Muslim. Everything I say is true."

Siddiqi said that they were made to roll over in the night every 15 minutes or so in order that they could not sleep. Then the interrogations started again. "It was always, `Are you Taliban or al-Qaida?`"

A civilian interrogator, whom Siddiqi described as wearing black jeans, treated him sympathetically. "He was a nice man. I told him that I am an innocent person and he told me I would forget what had happened. I said I would not forget it." After 12 days in Kandahar, he was taken by helicopter to Bagram. He was again made to lie on the floor, he said, once again demonstrating how his face was forced on to the ground. "Then an American asked, `Who is the policeman?` and they got me up and took my blindfold off. I saw computers and American flags on the wall.

"They asked me, `Do you know where you are now?` I said no. They said, `This is America. Do you accept American laws and rules?` I said: `If this is America, I will accept and obey the rules.` They said, `If a soldier orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey.` Then they took off our clothes and with gloves on they touched us everywhere they wanted." He said that fingers were stuck in his anus. (While the detainees we spoke to described these incidents as humiliating, the Coalition authorities maintain that they are standard search techniques to ensure that prisoners do not bring weapons into jails.) After 11 nights at Bagram, he was asked at two in the morning if he wanted to see his family and if he missed them.

"Then they said, `Do you forgive and forget?` I told them, `I will forgive all of you if you punish those people who reported me to you wrongly.` I told them that the reports came from people who had links with the government of the former communist regime and that they should not accept such reports. They promised me they would punish those people. They gave me a bottle of water and a box of biscuits and asked me to take them to my children."

In total, he was held for 45 days before being returned to his family. "When I returned, my children who were studying at school had left their lessons and were working in the bazaar in the city because there was no one to feed them."

The driver`s story

Out in the wheat fields, not far from Siddiqi`s home, a young man is helping to build a mud wall. Noor Aghah is 35, a father of four. Wearing a kolla, the traditional hat, he comes down from the wall to talk and we sit in a field watched intently by a teenage boy with a slingshot, who breaks off momentarily to fell a bird perched in a nearby tree. Lighting a cigarette, Aghah tells his story.

He had applied for a job as a driver for a local militia commander at the end of 2001, working first in Gardez and then in Kabul before returning to Gardez. Then the commander was arrested as a suspect and, six days later, so was Aghah. After one month`s detention at the Coalition centre outside Gardez, a complex of fort-like mud buildings and modern metal warehouses, he was sent to Bagram, where he was to spend the next four months.

"They said, `Tell us what sort of work [the commander] used to do,` " he said of his initial detention in Gardez. "I said I hadn`t seen anything. Then they forced me to drink 12 bottles of water and they didn`t allow me to go to the toilet." The interrogation continued along the same lines for one month, he said, with questions being asked all the time about his commander.

Along with other prisoners, he was handcuffed and kept kneeling in a narrow open space between two high walls with direct sun coming down on them for 10 hours during the day. This continued for 20 days until an American doctor instructed that a covering be put over the space and that the prisoners be given blankets and pillows. "Every minute in Gardez they were beating us. Mostly they kick me," he said.

"At Bagram, we were totally forbidden to talk to other prisoners and when we were interrogated we were blindfolded," he said. "Americans interrogated me with an interpreter. Twice a woman asked questions but it was mostly men. They interrogated me every day in Bagram for one month and then only every 20 days or so. They asked me if I was Taliban or al-Qaida. In Gardez and also in Bagram, we were asked to take off our clothes and everyone saw us without clothes, six or seven people."

Eventually, he was released. "In Bagram, they apologised and gave me a letter." (This pro forma letter declares that someone has been released from detention and is not a suspect, although it adds, `This certificate has no bearing on future misconduct.`) He knew of two other men who had suffered similar treatment.

"I was surprised and confused because I was innocent," said Aghah. "Why should a person not involved in crime go to jail and be treated like this?" He is unusual in being prepared to speak about what happened to him, although he does not want some of the more humiliating things that were done to him to be reported. "Maybe if they read your report, they will arrest me again," Aghah said, with a laugh. "Maybe you won`t know."

`A culture of impunity`

Fahim Hakim, a quietly spoken, thoughtful man, is the deputy head of the Independent Human Rights Commission set up in June 2002 as part of the Bonn agreeement signed by prime minister Hamid Karzai. Its 330 members of staff across the country have the task of both promoting human rights and investigating abuses, and it has been Hakim`s job to analyse the many complaints arising from the detentions. The commission had received 60 complaints, he said, some from the detainees themselves, and some from the families of men who are still inside.

He said that the complaints had come mainly from Gardez, Jalalabad and Kandahar. "It was really shocking. We had this kind of mistreatment during the communist regime - mass arrests, mass graves, killing of people, torture - but in a country where there is a low rate of literacy and where we haven`t had a well-trained and professional national police, this could be expected. But from those who are well trained and professional, who are talking about human rights and democracy, it is a great shock."

The complaints he had heard, he said, were to do with the stripping of prisoners, with the feeling of their genitals, with their being made to defecate in front of the Coalition forces, and with beatings. "There were a group of people kept naked in one room and given a bucket in the one room and asked to use that and it was traditionally, culturally, socially not possible for them and, to their surprise and shock, Coalition forces would come and say, `It`s very easy, aim at that.` "

"There was taunting language - `Do you know what is happening next door? Your wife is naked there. Our colleagues are playing with her,` " said Hakim. "There was deprivation of sleep and being made to kneel was the common complaint. There were complaints, too, of beating and kicking. They came here to liberate us, to make us free of this intimidation and oppression, but this will be overshadowed by this sort of behaviour."

His colleague, Zia Langari, said, "Traditionally, [detainees] do not want to make this sort of thing known because of the shame involved. If a man says that he has had to be naked, he gets a bad name for himself, so, because of the fear and shame, they will not disclose this to the public. Some of them ask that the sexual abuse they suffered not be disclosed."

Langari said that all the detainees interviewed said that they had received sexual abuse. This may in many cases have been strip searches involving anal and genital examinations and which US officials have argued were necessary to ensure that weapons were not brought into jails. "Maybe the Americans say that this is part of an investigation technique practice everywhere, but for Afghans it is not acceptable," said Langari. "They could x-ray them if they are suspicious of them."

Horia Mosadiq, an Afghan human rights worker who has interviewed many former detainees, said that many felt humiliated. Some told of having their pubic and underarm hair shaved by female US soldiers, she said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has access to Bagram every two weeks, but it is part of its established policy that it does not release details of its reports. It has not been able to gain such access to the other detention centres where many of the alleged abuses have taken place. Other human rights organisations have also failed in their attempts to visit them. "We have asked for access many times but in general there has been no response," said Nazia Hussein of Amnesty International, "so it is very difficult to determine what conditions are like."

Davood Moradian, an Afghan who lectures at St Andrews University`s international relations department, said: "Bagram seems to be run with exactly the same culture of impunity as the [Afghan] warlords run their private prisons. My impression is that the detainees are mainly poor people who do not have connections and footsoldiers, rather than the top people."

The Americans are now, in the wake of the revelations of Abu Ghraib, conducting an investigation. Earlier this month, General Barno, speaking at the sandbagged Coalition HQ, said that a "top to bottom" review of detention facilities was being undertaken by his deputy, General Chuck Jacoby. Barno said that much of the intelligence gleaned from these interrogations had been "extremely useful" in safeguarding the lives of Coalition soldiers and identifying targets. "That said, regardless of any intelligence value, I will tell you without hesitation that intelligence procedures have got to be done in accordance with the approriate standards . . . All our forces will treat every detainee here with dignity and respect."

Last week a US spokesman in Kabul said procedures at US-run detention centres in the country had been changed as a result of Brig Gen Jacoby`s interim findings, but he would not say how.

The deaths of three prisoners in custody are also being reviewed. Two died in Bagram in December 2002. A death certificate for a man, known simply as Dilawar, aged 22, from Yakubi in eastern Afghanistan, and signed by Major Elizabeth Rouse, pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, states that the cause of death was "blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease". Another prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, brother of a former Taliban commander, died the same month. Two of their fellow prisoners, Abdul Jabar and Hakkim Shah, told the New York Times last year that they were routinely kept naked, hooded, shackled and with their hands chained to the ceiling day and night. The circumstances of their deaths have still to be determined, said Fahim Hakim. The third suspcious death is that of Abdul Wali, a former commander, who died four days after he presented himself for questioning at the request of the governor of Kunar. He died after reportedly undergoing interrogation by a private contract employee of the CIA.

It has been argued that whatever the American troops may have done, its abuses pale into insignificance beside what the Taliban did to their prisoners. Until 2001, public executions and amputations as punishment were carried out at the national stadium in Kabul. However, human rights monitors point out that the action of the Coalition forces and their presence in the country is posited on ending "uncivilised" behaviour and installing a system of fairness and justice. Though Bagram and its satellite detention centres have so far been a largely hidden corner of America`s new gulag, there are signs that the treatment of detainees there is now beginning to come under scrutiny from Washington. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat member of the Senate subcommittee on foreign operations, who has campaigned about prison abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq, told the Guardian: "The abuses in Afghanistan were no less egregious than at Abu Ghraib, but because there were no photographs - at least, to our present knowledge - they have not received enough attention.

"Prisoners in Afghanistan were subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, and some died from it. These abuses were part of a wider pattern stemming from a White House attitude that `anything goes` in the war against terrorism, even if it crosses the line of illegality. Not only should these incidents be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators punished, but we need rules to prevent it from happening again."

Behind the wire: Bagram`s secrets
Until recently what goes on inside Bagram, as well as the number and identities of inmates who have been held there, has been shrouded in secrecy. Earlier this month, in response to a question from the Guardian, Lieutenant General David Barno, the head of US forces in Afghanistan, revealed that more than 2,000 people have been detained at the base since the war, and that there are currently 400 detainees being held without charge.

Last week a US spokesman in Kabul said procedures at the prison had been changed in response to the interum findings of an internal investigation.

· The interpreter in Afghanistan was Noor Ahmed.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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US voters are waking up to the reality of Iraq

Editorial

The Independent

23 June 2004

The "war on terror" was supposed to be the trump card of George W Bush in his battle to win a second term. America`s economy might be in the doldrums, and the occupation of Iraq an increasing failure, but, the theory ran, the President`s perceived ability to keep the country safe would be enough to see off Democrat John Kerry`s challenge in November. Not for the first time in this campaign, the conventional wisdom may be wrong.

Yesterday`s poll in The Washington Post is perhaps the most alarming yet for the Bush camp, not because it shows the Massachusetts senator with a narrow lead, or because Mr Bush`s approval rating remains below 50 per cent. Such has been the message of such surveys for weeks, as scarcely a day goes by without more bad news for the White House. Until now, however, the President has consistently rated far higher than Mr Kerry in how voters view his effectiveness in dealing with terrorist threats. No longer.

Finally, it would seem, the penny has dropped for American voters: far from making them safer, the invasion of Iraq has been al-Qa`ida`s most effective recruiting agent yet, fomenting anti-Americanism around the world, and turning Iraq itself into a so-called "Super Bowl" of international terrorism. Indeed, Mr Bush describes Iraq as "the central front" in the "war on terror". Now Americans are taking him at his word, and they are not impressed by what they see. The poll suggests that, albeit by a statistically insignificant margin, they now trust Mr Kerry to do a better job of it.

Publicly, Bush supporters claim it is a miracle that their man is as close to Mr Kerry as he is, given the Iraq prison abuse scandal, the ever-rising US casualty toll, and the mounting evidence of administration mendacity, both over Saddam Hussein`s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and the insinuation that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks. If the 30 June transfer of sovereignty goes relatively smoothly, they say, and the focus shifts from the US presence in Iraq, the President will be in good shape for the only poll that matters, the one on 2 November. In private, however, the worries are surely growing.

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

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Wednesday, June 23, 2004

2 US Troops Killed; Airstrike on Fallujah;
Korean Hostage Killed

The Associated Press reports that guerrillas attacked a US military convoy near Balad north of Baghdad, killing two US troops and wounding another.

After the body of a Korean hostage was found, the US air force launched yet another air attack, allegedly on a safe house for the al-Tawhid group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. AP reports, ` Fallujah residents said the strike hit a parking lot. Three people were killed and nine wounded, said Dr. Loai Ali Zeidan at Fallujah Hospital. ` An airstrike on Saturday killed 22, including some children and a woman, according to local residents. The US military maintained that the dead were radical Islamists and that the house went on exploding for a while because of the explosives stored there.

Guerrillas holding a Korean hostage killed him when the Korean government declined to withdraw its forces from Iraq (it is planning to send 3,000 more, dedicated to reconstruction and medical tasks, not to peace enforcement).

I don`t think a lot of press attention should be given to the capture and killing of a single hostage, since the whole point of the captors is to generate such attention. I think the big stories on Tuesday were the killing of 2 more US troops near Balad and the airstrike on Fallujah. The beheading creates a lurid interest, but it doesn`t matter to a dead person how he was killed. And, no, beheading has nothing special to do with Islam, it is just grisly and a good tool for terrorists.

The South Korean government is unlikely to back off its commitments because of this one murder. However, the killings of hostages have caused large numbers of civilian contractors to flee Iraq, according to al-Jazeerah. And, a group of Korean parliamentarians condemned their government for throwing in with what they saw as Bush`s unprovoked war in Iraq. The Washington Post contrasts the lively and divisive debate over Iraq in South Korea with the way in which Italians generally closed ranks over killings of their troops and of a hostage in Iraq.

posted by Juan @ 6/23/2004 08:51:42 AM

British Sailors Held by Iran

The Scotsman reports "Foreign Office fury" at Iran`s capture of 8 British sailors when they strayed over to the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab. The Shatt is a mile-wide body of water created by the union of the Tigris and Euphrates, which then flows into the Persian Gulf. The border between Iran and Iraq lies precisely in the middle of the Shatt al-Arab, which has caused trouble between the two countries for a long time. Control of the Shatt was one of the motives for Saddam Hussein`s 8-year war against Iran in the 1980s.

The capture of the Western sailors and the issuing of a videotape of them blindfolded hearken back to the hostage crisis of 1979-1981, when Iranian activists took US embassy personnel hostage.

It is possible that the British did stray a bit over onto the Iranian side of the Shatt. But it is likely that the hardliners in Tehran have engaged in these theatrics for domestic political purposes. The committed Shiites in Iran had been absolutely infuriated by the US troops` desecration of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in April and May, which provoked demonstrations in Tehran against the British Embassy. The problem is that the Iranian regime did nothing practical about this outrage to Shiite sensibilities, and did not want to tangle with the US army. Taking these British sailors hostage for a few days is a symbolic act of retribution by Khamenei`s government that shores up his support from the Iranian hard right. It seems likely that Iran will release them before too long.

The incident may also be intended to punish the UK for pressing Iran on the issue of nuclear weapons development, most recently in concert with the European Union.

It seems to me very likely that Iran will get a nuclear weapon. Any ruling elite in the global south with bad relations with the US can look at the difference between how the Bush administration dealt with Saddam and how it has dealt with North Korea. The difference seems mainly to be that North Korea already had a couple of nukes, whereas Iraq was not anywhere close. So Khamenei would look at that and decide that his government needs a couple of nukes to avoid being overthrown by the US, especially since Bush telegraphed his intention to do just that. I don`t see how it could be stopped militarily; the US is overstretched and in no position to attack and occupy Iran.

This is the point that Senator Edward M. Kennedy made on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But I would emphasize the ways in which Bush`s aggressiveness have probably actually ramped up any Iranian nuclear weapons program, out of which the Iranians might have been argued under different circumstances.

Of course, when one`s neighbors, such as Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India and (de facto) the United States all have nukes, that is a pretty powerful incentive to get them, in any case.

posted by Juan @ 6/23/2004 07:55:32 AM

US Has Lost War for Hearts and Minds in Iraq

Guy Dinmore and Alex Barker of the Financial Times report that some military analysts believe that the US has lost the wider war for hearts and minds in Iraq, and that the complex Sunni Muslim insurgency is defeating efforts by the relatively small US military force in Iraq to defeat it. The authors refer specifically to Ahmed Hashim of the Naval War College, Rhode Island, who has advised the US military on counter-insurgency. The authors say that Hashem

` described an "Islamo-nationalist fusion", a binding together of minority Sunnis now out of power and fearing their identity to be under threat. Their infrastructure is the mosques. Tribal elements play a role, as well as Islamist extremists from outside Iraq. Insurgents are growing more proficient and their tactics and techniques more lethal. They lack military resources but they have one key element that the US does not: time. `



Dinmore and Barker add:

Andrew Krepinevich, a veteran military analyst and formerly of the Pentagon, says that the insurgency, being primarily urban, has a "lower probability of success" than rural campaigns, as in China, Vietnam and Laos. But their focus will be to defeat the will of the US, he told the FT. `



Krepinevich is making the wrong analogy. From the point of view of social history, contemporary Iraq is not like China, Vietnam and Laos. It is like Iran in the 1970s. An urban insurgency/ revolution can in fact win, and win quite decisively, as the urban crowds won out over the shah. The shah tried everything to put down the urban crowds. He had them spied on. He had them shot at. Nothing worked. The urban crowds just got bigger and bigger.

The guerrillas in Iraq are hoping to provoke big, frequent demonstrations by the urban crowd. If elections are not held in January, or if they are widely felt to be unfair or stage-managed-- and if US troops overstay their welcome, we could well see the big crowds start coming out. The big threat for the US is if dissatisfaction with the situation and with the US presence becomes generalized in both the Shiite and the Sunni communities. If Grand Ayatollah Sistani and Sunni cleric Hareth al-Dhari both call for the crowds to come out, you could have hundreds of thousands in the streets.

Big, frequent urban demonstrations, in Mosul, Baghdad, Najaf, Basra, etc., would be a trump card. The US and the UK would just have to leave. You can`t take the crowds out and shoot them. If you do shoot at the demonstrators, you just grow the crowds the next time. The shah made this mistake with Black Friday (Sept. 8, 1978), when his troops fired into the crowd. It just infuriated everyone.

This worst case scenario will very possibly come to pass if 1) the US troops overstay their welcome and continue to act heavy-handedly (a repeat of April`s twin sieges of Fallujah and Najaf would be fatal), if 2) the January elections are postponed or perceived as deeply flawed, and if 3) both Sunni and Shiite leaders beyond the small circle of the guerrillas call for massive demonstrations.

I`d give 50/50 odds of this kind of urban crowd revolution happening in Iraq sometime in the next two years. It would be a huge disaster if the US were tossed out of Iraq by such a phenomenon. Leaving voluntarily and in a phased manner would be far more preferable.

posted by Juan @ 6/23/2004 07:50:30 AM

Neocons can`t Spell

A reader asked me to comment on the controversy over whether an Iraqi intelligence agent was detailed to al-Qaeda in Kuala Lumpur to be the guy that picked people up at the airport. It was covered by the Washington Post after the allegation was made by 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy.

The al-Qaeda employee in Malaysia is named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi.

The Iraqi intelligence agent is named Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad.

Political Scientist Christopher Carney, who was brought in to look at documents by Doug Feith`s Office of Special Plans so as to second-guess trained analysts at the CIA who actually know Arabic, first made the mistake of identifying the two. Carney is an Americanist at Penn State and had no business butting in.

The family name (here, nisba) of the al-Qaeda guy in Malaysia is Azzawi.

The family name of the guy in Iraqi intelligence is Ahmad.

Do you notice how they are not the same?

The personal or first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad.

The personal or first name of the Iraqi intelligence agent is Hikmat.

Do you notice how it is not the same?

So, Ahmad Azzawi is not Hikmat Ahmad. See how easy that is?

Mr. Ahmad Azzawi has a couple of middle names, to wit, Hikmat Shakir. Having a couple of middle names is common in the Arab world.

Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad just has one middle name, Shakir. This is the only place at which there is any overlap between them at all. They share a middle name. And, o.k., one of Azzawi`s middle names is the same as Lt. Col. Ahmad`s first name.

This would be like having someone named Mark Walter Paul Johnson who is a chauffeur for Holiday Inn.

And then you have a CIA agent named Walter Paul Mark.

Obviously, it is the same guy, right? Natch.

Azzawi is a nisbah, a form of last name having to do with a place or occupation or tribe. I`m not sure, but an `azzaw might be someone who specialized in consoling family members over the death of a loved one. It is being used as a family name.

Lt. Col. Ahmad`s last name could also be used as a first name. It may well be his father`s first name. Some Arab families use a system like that in Scandinavia. Thus, the father is Thor Odinsson and the son is Loki Thorsson. There isn`t a stable family name in that case. In the old style, he might be Hikmat ibn Ahmad or the son of Ahmad, but a lot of people drop the ibn nowadays. Most families either have a nisba type family name or they don`t. If a guy`s last name is Azzawi, that would certainly be in the government records. Lt. Col. Ahmad did not have Azzawi as a family name.

The first name or personal name is called "ism". In this case, the first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad. This means "the most praised" and is an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad.

The ism or personal name of the intelligence officer is Hikmat. Hikmah in Arabic means "wisdom." Hikmat with a long `t` at the end shows Ottoman influence, which in turn suggests an upper class Sunni background.

There isn`t actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment`s thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Isn`t it a shame that we have these key people doing important things who are either incompetent ignoramuses or dumb as posts?

Stephen Hayes of the National Review was on Jon Stewart`s Daily Show Monday, by the way, peddling his book, which is full of similar nonsense, and at one point Stewart actually told him he thought the book was a load of crap. Stewart`s Daily Show is among the best sources of news analysis on television.

posted by Juan @ 6/23/2004 07:30:42 AM

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Wirklich schlechte Handelsnachrichten vernebelt man ablenkungstechnisch durch schlechte Nachrichten von anderen Fronten
von Saul Landau
ZNet Kommentar 18.06.2004
“Den Armen und an den Rand Gedrängten wird Gerechtigkeit in aller Regel vorenthalten, (dabei) würden sie am meisten von der fairen Anwendung von Gesetz und Menschenrechten profitieren. Doch trotz der zunehmenden Debatte um die Unteilbarkeit der Menschenrechte, sieht die Realität so aus, dass wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Rechte vernachlässigt werden, sodass die Menschenrechte für die große Mehrheit der Weltbevölkerung auf ein bloßes theoretisches Konstrukt reduziert sind. Es ist nicht nur Zufall, dass im Irak-Krieg der Schutz der Ölquellen Priorität gegenüber dem Schutz von Krankenhäusern zu haben schien”, aus dem Jahresbericht von Amnesty International, Mai 2004. Am 29. Mai haben Terroristen, die der Al Kaida zugerechnet werden, in Saudi-Arabien westliche Geiseln genommen. Mehr als 20 dieser Geiseln wurden getötet - was Skeptiker in ihrer Ansicht bestätigt, Bushs Krieg gegen den Terror habe die Welt nicht sicherer sondern gefährlicher gemacht. Während aus dem Irak weiter schlechte Nachrichten eintreffen (und Bush sorgt dafür, dass die “Terroristen”, “Aufständischen” oder wie immer man “diese Leute” bezeichnen mag, an Boden und Prestige gewinnen), bezichtigt Amnesty International die USA, an der dauerhaften Erosion der Menschenrechte und des internationalen Rechts schuld zu sein - es sei schlimmer als in den letzten 50 Jahren. “Die globale Sicherheitsagenda, wie von der US-Administration verbreitet, ist eine visionäre Bankrotterklärung und prinzipienlos”, so der Report. “Im Namen der Sicherheit des eigenen Landes opfert (sie) Menschenrechte, ignoriert Misshandlungen im Ausland und setzt preemptive Militärgewalt ein, wo und wann immer sie will, was weder die Sicherheit erhöht, noch die Freiheit gesichert hat”. Anstatt dem Irak Freiheit und Sicherheit zu bescheren, resultierte Bushs Krieg gegen den Terror in systematischem Einsatz von Folter im Gefängnis Abu Ghraib - dies ist allerdings nur die sprichwörtliche Spitze des Eisbergs, was US-Folter im Irak und in Afghanistan anbelangt. Derweil haben Bushs Männer fürs Grobe versucht, die Öffentlichkeit vom täglichen Trauerspiel in Bagdad abzulenken, indem sie an der Heimatfront Alarmmeldungen verbreiteten. Schon wieder gibt Generalstaatsanwalt John Ashcroft eine dringliche Terrorwarnung aus. Allerdings vergaß er, das Ministerium für Heimatsicherheit (Department of Homeland Security) über die angeblich so imminente (aber wie immer vage) Drohung zu informieren. Und da ist das allgegenwärtige “Breaking-news”-Gekreische - “neue Entwicklungen” im Gerichtsfall Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson: Massenablenkungswaffen, die von den eigentlich wichtigen Nachrichten ablenken.

Einem Bericht der UNCTAD (Konferenz der Vereinten Nationen für Handel und Entwicklung) hingegen wurde in keiner der großen Zeitungen und TV-Nachrichtensendungen ‘prime space’ eingeräumt - leider. Die UNCTAD veröffentlicht zweimal im Jahr einen Report. Mit dem (aktuellen) Dokument zieht sie die gesamte “Globalisierung” bzw. das System der “freien Marktwirtschaft” in Zweifel. Der Anstieg des internationalen Handels, so der Report, habe nicht etwa zum Abbau der Armut in den ärmsten Ländern der Welt geführt. In Wirklichkeit sei die Armut während des Welthandels-Booms angestiegen, ebenso habe die Einkommenskluft zwischen Arm und Reich zugenommen. Laut dieser Studie gibt es wenig, was darauf schließen lässt, dass Handel das Einkommen der ärmsten Menschen in den 50 unterentwickeltsten Ländern der Welt verbessert hat. Zwar bestätigen die UNCTAD-Offiziellen, der Handel habe dazu beigetragen, einige arme Länder in die Weltwirtschaft zu integrieren; als Folge der neoliberalen Handelspolitik hätten sich deren negative Handelsbilanzen allerdings weiter verschlechtert. Bedeutet das, die Öffnung der Märkte verbreitet keinen Segen? Um das herauszufinden, hätte es keiner Expertengruppe bedurft, wache Leute haben das schon längst erkannt: Welthandels-Investionen - zoll- und steuerfrei und ohne Regierungsregularien - schaden den mehr als 3 Milliarden bedürftigsten Menschen dieser Welt, und sie nützen den Reichsten. Weitere Daten, die diese Schlussfolgerung belegen, enthält ein aktueller Bericht der ECLAC (UN-Wirtschaftskommission für Lateinamerika und die Karibik). Die Autoren schätzen, dass in den lateinamerikanischen Ländern und der Karibik 227 Millionen Bürger unterhalb der Armutsgrenze leben. Für die ersten Jahre des 21. Jahrhunderts hat man für diese Region eine Arbeitslosenrate von 10,3% ermittelt - was fast der Depressionszeit der 30ger entspricht. Enrique Iglesias, Präsident der Inter-amerikanischen Entwicklungsbank, bestätigt: 44% der Bevölkerung Lateinamerikas leben unterhalb der Armutsgrenze. Die Region, gibt Iglesias zu, reflektiere eine hässliche Kluft in puncto Reichtumsverteilung, es herrsche massive Arbeitslosigkeit und “soziale Ausgrenzung, mitbeeinflusst durch ethnische und rassische Faktoren”. Auf der anderen Seite diskutieren Finanzexperten auf den Kommentatoren- und Wirtschaftsseiten der New York Times und des Wall Street Journals, ob der Ex-Chef der New Yorker Börse Richard Grasso sein “Kompensationspaket” in Höhe von $188,5 Millionen nun verdient hat oder nicht - Grasso musste seinen Posten vorzeitig räumen. Sie diskutieren, ob CEOs, die tausende Arbeiter niederer Lohngruppen entlassen, einen Bonus über $10 oder $20 Millionen erhalten sollten. Prominente, über deren Beitrag zur Weltkultur wir nicht zu diskutieren brauchen, akzeptieren Verträge, bzw. lehnen sie ab, bei denen es um hunderte Millionen geht. Ein gewisser Baseball-Spieler “verdient” Millionen von Dollars damit, Schuhe anzupreisen, die $100 und mehr kosten. $100 Dollar - für die Hälfte der Weltbevölkerung ist das mehr als ein Halbjahresverdienst. Hunderte Millionen Menschen dieser Welt verdienen diese Summe nicht einmal im Jahr.

Hunderte Millionen Menschen Afrikas, Asiens und Lateinamerikas schaffen es irgendwie, von weniger als einem Dollar pro Tag zu überleben. Für eine Kuh auf einer von der US-Regierung subventionierten Milchfarm wird mehr ausgegeben als für ein Kind in einem nicaraguanischen Slum. Willkommen in der ach so rationalen und demokratischen Welt des Freihandels. In diesem System “testet” man die Bedürftigsten darauf, ob sie sich für Kredite qualifizieren - Kredite, die letztlich die Reichsten reicher machen. Die Ökonomen der Weltbank und des Internationalen Währungsfonds verlangen von den Regierungen armer Länder routinemäßig, dass sie in “Export-Chancen” investieren. Sie raten den Führern armer Länder der sogenannten Dritten Welt, endlich mit dem “Blödsinn Autarkie” aufzuhören und stattdessen lieber Exportpflanzen anzubauen: Blumen statt Mais, Macadamia-Nüsse statt Bohnen. Es ist typisch für die Offiziellen des IWF (Internationaler Währungsfonds), Kredite solange zurückzuhalten, bis die bittende Regierung bereit ist, ihre harten Regeln zu akzeptieren. Ein Beispiel: Um sich für einen IWF-Kredit zu qualifizieren, musste die Regierung Jamaicas Mitte der 70ger Jahre nachweisen, dass sie ihre Subventionen für die Armen gekürzt und die Währung abgewertet hat. Auf diese Weise wurden die Armen immer ärmer. Die Sozialausgaben wurden exakt für diejenigen gekürzt, die sie am nötigsten brauchten. “Aber keine Angst”, säuselte der Handelsvertreter des IWF, “bald fließt privates Kapital herein, das schafft neue Jobs und regt das allgemeine Wirtschaftswachstum an”. In Ländern, die diese Ratschläge befolgten, stehen heute Textilfabriken der Marke ‘kleiner Lohn, niedrige Kosten’. Honduras, zum Beispiel, wurde zum Superzulieferer für Walmart. Honduras Dividende allerdings ist alles andere als super. Nur ein sehr geringer Teil des “investierten” Kapitals bleibt tatsächlich im Land, und die Jobs werfen im allgemeinen weniger ab, als ein Mensch zum Leben braucht. Ein honduranischer Arbeiter verdient rund 70 Cents pro Stunde - und das nach massiven Lohnerhöhungen.

Hinzu kommt: In weiten Teilen der sogenannten Dritten Welt befindet sich die Landwirtschaft auf dem Rückzug - als Folge der “Eingliederung” der Dritte-Welt-Länder in die globale Wirtschaft. Länder, die früher ihren Eigenbedarf decken konnten, sind heute Importeure. So hat das Freihandelsmodell dazu geführt, dass Lebensmittelfabriken aus Watsonville, Kalifornien, nach Irapuato in Mexiko umsiedelten. Auf diese Weise konnte man Sozialleistungen umgehen und weit niedrigere Löhne zahlen. Umgekehrt produzierten die Bauern Irapuatos jetzt nicht mehr Mais und Bohnen sondern Erdbeeren und Brokkoli. Um ihren Bedarf zu decken, sind die Menschen in Irapuato heute auf importierten Mais und importierte Bohnen aus den USA angewiesen. In anderen Regionen Mexikos ist die Lage so, dass die Bauern sich außerstande sehen, mit den hochsubventionierten Agrobusiness-Giganten der USA zu konkurrieren. Sie gaben ihr Land einfach auf. Aber der Trommelruf nach Abschaffung der Zölle, nach Subventionsabbau in der Landwirtschaft gilt für Lateinamerika nach wie vor - während die Regierung der USA Agro-Unternehmen mit hunderten Milliarden verwöhnt. Die Regierung Nicaraguas - Nicaragua ist nach Haiti das ärmste Land in der Hemisphäre - unterzeichnete Ende Mai CAFTA (zentralamerikanisches Freihandelsabkommen mit den USA). Diese Unterschrift könnte das Ende der nicaraguanischen Landwirtschaft bedeuten. Wie sollen die kleinen Maisbauern mit US-Giganten konkurrieren, die ihre Steuergroschen-Unterstützung dazu nutzen, die Preise zu manipulieren und so die schwächeren Märkte zu entern? Noch etwas: In Nicaragua wie in Mexiko kommt dem Mais religiöse Bedeutung bei, aber auch biologische. Genveränderter Mais, wie ihn die US-Firmen anbieten, führt zu einer raschen Verseuchung und Zerstörung eingeborener Sorten - die Bauern hätten sie schützen können. Dieser Aspekt der Globalisierung macht Umweltschützer besorgt - so, wie die zunehmende Armut jeden ernsthaften Ökonomen besorgt macht (und alle Menschen, deren Herzen es noch nicht verlernt haben, mit menschlichem Leid mitzufühlen).

Ashley Seagers (‘Guardian’ vom 28. Mai) leitet aus dem jüngsten Amnesty-Report folgende Voraussage ab: “die Zahl der Menschen in den am wenigsten entwickelten Ländern, die in absoluter Armut oder von weniger als $1 am Tag leben, wird bis 2015 auf 471 Millionen angestiegen sein, von heute 334 Millionen” - das heißt, sollte der Trend anhalten. Denken wir nur an die sich ständig wiederholenden Versprechungen (Lügen) der Regierungsoffiziellen und “Experten”: Freihandel sei etwas Vernünftiges und Gutes; NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA und ähnliche Freihandelsabkommen schafften Jobs und führten zu einer gesunden Entwicklung, zu Stabilität. Richtig - so, wie die USA den Irak ja nur bekriegten, um Saddam Hussein daran zu hindern, Massenvernichtungswaffen einzusetzen und an Terroristen weiterzugeben und um dem Mittleren Osten Demokratie zu bringen, Freiheit und Stabilität! Alexander Solschenizyn schrieb einst über die UdSSR: “Zwangsernährung mit Lügen ist inzwischen zum leidvollsten Aspekt des Lebens in unserem Land geworden”. Die Freihandels-Lügen vernebeln die prekären Fakten des Lebens: Statt die Bedingungen für die arme Mehrheit auf Erden zu verbessern, hat der “freie Markt” zur Verschlechterung dieser Bedingungen geführt. Zeit für ‘fair trade’ statt ‘free trade’. Denn, ‘Freiheit’ aus dem Munde der Bushiten ist etwas anderes, als was wir darunter verstehen.

Anmerkungen:

Saul Landaus neuestes Buch trägt den Titel: ‘The Business of America: How Consumers Have Replaced Citizens and How We Can Reverse the Trend’. Sein neuer Film: ‘Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard Place’ (Cinema Guild: 800-723-5522). Landau ist Direktor des ‘Digital Media and International Outreach Programs for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences’ der California State Polytechnic University, Pomona 3801 W. Temple Avenue Pomona, wo Landau lehrt www.saullandau.net

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Michael Moore terrorizes the Bushies!
The right wing is going all out to stop "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- but it`s not working.

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By John Gorenfeld

June 23, 2004 | They`re back! OK, the "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary Clinton warned about never really went away. But they`ve found new purpose in the campaign to stop the distribution of "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore`s latest documentary. And just as the energetic conservative elves succeeded in making Bill Clinton ever more popular with the American public, so do they seem to be driving up public interest in Moore`s film, which is expected to have the biggest opening for a documentary film ever, in a scheduled 888 theaters.

The convergence between the anti-Clinton and anti-Moore movements is personified by the tireless David Bossie, whose Citizens United made headlines savaging the president in the late 1990s. It`s been a big week for Bossie and Citizens United. First they were busy producing anti-Clinton ads to run during the former president`s star turn Sunday night on "60 Minutes," while Bossie was scurrying to cable studios to denounce the memoir "My Life" and promote his new book, "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton`s National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11." Then Bossie scheduled a Wednesday press event in front of the Federal Election Commission, where he will demand that the commission take some sort of unspecified action to regulate the screening of "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- presumably because of the anti-Bush documentary`s power to influence the coming presidential election. "Documents will be hand delivered to several government agencies immediately following the media briefing," the group`s press release soberly states.

Anyone still wondering whether "Fahrenheit 9/11" has the far right squirming about the documentary`s possible effect on the November presidential election?

Over the past week, attacks on the film reached fever pitch. They involved right-wing-conspiracy veterans like Bossie, but also some relative newcomers. So far the campaign doesn`t seem to have hurt Moore. The real question is whether "Fahrenheit 911" can be anywhere as entertaining as the sometimes surreal campaign to derail it.

The Moore bashers include former California assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, whose Move America Forward launched a letter-writing campaign last week against a select number of theaters that planned to show "Fahrenheit." Kaloogian was part of a cabal that takes credit for recalling Gov. Gray Davis. Now they`ve set their sights on Moore.

"We`ve sent out probably well over 200,000 e-mails," says Melanie Morgan, a talk radio host, of the MAF campaign. With no small dose of glee, Morgan says of the cinemas targeted by MAF`s letter-writing campaign: "We`ve been causing them an enormous amount of aggravation."

Such aggravation is hard to measure. No theaters have canceled showings of "Fahrenheit" at this point. And the MAF group doesn`t seem to have had the most useful intelligence in its campaign. A lowly theater payroll employee inexplicably listed on MAF`s e-mail list of "leading movie executives" is confused about how he became a central front in the War on Moore (he did not wish to be identified). As he sat in his office Friday, messages pinged into his in box. Dryly, he read aloud his favorites: "`I will never see a movie again` ... `I will not support a business that aids a piece of crap sub-human like Moore in spreading his anti-american bullshit ...`"

More important, though, after the grass-roots political group MoveOn launched a counteroffensive, letters of support for the film`s release began outpacing negative letters (according to an unscientific survey of five theater owners) at roughly 3-to-1. Jennifer Caleshu of the Little Theatre, in Rochester, N.Y., says she`s received on the order of 3,000 e-mails. For every letter accusing her of soothing terrorists by showing the film, she says, seven are encouraging. Caleshu says that to every negative e-mail she`s received she replies by quoting the First Amendment. "I`ve gotten some real personal hate mail back about that," she says.

MAF vice-chair Morgan blames the deep pockets and international tentacles of financier George Soros for backing MoveOn to support the movie. (The group says it has secured pledges from 109,000 people to see the movie when it opens.) But MAF itself has been dogged by reporting on its ties to conservative power brokers. An investigation by the Web site Whatreallyhappened.com, which snooped around MAF`s domain registration info, revealed that it is no ordinary citizen`s movement.

The webmasters were careless enough to leave the contact information for the Sacramento public relations firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers. That gave away the fact that the supposedly grass-roots Web site was the creation of one Douglas Lorenz. A Russo employee, Lorenz was the information-technology guy for Bill Simon, the candidate too conservative to beat ultra-unpopular then-Gov. Gray Davis in 2000. He`s listed on the DefendReagan.org Web site (which rallied the fight against CBS`s Reagan movie last year) as the "grassroots coordinator," apparently foreshadowing his role in creating the faux-grass-roots Move America Forward Web site. "Doug has been very active in developing volunteer political organizations," his bio says, "and utilizing advanced technologies to extend their reach." (Lorenz did not reply to Salon`s request for an interview.) The P.R. firm`s namesake, Sal Russo, was chief strategist of the Recall Gray Davis committee, and the firm itself has Republican ties that run far and deep.

For Kaloogian (who did not return calls from Salon for this story) the failure of Move America Forward represents a reversal. Seven months ago, Kaloogian spearheaded a nationwide campaign to have CBS`s movie "The Reagans" yanked, calling for advertiser and audience boycotts. The movie was eventually ghettoized on the network`s sister channel, Showtime (though CBS executives insisted, unconvincingly, they were unaffected by boycott threats). But other Kaloogian stunts have fizzled. His threatened recall of California`s moderate attorney general over gay marriage went nowhere, and an accusation that Asian-American state assemblymen were violating their oaths of office for supporting Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist falsely accused of being a spy, was widely dismissed. ("He`s a mosquito on an elephant`s back," says longtime California Democratic Party strategist Bob Mulholland of Kaloogian.)

It now seems that MAF is doing little more than providing free publicity for "Fahrenheit 9/11," whose tag line now smirks, "Controversy? What controversy?" But there have been a few bad breaks this week for "Fahrenheit." Moore wanted a PG-13 rating for the movie; the Motion Picture Association of America claims that certain "bad words" require it receive an R-rating. For one thing the word "motherfucker" is used more than once in the film, in the context of troops quoting the Bloodhound Gang radio single "The Roof Is on Fire." On Monday, writing on behalf of backers IFC Films and Bob and Harvey Weinstein`s Fellowship Adventure Group, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo released a letter questioning the MPAA`s reasoning. Asked Cuomo: "[Why] should the film not be rated a PG-13 as was `The Lord of the Rings,` a film that is saturated with slaughter, butchery and corpses -- human and extraterrestrial?" On Tuesday, the MPAA denied the appeal.

Then this week Newsweek published a report by reporter Michael Isikoff that accuses Moore, and author Craig Unger (author of "House of Bush, House of Saud," which was excerpted in Salon), of something close to "fanaticism" in a portion of the movie discussing how Osama bin Laden`s family members were mysteriously spirited out of the country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Unger, writes Isikoff, "appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI. Not true, according to a recent report from the 9/11 panel," and the Newsweek author points out that the FBI found "[n]one had any links to terrorism."

But Unger says the article missed the point. "As I made clear to Isikoff on the phone, and should be clear in the movie, and is clear in my book," Unger says, "what did not take place was a serious criminal investigation into the murder of 3,000 people ... if you have a criminal investigation, you talk to innocent people." And there`s no evidence, he says, that the FBI checked its own terror watch list before letting the bin Ladens depart.

Still, the film`s opponents haven`t given up. Most recently the MAF is promoting a report reprinted in the Guardian that the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah has endorsed "Fahrenheit." Gianluca Chacra, the managing director of Front Row Entertainment, the movie`s distributor in the United Arab Emirates, confirms that Lebanese student members of Hezbollah "have asked us if there`s any way they could support the film." While Hezbollah is considered a legitimate political party in many parts of the world, the U.S. State Department classifies the group as a terrorist organization. Chacra was unfazed, even excited, about their offer. "Having the support of such an entity in Lebanon is quite significant for that market and not at all controversial. I think it`s quite natural." (Lion`s Gate did not return calls asking for comment.) Adam Rubin, a spokesman for MoveOn, calls it "an utterly ridiculous distraction from the actual substance of the film."

Of course, you can always find an unpopular leader in the Middle East to fuel buzz about a movie someone doesn`t want you to see. After all, Yasser Arafat loved Mel Gibson`s "The Passion of the Christ," which was so popular with right-wing Arafat haters and so unpopular among many Jews (Arafat`s blurb-ready review of Gibson`s movie: "Moving"). In the end, Moore`s movie will be judged by how many Americans turn out to see his film. And after the attacks and counterattacks of the last week, that number only grew.

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About the writer
John Gorenfeld is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

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Ein Film spaltet die Nation. Kein Tag vergeht ohne eine Bericht in den großen Zeitungen. Allein die LAtimes hat 12 Artikel in den letzten Tagen gebracht.

`Fahrenheit 9/11`
Michael Moore`s partisan yet provocative film commands attention.
By Kenneth Turan
Times Staff Writer

Jun 23 2004

He didn`t call it "J`Accuse!" but he might as well have.

Like Emile Zola, whose celebrated 19th century open letter assailed the French government for being a party to intolerable injustice, Michael Moore in "Fahrenheit 9/11" has launched an unapologetic attack, both savage and savvy, on an administration he feels has betrayed the best of America and done extensive damage in the world.

Unabashedly partisan, wearing its determination to bring about political change on its sleeve, "Fahrenheit" can be nitpicked and second-guessed, but it can`t be ignored. Set to open today in New York and Friday in Los Angeles and across the country, this landmark in American political filmmaking demands to be seen.

Both in form and effect, "Fahrenheit" goes a step beyond Moore`s Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine." He`s never made a documentary that so literally embodies the cliché of being ripped from today`s headlines, that arrives in theaters precisely as the issues he`s concerned with are getting maximum attention within the context of a heated presidential campaign. In fact, neither has anybody else. "Fahrenheit 9/11`s" determination to rewrite the rules of what Americans go to see in theaters has more kinship with Mel Gibson`s equally convention-shattering "The Passion of the Christ" — but the audience it seeks to galvanize is at the other end of the political spectrum.

It`s a tribute to how seriously Moore takes his secular crusade that he`s largely abandoned his usual haphazard style in favor of a more focused, more concentrated mode of attack. With expertly deployed footage and a take-no-prisoners attitude that echoes that of his conservative betes noir, Moore has made an overwhelming film. It is propaganda, no doubt about it, but propaganda is most effective when it has elements of truth, and too much here is taken from the record not to have a devastating effect on viewers.

Moore has always been a master provocateur, adept at raising temperatures and arousing passions. Under his shambling, willfully unglamorous persona lies a shrewd intelligence, someone with the keenest of eyes for the preposterous and the absurd, a filmmaker who knows both what he can make fun of and what makes fun of itself.

Now, seething with a controlled fury, Moore is angrier than ever; like Peter Finch`s anchorman in "Network," he`s fed up and not about to take it anymore. As outraged about Sept. 11 as any neo-con, he`s livid about what`s been done in its name. And he gives no one, least of all President Bush, the slightest benefit of the doubt.

What Moore has constructed in "Fahrenheit" is more ambitious and more complex than anyone had reason to expect.

This film isn`t about the Bush family relationship to Saudi Arabia, the excesses of the Patriot Act or the pitfalls of the invasion of Iraq, though it touches on those topics. Instead we get a full-blown alternate history of the last three-plus years. Moore makes a persuasive and unrelenting case that there is another way to look at things beyond the version we`ve been given.

What anger Moore has left over after savaging the administration is directed at the mainstream media for being too in thrall with the official line ("Navy SEALs rock!" exults "Today`s" Katie Couric in one clip.)

The core of "Fahrenheit`s" appeal comes in Moore`s alternating familiar images with footage many Americans may not have seen. The resulting mosaic, the cumulative effect of experiencing everything together in one place, is easily the most powerful piece of work of Moore`s career. Though it`s more likely to energize a liberal base than cause massive switching of parties, anyone who is the least bit open to Moore`s thesis will come away impressed.

The new material includes clips that were not broadcast widely or at all, some of which Moore says were sent to him unsolicited by people who heard about his project and wanted to help, a kind of unofficial coalition of the willing. Many of the most damning involve the president saying and doing things his handlers probably wish he hadn`t.

Here is George W. Bush in 1992, candidly explaining why he was a hot business-world commodity: "When you`re the president`s son, in Washington people tend to respect that. I can reach my father at any time. Access is power." More current is the post-9/11 president calling sternly on the world`s nations to "stop terrorist killers." Assuming that only that much would be broadcast, he steps back to reveal that he`s on a golf course, not in a war room. Switching roles like a practiced performer, he smiles and says, "Now watch this drive."

Perhaps the most disturbing of all is footage showing the president on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing with a photo op involving a Florida elementary school class reading "My Pet Goat" for nearly seven minutes after having been told that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center.

It`s an unflattering picture of irresolution and even paralysis, one that informs Moore`s thesis — of a president in over his head — and pervades the entire film.

Another category of clips comes from Iraq, where Moore managed to get camera operators embedded with U.S. troops under non-Michael Moore pretenses. These include soldiers taking snapshots of each other exulting with hooded captives, and laughing as they grab a drunken prisoner`s genitals through a blanket.

Though the overall somberness of the subject matter means that this will not go down as Moore`s funniest film, the director has added his trademark comedic moments. It`s his unmistakably biting voice-over that holds this film together. And though the situation is so grave we want to cry, Moore is adept at making us smile even when we`re not expecting to.

Moore also makes extensive use of absurdist juxtapositions of politics and pop culture to get genuine laughs. In a sequence about how the government allowed Bin Laden family members to depart soon after Sept. 11, he plays "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" and inserts a clip of "Dragnet`s" Jack Webb doing the kind of fierce questioning he feels the Saudis had coming.

Appropriating some conservatives` tendency to go for the jugular, Moore is not above making people look silly. We see extensive use of "the feed," embarrassing moments culled from TV outtakes — images like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz grotesquely licking his comb to help his hair stay in place.

The Wolfowitz clip, one you won`t be able to forget even if you want to, is a clear example of Moore at his most vulnerable and most effective. It leaves him open to charges that he`s being unfair, that he`s mocking human frailty. But he`s willing to take the risk to make his point.

Moore refuses to pass up an opportunity to show us how ridiculous, how awkward, how vain are the people who`ve successfully sold themselves as all-knowing Great White Fathers who have the gravitas to be trusted absolutely. It`s a daring ploy, and, silly though it may seem, it shows us how willing Moore is to use any tool he can to get his job done. Wake up, America, he`s saying, these are the people you`ve trusted your children`s lives to.

What there is less of in "Fahrenheit 9/11" than in earlier films such as "Roger and Me" is the director himself, driving the narrative with his on-camera presence. Moore does appear on a Washington street asking congressmen who voted for the war to get their children to enlist. And he commandeers an ice cream truck`s speaker system in an attempt to read the Patriot Act to members of Congress he says never bothered to do so.

But the filmmaker, whose presence has always been a lightning rod for criticism, seems to have known that in this case he could be most effective behind the camera, connecting the dots as he sees them and adding previously under-emphasized information to the public debate.

In "Fahrenheit`s" opening section, which deals with how Florida put George Bush in the White House, "Fahrenheit" includes almost surreal footage of the joint session of Congress that, with Al Gore presiding, certified the election. One by one, African American members of the House object to the certification and fume when not a single senator agrees to join them in a written protest that could have derailed the certification.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Moore claims, the administration concentrated not on chasing terrorists but on terrorizing the American people so they would support the invasion of Iraq. "Fear does work," Moore is told by Jim McDermott, a Democratic House member who is the chamber`s only psychologist. "The administration played us like an organ."

This first part of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to be so closely argued, so dense with information, that the film runs the danger of being too much to take in.

Perhaps realizing this, Moore eventually stops the bombardment. He increasingly personalizes his story by focusing on the people who actually pay the price for all the posturing out of Washington.

He goes back, invariably, to his hometown of Flint, Mich., where a destroyed economy means that the armed forces are perhaps the best career opportunity young people have.

Moore follows two Marine recruiters in full dress uniform, trolling for poverty-level signees at a shopping center as cynically as carnival barkers.

And he spends a considerable amount of time with a wife and mother named Lila Lipscomb, who provides the film with its emotional center.

A self-described "really proud American" who flies the flag every day and strongly encouraged her children to opt for a life in the military as their best career option, Lipscomb undergoes a wrenching change of heart as she searches for a reason to believe in a war that ends up taking the life of her son. "People think they know but they don`t know," she says, in tears. "I thought I knew but I didn`t know."

"Fahrenheit 9/11" lifted its title from the Ray Bradbury novel "Fahrenheit 451," which is in turn named after the temperature at which books burn. The novel posits a comfortable future world without books where omnipresent television tells people what they should be thinking. It`s a world, this always provocative and uncompromising film demonstrates, that is closer than we want to admit.

`Fahrenheit 9/11`

MPAA rating: R for some violent and disturbing images and for language.

Times guidelines: Explicit footage of dead and badly wounded Iraqis, shots of charred bodies of Americans being beaten and suspended from a bridge.

Lions Gate Films and IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group present a Dog Eat Dog production, released by Lions Gate Films. Director Michael Moore. Producers Michael Moore, Jim Czarnecki, Kathleen Glynn. Executive producers Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, Agnes Mentre. Screenplay Michael Moore. Cinematographer Mike Desjarlais. Editors Kurt Engfehr, Christopher Seward, T. Woody Richman. Music Jeff Gibbs. Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes. In general release.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Files Show Bush Team Torn Over POW Rules
By Richard A. Serrano and Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writers

June 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — A year into the war on terrorism, with little useful information coming from prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld allowed interrogators to toughen their tactics and use "mild, noninjurious physical conduct" to pry loose more crucial intelligence, the Bush administration disclosed Tuesday.

But the practice of permitting interrogators to grab and push prisoners was allowed for just six weeks before Rumsfeld rescinded it in January 2003, when he ordered military officials to formally seek his approval before getting tough with detainees, newly released records showed.

"In all interrogations," Rumsfeld warned his military subordinates, "you should continue the humane treatment of detainees, regardless of the type of interrogation technique employed."

The new details about interrogation techniques were contained in several hundred pages of documents released by the White House and the departments of Defense and Justice. They portray a Bush administration struggling to set down specific rules governing interrogation methods, from the early days of the war on terrorism to the start of the war in Iraq.

Portions of the documents have been previously disclosed, often in piecemeal fashion. One memo caused an outcry recently because it asserted, among other things, that federal laws against torture might not apply in the war on terrorism.

Justice Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the memo written by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay S. Bybee contained overly broad and irrelevant advice and that a new version would focus more narrowly on proper interrogation techniques.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales said Tuesday that some harsh interrogation tactics were raised as possibilities by Justice Department lawyers who were merely "exploring the boundaries as an abstract matter" of what might be permissible.

He said many of the proposals were never seen, much less approved, by senior administration officials. Gonzales said the documents also were never seen by individual soldiers and "do not reflect the policies that the president ultimately adopted."

At no time, according to the documents, did the administration approve anything approaching what was done to inmates at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Photographs show captives there being abused and sexually humiliated.

The memos shed light on the secrecy-shrouded prison at Guantanamo Bay, home to some 600 Taliban captives from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda members from Central Asia.

The internal documents, coming amid pretrial hearings in the Abu Ghraib case, were released by an administration hoping to quell persistent criticism that top officials had created an environment that fostered the prisoner abuse.

At the White House, President Bush said Tuesday that he had never permitted any mistreatment of prisoners.

"Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country," Bush said. "We do not condone torture. 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."

Bush`s comments seemed directed not only at administration critics but also at defense attorneys for six Army prison guards facing courts-martial in the Abu Ghraib scandal. A seventh guard has pleaded guilty.

The lawyers have been fashioning a defense that suggests their clients were given wide latitude in the way they treated inmates.

That strategy was given a boost Monday when a military judge in Baghdad cleared them to interview top U.S. military commanders to see if higher-ups encouraged the abuse.

Critics said the newly released documents did not give the public a full picture of how the administration decided what was the right treatment for enemy captives or how the policies were carried out.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the document release a "self-serving selection" and said "much more remains held back and hidden away from public view."

Harvey Volzer, a Washington lawyer who represents accused Army Spc. Megan Ambuhl in the Abu Ghraib case, said: "We have not seen anywhere close to the total relevant documents."

He said the evidence would show that the mistreatment documented at Abu Ghraib occurred only because guards were encouraged to do it.

"Isn`t it amazing that hooding, nudity and physical contact short of death and organ failure all are mentioned as techniques, and yet the administration would have us believe that they were not employed when Bush was getting no results from interrogations?" Volzer asked.

The earliest documents cover the period soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon and the start of the war in Afghanistan — when Guantanamo Bay became the central point for enemies captured in the field.

In a Feb. 7, 2002, memo signed by Bush and addressed to Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and others, the president decided that because the Taliban and Al Qaeda were not signatories to the Geneva Convention prohibiting prisoner mistreatment, they were not covered by those rules. But, Bush added: "Our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment."

The president`s directive came after officials in the Justice Department had told the White House the U.S. was not bound by the Geneva Convention and that prisoners could be harshly treated in order to extract information to protect the nation.

"Only by causing great suffering or serious bodily injury to POWs, killing or torturing them, depriving them of access to a fair trial or forcing them to serve in the Armed Forces could the United States actually commit a grave breach" of prisoner treatment, Bybee advised the White House and the Pentagon on Jan. 22, 2002.

In fall 2002, military authorities were becoming concerned that they were not getting enough information out of Guantanamo Bay captives and asked Rumsfeld for permission to step up their techniques.

The Defense secretary was advised of three escalating categories of techniques that could be used.

The first allowed for yelling at detainees and deceiving them about their surroundings and their fates.

The second included more stressful devices, such as forcing detainees to stand for four hours at a time, holding them in isolation cells for up to 30 days, taking away their comfort items, making them shave and "inducing stress by use of detainee`s fears [e.g., dogs]."

On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld approved the first two categories. But under his signature he added this handwritten note: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

The third category called for harsher measures. Detainees could be exposed to cold weather and cold water. Wet towels could be placed over them along with dripping water to make them think they were going to be suffocated.

Some prisoners could be convinced they were going to die and that family members would be killed if they did not cooperate.

The category also called for the "use of mild, noninjurious physical contact" such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger and light pushing. Rumsfeld approved only the "use of mild, noninjurious physical contact."

The policy was in effect for six weeks at Guantanamo Bay. On Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld rescinded his directive. He gave no reason for his decision, but did say that if intelligence officers wanted to step up techniques against individual detainees in the future, "you should forward that request to me" and it should include a "thorough justification."

The materials released Tuesday did not state whether any such requests were made or approved.

Daniel J. Dell`Orto, principal deputy Defense general counsel, said that as for the war in Iraq, the administration decided that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners would be "all Geneva, all the time," because that was a more traditional war against a traditional nation state — unlike the Taliban or Al Qaeda — and the Geneva Convention applied.

Times staff writers Edwin Chen and John Hendren in Washington contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Iraq Prison Abuse Undermines U.S. Hope for War Crimes Waiver
Some nations on U.N. council are balking at extending exemptions for Americans, forcing Bush officials into a diplomatic scramble.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

June 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — Persistent anger over the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal has led key U.S. allies to oppose a resolution shielding American peacekeeping troops from international prosecution for war crimes, forcing the Bush administration into a diplomatic scramble, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Tuesday.

For the last two years, the U.N. Security Council has given U.S. troops in Iraq and elsewhere a special exemption from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, created in 2002. U.S. officials fear that without such an exemption, troops and senior officials would be subject to war crimes prosecutions they consider groundless or politically motivated.

But several countries have begun to balk at extending the exemption for a third year, threatening a major diplomatic upset for the Bush administration at a time when it has been eager to foster international harmony on the divisive issue of Iraq. The current one-year exemption will run out June 30, the date on which the U.S.-led occupation is scheduled to return sovereignty to an interim government.

U.S. diplomats and allies worked Tuesday to win more Security Council support by offering an amendment that would make this the last year for the special waiver, diplomats at the United Nations said. But Powell acknowledged that prospects for the waiver`s extension remained questionable because of the prison scandal.

Powell said in an interview that other nations were acting mainly in response to the physical abuse and humiliation of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. He hoped the international court issue would be resolved Thursday, he said, when the administration was expected to learn whether it had the nine votes necessary to win another extension from the 15-member Security Council.

Last year, France, Germany and Syria abstained from a vote on the shield for U.S. forces. But this year, 10 countries have said they might abstain, including France, Germany, China, Brazil, Chile, Spain and Romania. Although no member is expected to vote against the measure, seven or more abstentions would kill it.

"I would just as soon not have to deal with this issue this week," Powell said. "Abu Ghraib has affected this, the way people view the ICC."

In addition to the nations that have voiced opposition to a new exemption, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has publicly campaigned against it, citing the inmate abuse.

U.S. officials desperately want Annan`s cooperation on Iraq. But he has sent notes to ambassadors raising "serious doubts" about the legality of another exemption. He said the measure undermined international law and sent an "unfortunate message at any time, but particularly at this time."

Ninety-four countries have agreed to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and some of them have accused the United States of hypocrisy in seeking special treatment for its forces. The United States has persuaded 89 countries to sign bilateral agreements exempting U.S. troops in their territory from the court`s jurisdiction. The U.S. has not ratified the international treaty creating the court.

Powell said that although the United States was considering a compromise on a new resolution, it would not agree to any language that could expose U.S. troops to risks of international prosecution.

Procedurally, if the United States fails to win passage of the resolution, it could still try to win immunity for its personnel on a case-by-case basis by attaching an exemption provision to every U.N. resolution related to peacekeeping. Yet this approach is not certain to succeed, and it probably would anger some Security Council members, diplomats said.

U.S. envoys have been pressuring some Security Council members for support, putting several nations in difficult positions, diplomats said. Among them is Romania, which has sought to be a strong ally of the United States, yet cannot afford to alienate court supporters that are members of the European Union, which Romania hopes to join soon.

The International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, was created to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But it is intended as a tribunal of last resort that takes on cases only when countries fail to handle them properly, in the eyes of the court.

Because of the strength of the American justice system, advocates say, it is unlikely that U.S. citizens would ever appear before the court. But Bush administration officials argue that U.S. officials and troops are especially vulnerable to abuse of such a tribunal because U.S. forces are assigned peacekeeping duties in dozens of countries.

Times staff writer Maggie Farley in New York contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
General Predicts Rise in Violence
Remarks to Congress by Marine commander and Wolfowitz signal U.S. is revising its assessment of the Iraqi insurgency`s strategy and capabilities.
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

June 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — A top U.S. commander told Congress on Tuesday that the level of violence in Iraq is likely to increase — not decrease — after sovereignty is returned to Iraqis in one week.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that insurgents were likely to step up the number of attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians as the country moved toward installing a permanent representative government in elections next year.

"We should expect more violence, not less, in the immediate weeks ahead," Pace said at an often contentious hearing of the House Armed Services Committee.

For months, top U.S. officials have said that violence is likely to level off or even decrease after the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, as insurgents come to see derailing the political process as impossible. Pace`s comments indicate that the U.S. government is recalibrating its assessment of the strategy and capabilities of the insurgency.

Shortly after ousted dictator Saddam Hussein was captured in December, some U.S. commanders in Iraq predicted that the insurgency would lose steam. But 2004 has seen some of the bloodiest months for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Both Pace and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who also spoke to the committee Tuesday, testified that although Iraqi security forces were rapidly expanding, they would require the backing of a significant number of U.S. and coalition forces for the foreseeable future.

Wolfowitz, who recently returned from a brief trip to Iraq, testified that there were signs of tremendous progress in the country, but said he could not predict exactly how long foreign troops would need to remain. It would depend, he said, on when Iraqis could assume responsibility for the security of their country.

"I can`t tell you how long that`s going to take," Wolfowitz said. "It`s dangerous. I remember when people were up here eight years ago saying we`d be in Bosnia only for a year. We are finally about to end the Bosnia mission — what is it? — eight years later. This is a vastly more important mission for our national security, and it`s important to stay and finish it."

Wolfowitz was sharply questioned by Democrats on the committee, who charged that the Bush administration did not have a clear strategy for getting U.S. forces out of Iraq. The committee`s ranking Democrat, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, likened the situation to a "security quagmire" and pressed Wolfowitz on the exit timetable.

"Is it your testimony you think that we might be there, then, a good number of years?" Skelton asked.

"I think it`s entirely possible," Wolfowitz responded.

The Army, which is shouldering most of the fighting burden in Iraq, has drawn up detailed plans for maintaining more than 140,000 troops there through January 2007, a senior Army official said Tuesday.

"We have to expect to maintain the current level of troops" until then, the official told a small group of reporters at the Pentagon.

The 1st Armored Division, whose yearlong tour in Iraq was extended in April for three months, is expected to return to its bases in Germany and the U.S. at the end of July, the Army official said.

Skelton also demanded an accounting of the millions of dollars the Pentagon gave to Ahmad Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress for intelligence gathering. Before the war in Iraq, the Pentagon began paying the INC a monthly stipend of $340,000 to gather information about Hussein`s military capabilities; the group provided U.S. intelligence officials with a number of Iraqi defectors who gave information that has since been discredited.

Wolfowitz acknowledged that the record of the INC was a "mixed picture," but said that after the war began, the group provided the U.S. military with documents that led to the capture of insurgent leaders.

Wolfowitz and Pace responded to recent statements by Iraq`s interim leaders that they might consider implementing martial law after June 30 to crack down on the insurgency. Just as in Afghanistan, they argued, U.S. forces would not be obliged to carry out such an edict.

"We`d also discuss with them the wisdom of doing it, and I think they`d be listening to us, just as [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai listens to us about the edicts that he proposes," Wolfowitz said.

Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE NATION
1st Chapter of Book Tour Is Filled With New York Warmth
By Josh Getlin
Times Staff Writer

June 23, 2004

NEW YORK — The police had warned them to stand behind the metal barricades and to stay on the sidewalks so traffic could pass by. But the instant Bill Clinton got out of his limousine Tuesday in front of a Harlem bookstore, the crowd broke through, chanting his name.

"There he is!" cried Florence Reynolds, an elementary school teacher, who along with several hundred others mobbed the former president on the first day of his national book tour.

Reynolds clutched a copy of the newly published autobiography, then held it up in the air, hoping Clinton might somehow see her. But even if he didn`t, the Harlem resident said: "It was important for me to be here and show support to him. He`s a great American president and this is a big moment for him."

It was Day One of the "Bubba bombardment," as one tabloid termed it, and Clinton spent several hours signing copies of "My Life" at the Hue-Man Bookstore near his office. Earlier in the day, he signed 1,000 copies at a Midtown Barnes & Noble — where people snaked around the block, waiting many hours to see him.

Some had gone to great lengths to get there. Kathleen Miller, a Pennsylvania activist, awoke after midnight Tuesday, drove three hours into Manhattan and lined up outside the store in the early morning darkness, hours before rain began to fall.

"Do you think a little bit of rain is going to stop someone like me?" Miller asked as she huddled under a small umbrella and kept her copy of Clinton`s 957-page book from getting soaked. "People like me are here on a mission."

Few cared about the book`s negative reviews, and fans in the Manhattan store applauded when Clinton said: "It`s up to the people to decide," adding: "I`m glad it`s finally happening. I`ve been living with this for two years."

Clinton`s autobiography, for which he was paid a record $10-million advance, had shot to the top of several national bestseller lists by the time it went on sale Tuesday, based on pre-orders. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced a first printing of 1.5 million copies, and some industry insiders speculated that sales of "My Life" could exceed those of "Living History" — the book by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), which sold 1.8 million copies.

To best her total, he must generate "great, sustained excitement" in the first days after publication, said veteran New York publicist Lynn Goldberg. Judging by the frenzied reaction to his Big Apple appearances, he may be on his way.

In Harlem, people shouted, "We love you, Bill!" when they caught a glimpse of him. Back in Manhattan, many in line nervously rehearsed what they might say to Clinton during a five- to 10-second interaction. Plucky fans stranded at the end of a line voiced hope that they too would get a chance to see the former president.

"I got it! I got it!" exclaimed one customer, holding an autographed copy aloft as she left the store and made her way up the street. "I`ll never sell this on EBay!"

Publicists at Knopf are betting that these scenes will be repeated across the country, but they caution that it will be at least 24 hours before the first day`s sales figures have been compiled by the company — a crucial indicator of how well a book will do.

But on Tuesday, Clinton`s face to face with thousands of customers provided some positive early reviews.

"Wow, how often do you get to see a real ex-president?" asked stockbroker Larry Zimmerman, standing under a stranger`s umbrella. "After the death of Ronald Reagan, something like this takes on a bigger meaning. And I guess I`m a big fan of Bill Clinton…. I like the way he reached out to a younger generation."

There was more than nostalgia, however, at play in the book line: Activists wearing "Beat Bush" buttons roamed through the crowd, seeking signatures on petitions protesting the president`s policies. And there were animated political conversations.

"How do we get rid of this guy?" asked Stella Ross, a Cupertino, Calif., resident, voicing displeasure with President Bush. "How do we get Clinton back into the White House?" asked her husband, Ken. "How do we let the good times roll again?"

For others, Clinton`s celebrity was enough to bring them out on a rainy day. Christine Mattingly, vacationing from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said the chance to see the former president up close "was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you just don`t pass up. I mean, this is my moment. What else have I got to do today?"

Like others in line, she said Clinton was a good president, even though he was a flawed human being. These flaws, she said, made him all the more interesting, "because it means he wasn`t made of plastic."

Asked what she would say to Clinton if she got the chance, Mattingly grinned slyly: "I`d go up to him and ask, very simply: `What were you thinking?` "

Others, however, said the sex scandal involving Monica S. Lewinsky would not frame their memories of Clinton. As he watched the former president disappear into the Hue-Man Bookstore, airline crew chief Paul Mozeak said he would remember the day Clinton came to the neighborhood, and he added that there was a special reason why so many in Harlem had turned out.

"This man is a member of the black community," he said, straining for a last look. "He is welcome here, and I think people here want to give him a fair shake. We`ll read his book, and we don`t care what all the critics say. We`ll make up our own minds."


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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A `Sovereign` Iraq? Don`t You Believe It
Straight talk would benefit U.S. policy.
By Amitai Etzioni
Amitai Etzioni`s most recent book, "From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations," was just published by Palgrave.

June 23, 2004

Here we go again. The United States is about to fall prey to its own propaganda.

President Bush has repeatedly said we will grant "full and complete sovereignty" to Iraq on June 30. We`ve said we`ll turn over Saddam Hussein for trial and punishment and that the occupation will finally be replaced by Iraqi self-rule. But these grand promises are as unbelievable as they are unattainable.

Already we`ve begun to qualify some of them: The Iraqis will take "legal" custody of Hussein, it turns out, but the U.S. will continue to hold him physically.

Now imagine what could happen next. Suppose that Iraqi judges and jurors acquit Hussein. Would he be released? Would he be allowed to preside over the re-erection of his statue in Firdos Square? Or to restore his regime?

Of course not, you say, the U.S. will never let that happen. And right you are. Just as we promised that a war in Iraq would result in a secure and democratic Middle East, we are now making a promise of full sovereignty that we are neither willing nor able to make come true.

One reason our words have all the value of a three-dinar bill is that no nation ever had "full" and "complete" sovereignty — although quite a few have come closer than Iraq will starting June 30. Stanford professor Stephen Krasner (who, by the way, served in the Bush National Security Council until 2002) wrote the definitive book on the subject, "Sovereignty." He refers to the whole notion of "supreme and independent political authority" (in Webster`s definition) as "organized hypocrisy." Why? Because nations often interfere in the internal affairs of other nations, belying the notion of absolute control by a ruler within a territory.

For instance, in just the last few years, one power or another, alone or in combination, marched into Afghanistan, Haiti, Liberia, Congo, Somalia, Sierra Leon, Bosnia, Serbia and Lebanon, among many others, to remove regimes, install new ones or otherwise "keep the peace." It`s true that many of these interventions were done with the approval of the United Nations, but that only underscores the point: Nations either yielded some of their sovereignty to the U.N., or the U.N. usurped it (in the right-wing view).

The whole idea behind the International Criminal Court, which the U.S. has not ratified, is that people from Country A can be brought to trial by forces of Country B and judged in Country C. The 25 European Union nations, recognizing that sovereignty is not a yes-or-no proposition, have turned over a fair measure of control of their governance to the European Commission, Parliament and Court. The International Monetary Fund has forced Argentina, Russia, Turkey and Indonesia to change the way they do business by threatening to withdraw vital financial support.

Iraq`s only distinction in all this is that the U.S. plans to grant it much less sovereignty than even weak nations have. The U.S. will continue to maintain a major military presence in the country, leaving Iraqis just a "say" in the ways these forces are employed. And the U.S. will continue to be in charge of Iraq`s security forces. Moreover, the U.S. has ruled that the interim government will be prevented from enacting new laws or changing any of the legal arrangements put into place by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Americans who have been controlling Iraqi ministries will become advisors. But who can doubt that they will stay in power for the foreseeable future. They will control the disbursement of the $18.6 billion that we will continue to pour into the country and that will constitute a major part of its budget. In other words, any independence on the part of the interim government could come at a very hefty price.

If the Bush administration would openly acknowledge that sovereignty only exists in varying degrees and that in Iraq it must be granted gradually, its actions would seem much less nefarious. We must openly admit that we are going to continue to pay for much of what the Iraqi ministries are going to do and that we will therefore have a major say in the way the funds are spent. We should openly admit that U.S. armed forces will be needed to prevent a civil war and pacify the country and that we will not allow a former Baathist general, or any other Iraqi officer, to command them, though we may take Iraqi military "advice."

As important, we should stop scoffing at the U.N., the International Criminal Court and other international institutions and admit that they should have some jurisdiction over the affairs of nations. Then we could send Hussein to The Hague for trial by the ICC, rather than pretend that we are going to turn him over to a wobbly Iraqi judicial system.

What would it mean to Bush`s reelection chances if he took back his "full and complete" rhetoric and replaced it with the truth: a frank admission that we are far from truly handing over power to the Iraqis? I don`t know, but I am confident it would make for a sounder and more responsible U.S. foreign policy.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Brooks ist ein Neocon. Und ich frage mich, was will er mit diesem Artikel bewirken. Er will ganz bestimmt nicht Kerry helfen.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/179018_brooks23.html

John Kerry hasn`t got a prayer unless he talks about religion

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

By DAVID BROOKS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

When Bill Clinton was 8, he started taking himself to church. When he was 10, he publicly committed himself to Jesus. As a boy, he begged his Sunday school teacher to take him to see Billy Graham. And as anybody watching his book rollout knows, he still exudes religiosity. He gave Dan Rather a tour of his Little Rock church and talked about praying in good times and bad.

More than any other leading Democrat, Bill Clinton understands the role religion actually plays in modern politics. He knows Americans want to be able to see their leaders` faith. A recent Pew survey showed that for every American who thinks politicians should talk less about religion, there are two Americans who believe politicians should talk more.

And Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a politician`s faith isn`t just about such litmus test issues as abortion or gay marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn`t have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God.

Clinton made this sort of faith-based connection, at least until he sullied himself with the Lewinsky affair. He won the evangelical vote in 1992 and won it again in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals and they will lose.

John Kerry doesn`t seem to get this. Many of the people running the Democratic Party don`t get it, either.

A recent Time magazine survey revealed that only 7 percent of Americans feel that Kerry is a man of strong religious faith. That`s a catastrophic number. That number should be the first thing Kerry strategists think about when they wake up in the morning and it should be the last thing on their lips when they go to sleep at night. They should be doing everything they can to change that perception, because unless more people get a sense of Kerry`s faith, they will feel no bond with him and they will be loath to trust him with their vote.

Yet his campaign does nothing. Kerry talks about jobs one week and the minimum wage the next, going about his wonky way, each day as secular as the last.

It`s mind-boggling. Can`t the Democratic strategists read the data? Religious involvement is a much, much more powerful predictor of how someone will vote than income, education, gender or any other social and demographic category save race.

Can`t the Democratic strategists feel it in their bones how important this is? After all, when you go out among the Democratic rank and file, you find millions of Democrats who are just as religious as Republicans. It`s mostly in the land of Democratic elites that you are likely to find yourself among religious illiterates.

But of course this is the problem. Forests have been felled so people could publish articles and books on the religious right`s influence on the Republican Party. But as the Baruch College political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio have suggested, the real political story of the past decade has been the growing size and cohesion of the secular left, and its growing influence on the Democratic Party.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the number of Americans with no religious affiliation has more than doubled since 1990. There is now a surging but unself-conscious power bloc within the Democratic Party.

Like the religious right in the Republican Party, the members of the secular left are interested primarily in social issues. What unites them more than anything else is a strong antipathy to pro-lifers and fundamentalists. While 75 percent of Americans feel little or no hostility to fundamentalists, people in this group are far more hostile to them than to other traditional Democratic bete noires, the rich or big business. They don`t like to see their politicians meddling with religion in any way.

Just as Republicans have to appeal to religious conservatives but move beyond them, Democrats have to appeal to the secular left but also build a bridge to religious moderates. Bill Clinton did this. John Kerry hasn`t. If you want to know why Kerry is still roughly even with Bush in the polls, even though Bush has had the worst year of any president since Nixon in 1973 or LBJ in 1968, this is one big reason.

David Brooks writes for The New York Times. E-mail: [e-mail]

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Because Dubya Said So!
Why prolong this insidious war? Gouge the economy? Rape the environment? Only one retort left
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 23, 2004

It`s somewhere around 1977 and I`m about 10 years old and I`m up past 10 pm watching juicy riveting prime-time "Magnum, P.I." (or whatever), and of course right at that moment I want nothing more from the universe than to stay up another hour and watch even more TV so as to feel, you know, older, and wiser, and somehow cooler.

And right about then my mother walks in and says hey kiddo, time for bed, and I plead and whine and protest and say no no no please please please why why why, and she says, slightly exasperated and motherly, well, because I said so.

She had her reasons, of course. After all, you gotta set some ground rules, gotta establish the boundaries and make the wee ones understand that the world ain`t always full of clear explanations and justifiable details, and sometimes you, as the dumb oppressed plebe, you just gotta shut the hell up and do whatever the elders say because, well, they said so.

You loathed that line then, and you`ll hate it even more now.

Yes, the line has returned with a nasty vengeance. Let us watch as this all-encompassing mantra of childhood, this absolutely invidious comeback line you simply are not allowed to question, let us watch how it mutates, in a twist of raging egomania, into the Bush administration`s most bestest catchphrase du jour.

Let`s watch, for example, as the bipartisan 9/11 commission -- the one that Bush finally, reluctantly, whiningly, after nearly three years, agreed to allow to exist at all -- let`s watch as they emerge after months of investigation with a report that declares, once again and for the 500th time, that there was no collaboration whatsoever between Saddam and al Qaeda in the 9/11 attack. Duh.

Of course, when the 9/11 commission`s report came out, BushCo was quick to reply: Um, well, we never actually claimed, you know, verbatim or whatever, that 9/11 was orchestrated by Saddam and al Qaeda, you know, together.

Except, of course, yes you did, Dubya. Repeatedly. Ad nauseam. In this very memo to Congress, outlining your reasons for leading America into this brutish hellpit. And also on just about every newscast and interview and mumbled speech, hint and gesture and Dick Cheney`s pallid snicker, all resulting a huge majority of misguided and fear-pummeled Americans who honestly believed not only that Saddam had a role in 9/11 but also that he pretty much piloted those doomed planes himself, and that`s why we needed to blast the living crap out of his piss-poor nation and earn ourselves huge gobs of global scorn while generating more anti-U.S. hatred among terrorists than Osama could have ever dreamed. Go, team!

Oh but here`s Dubya, in an AA-grade bout of denial, summing up the entire point quite nicely: "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."

See? That`s all you need to know. There was a connection because I say there was a connection. We stomped into war for justifiable reasons because I say there were justifiable reasons. Nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died for my oily and ultraviolent petrochemical corporate cronies because I say they should die. End of story and off to bed now, you little punkass American suckers.

And lo, "Because I said so" spreads like an ugly rash through BushCo`s increasingly teetering, imploding administration, as they desperately cling to any tattered shreds of whatever the hell it was that they claimed was the original reason that they shoved this nation into an economic tailspin and launched us into a brutal, violent, unwinnable war that, by most every measure, we`ve already lost.

Why continue this hideous, bloody invasion that is failing on every front? Because we said so. Why continue gouging the economy like pigs in a trough? Because we said so. How can raping the Clean Air Act and increasing logging in national parks and rolling back 30 years of environmental progress and dissing the Kyoto treaty and molesting the planet in the name of massaging the testicles of your corporate cronies in Big Oil and Big Industry possibly be healthy for the planet? Because we said so.

How can hacking away at women`s rights and endorsing homophobia in any way progress the evolution of the battered human soul? Because we said so. How can banning stem-cell research possibly be anything but a nasty and ridiculous and harmful decision that only strokes the bloody Bible of your wildly ignorant right-wing Christian voting bloc? You guessed it -- because we said so.

America is still on track and headed in the right direction despite all violent, ugly, soulless proofs to the contrary? Because we said so. Why do I, Geedubya, lie my Texas a-- off and say I never really met that Ahmed Chalabi guy and barely know who the hell he is, even though I had personal meetings with him and loved him like a drunk frat brother and championed him as the great swarthy hope for Iraq for like, a solid year? Because I said so.

And now please shut the hell up and quit shoving all those innocent dead Iraqi women and babies and all those disgusting pictures of U.S.-approved rapes and sodomizations and murders and tortures from Abu Ghraib in my face, OK? After all, those pictures don`t even really exist. Why? Simple: Because I said they don`t.

It is the new Bush doctrine. Screw proof. Screw validation. Screw the U.N. and screw Europe and screw your damn 9/11 commission and screw every hunk of lingering logic and humanitarian reasoning on the planet and screw, finally, the notion that we need to justify our actions to anyone, least of all the dumba-- American public, you who`ve swallowed every lie so far like Jenna swallows her 10th Coors Light.

Because I said so. It is the final comeback line. It is the only line that still holds, given how we have been awash in so many outright lies and fabrications and bogus Orange Alerts and flagrant misprisions it would make Richard Nixon cheer. It is the last twitch of Dick Cheney`s political sneer, the darkening blackness in Rummy`s eyes, the last spasm of Condi Rice`s comatose credibility, the only pathetic shield BushCo has left.

(BushCo Fun Comparison: 1) Budget allotted the 9/11 commission to investigate one of the most horrific atrocities in American history: $15 million. 2) Budget allotted Ken Starr and his flying monkeys during the GOP`s appallingly nasty effort to crucify Bill Clinton because he had mediocre oral sex in the Oval Office: $70 million. Just, you know, FYI.)

But the amazing thing about BushCo`s line is how quickly it can turn from a cheap escape route into a sort of desperate prayer, a final gasp of hope that their regime`s insidious policies will somehow see them through into a second term, despite the enormous wake of destruction and bile. We`ll win because we said so! We`ll be admired by those who now scorn us because we said so! We`ll cling to our power like desperate monkeys on meth because we have no other choice!

At which point America will stomp into the room and check the clock and realize, oh my God, little Dubya has been up way, way past his bedtime, and has clearly become far too whiny and bitchy and destructive and needs to be put to bed, pronto. Why? Simple: Because we, the Bush-sickened voters, will finally say so.


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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Wednesday, June 23, 2004
War News for June 23, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed by roadside bomb near Baghdad hospital.

Bring ‘em on: South Korean hostage beheaded near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqis killed, six wounded in air strike near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers killed, one wounded in ambush near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed in insurgent attack in Khaldiyah.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi translators assassinated near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline sabotaged near Beiji.

Bring ‘em on: Bulgarian troops ambushed near Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: US convoy ambushed by roadside bomb in Baghdad. Two Iraqis killed.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi policeman killed by roadside bomb near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi policemen killed in Ramadi drive-by shooting.

AQ threatens to assassinate Iraqi interim prime minister.

List of foreigners kidnapped in Iraq.

Wolfie watch. “Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Bush administration`s Iraq policy, said Tuesday that the Pentagon had underestimated the violent tenacity of an insurgency that formed after Baghdad fell, and he acknowledged that the United States may be forced to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq for years to come.”

More troops. “The U.S. Central Command has informally asked Army planners for up to five more brigades - about 25,000 troops - to augment the American force of 138,000 soldiers and Marines now in Iraq, military officers and Pentagon officials said.”

Mission accomplished. “Of the 842 U.S. service members who have died in Iraq since the invasion 15 months ago, 622 were killed by hostile fire, according to a Pentagon tally. The largest part of that combat death toll, 513, has come since President Bush`s declaration on May 1 last year that major combat was over. These troops died at the hands of Iraqis and a sprinkling of foreign Arabs fighting the U.S. occupation and seeking to derail the Bush administration`s plan to transform the country.” The full article is entitled, "A Soldier`s Last Battle" and is well worth reading.

AWOL update on Lieutenant AWOL. “The Associated Press sued the Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access to all records of George W. Bush`s military service during the Vietnam War. Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy of Bush`s microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.”

Commentary

Analysis: “But just nine days before Iraq takes its biggest legal stride since the invasion, the transfer of what is officially called full sovereignty on June 30 draws deep skepticism on Baghdad`s streets. In bookshops and offices, mosques and teahouses, ordinary Iraqis say they eagerly await the end of the U.S.-led occupation, but they dispute that an unelected interim Iraqi government, backed by about 140,000 U.S. troops, constitutes the fully sovereign state that President Bush and Iraqi politicians have touted. These doubts pose a fundamental challenge to Iraq`s fragile new government as it embarks on the high-stakes foray into autonomy.”

Opinion: “Cheney and Bush are squealing so much because the unmasking of their fiction about Iraq is one more shot into the solar plexus of their diminishing credibility -- and in the president`s reelection campaign, credibility is a major route to the independent-minded voters who will probably decide the election. Cheney and Bush, in short, have been caught in a lie, and that is why they are squealing.”

Analysis: “To put it succinctly, very little of what the White House told Congress to persuade it to pass the war resolution has turned out to be true or come to pass. Poor planning by the civilian chiefs at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his two top aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, has contributed to needless casualties. Washington didn`t have a contingency plan for a serious insurgency after cities were taken and ‘major combat’ was over. U.S. occupation casualties continue to rise even as newly trained Iraqi forces begin taking over security duties. The prisoner torture scandal at the Abu Ghraib jail has also stained the Defense Department and the CIA.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Georgia Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Kentucky Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Florida and Georgia contractors killed in Iraq.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



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SADDAM, OSAMA ‘JUST GOOD FRIENDS’

‘No Relationship,’ Says bin Laden’s Publicist

Rebutting charges by President George W. Bush that there was a “relationship” between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, a publicist for Mr. bin Laden today told reporters that the two Middle Eastern madmen were “just good friends.”

Sydni Betts, a Hollywood publicist whom Mr. bin Laden hired three years ago to handle a blizzard of bad press, said that the al-Qaeda kingpin wanted to put to rest “once and for all” the persistent rumors of a relationship between him and the former Iraqi strongman.

“Are they good friends? Yes. Do they like and admire each other? Yes. Is there a ‘relationship’ between them? No. End of story,” Ms. Betts said.

Ms. Betts also disputed claims that Messrs. bin Laden and Hussein had worked together: “They have never found the right project, and there have always been scheduling issues – we’re talking about two very, very busy guys here.”

In addition, Ms. Betts said, the former Iraqi dictator’s current incarceration makes it highly unlikely that he and Mr. bin Laden would join forces in the future: “No one wants to make plans that involve a guy who’s sitting in a prison cell – trust me, I used to handle Robert Downey, Jr.”

At the end of her session with reporters, Ms. Betts lodged her objection to the press’s continuing characterization of Mr. bin Laden as a “madman”: “He always pays on time – if that’s being a madman, I wish all my clients were.”

In other news, the U.S. cited “security concerns” in announcing that Iraqi sovereignty would be transferred on June 30 to Vice President Dick Cheney’s safety deposit box in Zurich, Switzerland.

**** BOROWITZ IN THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES ****

See Andy’s tribute to Father’s Day on the Op-Ed page of this Sunday’s New York Times.

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FUZZING IT UP
SAN ANTONIO--In the fall of 2002, fewer than a third of Americans believed that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. So George W. Bush developed a strategy for selling a war to a recalcitrant public. In statement after statement, Administration officials created the impression that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Their plan worked. By the time American tanks rumbled across the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border, 70 percent of Americans thought we were avenging 9/11.

A year later, the 9/11 Commission has concluded there is "no credible evidence" of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Accused of lying about an Iraqi role in 9/11 as well as WMDs, Republicans are making a startlingly Orwellian defense: Bush & Co., they say, never said what we all heard them say.

"The press wants to run out and say there`s a fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the [9/11] commission said," complains Dick Cheney. "And there`s no conflict. What they were addressing was whether or not [the Iraqis] were involved in 9/11. And there they found no evidence to support that proposition. I`ve watched a lot of the coverage on it and the fact of the matter is [the press] don`t make a distinction. They fuzz it up."

Someone`s been fuzzing like a madman, but the media has merely been taking dictation. In a weasely it-depends-on-the-meaning-of-is way, the Bushies are absolutely right. They never said that Saddam was behind 9/11. Not exactly.

On March 21, 2003, days before the start of war, Bush sent a letter to Congress justifying the imminent invasion: "I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

But on June 16, 2004, Bush said: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda." Sam Boone-Lutz wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times pointing to these two statements. "Explain to me," he asks, "how [the June 16, 2004] statement isn`t a lie."

This is your lucky day, Sam.

Parsing statements from the current White House is impossible without a strong background in sentence diagramming. (A shout-out here to Mr. Bradfield, my old-school seventh-grade English teacher.) The key word in Bush`s March 21, 2003 justification to Congress is including. He asserts that armed force is justified "against international terrorists and terrorist organizations." Everything after "including" is optional, i.e., non-conditional. Broken down to its essentials, Bush said: "I can go after terrorists, including those responsible for 9/11, but I can also go after terrorists who were not responsible for 9/11." Given the context--a notice to Congress that he is about to attack Iraq--he intended us to draw the inference that Iraq played a role in 9/11. But, strictly speaking, he doesn`t say that Iraq is included among those who carried out 9/11. His statement has been carefully lawyered to create "plausible deniability" if and when, as has happened, such an assertion is belied by the facts.

Bush does clearly assert, however, that Iraq is tied to "international terrorists and terrorist organizations." This section relates to payments Saddam made to survivors of Palestinian suicide bombers who died in attacks in Israel--not the United States. If the average American knew in March 2003 that Iraq had only been involved in terrorism against Israel, but never against the United States or any other country, he wouldn`t have viewed Saddam as a threat. Bush "fuzzed up" the differences between referring specific terrorism against Israel and terrorism in general, hoping that no one would notice the difference.

No one did.

White House lawyers applied similar legalese to every official pre-war statement so that, when the truth eventually came out, Bush & Co. could deny having tied Saddam to 9/11. Ordinary citizens, who quickly scan the headlines and get their news from TV, would draw the desired--incorrect--conclusion. Yet "plausible deniability" was in place as a future defense.

Any news junkie with some experience reading legal documents can extract the elusive truth from a Bush quote. On June 17, for example, Bush said that Saddam had "provided safe haven for a terrorist like [Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi, who is still killing innocents inside of Iraq." Actually, Zarqawi never lived in Saddam`s Iraq; he arrived after the U.S. invasion. But a guy Bush says is like Zarqawi, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, did live in Baghdad under Saddam. To the extent that any Abu is like another, Zarqawi is like Nidal. (In this phrasing, "like" typically means "for example." In order to obfuscate, however, Bush will claim to have meant "similar to.") Yes, Nidal`s Fatah organization was only a threat to Israel, never the United States. And Zarqawi`s Islamist Al Qaeda never cooperated with Yassir Arafat`s Fatah.

This statement elevates the craft of creating intentionally confusing syntax to dazzlingly cynical new heights. Polls confirm that such convoluted verbiage has convinced a plurality of Americans, 49 to 36 percent, that "clear evidence that Iraq was supporting Al Qaeda has been found."

It`s all so beautifully postmodern: all of the Bushies` lies are true. Technically.

Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You`re Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right." Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2004 TED RALL

RALL 6/22/04

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Published on Wednesday, June 23, 2004 by the International Herald Tribune
Bush`s Mistaken View of U.S. Democracy
by Robert O. Keohane and AnneMarie Slaughter


President George W. Bush`s efforts to build democracy in Iraq are underpinned by a misguided view of America`s own democracy. He believes that American democracy works because Americans are innately good people, believing in values of tolerance and respect for others and guided by religious faith.

In his view, Americans don`t need checks and balances so much as reminders of basic American values and America`s overriding moral mission to bring freedom to the world. Similarly, abuses of power, as at Abu Ghraib prison and beyond, do not represent the failure of the system, but rather the deviant behavior of a few bad people.

In a speech last month, former Vice President Al Gore articulated a very different vision of American democracy, one that derives not from the Bible but from the U.S. Constitution. The founding fathers of the United States assumed that unrestrained power is dangerous. It not only enables bad people to commit abuses; it tends to corrupt ordinary, generally decent people. As James Madison said in the Federalist Papers: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary ... A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

The "auxiliary precautions" decided upon were America`s system of checks and balances, by which Congress, the president and the courts each check each other, as do the states and the federal government, to ensure that the power of the government is both limited and controlled.

These are not simply theoretical differences about the core of American democracy. They have profound implications for how we think about and control the role of the United States in the world.

If, in the president`s view, the goodness of Americans and the nobility of our mission are self-evident, then the failure of peoples around the world to see the struggle in Iraq the same way we do means that they are "enemies of freedom." Fighters opposing American power, even if they are residents of occupied countries, do not merit the protections of international law. Institutional restraints on the exercise of power by Americans in detention centers and prisons can, in this view, safely be relaxed. Moreover, constitutional protections can be denied even to American citizens, arrested in the United States, when they are suspected of being "enemy combatants."

From James Madison`s point of view, on the other hand, the abuses of Abu Ghraib would have been entirely explicable. The founding fathers, and great American leaders ever since, understood that without institutional restraints, voluntarily followed and supported by the top leadership, such abuses are virtually inevitable. This doesn`t mean that Americans are "bad" people, just that they are human - like Iraqis, Afghans, Germans, Japanese, and every other nationality and race.

If the struggle against terrorism were to be carried out consistently with the institutional theory embedded in the U.S. Constitution, America`s leaders would be well aware of the potential for abuse - even by decent patriots. They would have ensured not only that the Constitution was upheld at home, but that the more limited protections embodied in international law would have been conscientiously applied to people living under American occupation, or otherwise within U.S. control.

Behind the debate about the conduct of the war in Iraq, and the occupation, is a larger divide - between those Americans who believe that their unique virtues should permit them to act above the law, and those who believe that people in authority, necessarily imperfect, must be constrained by institutions and by law. Those who understand and believe in the theory of the American Constitution should reject the Bush administration`s political theory of personal good and evil. We must continue to insist that the United States is a "government of laws and not of men."

Robert O. Keohane is a professor of political science at Duke University. Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of Princeton University`s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and author of "A New World Order."

Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune

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June 24, 2004
U.S. Drops Plan to Exempt G.I.`s From U.N. Court
By WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 — The United States bowed Wednesday to broad opposition on the Security Council and announced it was dropping its effort to gain immunity for its troops from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.

"The United States has decided not to proceed further with consideration and action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate," James B. Cunningham, the deputy American ambassador, said on emerging from the Council chamber.

The envoys from the 15-member Council had spent the morning in closed session, discussing a rewritten version of the American resolution that circulated on Tuesday night to try to meet the objections.

Resolutions granting a year`s exemption had passed the Council in each of the past two years, but this year the renewal ran into difficulties because of the prison scandal in Iraq and strong opposition from Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The outcome, while a political defeat for Washington, will have no effect on the vulnerability to prosecution of American soldiers in Iraq. Neither the United States nor Iraq is a member of the tribunal, and its jurisdiction is limited to countries that do not themselves prosecute crimes by their military.

The setback for American diplomacy at the United Nations came just two weeks after the Bush administration was praised there for demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to compromise in securing a unanimous vote on a resolution affirming the arrangements for the transfer of power in Iraq.

This time American diplomats, who had been confident of obtaining a routine "technical rollover" of the measure, appeared to have miscalculated the impact of the publicity given the American mistreatment of Iraqi detainees.

They were also caught off guard by the intervention of Mr. Annan, who told the ambassadors on Friday that a vote in favor of the United States would undermine the new solidarity of the Council.

Shortly after Mr. Cunningham`s announcement, Mr. Annan issued a statement saying, "The decision by the United States not to pursue a resolution on this matter will help maintain the unity of the Security Council at a time when it faces difficult challenges."

Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, which had supported the measure the past two years, said, "Clearly from the very beginning, this year China has been under pressure because of the scandals and the news coverage of the prisoner abuse, and it made it very difficult for my government to support it."

Spain`s ambassador, Juan Antonio Yáñez-Bernuevo, explained his country`s opposition, saying, "For us the essential thing is to remain faithful to the International Criminal Court, which we strongly support, and also to the United Nations Charter, and to respect the statement made by the secretary general last week, which had a powerful effect."

In calling for the Council to turn back the American request, Mr. Annan said it was "of dubious judicial value," and especially objectionable in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse. Passing the measure, he said, would discredit the Council, the United Nations and the "primacy of the rule of law," and he appealed to the members to maintain the common purpose they had shown on June 8 in their unanimous vote on Iraq.

Mr. Yáñez-Bernuevo said he regretted that the Americans had not mounted the same kind of diplomatic effort that secured that unanimous vote. "We would have liked to see a process as we saw in the Iraq resolution, a more collective effort," he said. Instead, he said, "according to what we heard from the U.S., that was the last word, they could not go any further, there was no point in pursuing the matter."

Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz of Chile said Mr. Annan`s statement had had "a very important impact on many delegations."

The Bush administration has said it needs the troop-protection measure to prevent people from using the court to bring politically motivated war-crime prosecutions against Americans abroad.

Elaborating on that Wednesday, Ambassador Cunningham noted that the United States was the "largest contributor to global security."

"When the United States voluntarily commits its armed forces to participate in peacekeeping missions around the world, we believe it is wholly inappropriate to subject them to a tribunal which cannot provide adequate guarantees of due process," he said.

Asked if the United States would limit its peacekeeping actitivies in the future — a threat it has made in past years — Mr. Cunningham said, "I`m not going to comment on that."

An accompanying statement said that in the absence of a resolution, the United States would "take into account the risk of International Criminal Court review when determining contributions to U.N. authorized or established operations."

Addressing concerns about American military conduct abroad, Mr. Cunningham said, "The United States has a well-functioning system of military justice that will assure accountablity."

Since the international court was established, the Bush administration has made bilateral agreements with 90 countries barring any prosecution of American officials by the court.

The current exemption expires on June 30, the day Iraq regains its sovereignty and American troops become part of the kind of United Nations-approved force that the renewal was meant to cover.

But the court has no jurisdiction in Iraq, which did not sign the 1998 treaty establishing it, or in the United States, which is also not a signer. In addition, backers of the court argue that since it accepts cases only when a nation is unwilling to prosecute, there is little likelihood it would ever be called upon to deal with the United States.

The court, formed in July 2002, is to hear cases of war crimes, genocide and systematic human rights abuses.

The resolution that was withdrawn on Wednesday included a revision intended to meet a major objection: language in the original proposal that expressed the intention to renew the one-year exemption each July 1 "for as long as may be necessary."

That paragraph was eliminated and new language inserted that pledged that this request for a one-year exemption would be the final one. But the attempt to bridge the differences did not work, and Ambassador Muñoz, of Chile, said that while he thought the United States` decision had been "too rushed," it was probably the best one under the circumstances.

"Better not to be divided after the consensus and the unity that we showed on Iraq," he said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Insurgents Launch Attacks Across Iraq
Two U.S. Soldiers Killed in Baquba; Explosions Rock Mosul


Wire Reports
Thursday, June 24, 2004; 3:34 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents launched a series of apparently coordinated attacks Thursday across Sunni Muslim-dominated areas of Iraq, killing at least 21 people, including two U.S. soldiers, police and hospital officials said. Three explosions rocked Iraq’s main northern city Mosul.

Attacks were unleashed at dawn on the police stations in Ramadi and Baquba. Two American soldiers were killed and seven wounded in fighting in Baquba, the U.S. 1st Infantry Division said. Witnesses said fierce fighting was raging in parts of Baquba and that insurgents had seized a police station there. U.S. aircraft dropped three 500-pound bombs against an insurgent position near the city soccer stadium, U.S. officials said.

In Mosul, explosions rocked police stations in at least three parts of the city. One of them could have been caused by a suicide bomber, a police officer said on condition of anonymity. One blast wrecked part of a building and destroyed some 15 cars, a Reuters journalist said at the scene. Iraqi police cordoned off the area, shooting in all directions. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

Maj. Neal E. O’Brien, a U.S. 1st Infantry Division spokesman in Baquba, said insurgents attacked American troops with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades.

The cities are part of the so-called Sunni triangle, which has been the site of frequent clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces battling insurgents. The level of coordination in the attacks appeared unusual and could signal the beginning of a push by insurgents to torpedo next week’s transfer of sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation authority to an interim Iraqi government.

© 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

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Setzt sich Schwarzenegger von Bush ab?

June 24, 2004
Schwarzenegger, Confident and Ready for Prime Time
By CHARLIE LeDUFF and JOHN M. BRODER

SACRAMENTO, June 23 — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has dazzled California with a string of legislative victories in his first months in office, has shown that he may well be a political master after all. And now he is letting President Bush know just how much he is — and is not — ready to devote his full star power to the national re-election effort.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, in an interview in the Bedouin-style smoking tent he has set up in the courtyard of the State Capitol here — smoking is banned in state buildings — made it clear that he expected a prominent role at the Republican National Convention in New York in late August.

"Whether I`m speaking, I`ll leave that up to them," said Mr. Schwarzenegger, a global celebrity who has emerged as perhaps the most intriguing new Republican face of the political season. "If they`re smart, they`ll have me obviously in prime time."

But Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has been defining himself as a moderate, also made it clear that when prime time is over, he intends to keep some distance from Mr. Bush, who is not particularly popular in Democratic-leaning California.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said that while he would appear with Mr. Bush if the president comes to California, he had no plans to travel outside of the state to stump for him. "If I start flying around and not spending time here, it could backfire big time," he said, adding that Californians elected him to be their full-time governor and that he was not going to risk his standing by devoting himself to national politics.

Not that it is clear that anyone is asking. Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush re-election committee, said simply that the convention program was not complete and that Mr. Schwarzenegger`s role was not yet decided. He quickly added that the campaign was "thrilled" to have Mr. Schwarzenegger`s support.

No one has ever accused Mr. Schwarzenegger, no matter what role he is in, of lacking self-confidence, and the governor himself knows that both his celebrity and his superhero screen image are at the core of his distinctive and so far successful political style. Asked to describe his governing philosophy seven months after toppling Gray Davis in California`s recall election, he said, "Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women."

He stopped himself. "Wait a minute, that`s Conan," he said. "I stepped out of character here for a second."

The governor, his skin and hair the color of a tarnished brass bed, his pectoral muscles testing the strength of his shirt buttons, is clearly a man enjoying himself and at ease with power. He said he had not encountered any major surprises in his latest career and found himself fully engaged in public policy. The biggest adjustment, he said, is learning to live with a schedule drawn up for him by others.

He said he met with 20 to 30 people every day while making time for weight lifting and riding a stationary bike in his Sacramento hotel room each morning. "People who know me really well thought that this would be pure torture for me because I don`t like to keep schedules, I like to live in an improvisational style," he said. "Appointments are always a no-no. Planning ahead is a no-no. Here you have to do all the opposite. Here you need to have a plan."

He said that after the budget was passed he planned to turn his attention to revamping the state`s troubled energy supply system and to streamlining state government, which he refers to as "blowing up boxes."

Flashing a jade ring as he talked, he ruminated on his introduction to government, in the 15-by-15-foot courtyard tent where he does much of his private business. It is decorated with rattan chairs, orchids, a humidor, a mirror, floor fan and books written by Mr. Schwarzenegger.

There was an expensive, half-burned cigar in a Baccarat crystal ashtray. The tent itself was placed precisely 20 feet from the doors leading to the governor`s offices to comply with state smoking regulations.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said business lessons he learned in Hollywood applied directly to running the nation`s most populous state. Success, he said, requires a combination of discipline, optimism, humor, a willingness to share credit and good cigars and an ability to cut back-room deals.

He defended his practice of negotiating key sections of important legislation and the budget behind closed doors or in his smoke-filled tent.

He learned it all in Hollywood. After all, in Hollywood, he said, "For the public you write agreements and then you have another agreement they put in the safe that no one is seeing - the thing with all the perks and the percentages because they do not want to break the mold and all of a sudden now here`s a guy who gets instead of 15 percent, 20 percent in the gross. Then that`ll be kept in the safe.

"Or that I get instead of a 30-foot trailer, a 40-foot trailer. That could break the mold and then every star wants a 40-foot trailer. That is then in the safe, that is never in the agreement, O.K.?"

That is, in Hollywood as in Sacramento, certain things are said for public consumption. Other things are understood. By any measure, Mr. Schwarzenegger has pulled off a remarkable series of victories since routing Mr. Davis. He repealed an unpopular increase in the car tax, rescinded a law granting driver`s licenses to illegal immigrants, pushed a workers` compensation package through the Legislature and persuaded the voters to approve $15 billion in new borrowing to help balance the budget.

This week, he signed an agreement with five Indian tribes that will bring the state more than $1 billion in casino revenues immediately and hundreds of millions more in the future.

Next week, he confidently predicted, the Legislature will deliver to him the first on-time state budget in 19 years. He has managed all this while keeping his firm pledge not to raise taxes.

In the interview, he diplomatically spread the credit among Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike.

"I`m not here trying to be a dictator," he said.

Critics say the governor`s tactics may address immediate political and fiscal problems but are creating bigger debts down the road. Mr. Schwarzenegger negotiated budget concessions from state colleges and universities, from K-12 educators and from local governments in exchange for more money for them in future years.

The independent Legislative Analysts Office here has warned that these deals will produce multibillion-dollar deficits far into the future and will only worsen the state`s chronic mismatch between revenues and spending.

Mr. Schwarzenegger waved off such carping. "Guys, don`t worry," he said with a grin. "You see me worry? It`ll be taken care of. It`s a piece of cake."

The governor departs Sacramento most Fridays and conducts weekend business in Los Angeles, commuting by private jet. Weekends are reserved for his wife, Maria Shriver, and their four school-aged children. The family attends Catholic services most Sundays.

Mr. Schwarzenegger describes himself as a moderate on social issues, including abortion, making him another Roman Catholic political figure at odds at times with the hierarchy of his church. Some bishops have suggested that Catholic public officials who support abortion rights should be denied communion.

He said he understood the bishops` point of view and said the church faced a dilemma in dealing with the thorny realities of modern life, including abortion, gay rights and marriage in the priesthood. "No matter what the debate is I will continue believing in God," he said.

On fiscal matters, Mr. Schwarzenegger considers himself an old-school Republican determined to ferret out waste. No item is too minor to escape his attention.

For instance, since Mr. Schwarzenegger took office on Nov. 17, the toilet paper in the Capitol has been switched from two-ply to one-ply, a saving of thousands of dollars over the years. "It`s not anymore the two-ply," he said. "Because you know what? We`re trimming. We`re living within our means."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 24, 2004
Author of `02 Memo on Torture: `Gentle` Soul for a Harsh Topic
By ADAM LIPTAK

The Bush administration is distancing itself from a memorandum prepared two years ago by a government lawyer asserting that the president`s power to use torture to extract information from suspected terrorists is almost unlimited.

Before the recent controversy concerning his work, however, some of the officials who received the memorandum worked diligently to elevate the lawyer, Jay S. Bybee, to the federal bench. Nominated by President Bush in 2002 and confirmed by the Senate last year, he now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Former colleagues say the judge, whose chambers are in Las Vegas, is a serious, soft-spoken, reflective man. They say it is difficult to reconcile his discussion of torture in clinical, dispassionate detail with his background. A former legal academic, Judge Bybee told Meridian, a Mormon magazine, last year that he hoped to be remembered for his probity.

"I would like my headstone to read, `He always tried to do the right thing,` " Judge Bybee said.

The memorandum, dated Aug. 1, 2002, defined torture narrowly under a federal law that prohibits it. Only pain like that accompanying "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" qualifies, Mr. Bybee wrote. It went on to say torture is unlawful only if the infliction of pain is the offender`s specific objective. "Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent," he wrote.

The memorandum also discussed various potential defenses to criminal prosecutions for torture, including necessity and self-defense. Finally, it asserted that the president was free under his authority as commander in chief to order torture notwithstanding treaties and laws barring it.

The memorandum said it was addressed to Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in response to his questions. At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzales specifically disavowed the part of the memorandum discussing the president`s authority as commander in chief, saying it was "irrelevant and unnecessary."

Senior Justice Department officials took a broader view, saying the entire memorandum would be withdrawn.

Judge Bybee, 50, served as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, an elite unit of the Justice Department that advises the executive branch on the law, from 2001 until he joined the appeals court last year. Among his predecessors in the office were William H. Rehnquist, now the chief justice, and Antonin Scalia, the associate justice.

The Office of Legal Counsel "is informally called the attorney general`s lawyer," said Douglas W. Kmiec, who ran the office in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush. "We used to call it the conscience of the Justice Department."

Justice Department officials said that the memo had been sent directly from the Legal Counsel`s office to the White House and that they did not believe it had required the approval beforehand of Attorney General John Ashcroft or his chief deputy at the time.

A former lawyer in the Legal Counsel`s office said the memorandum "went through the usual channels."

Those channels would include the attorney general, said Walter Dellinger, who was in charge of the office in the Clinton administration.

"I would be flabbergasted if a memo of this singular importance was not submitted to the attorney general as well as the White House," he said. "If it was not, I am not sure what the attorney general was supposed to be doing."

President Bush apparently never saw the memorandum. "I don`t believe the president had access to any legal opinions from the Department of Justice," Mr. Gonzales said Tuesday.

Senators on the Judiciary Committee who voted on Mr. Bybee`s nomination were aware that as head of the legal counsel`s office he would have played an important role in establishing the legal underpinnings of the fight against terror. But the lawmakers were refused access to the office`s opinions on the subject.

In response to written questions posed by several senators on Feb. 21, 2003, Mr. Bybee declined to comment on the advice given by his office. Asked by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to discuss his thinking about the status of detainees, Mr. Bybee responded: "As an attorney at the Department of Justice, I am obligated to keep confidential the legal advice that I provide to others in the executive branch. I cannot comment on whether or not I have provided any such advice and, if so, the substance of that advice."

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Leahy said the White House had withheld important information.

"If his nomination were up today," the senator said, "knowing now what we weren`t permitted to know then, the Senate — this senator included — might not be so willing to give him the same benefit of the doubt for this lifetime appointment."

On Feb. 27, 2003, the Judiciary Committee, in a vote of 12 to 6, approved Mr. Bybee`s nomination, with all of the votes against him cast by Democrats. Two Democrats voted in favor of Mr. Bybee, one of them Charles E. Schumer of New York. Mr. Schumer said later that the vote showed that he was willing to approve nominees whose views were inconsistent with his own.

The memorandum itself was unusual, former lawyers in the office said.

"What`s depressing about the memo is not that parts of it appear to be wrong," Mr. Dellinger said. "What`s depressing is that it`s such a one-sided advocacy document."

Through a spokesman, Judge Bybee declined requests for an interview. A former deputy, John Yoo, now an international law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, also contributed to the August 2002 memorandum. He said he could not comment on it, citing his ethical obligations.

But he said generally that the question of what conduct constitutes torture is an important and legitimate one. A good analogy, he said, was the legal advice police officers receive on the use of force.

"This is an unprecedented conflict with a completely new form of enemy that fights in unconventional ways that violate the very core principles of the laws of war by targeting civilians," Professor Yoo said in an interview yesterday. "We should want the executive to ask what rules apply to that conflict before they enact policy, not after."

A graduate of Brigham Young University and its law school, Judge Bybee worked as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va.; in private practice in Washington; as a lawyer in the Justice Department and the White House in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush.

But his main work in the decade before he rejoined the Justice Department in 2001 as assistant attorney general was academic. He taught at the law school of Louisiana State University and the University of Nevada, specializing in constitutional and administrative law and civil procedure.

Legal experts said they suspected that Professor Yoo was the primary author of the memorandum, given his background in international law. But a former official said that gave Judge Bybee too little credit.

"He`s not an autopen machine," the official said of Judge Bybee. "He`s a law professor and federal judge."

Judge Bybee is not, however, a dominant personality.

"He is a pretty gentle soul," Professor Kmiec said. "If you wanted to compare him to a personality, it would not be Donald Rumsfeld. He would be quieter, more reflective, quite temperate."

The judge is not without a playful side.

"He has a kazoo collection," said N. Gregory Smith, a former colleague on the law faculty at Louisiana State. "He`d get a little ensemble of kazoo enthusiasts together and play. They would occasionally perform the `1812` Overture."

Eric Lichtblau, David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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At the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, buffaloes were herded to a location where they could be vaccinated. Buffalo grazing, along with controlled burns, is essential to the life of a prairie.
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June 24, 2004
American Prairie Overlooked No More
By STEPHEN KINZER

ILMINGTON, Ill. - Ever since European pioneers first saw North America`s midsection more than 200 years ago, most people have considered its vast expanse of prairie to be "the great American desert," a barren landscape meant to be either crossed or plowed under.

More than 90 percent of it has been turned into farms, towns and commercial developments. Even many environmentalists working to protect spectacular mountain ranges, wild rivers and old-growth forests have viewed the prairie as little more than empty land.

That perception is rapidly changing. Across the Midwest and beyond, projects to preserve or restore prairie landscapes are winning broad support. Environmental groups are investing millions of dollars in them. When naturalists who run prairie preserves call for volunteer help, they are often overwhelmed by the number of people who turn up.

On a recent morning here at the country`s newest prairie preserve, the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, Bill Glass, an ecologist who is helping to plan its future, strolled like a proud father among long rows of wild quinine, porcupine grass and other native plants.

"We`ll use seeds from these plants to restore a beautiful prairie covering thousands of acres," Mr. Glass said. "This has become a major field of interest for environmental scientists, but what`s really amazing is how many ordinary people also want to be part of it. Somehow, this landscape touches people."

Midewin (pronounced mih-DAY-win) is the first federally designated, government-owned native-grass preserve in the United States. Five thousand acres of it opened in early June, and all 20,000 acres, with 48 miles of hiking and bicycle trails, are to be accessible within a decade or two. Because the preserve is barely an hour`s drive southwest of downtown Chicago, its supervisor, Logan Lee, an officer of the United States Forest Service, says she expects it to draw large numbers of visitors.

"The amount of enthusiasm and commitment has been a phenomenal eye-opener to me," Ms. Lee said. "People may not have appreciated this landscape in the past, but what I`m seeing tells me that attitude has changed completely."

Scientists and others who have watched this surging interest in prairie landscapes say it has several causes. Some see it as stemming from broader trends, including nostalgia for the Great Plains that is fed by everything from fascination with the Lewis and Clark expedition to films like "Open Range" and "Dances With Wolves." In recent years, many Americans have also become interested in cultures of the Plains Indians.

Because about 40 percent of North American bird species are native to the prairie, many people who enjoy bird-watching also support restoration projects. So do those who see tourist potential in restoring the landscape that existed here before European settlers arrived.
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Midewin is the first federally designated, government-owned native-grass preserve in the United States. Five thousand acres of it opened in early June, and all 20,000 acres are to be accessible within a decade or two.

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"People are leaving small towns, communities are declining, and the depopulation of the Great Plains is accelerating," said Rob McKim, a vice president of the Nature Conservancy, which owns the country`s largest network of prairie preserves and is spending more than $15 million this year to maintain and expand them. "So now people are looking at buffalo grazing, eco-tourism and other ways to conserve and restore what was once the American Serengeti."

Some specialists believe that people who join this growing save-the-prairie movement are responding to primal urges.

"Grasslands are tattooed on our genes," said James R. Petterson, a spokesman for the Nature Conservancy. "Our ancient ancestors evolved on the high, grassy plains of East Africa. We humans are programmed to prefer parklike vistas and wide-open, sunlit spaces."

Others have a more pragmatic explanation.

"This landscape has been on the brink of disappearing," said Harvey Payne, director of the 39,000-acre Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma. "The general public, academic specialists and our political leaders are sensing that if we don`t do something now to protect it, we aren`t going to have any left."

In May, the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve opened a new research station that includes classrooms, laboratories and space for specimen storage.

"It`s just amazing, the number of people who want to learn about the prairie," Mr. Payne said. "Even people who live here, people who in the past took this landscape pretty much for granted, are holding the prairie more dear to their hearts.``

A task force appointed by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas recommended in early June that plans to erect turbine towers for generating wind power should be limited so they do not mar the landscape of the Flint Hills, home to two-thirds of the country`s surviving tallgrass prairie. The task force also urged state agencies to begin promoting tourism in the area.

One major scientific breakthrough of modern prairie studies has been the discovery that two practices - buffalo grazing and periodic burning - are essential to the health of prairies. At many preserves, buffaloes, which eat prairie grasses and so keep them from overwhelming leafy plants, either have been introduced or are to be introduced. And controlled burns, which allow prairie plants to renew themselves, take place several times each year, often attracting crowds of spectators.

Four years ago Jan Jantzen, a former college administrator who lives near Emporia, Kan., started a company that offers horseback tours of the prairie. He also gives visitors a chance to witness and help manage controlled burns. At the last one, in April, he offered to accommodate 20 people, but ended up with 60 over a two-day period.

"The interest people have in the prairie from all over the country - really from all over the world - is becoming quite extreme," Mr. Jantzen said. "Tourism out here is still a new idea, but as soon as some of us guys start driving new pickups and our neighbors realize that we didn`t make the money from running cattle or raising crops, their interest is really going to pick up."

The cachet of this landscape has become so strong that thousands of businesses across the Midwest now use the word "prairie" in their names. Lincoln, Neb., has a Prairie Dental Clinic, and Grandview, Mo., a Prairie Framing Company. In Coralville, Iowa, there is Prairie Auto Sales.

When a housing development in northern Illinois called Prairie Crossing is completed in a couple of years, it will have 362 homes clustered near a restored 190-acre prairie.

"Our first development manager didn`t want to use the name `Prairie Crossing,` because he said it sounded unkempt," said Victoria P. Ranney, president of the development company. "But it has turned out to be a very big plus, because now there are so many people who are realizing how beautiful this landscape can be.

"People are so excited when they see what comes up after a prairie burn: the grasses and herbs and flowers, plus all the birds and butterflies and other kinds of wildlife. It`s something that makes ordinary people into-I don`t want to use the word `fanatics,` but incredibly committed advocates for this environment."

Artists have also begun to discover the prairie, and "prairie art" is emerging as a new genre. A show of this art called "Homage to the Flint Hills" was unveiled at the State Capitol in Topeka, Kan., in March and is to move to various locations around Kansas in the next two years.

"Because the prairie is very stark, paintings of it tend to convey an abstracted feel of color and light," said Joan Parker, one of the artists represented in the show. "They`re a middle ground between landscape and contemporary abstraction."

Publishing houses are also taking advantage of growing public interest in the prairie landscape. This spring the University of Iowa Press reprinted the 1982 book widely credited with setting off the modern fascination with prairies, "Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie," by John Madson.

The same press has also just published "Prairie: A North American Guide," which describes prairie preserves in 10 states and 2 Canadian provinces. Later this year the University of Nebraska Press will publish "Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, " a six-pound reference volume with contributions from more than 1,000 scholars.

"Our aesthetic is changing," said Stephen R. Jones, co-author of "The North American Prairie," a new 510-page field guide that is the most comprehensive catalog of prairie landscapes ever published for a general readership. "We`re suddenly discovering that we value native landscapes, and that has led to a groundswell of interest in prairies.

"I see it everywhere I go. Seventeen years ago I wrote another book on this subject, and I can assure you there`s been a quantum leap since then."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


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A group of bison ran toward a holding area at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma.
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June 24, 2004
The White House Papers

It was certainly good to finally see documents indicating that President Bush did not order the torture of prisoners. The newly released presidential memo of Feb. 7, 2002, talks about treating detainees humanely and refers comfortingly to American values. Unfortunately, beyond that there`s not much comfort in these documents, which only confirm that the Bush administration fostered a culture of permissiveness regarding the treatment of prisoners that ultimately led to the Abu Ghraib disaster.

We`re still being denied the full picture because the documents on planning for the treatment of prisoners were selected by the White House, which has for months ignored the Senate Armed Services Committee`s demand for the whole record. These hundreds of pages, which the administration has kept classified for so long, pose no possible security danger. About the only thing in them worth keeping secret was the degree to which the administration had decided to exempt itself from the Geneva Conventions and then spent months debating whether there was a legalistic way to justify what ordinary people would consider the torture of prisoners.

If the White House thought the documents it doled out this week would put to rest the concern that the brutal behavior of American soldiers in Iraqi prisons had been sanctioned from above, it was wrong. While Mr. Bush`s 2002 memo does not condone torture, it opens loopholes in the treatment of prisoners that the military could drive a Hummer through — and some clearly did.

We can understand why Mr. Bush decided not to apply the Geneva Conventions to Al Qaeda just months after 9/11. It`s a terrorist organization, not a country`s army. But Mr. Bush also took Attorney General John Ashcroft`s misguided advice that the Geneva protocols did not apply to the Taliban army, a position based on the flimsy pretext that Afghanistan was a "failed nation."

Mr. Bush`s memo instructed the armed forces to treat Taliban prisoners in a way consistent with the "principles of Geneva." (The top White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, refused to say whether that also applied to the Central Intelligence Agency or to others interrogating prisoners.) But Mr. Bush added that this instruction applied only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." That phrase is repeated throughout later government documents on the treatment of prisoners, including one prepared during the invasion of Iraq.

In his memo, Mr. Bush wrote, "Of course, our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment." We asked the White House what part of American law denies humane treatment to anyone, but did not get an answer.

In another memo, to the military jailers at Guantánamo Bay, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denies "blanket authorization" of a request to use interrogation techniques that seem clearly beyond the Geneva Conventions, including hooding prisoners, depriving them of sleep, forcing them to stand or squat for hours at a time, threatening their loved ones, pushing their heads underwater, stripping them and shaving them. But Mr. Rumsfeld said those methods were "legally available."

The documents do not explain how we got from Mr. Rumsfeld`s memo to the actual practice in Iraq, where these methods came to be routinely used and where one commander — presumably with an awareness of the Pentagon`s thinking — authorized the use of snarling guard dogs in interrogation sessions.

The document dump only reaffirms the need for a more robust Congressional response to this mess. The record is no straighter now than it was last week. It is time for Republican leaders in Congress to back up Senator John Warner, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and either compel full disclosure by the administration or create a new panel with subpoena powers.

This partial view of the thinking of the administration on the prisoner issue did provide, once again, confirmation of how this president and his team consider themselves above the rules that bind ordinary mortals. From the start of his presidency, Mr. Bush has resisted scrutiny and regulation, taking the position that the public should recognize that his people are good people with good intentions, and trust them to do the right thing.

The nation, of course, has always held to a different tradition that relies on the restraint of the rule of law rather than individual goodness. The debacle at Abu Ghraib shows how badly things can go when average Americans are let loose from those restraints, or allowed to believe that such restraints do not apply to them. The political and moral disasters of this administration, from the current dreadful state of American prestige abroad to the injustices perpetrated on innocent Americans erroneously suspected of terrorist ties, show that the same thing applies to the people at the top.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 24, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Thou-Shalt-See TV
By ROB KUTNER

Inspired by the runaway success of religion-themed novels like the "Left Behind" series and Mel Gibson`s "The Passion of the Christ," broadcasters are devoting more of their prime-time schedules to shows dealing with God, faith and the afterlife.

— Reuters, June 15

CSI: HOLY LAND (CBS) Liked "The Passion" but didn`t think it dwelled on the forensics enough? The trail to Damascus is still warm for these detectives, investigating unsolved martyrdoms as to whether they qualify the victim for sainthood. Not so much a whodunit as a who-gets-beatified-for-it.

CHASTITY & SLOTH (ABC) One regards the body as a sacred temple of the divine. The other lies idle, reaping not the fruits of human industry. And now they`re . . . roommates?

TUCKED BY AN ANGEL (CBS) Combining America`s love of both the supernatural and the superficial, this epidermally searing drama follows a mysterious figure who moves from town to town, solving people`s appearance problems, then moving on.

GODVILLE (WB) Moses begging Pharaoh to let him use the chariot. Samson being ordered to cut his hair and get a job. Jesus sulking over having to do "another stupid healing." It`s all your favorite Biblical figures — back when they were still teens.

AMERICAN DESTROYER OF IDOLS (FOX) Simon Cowell gets religion, a green card — and an AK-47.

SODOMITE EYE FOR THE MAN RIGHTEOUS BEFORE THE LORD (BRAVO) Identical to "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," except that each episode ends with the Fab Five being stoned to death. (Note: working title.)

THE DISCIPLE (NBC) Sixteen of America`s most pious compete to satisfy the increasingly personal whims of the great master Sri Chanamasala (né Larry Schwarzbaum of Canarsie). Who will be the one this week to get "deprogrammed"?

YAHWEH SCHMO (SPIKE) In this first-ever "divine reality" show, a group of actors seeks to fool the Omnipotent Lord of Creation (currently being "retooled").

SHARE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (HBO) Larry David becomes a born-again Christian, then goes around annoying people in an entirely new way.

Rob Kutner is a writer for "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

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June 24, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Attack of the Wolfman
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It would be hard to top the grandiosity of Bill Clinton`s self-pity. The man, after all, compared himself to communism with a straight face.

Talking to the audience after a New York screening of "The Hunting of the President," by his pal Harry Thomason, Mr. Clinton said: "When the Berlin Wall fell, the `perpetual right` in America, which always needs an enemy, didn`t have an enemy anymore. So I had to serve as the next best thing."

Interviewed by David Dimbleby of the BBC, Mr. Clinton angrily turned questions about his Monica Lewinsky dalliance into a self-justifying denunciation of the press: "People like you always help the far right `cause you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings" — instead of, Mr. Clinton said, referring to himself, "whether the Bosnian people were saved and whether he brought a million people home from Kosovo."

He said the press cared more about hurting people than "whether 27 million people had jobs at the end and whether we moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as Reagan and Bush. This is what I care about."

Ranting, he said the press didn`t care "a rip" that Kenneth Starr "sends a woman like Susan McDougal into a Hannibal Lecter-like cell and makes her wear a uniform worn only by murderers and child molesters," but merely about getting a juicy story. Of course, Mr. Clinton is peddling his book by telling a lot of juicy stories in interviews with the press and dishing about his personal failings, but that`s different, I guess.

Still, the former president pales when put up against the grandiosity of Paul Wolfowitz`s self-delusion. On Tuesday, Mr. Wolfowitz, Rummy`s top deputy, told the House Armed Services Committee that one reason so many negative stories come out of Iraq is that "a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors — and rumors are plentiful."

Beyond sliming journalists (much as he slimes his hair with his own saliva in Michael Moore`s new movie) who are risking their lives traveling around Iraq to cover the cakewalk that became chaos, Mr. Wolfowitz dodges the responsibility he bears for turning Iraq into a shooting gallery and Al Qaeda recruitment center.

When challenged by Democratic lawmakers about the lack of a connection between Saddam and Sept. 11, Mr. Wolfowitz was unrepentant — and unmoved by the 9/11 panel`s conclusion that Saddam and Al Qaeda had no collaborative relationship.

"I don`t need proof of involvement in Sept. 11 to be concerned that Saddam Hussein is providing mutual support to Al Qaeda," he said. "It seems to me it`s like saying if someone breeds Rottweilers and leaves the gate open but doesn`t tell the dog who to attack, that he`s not operationally involved in the thing." (What`s he talking about, and why are we still paying him?)

Perhaps that`s not the most felicitous metaphor, given the revelations that it was Donald Rumsfeld who O.K.`d the use of vicious dogs by U.S. guards to threaten Iraqi prisoners.

The White House refuses to admit that, as far as U.S. security was concerned, Saddam was more bark than bite. As Hans Blix put it, Saddam had put up a "Beware of Dog" sign, so he didn`t bother with the dog.

But instead of admitting he got the Saddam threat wrong, Mr. Wolfowitz lectured Americans not to be impatient. Referring to our foes, he said, "The more they sense that we`re impatient . . . the more car bombs there will be." He seems to imply that we`re complicit in killing our soldiers if we don`t sanguinely go along with the Bush administration`s delusions.

"The notion that this was `a war of choice,` that we could sit there and live with the Middle East status quo after Sept. 11, I think is wrong," he said.

Once again, Mr. Wolfowitz conflates 9/11 and Iraq. Instead of finishing off Osama in Afghanistan, the neocons dragged us into an Iraq adventure, which has ended up destabilizing the Middle East. So much for the "status quo."

At least Colin Powell has the decency to be embarrassed about the State Department`s preposterous initial understatement of terror incidents.

Wolfie`s never embarrassed, even as he continues to spin his version of the truth about why we went to Iraq, how we`re doing there and when we`ll be able to leave. The man is quite a talented propagandist — Michael Moore without the laughs.

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Marines Clash With Insurgents in Fallujah


Reuters
Thursday, June 24, 2004; 3:30 AM

Fallujah, Iraq, June 24 - Fighting erupted between U.S. soldiers and guerrillas in Fallujah on Thursday, with U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships swooping low over the Iraqi city and insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s.

A U.S. Cobra helicopter was shot down during fierce fighting between Marines and guerrillas in the city. The crew walked away unhurt, U.S. Marines said.

The rattle of gunfire rang out in streets near one of the main intersections of the city, and explosions could be heard, witnesses said.

U.S. armoured vehicles were moving into parts of the city, backed by air support.

Under terms of a truce agreed between Marines and city elders in Fallujah to end weeks of fighting in April, U.S. forces pulled out of the city and handed responsibility for security to an Iraqi brigade that includes many soldiers who served under former President Saddam Hussein.

On Saturday and Tuesday, U.S. forces destroyed houses in Fallujah in what the military said were "precision strikes" against safehouses used by fighters loyal to Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for many attacks in Iraq.

A senior military official said 20 foreign fighters had been killed in Tuesday`s strike on a Zarqawi-linked safehouse.

© 2004 Reuters

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U.S. Immunity In Iraq Will Go Beyond June 30

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said.

The administration plans to accomplish that step -- which would bypass the most contentious remaining issue before the transfer of power -- by extending an order that has been in place during the year-long occupation of Iraq. Order 17 gives all foreign personnel in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority immunity from "local criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their parent states."

U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer is expected to extend Order 17 as one of his last acts before shutting down the occupation next week, U.S. officials said. The order is expected to last an additional six or seven months, until the first national elections are held.

The United States would draw legal authority from Iraq`s Transitional Administrative Law and the recent U.N. resolution recognizing the new government and approving a multinational force, but some U.S. officials and countries in the multinational force still want greater reassurances on immunity, U.S. officials said.

Bush`s top foreign policy advisers, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, are still debating the scope of immunity to be granted. "The debate is on the extent or parameters of coverage -- should it be sweeping, as it is now, or more limited," said a senior U.S. official familiar with discussions, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue.

In Baghdad, U.S. officials have been engaged all week with interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and national security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie. Both sides hope to finalize the terms before Bush leaves for the NATO summit in Istanbul at week`s end, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

The administration is taking the step in an effort to prevent the new Iraqi government from having to grant a blanket waiver as one of its first acts, which could undermine its credibility just as it assumes power. But U.S. officials said Washington`s act could also create the impression that the United States is not turning over full sovereignty -- and giving itself special privileges.

The administration`s move comes when issues of immunity are particularly sensitive, in light of the scandal over the abuse of U.S. detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday at the United Nations, the administration, citing opposition on the Security Council, withdrew a resolution that would have extended immunity for U.S. personnel in U.N.-approved peacekeeping missions from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.

In Iraq, U.S. officials are already concerned about the potential fallout after June 30 among key players -- from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s most powerful religious cleric, to militant insurgents. But the Bush foreign policy team concluded that there are few alternatives until elections select a government that will be powerful enough to negotiate a formal treaty, U.S. officials said.

The issue of immunity for U.S. troops is among the most contentious in the Islamic world, where it has galvanized public opinion against the United States in the past. A similar grant of immunity to U.S. troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people.

"Our honor has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed," Khomeini said in a famous 1964 speech that led to his detention and then expulsion from Iran. The measure "reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog."

Ironically, Khomeini went into exile in Iraq, where he spent 12 years in Najaf -- the Shiite holy city that is now home to Sistani and his followers and where Iraqis still remember the flap that led the shah to deport a cleric who later led Iran`s 1979 Islamic revolution.

In Iraq, Washington had originally hoped to achieve a formal Status of Forces Agreement to grant immunity, but that was effectively vetoed when Sistani and other Iraqi politicians said no unelected Iraqi government could enter into a treaty with other countries. The United States now hopes to negotiate a status agreement next year, after a government is elected.

In the current negotiations over Order 17, a senior Iraqi official said, the basic concept is to cover "soldiers and foreign nationals working in operations conducted by mutual consent or understanding with the Iraqi interim government and the command of the multinational force. But what that means remains to be seen."

The United States hopes to include some foreign contractors, many of whom are engaged in security operations, the Iraqi official added, while Iraq is pressing to retain sovereignty.

"It`s going to be a political hot potato, and we`re worried it`ll be used as a hot potato in a way that is not good for either the interim government or the multinational force," the official said.

As a legal basis, Iraq`s transitional law, which was worked out between Bremer and the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, may be considered too weak a foundation for granting immunity. Sistani argued against it because it was not the work of elected officials.

The U.N. resolution also has no direct reference to immunity for foreign troops. The only reference is in a letter from Powell to the Security Council attached to the resolution, which says contributing states in the multinational force must "have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel" but does not mention prosecution or other specific activity.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, center, leaves Camp X-Ray, where suspected members of al Qaeda and the Taliban are held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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U.S. Struggled Over How Far to Push Tactics
Documents Show Back-and-Forth on Interrogation Policy

By Dana Priest and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A01

Newly released documents and interviews portray the civilian leadership at the Pentagon as urgently concerned that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees might have information that could prevent terrorist attacks and as searching intently for effective and "exceptional" interrogation techniques that would pass legal muster.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides emerge as central players in the government`s struggle over nearly three years to decide how far it could go to extract information from those captured in Afghanistan and Iraq and others imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The result, seen in the documents and in the officials` statements, is a trail of fitful ad hoc policymaking in which interrogation tactics were authorized for a time, then rescinded or modified after the Pentagon`s lawyers or others raised legal, ethical or practical objections. Some practices authorized in the field were pulled back at the Pentagon level, and decisions on how to treat detainees were sometimes made case by case.

Rumsfeld, for example, approved in December 2002 a range of severe methods including the stripping of prisoners at Guantanamo, and using dogs to frighten them. He later rescinded those tactics and signed off on a shorter list of "exceptional techniques" suggested by a Pentagon working group in 2003, even though the panel pointed out that, historically, the U.S. military had rejected the use of force in interrogations. "Army interrogation experts view the use of force as an inferior technique that yields information of questionable quality," and distorts the behavior of those being questioned, the group report noted.

Although the White House this week repudiated a Justice Department opinion that torture might be legally defensible, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II in 2003 forced the Pentagon working group to use it as its legal guidepost. He did so over objections from the top lawyers of every military service, who found the legal judgments to be extreme and wrong-headed, according to several military lawyers and memos outlining the debate that were summarized for The Washington Post.

In Iraq, where White House and Pentagon lawyers say all prisoners are protected by the Geneva Conventions, Rumsfeld agreed to hide an Iraqi captive from the International Committee of the Red Cross because, he said, CIA Director George J. Tenet asked him to. Legal experts call it a clear violation of the conventions. "A request was made to do that, and we did," Rumsfeld said last week, even as his deputy general counsel, Daniel J. Dell`Orto, acknowledged from the same podium that "we should have registered him much sooner than we did."

Rumsfeld played a direct role in setting policies for detainee treatment in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, according to a list of Defense Department memos related to Guantanamo Bay obtained by The Post. He signed seven orders from January 2002 to January 2003 establishing the interrogation center, placing the Army in charge, allowing access by the Red Cross and foreign intelligence officials, and even deciding how detainee mail would be handled.

Unlike the CIA, which vetted and won approval from the Justice Department and National Security Council for its aggressive interrogation tactics after Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon has worked largely on its own in promulgating new questioning methods.

The White House and Justice Department were "completely uninvolved with" reviewing the interrogation rules in Afghanistan and Iraq, said a senior administration official involved in the process.

The Pentagon`s chief spokesman, Lawrence T. DiRita, portrayed Rumsfeld as largely responding to requests from commanders and interrogators in the field rather than pushing a certain interrogation policy. "These things tended to come up through legal channels," he said in an interview.

Part of the Pentagon leadership`s drive for more leeway in interrogations can be traced to a historic change during Rumsfeld`s tenure: the military`s dramatically enhanced role in collecting and analyzing intelligence that can be used to thwart terrorist networks worldwide. To accomplish this, Rumsfeld has begun an unprecedented drive to build a Pentagon-based human intelligence apparatus that could one day rival the CIA`s clandestine case officer program.

This intelligence-gathering mission trumps most other priorities, including the desire to bring alleged wrongdoers to trial for their role in terrorist plots.

As Rumsfeld explained it in February to the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce: "What we think about is keeping them off the battlefield so they can`t go out and kill more people, immediately interrogating them so we can find out what they know that can prevent future acts of terror against our country . . . and only last is the issue of a crime and some sort of a process that would make a judgment about that crime."

The debate over tactics at Guantanamo appears to have begun in December 2002 when two Navy interrogators heard young military intelligence personnel talking about using techniques that they described to their superiors as "repulsive and potentially illegal."

Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora brought the issue to the attention of Haynes. Mora`s appeals were ignored, however, until he threatened to put his concerns in writing for Haynes, several senior Pentagon officials said. Mora`s questions led to the discovery that among the list of "counter-resistance strategies" at Guantanamo were such tactics as using scenarios "designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family," according to an October 2002 memo, and wrapping detainees in wet towels or dripping water on them to make them believe they would suffocate.

Lt. Col. Diane E. Beaver, the legal counsel at Guantanamo then, ruled that those and other techniques -- including 20-hour interrogations, light and sound assaults, stress positions, exposure to cold weather and water -- were legal. She said they could be used with proper oversight and training of interrogators, as long as "there is an important governmental objective, and it is not done for the purpose of causing harm or with the intent to cause prolonged mental suffering."

Interrogators at the detention facilities were particularly interested in using the techniques against two prisoners -- one of them Mohamed al Qahtani, a Saudi detainee who some officials believed may have been the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11. Both detainees were considered to have important information about potential future terrorist operations, defense officials have said.

Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantanamo, agreed, and sent the list of tactics to Gen. James T. Hill, head of the U.S. Southern Command, for approval.

Hill was not as convinced, and wondered in a memo about the legality of some of the techniques. He asked Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for guidance. In December, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs and stripping, but threw out other controversial items.

Rumsfeld also set up a working group of military lawyers and others to deliberate over the range of techniques that might be useful and appropriate. The group came up with 35 techniques. Among the most severe were 20-hour interrogations, face slapping, stripping detainees to create "a feeling of helplessness and dependence," and using dogs to increase anxiety.

The president`s directive in February 2002 that ordered U.S. forces to treat al Qaeda and Taliban detainees humanely and consistent with the Geneva Conventions does contain a loophole phrase: "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."

The working group`s report discussed when the "military necessity" exception might be invoked, citing two factors. One was when government officials felt certain that a particular detainee had information needed to prevent an attack. The other factor was a likelihood that a terrorist attack was about to occur and the attack`s potential scale.

But the report also noted that "military courts have treated the necessity defense with disfavor and in fact, some have refused to accept necessity as a permissible defense." The rejections have come from judges who objected to the notion of weighing one evil against another, or who feared that acceptance of the necessity argument would open the door to "private moral codes" substituting for the rule of law, the report said.

Other cautionary flags were raised as well. The report warned that use of exceptional techniques could have "adverse effects" on the "culture and self-image" of the armed forces, recalling the damage done in the past by "perceived law of war violations."

It argued that use of such tactics in some cases but not others could create uncertainty among interrogators about the appropriate limits for interrogators. It also noted that, if the tactics became public, the disclosure could undermine confidence in the war on terrorism and in the military tribunal process that was developed for putting detainees on trial.

Rumsfeld eventually pared the list of 35 methods to 24. Most were part of standard military doctrine. Seven, however, went beyond that, including: removing a detainee from the standard interrogation setting and putting him in a less comfortable room; replacing hot rations with cold food or military Meals Ready to Eat; adjusting the temperature to uncomfortable levels or introducing an unpleasant smell; reversing sleep cycles from night to day; deceiving detainees into thinking they were being questioned by people from a country other than the United States.

"The secretary has placed great stock in the legal reviews that have taken place at every level, and has been persuaded each time that he has had to make decisions, that there were sufficient legal reviews along the way," DiRita said.

A suspected Iraqi member of the terrorist group Al Ansar did not receive such a thorough legal review, defense officials said. The man -- identified by U.S. News & World Report as Hiwa AbdulRahman Rashul -- was picked up by Kurdish soldiers in June or July of 2003 and taken outside Iraq by the CIA for interrogation. In October, the CIA`s general counsel told the CIA`s directorate of operations that it had to bring the man back to Iraq, since all Iraqi detainees were to be accorded treatment under the Geneva Conventions.

Tenet asked Rumsfeld not to give the prisoner a number and to hide him from international Red Cross officials. He became lost in the system for seven months and was not interrogated by CIA or military officials during that time.

In his investigation into the abuse of detainees at Iraq`s Abu Ghraib prison, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba had criticized the CIA practice of maintaining such "ghost detainees" and called the practice "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law."

Rumsfeld was asked at a news conference last week, "How is this case different from what Taguba was talking about, the ghost detainees?"

"It is just different, that`s all," Rumsfeld replied.

"But can you explain how and why?"

"I can`t."

Staff writers Mike Allen and R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Halla Maarouf bargains with a customer in her mother`s house. Below, wearing a traditional abaya, she tucks the proceeds from her prostitution into her bra.
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The Cost of Liberty
In a Chaotic New Iraq, A Young Widow Turns to Prostitution

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page C01

BAGHDAD

The row of beauty salons had been ransacked and torched. Shards of glass, dust and bottles leaking sweet-smelling liquid were all that was left, creating an eerie mosaic in the afternoon light. Wrapped in a black abaya, Halla Muhammad Maarouf stood in the middle of the street, staring at the destruction and trying not to cry. There was no note, no graffiti saying who had done it or why, but Halla knew the attack was a warning meant for her.

Three months before, in October, Halla had begun working as a prostitute to supplement the income she earned helping out at her mother`s salon. Her brother had been killed in the U.S.-led invasion, and after her husband was killed in the bloody chaos that followed, Halla suddenly found herself solely responsible for supporting her two young children. The $5 or so a week she earned at the salon was not enough.

She had tried to be discreet, but word got out. Earlier that week, she says, a stranger had shown up at her doorway with a copy of the Koran and asked her whether she knew any women who sold their bodies and, if she did, to tell them it was wrong. Neighbors inquired about the men coming and going from her apartment, and potential clients had tracked her down at the salon.

When U.S. troops marched into the capital on April 9 last year, they liberated a people who, for decades, had lived under a government that controlled nearly every aspect of their lives. In the later years of Saddam Hussein`s rule, getting caught trying to solicit meant life in prison or even death. In a public ceremony in 2000, Hussein had 200 women beheaded after accusing them of prostitution.

Today, under a justice system largely overseen by foreigners, getting caught generally means a slap on the wrist and 48 hours in a jail cell. That has made soliciting a more inviting option for a new generation of women, especially in a place where few employment opportunities exist and hundreds of thousands of women have been left widows as a result of three successive wars.

But as the U.S. occupation draws to an end, and more conservative Islamic clerics gain power, the fate of prostitutes like Halla is uncertain. In recent months, attacks on people and establishments accused of promoting vices have escalated. Masked gunmen have shot at liquor vendors, according to Iraqi police officials. Religious leaders have run renters of racy videotapes out of town. And anonymous vigilantes have kidnapped, beaten and killed prostitutes in several major cities. Women`s rights groups, including the Organization of Women`s Freedom, have decried the killings, saying the women are in need of help, not punishment.

"Maybe there is an order to kill all the prostitutes," Halla would recall thinking that day. "If the Islamic parties arrive to power maybe even the Americans can`t stop them." As she made her way through the rubble, Halla wondered what it would be like to have a real job, of being a receptionist at a hotel, a laundry woman or maybe opening a boutique for used clothes. She was 23 years old, healthy and a hard worker. There was a chance she could start anew. Wasn`t there?

Halla grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Baghdad, a strip of nondescript apartment buildings a few blocks from the Palestine and Sheraton hotels that became bunkers for foreign journalists during the U.S.-led invasion. Her father was a carpenter, her mother a beauty stylist. She had three younger brothers, and money was always a problem. After her parents separated when she was 10 years old, she dropped out of school to work alongside her mother. She washed hair and swept the floors.
The Loving Wife

She met her husband at the salon years later. She had spied a tall, muscular man staring at her. She was 15, barely five feet tall with bleached blond hair and a sassy attitude. At 26, Walid Hameed was more serious and worked as a security guard in Tikrit, about 90 miles north of Baghdad. He had stopped by to pick up a friend who was getting her tresses set.

Within days they went on their first date and within a few months he proposed. At first, both families objected. Halla`s mother had another, wealthier beau in mind for her only daughter. Walid`s parents thought Halla was too young. But the two were in love, and in late 1996 they were married at the swank Babylon Hotel. There were mounds of sweets, pretty shimmery clothes, and family and friends from all over Iraq. When her new husband came to their bedroom that night and tried to take her clothes off, she giggled. She says she changed into a nightgown and insisted on keeping her flowing white veil and her elbow-length white gloves. She ran out of the room and back to the elevator, where she spent the entire night pressing buttons and going up and down. It would be a week before she figured out what it meant to lose her virginity.

Married life suited Halla and Walid. They both kept their jobs, lived in a small one-bedroom apartment and shared the chores. On hot evenings, they used to get ice cream and sit on the sidewalk staring at the passersby. She affectionately called him "bald man" because his hair was thinning. He called her "baga," or bug, because she was so tiny. The couple had two boys, Iaad and Saif, in quick succession.

Everything changed with the war. Her middle brother, Ali Muhammad Maarouf, 20, a soldier, was shot and killed in the first few days of the fighting in the southern port city of Basra. And a few weeks later, after major combat was declared over but when law and order had yet to be established, her husband was shot in the head one night by a business associate. Halla said that her husband was still alive when she arrived at the hospital and that he managed to tell her, "Halla, be a good girl," before he died. Halla insisted on spending the night at the morgue, hugging Walid`s body and weeping. At daybreak, one of her brothers came and gently carried her away.

Halla says she did not leave her mother`s house for a month. When she finally ventured out and started thinking about her situation, she knew it was dire. Shortly after Walid`s death, his family took all of the couple`s possessions and stopped talking to her. She had already used up their modest savings and knew her wages from the salon would not be enough to support her sons and her younger brothers, who had had trouble finding work.

As a distraction, some girlfriends offered to treat her to a trip up north, to the resort town of Sulaymaniyah for a mini-vacation. They spent the days wandering around the marketplaces, staring at the blocks of honeycomb, hand-woven carpets, the children`s clothes and toys. She had no money but as she touched the beautiful things she said she somehow felt more alive and hopeful.

One night at dinner, she was introduced to an older man who said he was a car salesman. He had a big potbelly, thin legs, and wore glasses but was otherwise quite cheerful looking. She said she told him about her husband and her worries about money. He took out four $100 bills and told her he would give them to her -- if she would spend the night with him. Halla says she shook her head when he made the advance, but he persisted and she followed him to a hotel.

She remembers that he gave her the money as soon as they walked into the room, and she put it on the table, ready to bolt. He picked it up and handed it to her again, telling her not to be afraid. She took a cigarette and a drink and they talked for a few hours before he took her to the bed and lay on top of her. She began to scream: "I can`t breathe! I can`t breathe!" She pushed him away and ran out, she says. But the next day he invited her to lunch, and a few hours later they were back in the hotel room. This time she gave in.

"I had a shock with that man, but I thought that with $400 I could buy everything," she says. She imagined the honeycomb, the carpets, the children`s clothes and toys. "After that it became easier."

Her subsequent clients, maybe 40 to 50 in all, are a blur. The government officials from the Anbar province out west. The skinny young man who looked like a chicken. The wealthy former military official. The money flowed -- $100 to $300 for each night, as much as $2,500 some months, plenty to support herself, her sons, her brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins.

No one in her family asked where the money was coming from, but they soon found out. She says that by the winter, they were talking about prostitution openly, as if it were just another 9 to 5 desk job.
The Life

On a recent afternoon, Halla was holding court in her ground-floor apartment, a place that has become a salon of sorts for the destitute in the new Iraq. More than a dozen people rotated in and out of the room. There were small-time criminals, pimps and other prostitutes. Halla`s brothers, Omar, 22, and Maarouf, 18, who act as her bodyguards, were also there. So was Halla`s most regular customer, Shamil.

Shamil, an engineer who is a subcontractor for a U.S. company, visits Halla several times a week, three times a day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner that she cooks for him. He says he liked her because she is "frank" and "pure of heart." He has a wife, with whom he lives in a big house in the ritzy Mansour district of Baghdad, but he spends most of his free time with Halla. He has even helped her brothers by providing them with odd jobs in his company.

In Iraq, there are no red-light districts, and Halla and other prostitutes don`t walk the streets. They typically meet their clients through friends. Aya Abbas Latif, 22, talks about being "married" three times to customers. Another friend, Nada Baqr, 31, refers to being in love with one of her "boyfriends." Halla and Shamil quarrel like husband and wife and he treats her children -- now 4 and 2 years old, like his own, buying them presents and playing with them when he is in the apartment. He has prohibited Halla from seeing other men. (She does, though, behind his back.)

Sometimes the conversation at Halla`s place is mundane and practical, about repairing the electricity generator or favorite restaurants. Sometimes the conversation is racy. At other times, it`s reflective.

Halla`s friend Nada fell into prostitution when she could not pay her rent and her landlord said he`d let it go if she came to a party and danced. "My first reaction was that I felt sad and ashamed," she recalls. She told her husband the money came from her new job as a cleaning lady. Nada says one day she and her sister were driven to an office building near the Baghdad airport and were introduced to two American soldiers. She was afraid, she says, but they were gentle and nice and made jokes and slipped them an extra $100 each. She was so giddy from the encounter that she hardly cared that the pimp`s profit, Nada says, was $700.

Aya, who goes by the nickname Hiba, says she had to give her son to a distant relative because she could not support him. She took a job as a dental assistant but the monthly salary of $64 was not enough. She says she sends most of the money she makes to her family and is occasionally allowed to see her son. "I go to kiss him and tell him I love him but I don`t tell him I am his mother because I don`t want the other children to know he is the son of a prostitute," she says.

Halla and her friends say they worry about pregnancy and disease and have sought advice from each other about how to protect themselves. Before they became prostitutes, they say, they didn`t know very much about sexual health. But those are relatively minor concerns when compared with how to reconcile their jobs with their religion. Halla is Muslim but acknowledges that she doesn`t believe her job conforms to Islamic law. Still she is more afraid of being judged by other Iraqis and being hurt than of a higher being in the afterlife. Allah, she says, will understand why she is doing what she is doing.

Halla`s parents and brothers say they feel guilty about letting Halla work as a prostitute but have little choice. Her mother doesn`t have the money to reopen her beauty salon and her father is now too old to work. Her brothers have had short stints as construction workers but say there are few steady jobs for people their age and with their junior high school education. "I hate it, but without her doing this we could not survive," Omar says. They sleep on the floor in her apartment and do what they can to keep her safe from the beatings that other prostitutes have suffered. One night a few months ago, a drunken man came to Halla`s apartment and began shouting for Halla, she says. Omar told him to go away. The man fired two bullets into Omar`s leg, cracking the bones. Doctors said he will have to wear a brace on that leg for a full year.

The attack on the salons in October badly shook Halla, her family and friends. When U.S. soldiers arrived to help extinguish the flames, she says they told her they thought the attackers were Islamic extremists and warned her to be careful. She was -- for a while. Halla says she made inquiries about other jobs through friends, but her attempts were cursory and she discovered that they often paid $30 or less a month, a tiny fraction of what she made as a prostitute. As the days passed without another attack, the fears started to fade and she went back to her old life.
Rude Awakening

One day in February, she woke up on a cold stone floor, confused. Her head was resting on her purse and she was covered by a blanket. She was still in her red flannel pajamas but was also wearing an abaya robe on top of them. The left sleeve was ripped. Then Halla noticed that the walls of the room were sky blue, the trademark color of the Iraqi police. She was at a police station.

Her head spun as she recalled the events of the night. She had been out with a friend, Asaad Abdul Razak, 22, and they had gotten into an argument. He criticized her for being a prostitute, but what really set her off was that he had said her late husband, Walid, was no good and had chastised her for being so stuck on him. She hit him and he hit her. Then somehow her brother Maarouf showed up, stabbed Asaad in the stomach and ran from the scene.

The police arrived but found only Halla and the wounded young man. She was arrested and locked up in an office in the local police station. All she did that day was cry, she says, so hard that at one point she had an asthma attack and the police had to rush her to the hospital.

But by morning, she says, things didn`t seem as gloomy. Shamil had brought chicken and rice from her favorite restaurant and had talked the police into visiting Asaad in the hospital to clear things up. Asaad signed a statement saying Halla wasn`t involved and told police some random gangsters had attacked him. After reviewing all the reports, a U.S. Army captain signed Halla`s release papers, Halla says, and smiled as he wished her well.

That gave Halla an idea. Images of money flashed through her mind. She scribbled down her phone number and slipped it to the interpreter to give to the soldier.

She was disappointed when he didn`t call.

Special correspondent Shereen Jerjes contributed to this report.

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A Partial Disclosure



Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A24

THE BUSH administration has taken two important steps toward correcting its policies on the handling of foreign detainees. On Tuesday administration officials renounced earlier legal opinions that justified the use of torture, and President Bush stated that the United States will not condone its use. At the same time, the Defense Department released its current procedures for prisoner interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, where the administration considers itself unbound by the Geneva Conventions. Both the revised procedures and the administration`s statements about them give some cause for concern, and many important questions remain unanswered. But President Bush deserves credit for accepting that some administration policymaking was, as his counsel put it, "controversial" and "subject to misinterpretation," and for breaking with a self-defeating policy of secrecy about the rules for interrogation.

Now that the current Guantanamo procedures are public, Americans and foreign observers alike can see that most are the same as those used by the U.S. military for decades, without controversy and without leading to abuse. Of the seven additional techniques now allowed by the Pentagon under certain circumstances, several -- including "environmental manipulation" and "isolation" -- are considered inhumane or illegal by human rights groups and other governments, as the official policy statement acknowledges. In our view, the administration ought to reconsider whether the intelligence fruits of such questionable techniques, reportedly meager, are worth the political costs and the damage they do to America`s reputation, or whether they too should be publicly renounced.

A deeper concern is the administration`s continuing failure to disclose the interrogation policies applicable outside Guantanamo, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the United States. A statement Tuesday by White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales appeared to diminish Mr. Bush`s broad assurance on torture: Mr. Gonzales said that the administration considers torture to be "a specific intent to inflict severe physical or mental harm or suffering." That narrow definition, according to the administration`s previous reasoning, would allow the infliction of pain short of death or organ failure, and even this would be acceptable if the pain were not the interrogator`s primary purpose. If Mr. Bush`s pledge is to have credibility around the world, more detailed and restrictive guidelines on torture should be adopted and made public -- or legislated by Congress.

Questions also remain about how the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere came about. The documents confirm that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a number of harsh interrogation techniques for use in Guantanamo in December 2002, including hooding, requiring nudity, placing prisoners in stress positions and using dogs. After military lawyers objected that these violated international law, Mr. Rumsfeld suspended their use a month later. But all these techniques, as well as the restricted practices now approved for Guantanamo, appeared in an interrogation policy issued for Iraq by command of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez in September 2003. Nearly word for word, the harsh methods detailed in memos signed by Mr. Rumsfeld -- which even administration lawyers considered violations of the Geneva Conventions -- were then distributed to interrogators at Abu Ghraib. The procedures in turn could be read to cover much of what is seen in the photographs that have scandalized the world. How did this spread of improper and illegal practices occur? The Bush administration has yet to offer a convincing answer -- or hold anyone accountable for it.

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Grand `Oprah,` Poor History

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A25

BOULDER, Colo. -- The good news for Bill Clinton is that his book, "My Life," sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores the first day it was on sale, a record for the chain. The bad news for Bill Clinton is that the book sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores, a record for the chain. The book may make Clinton rich. It will not rehabilitate him.

The pity of it is that Clinton went for the bucks. That`s understandable, since he never had much money and left office with a mountain of legal and other debts. But ever since Jerry Ford pioneered the franchising of the presidency -- there was virtually nothing he would not do for the right fee -- huge riches have awaited any former occupant of the White House. Solvency would have come to Clinton, if it has not already, even without his $10 million book advance. Clinton took the money -- and the obligation that came with it: write the sort of book that could be promoted on "Oprah." Clinton more or less did that.

The early reviews have been eviscerating, particularly the one in the New York Times. Its chief reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, somehow managed to read 957 pages in what must have been about a day and pronounced the book a mess -- "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull." Other reviews have reached similar conclusions (although some feel otherwise), but suffice it to say that it is not being universally hailed as a triumph -- a book as brilliant as its author.

My own hurried perusal of the tome leads me to support Kakutani. Although in his acknowledgment Clinton thanks his editor, Robert Gottlieb, for teaching him about "hard cuts," it sometimes seems that nothing has been cut. We get, for instance, an appreciation of the Grand Canyon in late afternoon: "It was amazing the way the rocks, compressed into distinct layers over millions of years, changed colors as the canyon darkened from the bottom up." Nice, but can we move on?

To a large extent, Ulysses S. Grant`s presidency was rehabilitated by his memoirs, written as the Civil War general was dying of cancer. Richard Nixon, virtually banished from Washington, wrote book after book from his exurban Elba in New Jersey. Watergate haunted him, as it should have, but slowly we came to realize that he possessed a first-class mind, keenly analytical, occasionally wise. No one could say that Nixon did not have gravitas.

Clinton, too, has a first-class mind -- I have observed him long enough to tell you that -- but this book, and especially the attendant publicity, obscures it. The people who lined up long before dawn to buy a copy were not drooling to find out about health care or the budget. Instead they were seeking a piece of Clinton -- like a souvenir or an autograph. He has emerged as the uber-celebrity of our times, beloved for his good looks, his charm and, paradoxically, the sex scandal that almost doomed his presidency.

I`m not sure Clinton can ever overcome Monica, but once he took that $10 million, he obligated himself to include personal details that would entice the public. He tried to draw a line, as he did in his "60 Minutes" interview with Dan Rather, but the book nonetheless contains fresh details designed to provide news for a voyeuristic public. For instance, he writes that after he confessed the truth to Hillary, he slept on the couch for a while. They devoted one day a week to marital therapy, and he met, as we have always known, with three ministers to restore his soul. You and I may care about this, but history does not.

As a result, the news that initially came out of the book was mostly about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. If there is something dramatically new about the Middle East, I haven`t heard about it. If there is something revealing about why health care reform went down in flames, that has not been reported either. Partly that`s because the Clinton administration -- and Clinton himself -- was so bad at keeping secrets, but mostly it`s because the public`s attention is focused on the salacious and personal. A president who makes history is of interest mostly to historians. A president who makes personal mistakes is of interest to us all.

At the Barnes & Noble Bookseller here, a clerk told me that the Clinton book was selling well, suggesting it`s not merely a bicoastal phenomenon. If that holds, then there is a good chance Bill Clinton will have succeeded in his financial obligation to his publisher. It is his obligation to himself that remains to be fulfilled.

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The Toll of `No More Iraqs`

By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A25

Military victory in Iraq was supposed to change the psychology of nations as well as the regime in Baghdad. "For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America," President Bush said in his State of the Union message in January.

It is not working that way as the occupation of Iraq stumbles toward a nominal end on June 30. The purposes and durability of the use of American military power abroad are being more loudly questioned and more persistently stigmatized in the media, on domestic political hustings and at international conclaves than they have been since Vietnam.

This is a growing problem for Bush as he heads toward Election Day. But the consequences of failure to create a psychology of victory by following Afghanistan with Iraq are far broader than Bush`s fate at the polls. The souring of America on intervention abroad has major strategic implications for the United States and for the world.

The threshold for preventive war, for example, will be raised significantly for the immediate future. Intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and the intentions of dictators or terrorist gangs that seem to possess them are unlikely to be sufficiently clear to meet the standards for action demanded by the post-facto doubts and recriminations on Iraq. Intelligence analysis will become even more cautious and ambiguously stated to policymakers. Vulnerability to surprise attack could grow again.

Widespread disillusionment will also seriously undercut idealistic rationales for deploying U.S. forces overseas. The growing acceptance of humanitarian intervention that gave rise to the slogan "No more Rwandas" is marginalized today by the drumbeat of "No more Iraqs." The mishandling and abuses of the Iraq occupation have negated much of the idealism of the liberation in one long, bloody year.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking of Kosovo in 1999, called for "a new internationalism" in which countries fight "not for territorial imperatives but for values . . . for a world where those responsible for crimes will have nowhere to hide." The sentiments were echoed by Kofi Annan at the United Nations and drew many to the cause of regime change in Iraq.

Blair`s words are quoted in "The Breaking of Nations," an outstanding new book of essays by Robert Cooper, who once served as an adviser to Blair and is now a senior official at the European Union in Brussels. Cooper treats Blair`s high-mindedness with respectful but cool skepticism:

"Humanitarian interventions are particularly dangerous for those who intervene. It is difficult to set clear objectives; it is difficult to know where to stop," he writes, adding that those who become involved in places such as Iraq or Sudan "run the risk that ultimately they will be there because they are there."

The United States has "typically" stationed troops abroad "to defend its allies," not to seek territory or empire -- or to create new world orders, Cooper notes. The traditional Cold War defensive role is at an end, as decisions this month on troop redeployments from Germany and South Korea signify. But a consensus on what American troops can hope to accomplish in the Middle East or elsewhere is ever more elusive as the problems of intervention rather than its uses dominate U.S. national attention.

Unfortunately, Bush has compounded the confusion by prolonging Iraq`s occupation and its aftermath, and blessing naked expediency in Baghdad, where the new prime minister is a longtime CIA asset who is accused in the New Yorker this week of having once been part of Saddam Hussein`s execution squads.

Americans have lost sight of the mass graves of Iraqi Shiites, the genocide campaigns against the Kurds and the war crimes committed by the criminal Baathist regime that was overthrown a year ago. The benefits of fighting terrorist networks in the Middle East and thereby galvanizing the Saudi, Moroccan and other Arab regimes to take forceful action against their extremists are not described or seen clearly enough to counterbalance the abuses of Abu Ghraib or the problems of Fallujah.

Instead, Washington is in the grips of an overlapping series of blame games geared toward influencing the November elections, ruining the reputations of rivals, and obtaining or protecting jobs for the professionally ambitious and the ambitiously professional. Perspective on the future of America`s role in Iraq, the Middle East and the world is quickly jettisoned in this psychological sourness. So are the once bright hopes of humanitarian intervention.

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This is torture - whatever it is called by the White House

Editorial

The Independent

24 June 2004

There are times - and, alas, they seem to be growing more frequent - when decent human beings can only recoil aghast at the conversation that is being conducted in all seriousness before them. On Tuesday, we had the release by the White House of a thick file of papers detailing the discussions that took place inside the US administration about rules for interrogating prisoners. The apparent purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that President George Bush`s first concern was that prisoners in US custody in Iraq and elsewhere should be treated "humanely". What the mass of material actually reveals is that the approach of the administration was to ask not "how humane can we be?" but "how far can we go before we cross the boundary from tough interrogation to torture?"

The dictionary definitions of torture are many. So far as the treatment of prisoners is concerned, from Guantanamo through Afghanistan to Iraq, words such as "abuse" and "mistreatment" have generally figured more prominently than "torture". But while the precise definition of torture may be open to linguistic and judicial debate, do interrogators really have to apply thumbscrews, pull nails and administer electric shocks before they become torturers? To the ordinary person, practices such as hooding, the perpetual playing of loud music, sleep deprivation, diet change, sexual humiliation, intimidation with dogs - to name but some of the documented practices at Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib prison - constitute torture. They surely also fit the definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" outlawed by the US Constitution.

But the bigger point is that no government should have to resort to hair-splitting over small-print definitions to extricate itself from accusations of torture, least of all a government that has set itself up as the beacon of freedom and the protector of the oppressed. It is hard to conceive of any greater betrayal of the "inalienable" human rights declared by America`s founding fathers - the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - than the practice of torture: with or without music, with or without dogs, and however the lawyers and linguists may choose to define it.

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An Iraqi man surveys the destruction of a police station in Ramadi, Iraq, that was reduced to rubble by an insurgent attack Thursday.

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Ein landesweiter Aufstand eine Woche vor der `Machtübergabe`.
Und es gibt immer noch Narren, die sagen, der Überfall hätte die Region befriedigt.

washingtonpost.com

Dozens Killed As Insurgents Launch Attacks Across Iraq
Marines Involved in Heavy Clashes in Fallujah

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; 6:24 AM

BAGHDAD, June 24 -- Iraqi insurgents launched an apparently coordinated offensive against U.S. occupation forces and Iraqi security posts in a number of locations Thursday, setting off continuing battles that killed at least one U.S. soldier and more than 20 Iraqi policemen.

The attacks, an unusual display of ability to stage simultaneous assaults, were the broadest and largest-scale so far in an insurgent campaign of bombings and assassinations in the weeks leading up to transfer of a limited form of sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government scheduled for next Wednesday.

The largest and most sustained attack came shortly after dawn on a police station and other government buildings in Baqubah, a farming hub 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Gunmen firing AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades took over the town`s main police station and occupied the central intersections.

The U.S. military said it was also fighting insurgents near its two bases on Baqubah`s outskirts. A U.S. soldier was killed in the clashes, a U.S. military spokesman said.

Local correspondents for the al-Jazeera satellite television network said 26 Iraqis were killed, including 16 policemen, and 30 were wounded. The insurgents raised black flags over the police station, which they still occupied at midday, they reported.

In a similar attack at Ramadi, 50 miles west of the capital, gunmen attacked a police station with automatic rifles and grenades, seizing the facility and killing seven policemen, local officials told Iraqi journalists. Then the insurgents set explosives in the building and blew it up.

At least five bombs were set off, meanwhile, in Mosul, about 220 miles north of Baghdad. Reports from the city, heavily populated by Kurds but also home to many of former president Saddam Hussein`s military officers, said a U.S. soldier and at least one Iraqi policeman were killed.

In Fallujah, which lies halfway along the road linking Ramadi with Baghdad, U.S. Marines moving near in armored vehicles were reported to be fighting in heavy clashes on the eastern outskirts of the long-rebellious city. A U.S. Marine AH-1H Cobra helicopter gunship was shot down nearby, but its crew walked away unhurt, the Marines announced. U.S. warplanes also were seen over the city.

A group of insurgents in Fallujah issued a statement over al-Jazeera warning that they would attack all Iraq`s oil pipelines and wells and set them ablaze unless the Marines halted their push toward the city.

Marines had largely kept out of Fallujah since a cease-fire was agreed early last month. Security responsibilities were turned over to a group of former Iraqi Army officers, the Fallujah Brigade, but U.S. officers have expressed disappointment that armed Islamic radicals still control the city, giving sanctuary to foreign fighters.

Four Marines who had been posted as a sniper squad atop a roof were killed and stripped of their gear earlier this week in nearby Ramadi.

The U.S. military launched a missile strike in Fallujah Tuesday against what it called a safe house used by followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian border Islamic guerrilla leader whom U.S. officials have blamed for much of the recent violence in Iraq. About 20 of Zarqawi`s followers were killed in the blast, a senior U.S. military official said. That attack followed a similar air strike Saturday, in which Fallujah officials said about 20 people were killed, including women and children.

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White House Succumbs to Pressure

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; 11:33 AM

Faced with unrelenting pressure to explain its position on torture, the White House yesterday handed reporters a 2-inch-thick stack of papers documenting the administration`s internal debate about interrogation tactics.

Ever since the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the White House has been increasingly perceived, both nationally and internationally, as condoning torture. Leaked memos and hazy denials only added to the furor.

And moral ambiguity is never good politics.

Yesterday, the White House once again maintained that it was opposed to torture, but this time backed it up with a strong statement from the president -- and a February 2002 memo signed by the president himself and insisting on humane treatment for all detainees.

Coming from a White House that plays pretty much everything close to the vest, it was a day of extraordinary disclosure.

But today`s coverage makes it clear that there are still a host of unresolved issues. Among them:

• Does President Bush still believe, as his 2002 memo said, that he has "the authority under the Constitution" to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to some combatants?

• The memos describe Pentagon prohibitions against torture. But do the distinctions drawn between forceful interrogation tactics and torture meet the common-sense test? And what rules did the White House set for the CIA?

• Did the White House set a tone that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib?

• What was the president`s involvement in the deliberations on torture, beyond putting his name at the bottom of that one memo?

• And the debate within the administration, as illustrated most clearly by memos from the Justice Department, continued to rage long after Bush`s memo. So how long did the issue of torture remain in play?

There`s lots to read about the torture issue below. And keep scrolling to find out about these other White House headlines:

• A Washington Post reporter was questioned yesterday by the special prosecutor investigating the possibly illegal leak of a CIA employee`s identity by Bush administration officials.

• The Associated Press yesterday sued for access to Bush`s National Guard records.
The Torture Coverage

Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt write in The Washington Post: "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. . . .

"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."

Judy Keen writes in USA Today: "White House officials decided that they had no choice but to release documents Tuesday detailing their internal debate over interrogation policies, according to interviews with administration officials.

"The leaks and accusations, officials decided, were contributing to a worldwide perception that the administration condoned torture and distracting from President Bush`s agenda. Officials said they hoped that making the documents public would convince critics that the administration was struggling with appropriate ways to deal with a new enemy, not trying to circumvent international law that spells out how prisoners can be treated.

"Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said there was `no real debate at all` about the wisdom of the move. `It just took time to gather and declassify` the documents, he said. . . .

"Washington lawyer Lanny Davis said the Bush White House borrowed a strategy he used when he managed the Clinton administration`s response to scandals: `Help reporters write what is a bad story. Not because you like the bad story, but because you want to finish it as quickly as possible.` "

Richard W. Stevenson writes in the New York Times: "In a February 2002 directive that set new rules for handling prisoners captured in Afghanistan, President Bush broadly cited the need for `new thinking in the law of war.` He ordered that all people detained as part of the fight against terrorism should be treated humanely even if the United States considered them not to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the White House said Tuesday. . . .

"The release of the documents seemed to be driven by a sense at the White House that the gravity of the prison abuses required a fuller disclosure of the legal papers and internal debate that formed the basis for Washington`s handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Here`s how it played on ABC`s World News Tonight: Terry Moran, riffling through the stack of papers, tells Peter Jennings: "Peter, this extraordinary release of internal documents amounts to a huge PR offensive. The White House is trying to show that there was a serious internal administration debate about these issues -- and that President Bush never ordered any torture or abuse of detainees."

Hours before the document dump, Bush addressed the issue head-on during a photo op with Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy.

"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."

Here`s the text of his remarks.

Here`s the text of the order signed by Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, outlining treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

And here`s a full list of all documents.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, issued a response. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point. 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. All should have been provided earlier to Congress, and much more remains held back and hidden away from public view."
The Values Debate

The Wall Street Journal`s John Harwood writes in his Capital Journal column: "The ongoing scandal over prisoner abuse is creating a new values debate -- threatening one of Mr. Bush`s bedrock strengths.

"Prisoner abuse has proven toxic for Mr. Bush in many ways: deepening pessimism over the occupation of Iraq, heightening doubts about the administration`s competence in the antiterror war and damping attitudes toward the resurging economy. It also has begun eroding Mr. Bush`s standing on values."

Harwood notes that at a news conference earlier this month, journalists gave the president three chances to condemn the use of torture. (See my June 11 column, A Tortured Non-Denial.)

"He didn`t," Harwood writes. "Only yesterday, as investigations kept prisoner abuse in the headlines, did Mr. Bush declare `I will never order torture` and release documents about administration deliberations on interrogation techniques."
The Briefing

Here`s the text of the hour-and-a-half long press briefing by Gonzales and Pentagon officials.

It is indeed remarkable. Here are a few excerpts:

"Q I`d like to push Judge Gonzales, if I could, just a little bit on why you convened this today? You said it was to clear up, in your words, much confusion. Mr. Haynes used the word `extraordinary` to describe this session and this release several times in your presentation. And, certainly, I`ve covered this White House since day one and never seen anything like this. It is extraordinary. (Laughter.) So, thank you, but also, is it fair to assume you think you have an extraordinary public relations problem on your hands, is that why you`re doing this?

"JUDGE GONZALES: I think -- what`s your name, I`m sorry?

"Q Scott Lindlaw, AP.

"JUDGE GONZALES: Scott, we thought a lot about this, because we know that all the information that we convey to you and to the world also goes to our enemies. And that`s something we had to consider very, very carefully. On the other hand, we also felt that it was harmful to this country, in terms of the notion that perhaps we may be engaging in torture. That`s contrary to the values of this President and this administration. And we felt that was harmful, also.

"And so weighing those considerations and the fact that, regrettably, some of these techniques have already been leaked, and probably are already known by the enemy, we made the decision that this was probably the right thing to do at this particular time."

Later on:

"Q Judge, I wanted to follow on what Suzanne and Ed are asking you. I think people here are looking for more specifics about the President`s actual involvement, other than signing his name, to this February document. Can you be more specific about how many meetings did he engage in with you to discuss this? Did you put together a memo yourself, because there isn`t one here, that would have preceded his signature on his own? Was there a meeting that involved the Vice President? Can you just give us some more idea, because the President has said we should feel comforted, but I`m not sure there`s a lot of specifics here about his interest, his personal interest.

"JUDGE GONZALES: I`m not going to get into a discussion about the internal deliberations of the White House. I can say that during this period of time there was a great deal of debate, over a period of days, maybe a period of a couple weeks, when the presidential determination was made, all the agencies had actually weighed-in very strongly.

"Q With the President, personally?

"JUDGE GONZALES: I believe so. But the equities of all the agencies were presented to the President, and they were before the President as he made his decision.

"Q And who did that, you?

"JUDGE GONZALES: Again, I`m not going to talk about --

"Q Well, wait, I`m not sure I understand, why is that a difficult thing to discuss?

"JUDGE GONZALES: It`s not a difficult thing to discuss, it`s just one that I don`t choose to discuss.

"Q Why?

"JUDGE GONZALES: I just don`t.

"Q Why wouldn`t that be helpful?

"JUDGE GONZALES: We normally don`t talk about the internal deliberations within the White House. I don`t think that`s appropriate."
Incoming

Also today, Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg uncork a special report for the British paper, the Guardian: "Inside America`s Secret Afghan Gulag."
Valerie Plame Watch

Susan Schmidt writes in The Washington Post: "A Washington Post reporter was questioned yesterday by the special prosecutor investigating the possibly illegal leak of a CIA employee`s identity by Bush administration officials.

"State Department reporter Glenn Kessler submitted to a tape-recorded interview that will be provided to a grand jury investigating the disclosure last summer of CIA employee Valerie Plame`s name to columnist Robert D. Novak.

"Kessler said he agreed to be interviewed about two phone conversations he had with I. Lewis `Scooter` Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, at Libby`s urging. At the prosecutor`s request, Libby and other White House aides have signed waivers saying they agree to release reporters they have talked to from keeping confidential any disclosures about Plame.

"Kessler said he told prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald that, during conversations last July 12 and July 18, Libby did not mention Plame or her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, or Wilson`s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to buy uranium there."

Here is the text of a statement by Kessler, explaining why he testified.
National Guard Watch

Pete Yost of the Associated Press reports: "The Associated Press sued the Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access to all records of George W. Bush`s military service during the Vietnam War.

"Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy of Bush`s microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin."
The Seven Excruciating Minutes

Good Morning America called more attention yesterday to those seven excruciating minutes -- you know, the ones during which Bush sat in a classroom, after hearing that America was under attack.

Jake Tapper told Diane Sawyer: "It was just a few minutes. But Democrats hope seeing them will make voters uncomfortable, not just with the scene, but with the President himself."

There`s a sound bite from filmmaker Michael Moore, who uses video of that scene in his new movie. "He looks frightened and lost and you almost feel sorry for him," Moore said of Bush.

There`s a sound bite from White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.: "I think there was a moment of shock and he did stare off, maybe for just a second."

George Stephanopoulous then blames Card. "You have to wonder why Andy Card didn`t pull him out at that moment," he tells Sawyer.

Sawyer concludes: "It`s become this litmus test for a lot of people about how you feel about President Bush."
Economy Watch

Jonathan Weisman and Nell Henderson write in The Washington Post about "a burgeoning election-year debate over the quality of jobs being added to the nation`s payrolls. One key measure is wages."

Jacob M. Schlesinger writes in the Wall Street Journal: "With the economy now growing at a rapid clip, and employers finally hiring again in industrial Midwest battleground states . . . Democrats are edging away from their charges that President Bush is presiding over a `jobless recovery,` which has been a staple of their campaign rhetoric. That argument is giving way to the line of attack that working America is suffering a `middle-class squeeze.` "

Martin Crutsinger writes for the Associated Press: "Listening to President Bush and Sen. John Kerry talk about the economy, voters might almost think the two candidates were describing different countries. To Bush, the economy is `strong and getting stronger` while Kerry derides an administration that he says has the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression."
Today`s Calendar

Vicki Kemper writes in the Los Angeles Times: "The Bush administration is adding Vietnam to the list of countries eligible for U.S. funds to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

"President Bush plans to announce the decision, as well as the pending release of an additional $500 million in funding for AIDS prevention, care and treatment, at an African American church in Philadelphia today. Bush also is expected to call for reauthorization of the federal law that funds many HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs in the United States."

Thomas Fitzgerald writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Bush is scheduled to speak on compassion and HIV/AIDS in North Philadelphia at People for People, the charitable arm of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church. The head of both the charity and the church, the Rev. Herbert Lusk II, has been an ardent Bush supporter, and the administration has given at least $1 million in federal grants to programs there. . . .

"After the speech, the presidential motorcade will zip to Villanova for a fund-raiser at a private home that is expected to bring in up to $1.5 million for Victory 2004, the Republican Party`s coordinated campaign in battleground states."

Then Bush heads back to the White House to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to this list of recipients.
One War or Two Wars

The Bush White House`s insistence that the war in Iraq was an essential part of the war on terror is taking a hit from an upcoming book.

Douglas Jehl writes in the New York Times: "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."
Turkey Trip

Gareth Jones writes for Reuters: "President Bush`s visit to Turkey this weekend caps efforts to mend fences between the NATO allies after strains arising from the Iraq war. . . .

"Bush arrives in the Turkish capital Saturday night, holds talks with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, then flies to Turkey`s business hub, Istanbul, for a NATO summit Monday and Tuesday."
Will Bush Go to Iraq for the Handover?

Maura Reynolds writes in the Los Angeles Times: "The day before the transfer, Bush will be in Istanbul, Turkey, attending a NATO summit. There has been considerable speculation that he might choose to pay a visit to Iraq before heading home, just as he made a surprise visit to troops in Baghdad at Thanksgiving.

"White House aides insist that the president`s schedule calls for him to be in Washington on June 30. But they made similar assurances at Thanksgiving. With Bush already in the region with his security entourage, it would be relatively easy for plans to change at the last minute. Still, the consensus inside and outside the White House appears to be that Bush is better off staying away from Iraq for the time being."
Senior Administration Official Watch

It was hard to keep track of who was -- or wasn`t -- in a White House conference call featuring four -- count `em, four -- senior administration officials.

Here`s the transcript.

Two excerpts:

"SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thank you. Thanks everybody for joining us this afternoon. This is the conference call on the President`s HIV/AIDS plan, both internationally and domestically, he`ll be providing in a speech tomorrow.

"We have three senior administration officials with us today. This will be a background briefing, and the senior administration officials should be referenced as such. So I`ll just turn it over to my colleague. We`ll each make quick opening remarks, and then turn it over to your questions.

"SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Good afternoon. . . .

Then, later:

"Q . . . I assume these are senior administration officials. I just didn`t get your names at the beginning.

"SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: They are senior administration officials. I`ll go back and recap who they are at the end for everybody who got on late."
Fire Them

The Washington Post`s Richard Leiby lifts a quote from the latest Rolling Stone magazine, in which Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) described some unsolicited advice he gave Bush.

"I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, `Mr. Vice President, I wouldn`t keep you if it weren`t constitutionally required.` I turned back to the president and said, `Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they`ve been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they`ve given you. That`s why I`d get rid of them, Mr. President . . . ` They said nothing. Just sat like big old bullfrogs on a log and looked at me."

© 2004 washingtonpost.com

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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 24, 2004

Iraq


Allawi Threatened; Attacks at Ramadi
Sadr Refuses to Attend National Congress

Guerrillas targeted police stations all around Iraq on Wednesday and early Thursday, killing and wounding tens of Iraqis. Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi threatened to assassinate caretaker Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, calling him an "American agent."

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced Wednesday that he would not agree to serve on a preparatory committee that will call a national congress of 1000 delegates in late July. Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani said that Muqtada had studied the invitation for 3 days, but had found huge problems with it. He added (al-Hayat) "There are enormous movements such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Al-Da`wa Party and the Sadrists, and each of them has only been given one seat [on the preparatory committee]. Then there are ordinary people who only represent themselves, who also have a seat . . . For this reason, we rejected the invitation."

Meanwhile, US troops began pulling out of the holy Shiite shrine city of Karbala earlier this week. Likely the US military knows very well that any Iraqi government will ask it to please leave Karbala, so it is beating them to the punch.

posted by Juan @ 6/24/2004 09:00:02 AM

Religion and Ethics

7 of 9 and the Paris Orgy

Science fiction is in the real-world news big time these days. The actress Jeri Ryan, former wife (1990-1998) of currently embattled Republican senate candidate Jack Ryan of Illinois, played the Borg babe 7 of 9 in Star Trek Voyager. For the uninitiated, the plot of Star Trek Voyager is that Captain Kathryn Janeway`s space vessel, Voyager, is accidentally thrown to the wrong side of the galaxy, and the crew spends seven years trying to get back to earth (Star Trek is based on the premise that somehow we will find a real-time way around Einstein`s finding that things with mass cannot go faster than the speed of light; this premise is unlikely). Among the species the Federation troops battle out there is the Borg, who are cyborgs or hybrids of human and machine. They have a collective mind and lack individuality, and are dedicated to incorporating forcibly all individuals they encounter from other species into their collective. This incorporation appears to be painful and unpleasant, and to involve high-powered buzz saws. When people come out of it they are robotic, lack individuality, and have chrome various places on their bodies.

The Star Trek Voyager creative team hit on the idea of casting Jeri Ryan as a former Borg who has somewhat reverted to being human (she had been born Annika Hansen; the Borg killed her parents). She is therefore the ultimate ice princess, though in hoary science fiction tradition (the genre after all appeals disproportionately to adolescent males), she was made to wear extemely revealing spandex. Viacom (owner of UPN and Paramount Pictures), Jack Ryan, everyone wanted her in leather or spandex or something that left little to the imagination.

Incredibly, Seven of Nine could help throw the Senate to the Democrats. Jeri Ryan was married to multi-millionnaire investment banker turned teacher Jack Ryan, but filed for divorce four years ago. In her filing, she alleged


On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent [Jack Ryan] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways. ... The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. ... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and that he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system. Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.



The unsealing of this filing, which Ryan fought, has created a huge political scandal in Illinois and has given a big boost to Ryan`s Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Most Republicans, who have increasingly tied their political fortunes to an alliance with the evangelical Christians, are defending Ryan, usually by implying that Jeri`s charges are untrue and are part of the junk that comes out in any divorce proceeding. Ryan admits, however, to having taken her to the Paris club. Some Republicans have said snippy things like that it was she who committed adultery, not he. The Phyllis Schlaflys should give up this implicit attack on Jeri`s credibility. Jeri is popular with the public, more of whom probably know her from a subsequent turn on David Kelly`s series about teaching in an urban high school, "Boston Public," than through the niche Star Trek franchise. Ironically, Kelly may have modeled Jeri`s BP character, a lawyer who gives up practicing in order to teach, on Jack Ryan, who left Goldman Sachs (having gotten rich when the firm went public in the late 1990s), to teach school.

Obama has taken the high road, and is refusing to attack Jack Ryan on the sex clubs issue. Many Democrats, still boiling mad over what the hypocritical Republicans did to Bill Clinton, seem intent on making an object lesson of him.

Another irony is that Ryan pulled the stunt early in the campaign of having a cameraman follow Obama around everywhere, documenting all his moves. Obama could not even speak to his wife on his cellphone in privacy. Ryan tried to create what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a "panopticon," as a way of intimidating his opponent. This move was despicable, an invasion of privacy, and a form of stalking, and should be illegal. (I think it would be in California, which has proper privacy laws). Now Jack Ryan is going to be the one followed around by cameras, into whose private life strangers are going to poke relentlessly. In that sense, the whole thing serves him right.

But I think Obama is making the right choice in letting the tabloids and the schlock television shows run with this story and keeping it out of his own campaign, which is about issues. For instance, Obama wants to give more tax breaks to companies that keep jobs in Illinois.

The lesson for the Republicans of all this is that the wages of Puritanism are hypocrisy. Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, and many other Republicans who tried to nail Clinton had also tried to nail women not their spouses and were no better than Clinton morally. In fact, no one is better morally than anyone else as a matter of ontology or being. Some deeds are better than others, and some people achieve better deeds more often than others. Some people are capable of higher ethical standards than others. But human beings are not in the nature of the case morally perfect beings. Since that is so, it is crazy for the American public to want its politicians to be saints (they aren`t), and the desire merely produces hypocrisy, which in turn corrodes ideals and the moral order.

I therefore agree with Jack Ryan that the visits to those clubs should not in themselves disqualify him from public office. Why should we care where he takes his wife? Note that business travelers who stay in nice hotels are known to rent enormous amounts of porn. The travelers, the hotels, and the cable companies involved are all heavily Republican. What is the difference between watching it on celluloid and watching it at a club in Paris? Isn`t this the same public that yawned at Kubrick`s Eyes Wide Shut and complained it was only shocking to a 1950s sensibility? Are we going to get to the point where every guy who has ever been to a strip club is disqualified from public service? Are we doomed to have the French and other Europeans laugh at us hysterically yet again?

Journalists keep asking me if the US can prevent Iraq from becoming a "theocracy." Why are the Americans so worried about Iraqis insisting on strict religious standards in their politics, if in fact that is the public platform of the dominant Republican Party in the United States? I think politicians should be permitted wide lattitude in their private lives, as long as they are good at their jobs-- i.e. use their positions to empower the people, to create jobs and wealth, and improve their states or districts. Jack Kennedy did lots of things that make a married couple`s visits to some clubs rather tame in comparison. No one I know holds it against him.

The troubling issue here seems to be that Jeri alleges that Jack tricked her into going to the clubs, so this was a compulsion he had that she did not share. (Star Trek fans will not forgive him for this, especially for making her weep. Everyone remembers how brittle 7 of 9 was about sex and romance, what with being a former automaton and all. Starfleet Ensign Harry Kim tried to romance her, and found he had to go very slow.). If Jack Ryan would trick her that way, he might trick the public. So if what she alleged is true (and the Borg are incapable of subterfuge, it should be remembered), that would be the key issue. On the other hand, this all happened some years ago; he clearly had some sort of sex addiction at the time, which he may have kicked by now, and addictions compel people to do things they would not otherwise do. People change.

The one counter-indication I know of is the dirty trick Jack Ryan pulled of having Obama followed around by cameramen. That sounds coercive and manipulative, and falls within his earlier pattern of enjoying forcing others to exhibit themselves (the postmodernists might call it sado-alter-exhibitionism). In essence, he treated Obama just the way he treated Jeri. That is not a good sign.

Bottom line, the question for the good people of Illinois should not be whether Ryan is kinkier than Obama, but a) whether Ryan still uses people instrumentally to get his rocks off and b) whether Ryan could accomplish something for their state that Obama cannot. Even before the club scandal broke, the increasingly Democratic-leaning Illinois voters had seemed to discount Ryan, who after all doesn`t exactly have a thick portfolio to be senator. The club scandal probably finishes off his candidacy (perhaps for the wrong reasons), but he was unlikely to have won anyway.

If Bush gets reelected but does not have the Senate, the Democratic Senators will finally be in a position to establish some investigatory commissions into Bush administration actions of questionable probity. If that happens, the country will have Jeri Ryan, ex-cyborg, to thank for it.

posted by Juan @ 6/24/2004 07:14:45 AM

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Mercenary Hits It Big, Thanks to the U.S.
A controversial figure wins huge contract in Iraq.
By Robert Young Pelton
Robert Young Pelton is the author of the "World`s Most Dangerous Places" (HarperResource, 2003) and "Three Worlds Gone Mad" (Lyons Press, 2004), in which he gives a fuller rendition of Timothy Spicer`

June 24, 2004

On May 25, the U.S. Army awarded Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, formerly of the British army, and his company, Aegis — a tiny 2-year-old London-based holding corporation — the largest and most important security contract of the Iraq war. Over three years, Aegis will be in charge of all security for the $18.4 billion in ongoing reconstruction projects being overseen by the United States.

As part of the contract, Aegis will hire a "force-protection detail" of about 600 armed men. It will also coordinate the operations of 60 other private military companies already working in Iraq and their 20,000 men, including handling security at prisons and oil fields. It`s a no-risk, cost-plus arrangement that could earn the company up to $293 million. And as the owner of almost 40% of Aegis, Spicer could pocket $20 million, according to one financial expert.

No problem there, right? It`s the American way.

But it turns out that the United States may have made an enormous error: Apparently nobody bothered to ask who Timothy Simon Spicer really was — a controversial British mercenary.

Spicer has not responded to requests for comment. However, his exploits are well documented.

For example, Spicer`s memoir says he was hired by the government of Papua New Guinea in 1997 to put down a rebellion. The prime minister was ultimately forced to step down and Spicer ended up arrested, charged and jailed on weapons violations there. The charges were later dropped.

Spicer was also a central figure in a British "arms to Africa" scandal in which a 1998 U.N. arms embargo was broken. Spicer`s company supplied arms to Sierra Leone, and, as he recounts, he accepted $70,000 from a fugitive financier accused of embezzlement to look into overthrowing the government there. And according to the Boston Globe, when he was in the British military he commanded a unit in which two members were convicted of murdering an 18-year-old Catholic in north Belfast. Spicer`s business background isn`t any more reassuring. He has owned or worked for four private military corporations that have either failed financially, done poorly or have suspended business.

Although Aegis has no track record in Iraq, Spicer is known to members of the Coalition Provisional Authority staff — retired British army Brigadier Tony Hunter-Choat, for example. Hunter-Choat heads security for the program management office of the CPA. He and Spicer both worked in the Balkans, where Hunter-Choat was part of the British U.N. contingent and Spicer was a spokesman for the commander of the U.N. Protection Force.

How did Aegis win the security contract? Last month in Ft. Eustis, Va., an Army board reviewed six competing proposals, including entries from giants like Dyncorp and Control Risks Group and others with long histories of successful contracting with the U.S. military. Army spokesman Maj. Gary C. Tallman said Aegis` proposal did the best in meeting the bid requirements. He said Spicer`s resumé showed that he had an impeccable career in the British army and that Spicer had done "security work in Africa and Southeast Asia."

When asked if he knew details of Spicer`s background, Tallman replied: "My understanding is that they [Aegis] met all the [bid] requirements." He said that other than checking candidates against an official list of those barred from getting Army contracts, "it`s not part of the process to look into the backgrounds of the principals."

The growing controversy over Aegis` qualifications may force the Army to once again review how it hires private contractors. Security analysts and human rights activists have questioned the contract, and one of the losing bidders has asked for a review.

As for Spicer, he is reportedly already at work in Baghdad — Washington`s newest private contractor, building a huge private security force with a famous mercenary at its head.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/179199_musicforamerica…

We don`t need Bush to fix our culture

Thursday, June 24, 2004

By MICHAEL CONNERY
GUEST COLUMNIST

At a recent news conference President Bush declared it was his job to change our culture -- to replace a "do what feels right" mentality with an "Era of Responsibility." The image is comic; one could almost imagine Bush wearing a trucker hat emblazoned "Jesus is My Homeboy" as he spoke. Well, on behalf of the culture he so desperately wants to reform, thanks, but no thanks, Mr. President.

Don`t get me wrong; responsibility is a good thing. It`s just that a man who evasively describes his first 40 years of life by saying "I did some irresponsible things when I was young and irresponsible" doesn`t really have the credibility to tell anyone how to live their life. Especially when his conception of responsibility has less to do with personal accountability and more to do with a punitive, fundamentalist version of morality. The hypocrisy reeks and our generation has grown up with a knack for sniffing it out.

During his three years in office, Bush continuously has pursued policies that inhibit personal responsibility and has shown that when it comes to himself, his administration and his corporate backers, responsibility is a nuisance to be dodged. Accountability is a concept applied to others.

Bush`s conception of responsibility tells him to deny non-violent drug offenders the education and treatment that could make them responsible citizens. It vilifies a woman`s right to choose even as it seeks to outlaw practical sex education that could reduce abortion rates. Bush`s vision of responsibility preaches cleaner air but excuses corporations from environmental regulations while limiting the rights of citizens to hold corporations accountable. It condones the abuse of prisoners and then shifts the blame onto the backs of our soldiers.

In Bush`s "Era of Responsibility," the buck always stops somewhere else.

We don`t need Bush to fix our culture; the culture is all right. We don`t need him to tell us how to live responsibly. The culture is becoming responsible of its own accord. We don`t need an "Era of Responsibility" that preaches one thing while it does another. We need a new Culture of Opportunity that provides us with the resources to live responsibly.

Doing what feels right and living responsibly are not mutually exclusive. It feels right to have a job when you get out of school. It feels right when you know you have health coverage. It feels right when you can trust your government to act responsibly in the world. And when you practice safe sex, it feels pretty good.

A movement is growing in this country. Through such organizations as Music for America, artists and music fans are becoming politically active in greater numbers than we`ve seen since the `60s. They are working to register, educate and motivate their fans to take responsibility for their lives and participate in the political process.

In his State of the Union speech, Bush said it was the job of government to counteract the "negative influences of the culture." It is not Bush`s job to unilaterally change our culture. Nor is it his right.

Culture is powerful because it is fundamentally democratic -- trendsetters can point the way, but everyone has to agree in order for change to occur. A movement is under way -- a movement of artists and fans, activists and average Joes, bachelors and bachelorettes. Our culture is waking up and realizing that it has the power to counter the negative policies of our government. In a few months, we may see the end of the "Era of Responsibility" and the rise of the Culture of Opportunity.

Michael Connery is co-founder of Music for America, a partisan, political non-profit working to get 1 million new progressive voters to participate in the 2004 elections; www.musicforamerica.org.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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`The liberation of Baghdad is not far away`

Editor`s note: Coordinated attacks and skirmishes in several Iraqi cities on Thursday killed at least 66 people and wounded more than 250. Forty-four people were killed in a series of car bomb blasts in the northern city of Mosul and 216 wounded. Fighting in al-Anbar province, where there were clashes in Fallujah and Ramadi, killed at least nine people and wounded 27, and fighting around Baquba killed 13 and wounded 15.

By Alix de la Grange

06/24/04 "Asia Times " -- BAGHDAD - On the eve of the so-called transfer of sovereignty to the new Iraqi caretaker government on June 30, former Saddam Hussein generals turned members of the elite of the Iraqi resistance movement have abandoned their clandestine positions for a while to explain their version of events and talk about their plans. According to these Ba`ath officials, "the big battle" in Iraq is yet to take place.

"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets."

Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we`re going to win."

Secret rendezvous
Palestine Hotel, Tuesday, 3pm. One week after a formal request, the prospect of talking with the resistance is getting slimmer. We reach a series of dead ends - until a man we have never met before discreetly approaches our table. "You still want to meet members of the resistance?" He speaks to my associate, a female Arab journalist who has been to Iraq many times. Talk is brief. "We meet tomorrow morning at the Babel Hotel," the man says before disappearing. Against all expectations, this contact seems to be more reliable than the ones we have previously tried.

Hotel Babel, Wednesday, 9am. At the entrance of the cybercafe, mobbed by foreign mercenaries, the man we saw the day before lays it down: "Tomorrow, 10 o`clock, al-Saadoun Street, in front of the Palestine. Come without your driver."

We arrive at the meeting place on Thursday morning by taxi. The contact is there. After a brief "Salam Alekum" we get into his car. "Where are we going?" No reply.

We drive for more than two hours. In Baghdad, even when traffic is not totally blocked by military checkpoints, traffic jams are permanent. In one year, more than 300,000 vehicles have been smuggled into the country. Every other car has no license plate and most drivers don`t even know what "driver`s license" means.

"We`ll be there soon. Do you know Baghdad?", asks our man. The answer is clearly no. To get oriented in the sprawling city, one must circulate freely, and on foot. With criminal behavior spreading like a virus, a wave of kidnappings, the 50 or 60 daily attacks against the occupation forces and the indiscriminate response of the American military, there`s hardly any incentive to do any walking.

The car stops in an alley, near a minibus with tinted windows. One of its doors opens. On board, there are three men and a driver carefully scrutinizing all the streets and houses around us. If we don`t know at all what we are confronted with, our interlocutors seem to know very well who they`re talking to. "Before any discussions, we don`t want any doubts on your part about our identities," they say, while extracting some papers from inside a dusty plastic bag: identity cards, military IDs and several photos showing them in uniform beside Saddam Hussein. They are two generals and a colonel of the disbanded Iraqi army, now on the run for many months, chased by the coalition`s intelligence services.

"We would like to rectify some information now circulating in the Western media, that`s why we took the initiative of meeting you." Our discussion lasts for more than three hours.

Back to the fall of Baghdad
"We knew that if the United States decided to attack Iraq, we would have no chance faced with their technological and military power. The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war. In other words: the resistance. Contrary to what has been largely said, we did not desert after American troops entered the center of Baghdad on April 5, 2003. We fought a few days for the honor of Iraq - not Saddam Hussein - then we received orders to disperse." Baghdad fell on April 9: Saddam and his army where nowhere to be seen.

"As we have foreseen, strategic zones fell quickly under control of the Americans and their allies. For our part, it was time to execute our plan. Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell." This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The objective was "to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don`t want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people," say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. "We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don`t lack is volunteers."

Fallujah
The lethal offensive of the American troops in Fallujah in March has been the turning point as far as the resistance is concerned. The indiscriminate pillage by American soldiers during their search missions (according to many witnesses) and the sexual humiliation inflicted to prisoners, including Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, have only served to magnify the anger felt by most Iraqis. "There`s no more trust, it will be hard to regain it." According to these resistance leaders, "We have reached the point of no return."

This is exactly the point of view of a Shi`ite woman we had met two days earlier - a former undercover opposition militant against Saddam: "The biggest mistake of the occupation forces was to despise our traditions and our culture. They are not satisfied with having bombed our infrastructure, they tried to destroy our social system and our dignity. And this we cannot allow. The wounds are deep and the healing will take long. We prefer to live under the terror of one of our own than under the humiliation of a foreign occupation."

According to Saddam`s generals, "more than a year after the beginning of the war, insecurity and anarchy still dominate the country. Because of their incapacity to control the situation and to maintain their promises, the Americans have antagonized the population as a whole. The resistance is not limited to a few thousand activists. Seventy-five percent of the population supports us and helps us, directly and indirectly, volunteering information, hiding combatants or weapons. And all this despite the fact that many civilians are caught as collateral damage in operations against the coalition and collaborators."

Who do they regard as "collaborators"? "Every Iraqi or foreigner who works with the coalition is a target. Ministries, mercenaries, translators, businessmen, cooks or maids, it doesn`t matter the degree of collaboration. To sign a contract with the occupier is to sign your death certificate. Iraqi or not, these are traitors. Don`t forget that we are at war."

The resistance`s means of dissuasion led to an ever-shrinking list of candidates to key government posts proposed by the coalition, and this in a country ravaged by 13 years of embargo and two wars where unemployment has been a crucial problem. The ambient chaos is not the only reason preventing people from resuming professional activity. If the Americans, quickly overwhelmed by the whole situation, had to take the decision to reinstate former Ba`athists (policemen, secret service agents, military, officials at the oil ministry), this does not apply to everybody. The majority of victims of administrator L Paul Bremer`s decree of May 16, 2003 applying the de-Ba`athification of Iraq is still clandestine.

The network
Essentially composed by Ba`athists (Sunni and Shi`ite), the resistance currently regroups "all movements of national struggle against the occupation, without confessional, ethnic or political distinction. Contrary to what you imagine in the West, there is no fratricide war in Iraq. We have a united front against the enemy. From Fallujah to Ramadi, and including Najaf, Karbala and the Shi`ite suburbs of Baghdad, combatants speak with a single voice. As to the young Shi`ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, he is, like ourselves, in favor of the unity of the Iraqi people, multiconfessional and Arab. We support him from a tactical and logistical perspective."

Every Iraqi region has its own combatants and each faction is free to choose its targets and its modus operandi. But as time goes by, their actions are increasingly coordinated. Saddam`s generals insist there is no rivalry among these different organizations, except on one point: which one will eliminate the largest number of Americans.

Weapons of choice
"The attacks are meticulously prepared. They must not last longer than 20 minutes and we operate preferably at night or very early in the morning to limit the risks of hitting Iraqi civilians." They anticipate our next question: "No, we don`t have weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have more than 50 million conventional weapons." By the initiative of Saddam, a real arsenal was concealed all over Iraq way before the beginning of the war. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no helicopters, but Katyushas, mortars (which the Iraqis call haoun), anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other Russian-made rocket launchers, missiles, AK 47s and substantial reserves of all sorts of ammunition. And the list is far from being extensive.

But the most efficient weapon remains the Kamikazes. A special unit, composed of 90% Iraqis and 10% foreign fighters, with more than 5,000 solidly-trained men and women, they need no more than a verbal order to drive a vehicle loaded with explosives.

What if the weapons` reserves dwindle? "No worries, for some time we have been making our own weapons." That`s all they are willing to disclose.

Claiming responsibility
"Yes, we have executed the four American mercenaries in Fallujah last March. On the other hand, the Americans soldiers waited for four hours before removing the bodies, while they usually do it in less than 20 minutes. Two days earlier, a young married woman had been arbitrarily arrested. For the population of Fallujah, this was the last straw, so they expressed their full rage against the four cadavers. The Americans, they did much worse to living Iraqi prisoners."

The suicide attack which provoked the death of Akila al-Hashimi, a diplomat and member of the Iraqi Governing Council on September 22, 2003, was also perpetrated by the resistance, as well as the car bomb which killed the president of the Iraqi executive body Ezzedin Salim in May 17 this year at the entrance of the Green Zone (which Iraqis call the Red Zone, due to the number of resistance offensives).

They are also responsible for the kidnapping of foreigners. "We are aware that the kidnapping of foreign nationals blemishes our image, but try to understand the situation. We are forced to control the identity of people circulating in our territory. If we have proof that they are humanitarians or journalists we release them. If they are spies, mercenaries or collaborators we execute them. On this matter, let`s be clear, we are not responsible for the death of Nick Berg, the American who was beheaded."

As to the attack against the UN headquarters in Baghdad on August 20, 2003: "We have never issued an order to attack the UN and we had a lot of esteem towards the Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello [special UN representative who died in the attack], but it`s not impossible that the authors of this suicide attack come from another resistance group. As we have explained, we don`t control everything. And we must not forget that the UN is responsible for the 13 years of embargo we have endured."

What about the October 27, 2003 attack against the Red Cross in Baghdad? "This had nothing to do with us, we always had a lot of respect for this organization and the people who work for them. What would be our interest to attack one of the few institutions which has been helping the Iraq population for years? We know that people from Fallujah have claimed this attack, but we can assure you they are not part of the resistance. And we also add: for political and economic reasons, there are many who have an interest in discrediting us."

After June 30
"Resolution 1546 adopted on June 8 is nothing but one more web of lies to the eyes of many Iraqis. First, because it officially ends the occupation by foreign troops while authorizing the presence of a multinational force under American command, without stipulating the date of their removal. Second, because the Iraqi right to veto important military operations, demanded by France, Russia and China, was rejected. Washington has conceded only a vague notion of partnership with the Iraqi authority and did not think of anything in case of disagreement. Iraqis are not fools, the maintenance of American troops in Iraq after June 30 and the aid money they will get from the American Congress leave no doubt over the identity of who will really rule the country."

What about a possible role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? "If NATO intervenes, it`s not to help our people, but to help the Americans leave this quagmire. If they wanted our well-being, they would have made a move before," say the three officers while looking at their watches. It`s late and we have largely exceeded our allotted time.

"What American troops cannot do today, NATO troops won`t be able to do later on. Everyone must know: Western troops will be regarded by Iraqis as occupiers. This is something that George W Bush and his faithful ally Tony Blair will do well to think about. If they have won a battle, they have not won the war yet. The great battle is still to begin. The liberation of Baghdad is not far away."

Copyright 2004 Asia Times

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Published on Thursday, June 24, 2004 by CNN
New Poll: 54% Say Sending troops to Iraq was a Mistake


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- For the first time since the start of the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to that country, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday.

Fifty-four percent of those polled said it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, compared with 41 percent who expressed that sentiment in early June.

Most poll respondents, 55 percent, also said they don`t believe the war has made the United States safer from terrorism -- rejecting an argument that President Bush has repeatedly advanced in his rationale for the war.

Yet the poll also found that Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has made little headway on the issue of Iraq, which has figured prominently on the campaign trail.

Kerry, a four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts, and Bush are essentially tied when Americans are asked who would better handle the situation in Iraq. Forty-seven percent said Bush would do a better job on Iraq, compared with 46 percent who picked Kerry.

Commander-in-chief

And while six in 10 of those polled said they believe Kerry could handle the job of commander-in-chief, most Americans indicated that they trust Bush more in that role, 51 percent to 43 percent.

The poll, based on interviews with 1,005 Americans -- including 521 likely voters -- was conducted by telephone June 21-23. The margin of error varied by question, from a low of 3 percentage points to 4.5 percentage points.

The poll comes on the same day that a wave of attacks on Iraqis and coalition forces left more than 90 dead. The impact of those attacks was not a factor in the poll, as it was conducted earlier.

Looking at the presidential race, the poll found a tie among likely voters: 49 percent for Bush and 48 percent for Kerry. When poll respondents were asked to consider independent Ralph Nader, the breakdown was: 48 percent for Bush, 47 percent for Kerry and 3 percent for Nader.

The poll found some advantages for Kerry. His favorable rating is higher than Bush`s, 58 percent to 53 percent, and it has grown over the past few months as Bush`s has fallen.

Kerry also gets higher ratings on who would better handle the economy -- 53 percent picked the Democrat, while 40 percent selected Bush. And the economy was identified by more voters, 41 percent, as the most important role for the president -- ahead of both managing the government or acting as commander-in-chief.

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2004 CNN

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Das Enttarnen eines Agenten ist in den USA ein Verbrechen, was mit Gefängnis bestraft wird.

June 24, 2004
Bush Is Interviewed in Inquiry on Leak of Operative`s Name
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, June 24 — President Bush was interviewed by federal prosecutors today in connection with their attempts to discover who leaked the identity of an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency last summer.

The White House said Mr. Bush was questioned for 70 minutes in the Oval Office by United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is heading the Justice Department`s inquiry into the episode, and assistant prosecutors. Jim Sharp, a Washington trial lawyer who was retained recently by Mr. Bush, was also present.

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the president was happy to cooperate with the investigators. "The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," Mr. McClellan told reporters. "No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States."

The interview suggested that the Justice Department may be in the final stages of its investigation into who leaked the name of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. Ms. Plame is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, who has been critical of the administration`s Iraq policy and who questioned Mr. Bush`s assertion early in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium in Africa.

When asked if the president had answered every question put to him, Mr. McClellan said Mr. Bush "was pleased to share whatever information he had." And when asked if Mr. Bush had any information on who had leaked Ms. Plame`s name, Mr. McClellan said such questions should be directed to investigators, adding, "I would not read anything into that one way or the other."

It is extraordinary in itself for a president to be interviewed in connection with an investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing. And 70 minutes is an unusually long segment of time in the schedule of a president, whose movements are typically budgeted minute by minute.

Vice President Dick Cheney and the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, have previously been questioned by Mr. Fitzgerald`s team.

Mr. Wilson and some Democrats have charged that the White House leaked Ms. Plame`s identity as a way of retaliating against him. Disclosure of the identity of an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency can be a federal crime.

Mr. Wilson has mentioned several prominent White House advisers — including Karl Rove, the White House political strategist, and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney`s chief of staff — as possible sources of the leak. They have denied it.

The president himself has not been seen as a potential target of the investigation. He could, however, become a witness if prosecutors believe he had information about the events that led to the disclosure of Ms. Plame`s name or if he had personal records that might aid in the inquiry.

If the Justice Department team announces any findings this summer or fall, they could become grist for what is shaping up as a close presidential election.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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AP Lawyer: It`s `Curious` We`ve Had to Sue for Bush Records
President George W. Bush


By Joe Strupp

Published: June 24, 2004 12:01 AM EST

NEW YORK The Associated Press has sued the Pentagon and Air Force, seeking access to all records of President George W. Bush`s military service, but the news agency wonders why it has come to this.

"It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government stonewalling. "But we are not surprised."

Tomlin told E&P the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush`s record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with."

Because the microfilm record has been in storage and "it can`t be altered, that access to the microfilm would settle the matter," Tomlin added.

When asked why a lawsuit was needed, he said, "the administrative efforts we`ve made just aren`t getting traction."

Tomlin said he did not expect White House officials to "rush right over with the information," after the lawsuit was filed, but expected a proper response. "It is important to get this; we`d like to see priority handling on it."

The suit, filed in federal court in New York on Tuesday, seeks access to a copy of Bush`s microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin. The White House has said it has already released all records of Bush`s military service.

The Air National Guard has control of the microfilm, which should be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, the lawsuit claims. AP says the records "are being unlawfully withheld from the public." The lawsuit adds that no one has looked at any of the Bush military records at the state archives since 1996.

Joe Strupp ([e-mail]) is senior editor for E&P.

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"Heard about the controversial `Fahrenheit 9/11`? I hope George Bush isn`t too angry about this film. No one wants to see Michael Moore in a naked pyramid."
[/TABLE]Craig Kilborn

"JOHN (KERRY) and I are good friends ... I told him if he`s elected president, on your inaugural, we`ll play."

AEROSMITH lead singer STEVEN TYLER in the Boston Herald.

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“The (9/11 commission) report said that Mohamed Atta did meet with an Iraqi Intelligence Agency, or agent, in Prague on April 9th of 2001. We`ve known this for a long time."
[/Table]--Rush Limbaugh still hallucinating after rehab

http://mediamatters.org/items/200406210002

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Police stations in Ramadi, above, Mahaweel and Mosul were attacked along with several other targets.
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June 25, 2004
Attacks in 5 Iraqi Cities Leave More Than 100 Dead
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 24 — Fighting raged in five cities across Iraq on Thursday as insurgents unleashed a surge of apparently coordinated attacks that killed at least 105 people and wounded hundreds more.

Plumes of smoke boiled up from the streets of Falluja, Ramadi, Baquba, Mosul and Baghdad as masked insurgents battled American and Iraqi security forces in what several officials said could be the opening salvo in a violent push to derail the June 30 transfer of sovereignty.

"We were expecting such an escalation, and we will witness more in the next few weeks," said Iraq`s prime minister, Iyad Allawi, whom terrorists have threatened to assassinate. "We will deal with it and crush it."

The heaviest carnage on Thursday was in Mosul, in northern Iraq, where a battery of car bombs leveled two police stations and ripped into a police academy and a hospital, killing at least 62 people, including an American soldier.

In Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, black-clad insurgents flooded into the streets after taking over police stations and killing two American soldiers. The insurgents, thought to be made up of allied Shiite and Sunni fighters, proclaimed their loyalty to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the suspected mastermind of dozens of suicide attacks in Iraq and two recent beheadings.

American military officials said it was not clear what role Mr. Zarqawi might have played in Thursday`s mayhem. The car bombs in Mosul were most likely Mr. Zarqawi`s handiwork, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for occupation forces.

"Whether the other attacks were orchestrated by Zarqawi or one of his proxies, we`re not yet sure," the general said. "But we can say there was some level of coordination."

Mr. Zarqawi, a 37-year-old Jordanian who has shifted across deserts and mountains eluding the authorities for several years, has become enemy No. 1 for the occupation authorities in Iraq. American officials said they believed that he was now somewhere in Iraq, planning more attacks, though they concede they are no closer to finding him.

As the days edge up to June 30, the air is thick with tension.

In Baghdad, American troops have positioned Bradley fighting vehicles at major intersections, with their cannons pointing into traffic. In the northern city of Mosul, a curfew has been called. And across the country, Western security consultants are warning foreign workers not to set foot outside their compounds and to brace themselves for a major offensive.

At the same time, the insurgency`s tactics seem to be getting bolder. On Thursday morning, a man dressed in a crisply ironed police uniform walked up to a checkpoint in the Rashid neighborhood of Baghdad carrying a black Samsonite briefcase and blew himself up. Four people were killed, including a farmer driving to market in a pickup truck full of eggplants.

"The bomb was packed with ball bearings and meant to kill a lot of people," said Col. Steve Lanza of the Army. "This could have been a lot worse."

Two American soldiers were wounded in the attack, which littered the Rashid road with the grimly familiar mix of sparkling glass, chunks of flesh, scorched car parts and pools of blood and motor oil.

In Falluja, a flash point of anti-occupation violence, fighting erupted at dawn. American helicopters fired missiles into several houses, and armored personnel carriers and several dozen soldiers stormed into the city, which had been off limits to American troops for the last seven weeks after a truce was declared.

By midafternoon, another uneasy truce was struck, with a message blared from mosque minarets for insurgents to put down their weapons and go home. Jasim Muhammad Saleh, a former Iraqi Army general in Falluja, said, "The big people of the city — the sheiks, the tribes, the police and the mayor — met with Americans to stop their fire, and the Americans agreed to withdraw to their base."
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U.S. troops worked with Iraqi soldiers to clean up the scene of a bombing in Baghdad.
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During the Falluja fighting, insurgents hit a Cobra attack helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, forcing the chopper down, though none of crew were hurt, the American military said. Falluja officials estimated that 10 people had been killed in the fighting, which American commanders said had been started by insurgents.

American warplanes have bombed Falluja twice in the last week in strikes aimed at Mr. Zarqawi`s network, which is thought to operate several safe houses in the city. American officials have said the airstrikes killed more than 40 foreign fighters.

In Ramadi, gunmen pounded a police station with rocket-propelled grenades, destroying the building. At least eight people were killed, American military officials said.

In Baquba, about 150 insurgents seized two police stations and began storing weapons in buildings around a stadium downtown in preparation for another strike. United States military officials said American troops had killed 23 insurgents.

A statement quoted Thursday by an Islamist Web site said Mr. Zarqawi`s Tawhid and Jihad movement was responsible for the Baquba attacks.

If true, the attacks marked a shift, or at least an expansion, of Mr. Zarqawi`s tactics, from suicide bombings to more classic guerrilla warfare.

In an intercepted letter that American officials say Mr. Zarqawi wrote to the leadership of Al Qaeda sometime this winter, he took responsibility for 25 suicide attacks and added: "There will be more in the future, God willing. We did not want to publicly claim these operations until we become more powerful and were ready for the consequences."

Mr. Zarqawi is steeped in Islamic militant traditions. In his teens, he fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan, where it is thought he met Osama bin Laden.

His real name is Ahmed Fadil al-Khalaylah, but he created a nom de guerre from the Jordanian town of Zarqa, where he was born.

In the early 1990`s, he returned to Jordan, where he was accused of conspiring to overthrow the monarchy and trying to blow up a tourist hotel in Amman.

In 1999, Mr. Zarqawi fled back to Afghanistan. Intelligence officials said Al Qaeda`s leaders placed him in charge of a training camp, where he experimented with chemical weapons. Until recently, he was known as the "one-legged terrorist" because American intelligence indicated he was wounded in a missile attack on Afghanistan and received medical treatment in 2002 in Baghdad, where he was fitted with an artificial leg.

American officials said he had also spent time in Iran and in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, working with Ansar al-Islam, a militant group that Prime Minister Allawi blamed Thursday for the suicide attacks in Mosul.

Mr. Zarqawi and his followers have taken responsibility for the beheadings of Nicholas Berg, the American contractor killed in May, and Kim Sun Il, the South Korean hostage decapitated this week.

Intelligence officials say it is not clear if Mr. Zarqawi is an associate or a rival of Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Zarqawi has organized several attacks on Shiite Muslims, which is thought to go against the grain of Mr. bin Laden`s attempts to unify the Muslim world against the West.

Still, Mr. Zarqawi remains an inspiration for the resistance in Iraq.

"His operations may have inspired other groups to come over to his organization," General Kimmitt said. "Clearly Zarqawi has tried to expand his network. Success breeds success."

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Baquba for this article, and Fooad Al Sheikhly from Baghdad.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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June 25, 2004
ABUSE
Testimony Ties Key Officer to Cover-Up of Iraqi Death
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 24 — The company commander of the unit charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib testified Thursday that the top military intelligence officer at the prison was in the cellblock the night a prisoner died during interrogation.

His testimony suggested the officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, was aware of efforts to conceal the death.

Testifying at a hearing for one of the seven accused members of his unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, Capt. Donald Reese said that one night in November 2003, he saw the bloodied body of an Iraqi prisoner who had died during interrogation inside a shower stall in a prison cellblock. He said a number of officers were standing around it, discussing what to do.

One of them, he said, was Colonel Pappas, the head of the military intelligence at the prison. "I heard Colonel Pappas say, `I`m not going to go down alone for this,` " Captain Reese testified.

An autopsy the next day established the cause of death as a blood clot from trauma, he said.

The hearing was for Specialist Sabrina Harman, 26, of Alexandria, Va., who appears in some of the photographs of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib showing a human pyramid of detainees. Specialist Harman also appears in a photograph with the dead detainee referred to in Captain Reese`s testimony, his body packed in ice. She has been charged with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, making a false statement and assault.

In addition to Colonel Pappas, Captain Reese testified that among the others in the room were members of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also said there was a female major present, as well as a man named Jordan. It was not clear whether he was referring to Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the head of the interrogations center at Abu Ghraib.

Captain Reese, whose testimony lasted several hours and was covered in a news pool report, said he had been told the detainee had died from "a heart attack." But, he said, the body was "bleeding from the head, nose, mouth."

The testimony appears to be the first to suggest that a senior officer was aware of a suspicious death immediately after it happened, and that he was involved in or knew of attempts to hide it. The testimony also offered a wealth of details on the case, from a request for ice to preserve the detainee`s body to an attempt to spirit it out of the prison, connected to an intravenous drip to make it appear the dead man was simply ill.

Captain Reese testified that the detainee had been captured during a firefight and had died during his interrogation. "He died in the shower," Captain Reese said. "I was told that when he was brought in he was combative, that they took him up to the room and during the interrogation he passed."

The body was left locked in the shower overnight. The next day an intravenous drip was fitted to it and it was taken away. "I was told the reason they did that was they didn`t want the other inmates to get upset he had passed during the interrogation," he said. He said he was told the body "was taken to Baghdad somewhere."

An American military policeman said in sworn testimony in April that the man had been brought to Abu Ghraib by "O.G.A.," initials for other government agency, or the C.I.A., with a sandbag over his head. Military guards took the prisoner to a shower room at the prison, which was used as a temporary interrogation center, according to the account by Specialist Jason A. Kenner, also of the 372nd Military Police Company.

"He went into the shower for interrogation and about an hour later he died on them," said Specialist Kenner, whose account left unclear whether the detainee had been examined by a doctor or given any medical treatment before he died.

Captain Reese`s testimony added further details. He said that when Colonel Pappas and the other officers were gathered around the body, a man he identified only as Jordan ordered a lower-ranking officer "to get some ice out of the chow hall" to store the body.

"Jordan" and Colonel Pappas were "talking about the situation" and the "O.G.A. guys were visibly upset this had happened." Captain Reese said the incident occurred after an attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad. Meshing with other accounts, he said the detainee had been brought in alive by Navy Seals. Captain Reese said the detainee was one of three men captured; the other two had been killed in the fighting.

In his testimony, Captain Reese described the generally abusive atmosphere at the prison. On his first day there, he said, he noticed Iraqi inmates with underwear on their heads. Another inmate, he said, was wearing a plastic food container as underwear.

"He`d made it himself, I guess, to cover him," Captain Reese said. "That was one of the things that struck me as odd."

Under cross-examination, he said that some inmates at Abu Ghraib whom he described as "psychological patients," had eaten their own feces. Some prisoners wore women`s underwear, he said, only because there were not enough men`s briefs to go around.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 25, 2004
Iraqis, Seeking Foes of Saudis, Contacted bin Laden, File Says
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, June 24 — Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990`s were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq.

American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden`s organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization. He was based in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, when that country forced him to leave and he took refuge in Afghanistan.

The document states that Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and that a request from Mr. bin Laden to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered. There is no further indication of collaboration.

Last week, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks addressed the known contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which have been cited by the White House as evidence of a close relationship between the two.

The commission concluded that the contacts had not demonstrated "a collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Bush administration responded that there was considerable evidence of ties.

The new document, which appears to have circulated only since April, was provided to The New York Times several weeks ago, before the commission`s report was released. Since obtaining the document, The Times has interviewed several military, intelligence and United States government officials in Washington and Baghdad to determine that the government considered it authentic.

The Americans confirmed that they had obtained the document from the Iraqi National Congress, as part of a trove that the group gathered after the fall of Saddam Hussein`s government last year. The Defense Intelligence Agency paid the Iraqi National Congress for documents and other information until recently, when the group and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, fell out of favor in Washington.

Some of the intelligence provided by the group is now wholly discredited, although officials have called some of the documents it helped to obtain useful.

A translation of the new Iraqi document was reviewed by a Pentagon working group in the spring, officials said. It included senior analysts from the military`s Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and a joint intelligence task force that specialized in counterterrorism issues, they said.

The task force concluded that the document "appeared authentic," and that it "corroborates and expands on previous reporting" about contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan, according to the task force`s analysis.

It is not known whether some on the task force held dissenting opinions about the document`s veracity.

At the time of the contacts described in the Iraqi document, Mr. bin Laden was little known beyond the world of national security experts. It is now thought that his associates bombed a hotel in Yemen used by American troops bound for Somalia in 1992. Intelligence officials also believe he played a role in training Somali fighters who battled Army Rangers and Special Operations forces in Mogadishu during the "Black Hawk Down" battle of 1993.

Iraq during that period was struggling with its defeat by American-led forces in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when American troops used Saudi Arabia as the base for expelling Iraqi invaders from Kuwait.

The document details a time before any of the spectacular anti-American terrorist strikes attributed to Al Qaeda: the two American Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the strike on the destroyer Cole in Yemeni waters in 2000, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The document, which asserts that Mr. bin Laden "was approached by our side," states that Mr. bin Laden previously "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative," but was now willing to meet in Sudan, and that "presidential approval" was granted to the Iraqi security service to proceed.

At the meeting, Mr. bin Laden requested that sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric be rebroadcast in Iraq. That request, the document states, was approved by Baghdad.

Mr. bin Laden "also requested joint operations against foreign forces" based in Saudi Arabia, where the American presence has been a rallying cry for Islamic militants who oppose American troops in the land of the Muslim pilgrimage sites of Mecca and Medina.

But the document contains no statement of response by the Iraqi leadership under Mr. Hussein to the request for joint operations, and there is no indication of discussions about attacks on the United States or the use of unconventional weapons.

The document is of interest to American officials as a detailed, if limited, snapshot of communications between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden, but this view ends with Mr. bin Laden`s departure from Sudan. At that point, Iraqi intelligence officers began "seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location," the document states.

Members of the Pentagon task force that reviewed the document said it described no formal alliance being reached between Mr. bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence. The Iraqi document itself states that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

The heated public debate over links between Mr. bin Laden and the Hussein government fall basically into three categories: the extent of communications and contacts between the two, the level of actual cooperation, and any specific collaboration in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The document provides evidence of communications between Mr. bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence, similar to that described in the Sept. 11 staff report released last week.

"Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein`s secular regime," the Sept. 11 commission report stated.

The Sudanese government, the commission report added, "arranged for contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

"A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan," it said, "finally meeting bin Laden in 1994. 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 Sept. 11 commission statement said there were reports of further contacts with Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan after Mr. bin Laden`s departure from Sudan, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," it added.

After the Sept. 11 commission released its staff reports last week, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney said they remained convinced that Mr. Hussein`s government had a long history of ties to Al Qaeda.

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda," Mr. Bush said. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda, in the Sudan. There`s numerous contacts between the two."

It is not clear whether the commission knew of this document. After its report was released, Mr. Cheney said he might have been privy to more information than the commission had; it is not known whether any further information has changed hands.

A spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission declined to say whether it had seen the Iraqi document, saying its policy was not to discuss its sources.

The Iraqi document states that Mr. bin Laden`s organization in Sudan was called "The Advice and Reform Commission." The Iraqis were cued to make their approach to Mr. bin Laden in 1994 after a Sudanese official visited Uday Hussein, the leader`s son, as well as the director of Iraqi intelligence, and indicated that Mr. bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan.

A former director of operations for Iraqi intelligence Directorate 4 met with Mr. bin Laden on Feb. 19, 1995, the document states.

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June 25, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Errors on Terror
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location. Our government must have the very best information possible." Thus spoke President Bush in the 2003 State of the Union address. A White House fact sheet called the center "the next phase in the dramatic enhancement of the government`s counterterrorism effort."

Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government`s annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making major errors. In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak.

How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of the "war on terror."

Credit for uncovering the report`s errors goes to Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist, who are studying patterns of terrorism. Mr. Krueger tells me that as soon as they looked at the latest report, they knew something was wrong.

All of the supposed decline in terrorism, they quickly saw, resulted from a fall in the number of "nonsignificant" events, which Mr. Krueger and Mr. Laitin say "are counted with a squishy definition." Even the original report showed significant attacks — a much less squishy category — rising to a 20-year high. And the list of significant attacks ended on Nov. 11, 2003, but there were several major terrorist incidents after that date. Sure enough, including these and other omitted attacks more than doubled the estimated 2003 death toll.

Was the report`s squishy math politically motivated? Well, the Bush administration has cooked the books in many areas, including budget projections, tax policy, environmental policy and stem cell research. Why wouldn`t it do the same on terrorism?

The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment. The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush was on a "Winning the War on Terror" campaign bus tour in the Midwest.

Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn`t want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report`s tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.

In any case, the incompetence explanation is hardly comforting. In a press conference announcing the release of the revised report, the counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black attributed the errors to "inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated." Remember: we`re talking about the government`s central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a "dramatic enhancement" of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can`t input data into its own computers? (It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to — and botched by — private contractors.)

Think of it as just one more indication that Mr. Bush isn`t really serious about this terrorism thing. He talks about terror a lot, and invokes it to justify unrelated wars he feels like fighting. But when it comes to devoting resources to the unglamorous work of protecting the nation from attack — well, never mind.

Speaking of numbers: in 1980, middle-income families with children paid 8.7 percent of their income in income taxes, not 8.2 percent, as I reported on June 8. But it`s still true that their combined income and payroll taxes rose under Ronald Reagan.

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Bush Considers Goss for CIA Director
Fla. Congressman, Former Agency Case Officer, Chairs House Intelligence Panel

By Mike Allen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 25, 2004; Page A07

President Bush has decided he needs to choose a new CIA director to replace George J. Tenet before the election, and the leading candidate is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss, senior administration officials said yesterday.

Goss (R-Fla.), who served as a CIA case officer for nine years beginning in 1962, has announced he will retire from Congress at the end of the year. After Tenet announced he would leave in July, Goss, 65, told reporters he had not been approached for the job but "would have to consider it seriously if offered."

Although administration officials predicted yesterday that winning Senate confirmation for Goss would be little more than a formality, some Democrats disagreed and predicted such hearings would assertively probe both the CIA`s performance under Bush and Goss`s fitness for the job. Democrats have urged Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) to prepare for an extensive confirmation hearing this fall, according to several Democratic congressional aides.

White House officials had said earlier they were contemplating leaving Tenet`s top deputy, John McLaughlin, as the acting head of the agency after Tenet leaves July 11. But the White House has been told to expect blistering criticism of the CIA in a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee in the next few weeks, and McLaughlin was intimately involved in many of the decisions and conclusions that will be called into question. Bush aides also said the president wants someone who can play a strong leadership role within the agency and in public.

Administration officials said Bush is focusing on Goss as his choice for the job, although White House communications director Dan Bartlett said last night that no final decision has been made. "The president has not made a decision, and there`s more than one candidate," Bartlett told the Associated Press.

Bush advisers said naming a replacement for Tenet would show that the president was taking seriously the need for changes in the intelligence community. But several Democrats noted yesterday that if Kerry won the November election, it would be unlikely that he would keep Goss, should he win Senate approval.

On Capitol Hill late yesterday, as word of the potential appointment circulated, senior Republican and Democratic staff members said there has been no word given to the Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) or to the ranking Democrat, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.). "It is the Democrats that give advance notice to the Senate, not these Republicans," one GOP congressional staffer said. Even high-ranking CIA officials were left in the dark, according to one senior intelligence official.

The administration officials who spoke on a guarantee of anonymity said that if Bush were to choose someone inside the administration, it would risk a drawn-out inquest into the decision making that led to the invasion of Iraq, which is the subject of several investigations.

But Democrats on the Hill disputed the idea that Goss would sail through the process. "We could have a referendum on the CIA," said one senior Democratic staff member yesterday.

Intelligence will come under close scrutiny during the presidential campaign, one reason that led Tenet to leave before the end of the year. While Republicans said choosing Goss would give Bush a clean break and allow him to say that changes were being made, Democrats yesterday responded that some would describe Goss as an attempt to politicize the agency directorship.

Rockefeller has told aides he is concerned that Goss, a vocal supporter of Bush`s, has become "too political" for the CIA director job, an aide to the senator said yesterday.

Goss was selected by the Bush-Cheney campaign to critique a June 2 national security speech by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.). Goss called Kerry`s nonproliferation proposals "unrealistic and dangerously naive," saying they amounted to saying, "We`re going to get all the nukes in a lockbox somehow."

As the intelligence authorization bill was on the House floor Wednesday, Goss gave what could be considered a speech in support of his candidacy for CIA director.

"For the past seven-plus years, I have been working to refit the intelligence community for its future . . . to posture it for the days ahead. We have always worked hard on the committee to create a constituency for intelligence inside and outside of this institution. We have insisted that the committee be both supportive advocates and constructive overseers."

The report on the bill by Goss`s panel sharply criticized the CIA for "ignoring its core missional activities" and having "a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action."

In an unusually frank letter, Tenet yesterday wrote Goss that his criticism was "ill informed" and "frankly absurd."

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Bush Seeks NATO Help on Iraq
President Hopes to Win International Commitment at Summit

By Mike Allen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 25, 2004; Page A19

President Bush heads overseas today for twin summits amid increasing signs that he will win token -- but politically important -- support from NATO for the fledgling Iraqi government, administration officials said yesterday.

Bush has struggled for months to expand NATO`s role in providing security in Iraq, and he was disappointed by the continuing objections of allies during an economic summit in Sea Island, Ga., early this month.

Now administration officials say they are optimistic that Bush will be able to join in an announcement of a new international commitment to Iraq at the end of a NATO summit in Istanbul on Monday and Tuesday. But some member nations -- most notably France -- are demanding clarifications before they sign on.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice signaled there would be an aggressive lobbying campaign, including face-to-face meetings between Bush and leaders of NATO countries. Rice said yesterday during a pre-trip briefing that the United States will ask the leaders "to look back at their own histories and to look at the darkest points in their own history, and to ask what it would have been like if people had abandoned them in those dark moments."

"The Iraqi people, as Prime Minister Allawi said in his opening line, are going through a difficult period now," she said. "They need those who are lucky enough to be on the side of -- who live in freedom -- to stay with them and not abandon them."

The summit -- part of a five-day trip for a European Union summit in Ireland and the NATO meeting in Turkey -- may be one of Bush`s last chances to chalk up a victory overseas before he faces reelection. It would come just ahead of Wednesday`s handover of control of Iraq from the U.S-led occupation to an interim sovereign government.

Several NATO nations signaled a favorable response to a letter this week from Iraq`s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, who asked for military training and other assistance -- but not troops, which key alliance members like France and Germany have refused to provide.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters at a pre-summit briefing: "NATO should never slam the door in this prime minister`s face."

An agreement would be an important victory for Bush, as well as for Allawi. Polls show that voters want Bush to show he can work with other countries, particularly in Europe, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has argued as part of his campaign that the United States must solicit greater international involvement.

Bush`s advisers determined that it was crucial to establish a new tone for his international relations. They had looked forward to the three international summits, weekly speeches on Iraq and showcase speeches like those on Memorial Day and the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

Instead, Bush has suffered repeated setbacks, including escalating violence in Iraq, which crested yesterday with attacks in six cities as Bush was making final preparations for his trip.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, predicted that Bush will "have some success as relates to Iraq. Mainly the French and Germans can use Allawi as a rationale -- `We`re not giving to Bush but to the Iraqis.` "

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hosheyar Zebari is expected to make personal appeals for help at the Istanbul summit.

A French diplomat said the specifics of the NATO commitment are still being debated. "There are debates which are about whether NATO should have a monopoly on training or whether it should have a direct responsibility for training or whether it should coordinate national efforts for training," the diplomat said.

The diplomat made it clear that France favors a light footprint, showing there is strong resistance to NATO taking as large a leadership role as it has in Afghanistan.

"Small is beautiful," the diplomat said. "Everything should be done that Iraqis are empowered and they have responsibilities. To come with a huge NATO flag is not a solution."

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A Tough Iraqi`s Strategy

By David Ignatius

Friday, June 25, 2004; Page A29

Iraq`s new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, has been making the same basic argument for the past two decades that a stable, post-Saddam Hussein government can be built only on salvageable remnants of the old army and civil service. Starting next week, Allawi will have a chance to put that theory into practice.

I`ve known Allawi since 1991, when he was trying to organize a coup after Hussein`s defeat in the Gulf War that year. Here`s how he explained his group`s strategy to me in one of those early conversations: "We were originally leading members of the Baath Party, so we still have a lot of supporters in the Iraqi establishment. We subscribe to the theory that we can only change the regime through the existing establishment."

Allawi`s group was backed through the early 1990s by British intelligence and later by the CIA and many Arab intelligence services. But he was never able to pull off his palace coup. When the United States invaded Iraq last year, it decided to embrace another strategy for rebuilding the country. Rather than working with the Iraqi army and former members of the Baath Party, as Allawi had urged, the Americans decided to start from scratch -- and build a democratic Iraq from the bottom up.

That ambitious U.S. strategy now lies in ruins in the final days before the handover of sovereignty. It was a victim of too much wishful thinking and too little practical planning. Because America had too few troops to maintain security, it could never deliver on its promises to rebuild a prosperous Iraq.

Now the Americans have turned back to their old covert ally, Allawi, backing him as interim prime minister. The hope is that he can use parts of the old power structure to restore security to a country that, over the past year of occupation, has been coming apart at the seams.

A large, round-faced man, the 58-year-old Allawi has the advantage of a stolid imperturbability. Trained as a medical doctor, he seems unfazed by a life of repeated assassination attempts, including one in 1978 that nearly killed him. He`s an amiable, somewhat disheveled man who has to be prodded to buy the fancy clothes befitting a politician. Though a practicing Shiite Muslim, Allawi is a secular man with Western tastes. One old friend recalls him fleeing a fancy Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington to eat at a fast-food restaurant in a mall.

Allawi joined the brutal world of Baathist intelligence as a young man, and there are many stories about his ruthlessness as an operative in Europe during the 1970s. But many of his friends agree with a former CIA station chief who describes him as a "big, strapping bear" who cared little about his own power: "His idea was to bring everyone under the tent, and make sure no one was excluded."

I have talked regularly with Allawi since Saddam Hussein was toppled last April, and I can offer some hints of how he is likely to govern Iraq. The quotes below are drawn from a long e-mail he sent me from Baghdad this week.

Allawi has made a surprisingly fast start since he was named interim prime minister early this month -- issuing almost daily proposals and public statements. Inevitably, he has tried to distance himself from his U.S. patrons -- suggesting he may impose martial law and announcing plans to fold the Americans` cherished new security force, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, into a revived Iraqi army.

Allawi explained his decision to disband the corps this way: "We need to regroup, reorganize and pool our resources in a fashion which is fully understood by the Iraqi culture. We are Iraqis -- not Americans or Swedes." A mistake of American postwar planning, he said, was in "sometimes presenting models of governance which are suitable to the U.S., but don`t meet the requirements and culture of Iraq."

As a former Baathist, Allawi hopes he can persuade the Baath regime in Syria to help police Iraq`s borders. And he said he has sent letters to all his neighbors "asking for their support and understanding and inviting them for constructive dialogue." He has contacts from his old, coup-plotting days with the governments of Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. "I intend to make use of these relationships," he said.

Allawi`s appeal, and also his liability, is that he will govern Iraq as a strongman. His biggest problem these next few months will be staying alive, in the face of death threats. His only real protection will be the support of other Iraqis. In that sense, for all the U.S. troops who will remain after Wednesday`s handover, Iraq`s fate will really be in the hands of Iraqis once again.

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Europe supports U.S. on Iraq, Bush tells Irish TV in tense interview

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Europe supports U.S. on Iraq, Bush tells Irish TV in tense interview

Thursday June 24, 2004
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
Associated Press Writer

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) President Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq and insisted most of Europe backed the move during a tense interview Thursday on Irish television.

On several occasions during the 15-minute interview, Bush asked RTE correspondent Carol Coleman not to interrupt him.

When Coleman said most Irish people thought the world was more dangerous today than before the Iraq invasion, Bush disagreed and responded, ``What was it like Sept. 11th, 2001?``

``I wouldn`t have made the decisions I did if I didn`t believe the world would be better. Why would I put people in harm`s way if I didn`t believe the world would be better?`` said Bush, who arrives in Ireland Friday night for a summit the next day with European Union leaders.

Bush was asked whether he was satisfied with the level of political, economic and military support coming from European nations in Iraq.

``First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq. Really what you`re talking about is France, isn`t it? And they didn`t agree with my decision. They did vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution. ... We just had a difference of opinion about whether, when you say something, you mean it.``

Left-wing activists plan mass protests against Bush. About 6,000 security forces have deployed around the summit site of Dromoland Castle.

Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press

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`This is the only fun the kids get - shooting at the US sitting ducks`

Who exactly are the Iraqi resistance? In a remarkable essay, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad joins the front-line anti-American fighters in Kerbala, Falluja and Sadr City, and discovers that they are not always the well-trained, highly motivated fanatics we imagine
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Friday June 25, 2004

The Guardian
By the time I arrive in Kerbala, in the last week in May, the clashes between Moqtada al-Sadr`s Shia militia and the Americans have been going on for weeks. Apart from the scores of Shia militiamen running around the streets with RPGs on their shoulders, the streets are empty. The police have evaporated, leaving only their burned-out cars from previous skirmishes with rebel fighters.

We park our car on the outskirts of the shrine area. Normally, thousands of devout Shia pilgrims from Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia would be bustling around on buses, taxis and donkey carts, but today there are no buses, no donkeys, and certainly no pilgrims.

The main street leading to the shrine is terrifyingly empty, with shattered windows and piles of garbage everywhere. As we start along the street, a bunch of militiamen from the Badr brigade, one of the main Shia factions, demand our press passes. They are all dressed alike - in flip-flops, black T-shirts and pyjama pants - and all are carrying AK47s. "I`m sorry," says one ugly militiaman. "You are not allowed in. We have instructions not to allow journalists to take pictures of the shrine because this will compromise the safety of the shrine." As if the hundreds of Americans and militiamen shooting at each other just metres from the shrine are not compromising its safety.

We ask him to check; after a few minutes of creaking noises from the radio, he comes back with a big grin: no journalists allowed.

It takes us a little while to figure out the game that we will have to play for the next three days. The Shia factions, we work out, are very keen not to allow journalists to go into the centre of the city and report the activities of the other Shia factions - they are not yet fighting each other, but they don`t like each other much. After all, it`s a family issue, and we Iraqis don`t like foreigners to mess with our affairs.

So we do a big loop and sneak through the alleys, telling the guards at every checkpoint that we are not here for the fighting but have an appointment with Ayatollah X, Y or Z.

We finally come out of one alley to find ourselves face to face with three gunmen, their heads wrapped in keffiyehs, Kalashnikovs and RPGs in their hands (this is now considered the new Iraqi dress code, or the "muj style"). They are the Mahdi army, a militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr, which, according to the US army, includes highly trained former Iraqi military officers.

I manage to convince one of them to take us to their HQ. He puts his AK on his shoulder and points at the end of the street - "Snipers. Run very fast" - and we sprint across the street.

He leads us through a maze of alleyways which make up part of the old covered souks of Kerbala, the shops heavily barricaded with steel bars, the streets piled with weeks` old rubbish, fighters sitting in groups of three to five, smoking. Every once in a while someone shouts, "Americans, Americans!", and one or two move into a sniping position, shout at each other, and then come and sit down again. They look tired, hungry and bored, fiddling with their RPGs and rifles.

Finally, we arrive at the HQ, 50m from the shrine and a street corner where most of the fighting has taken place in the past few days. They take us to the "sheikh" for permission, a young guy in his early 30s with a big bushy beard who is the local Mahdi commander. I spend the next two days with these men on a clutch of street corners from where they take occasional pot shots at the Americans.

This is the front-line elite, a bunch of badly equipped men with rusted AKs and decade-old RPG rockets. When we first arrive they are brewing tea, piles of RPG rockets stacked on the walls two feet away from the fire.

"So how long you have been here?" I ask one of them.

"Three weeks now." He says he is here because he wants to defend the shrine of Imam Ali. "I`m unemployed and have nothing else to do." He is 17.

Others start to gather around us. "Don`t talk to them." "No, do talk to them, they must know what`s happening." "Are you Americans?" "Are you spies?" "Who sent you here?" "Take my picture." "No, take my picture with an RPG." "No, don`t let them photograph the RPGs - they`ll sell the pictures to the Americans."

Suddenly, there are some explosions, and three of them run towards the corner. We hear heavy machine-gun fire and I see American APCs firing at a building in the street.

"Where`s the machine gun?"

"I don`t know! You had it yesterday!"

"No, you had it!"

"No, no, it`s there with Ali."

"Where`s Ali?"

"He went home."

"So where is the machine gun?"

"With Ali."

So they decide to fire RPGs without machine-gun cover. They hop into the street, fire off a grenade, and hop back. All the while we are squeezed behind the corner. All I can think is that I have to stay alive otherwise my girlfriend will kill me.

They can`t see what they are shooting at but shout Allahu-Akbar all the same, and everyone starts giving numbers of how many Americans they have killed.

Then another man shows up, shortish and in his 40s, and while everyone is ducking or hiding behind columns, he strolls about as if he is in the park. Another fighter loads an RPG for him and the guy turns with the thing on his shoulder as if looking for the direction he should shoot in. Someone shouts: "Push him into the street before he fires it at us!" Another fighter grabs him around his waist and pushes him to the corner where he stands, bullets whizzing around him, takes his time, and - boom! - fires his RPG. He stands there until someone grips his pants and pulls him in.

His eyes are not even blinking at the sounds around him. They give him another one and he spins again and everyone hits the ground. Someone shouts: "He can`t hear you, go and show him!"

The deaf mute is getting support fire from a kid who shoots off a few rounds, then jumps back to fix his AK, which is falling apart. "If you take a picture of me fixing this, I will kill you."

We wait for the fire to subside and run across the street to the other side, the same dark alleys in which the same bored fighters are sitting doing nothing but chewing over the same old conspiracy theories. The walls and the ground are varnished with fresh blood. In the market a couple of shops are on fire from earlier fighting. A man is hiding behind a pile of empty banana boxes with his eight-year-old son.

That is when we catch sight of a small boy with a stunned look on his face. He says his name is Amjad and he is 11 years old.

"How long you have been here?"

"Ten days. Since my brother was killed. There, at the end of that street."

"And why are you here?"

"To become a martyr like my brother."

I ask him why he wants to die. "We should all die for the sake of our leader!" shouts one of the militiamen who have gathered around us.

On the last day, while I am trying to leave this crazy place, we are chased by an overheated young muj ("muj", from mujaheddin, means simply a religious fighter - since the Shia started fighting the Americans, they too have been happy to call themselves "muj"). He demands that we give him all our films. "You are foreigners working with the Americans!" We tell him it`s not true. He click-clicks his AK, and points it at us. "I said, give me the films or I will shoot!"

"No, leave them alone," someone calls out, "they have been with us for the last three days, the sheikh knows about them."

Shaking, we leave, and head to the shrine to see if there are any pilgrims there. As we are sitting on the pavement, three men with AKs come over and tell us we are under arrest.

I wish I had taped the previous conversation.

They take us to the shrine of Imam Abbas, and into a marble-clad room filled with big, ugly guys with thick beards and an arsenal of automatic weapons. These men are from the Shrine Protection Force, a militia loyal to the grand Shia Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and so loosely allied with the Americans.

"It is all because of journalists that all this is happening," says a guy dressed in black, sitting behind a big wooden table. He says that the Mahdi are manipulating the media. "They are thugs and assassins, they have paralysed the holy city of Kerbala, they have desecrated the shrines and shoot from behind them, trying to provoke a response.

"But, alhamdulillah [thank God], the Americans are very wise and respect the shrines. Our brothers, the Americans, are taking very good care of this thing, but as far as the Shias around the world and in Iraq are concerned, they hear that the Americans are fighting `close to the shrines`, and that Shias are being killed. They see the smoke on your films so they come en masse to fight and they are immediately brainwashed by Moqtada and his thugs."

If that`s the case, I ask, why doesn`t the Ayatollah come out publicly and denounce those people, and show his support for these "brothers"?

"Are you crazy? It`s haram [forbidden by Islamic law] to support an infidel, even when he is right, against a brother Muslim."

"So what is your strategy?"

"We will pray for Allah to stop this."

I decide that Allah has a few other things to solve in Iraq first.

In any case, once they discover that we are photographers and not video cameramen, the detention comes to an end pretty quickly. And I decide to stop chasing bullets and RPGs and find somewhere calm. So I resolve to head to Falluja - after all, the Americans have managed to install peace over there, haven`t they?

Falluja

Falluja is very calm by the time I arrive. I have been to Falluja once before, in April during the "great battle", as they now call it up there. Back then it was like Apocalypse Now, with muj running in the streets and American marines firing at any house they suspected had "enemies" inside. Falluja is a peaceful town now; shops are open and cars are in the streets, and Iraqi security forces are every where: ICDC (the US-trained civil defence corps), policemen, traffic police, and the new Falluja brigade, known as the "brigade of the heroes" by the locals. You can even say that things are normal.

After a devastating military campaign that left more than 800 Iraqis dead, the US liberators established the Falluja brigade out of the former military, some of whom had been fighting the Americans but are now on their payroll. Falluja is now like a deja vu from the good old times of Saddam; there are so many former Iraqi military in khaki uniforms, big moustaches and bellies that I am scared that someone will come up and ask me for my military ID card.

But, as everything in the new Iraq, the picture is totally blurred, and no one in Falluja can figure out what the new arrangement actually means. For some Fallujans, it meant that their people would get paid again and they would be in charge of their own security without being seen as collaborators. For the Americans it meant the new force would work with them to enforce law and order in the city, helping to build a new Iraq.

But for other Fallujans, he who works with Americans is seen as the enemy of God. Which means that we now have Falluja versus Falluja in the biggest stand-off of the year: who really controls Falluja?

The city is now like a loose federation of Sunni mosques and mujaheddin-run fiefdoms. These have become the only successfully functioning "civil society" institutions, although the only form of civil society they are interested in is a 1,400-year-old model.

So they raid houses where sinners are believed to be drinking alcohol, and insist on forcing their own version of the hijab. If you have a record shop in Falluja, it had better be selling the latest version of Koranic chanting; Britney Spearscould get you flogged.

A bunch of Falluja kids, just finishing their exams, are hanging around their school when two muj trucks surround them and pick up all the kids who don`t have a "decent" hair cut. They will be taken to get their heads shaved. (Bear in mind that we are talking about Falluja, which is already one of the most conservative towns in Iraq. There aren`t too many funky haircuts here to begin with.)

As I arrive at the main entrance to the city, two shaking Iraqi ICDC are handing flyers to Fallujans driving into the city. The leaflets are designed to advise how to file a complaint for compensation, and to reassure them about what the Americans are up to: "The marines came here originally to help the people of Falluja, and they will work together to defeat the enemies of the Iraqi people."

I head towards one of the mosques where people are going to get aid and charity donations. A guy in his 40s approaches me with the famous welcoming smile of the Fallujans - a look of, "What the fuck are you doing here?"

I tell him that I`m a journalist and would like to meet the Sheikh.

"How did you manage to get in? Didn`t they stop you at the checkpoint?"

Thinking he is talking about the marines` checkpoint, I say, "No, everything was fine."

"Did they see your camera?" I tell him I was hiding it.

"This Abu Tahrir, I don`t know what kind of mujaheddin cell he is running! I told him that every car should be thoroughly searched and all journalists should be brought here!"

I am ushered inside where, surrounded by three muj fighters, the new mayor of Falluja gives me his geopolitical analysis of the American plot to control the world by occupying Falluja. "You know, we were all very happy when the Americans came, we thought our country would be better with their help, but Allah the Mighty wasn`t pleased," he tells me. The Americans started making mistakes, he explains, and now, "It`s all Allah`s plot to stop the believers from dealing with infidel foreigners."

He opens his drawer and pulls out two sheets of paper: the demands and the strategies of the resistance. One details an American-Shia plot to kill the Sunni clerics, technocrats and former army officers. "Be careful, oh brothers, because the Americans and their traitor allies, the Kurds and the Shias, are planning to come after your leaders." The other is a letter sent by the joint committee for the Iraqi resistance to Lakhdar Ibrahimi, the UN envoy working to form a new government. Its demands can be summarised as a request to hand Iraq to a bunch of wacko Sunni army generals.

The meeting is interrupted many times, once when a small kid comes into the room and everyone stands to shake his hand. "He is our best sniper here. He has killed three Americans, he wants to call the Americans out for a sniping competition."

One of the local muj cell leaders, Abu Tahrir ("father of liberation"), is complaining how part of the muj corps has deserted and joined the Americans. He is in his late 30s, overweight and a bit grim; a typical former mukhabarat officer who mixes bits of the Koran with chunks of nationalist and Ba`athist ranting.

Ten minutes later, another muj comes into the room complaining that different muj groups haven`t shown up to take their positions. The mayor makes a few phone calls using his mobile phone - "We have cellphones now, you know" - before returning to his thesis of where the American invasion went wrong. "The Iraqi army has been staging coups and counter-coups from 1958 to 1968; it was the army who managed to get everything under control, instead of those stooges on the governing council. The Americans should have counted on the real Iraqis" - and so on, until the muj who brought me in comes back and says: "You have to leave now. The commanders of the mujaheddin cells are going to have a big meeting in Falluja in 15 minutes, and soon there will be muj checkpoints everywhere. As we leave the mosque, he waves to a passing police car and orders them to follow, so that we drive out of Falluja escorted by both the muj and the police.

Sadr City in eastern Baghdad

Sadr City is an easy job for a journalist: all you have to do is cruise around looking for trouble. It is a Soweto kind of slum: rubbish-filled streets, ponds of sewage, and thousands of unemployed kids.

It is Saturday, and we are driving through the streets for the second time in the day. It is late afternoon when we see a bunch of kids directing the traffic away. By now we are able to sniff trouble from miles away, but I tell my driver to head to that street. Makeshift barricades are laid in the middle of the road, made of stones, tyres and chunks of car metal. Someone`s house has even been dismantled for the barricade.

"Don`t go, there are Americans down the street," shouts one of the kids, so we duck into a side road. The battlefield is an empty plot of land by a mosque, surrounded by alleyways.

In one of them, a dozen teenagers, three or four of them wearing Arsenal T-shirts and flip-flops, are emptying a car boot of a mortar tube and a sackful of shells. I am allowed to stay and take pictures, but with the usual proviso: "If we discover that you are working for the Americans, we will kill you."

The target is a police station and three Humvees parked in front. Masked like a western cowboy, the shooter, or the "expert" as they call him, takes measure of the angle and shouts to another fighter: "Give me one!" The other guy produces what looks like a rusted, 2-ft long shell. The fighters here are also Mahdi, and the fighting in Sadr City often feels like one big carnival. All the kids are by now doing their cheering chant: "Ali wiyak, Ali!" "Ali with you, Ali!" If I were an American soldier, I would be expecting a flying shell every time I hear kids cheering in Sadr City. After all, this is the only fun they get, shooting at the sitting ducks.

The expert tosses the shell into the barrel, and a big explosion follows. "Right a bit!" shouts one of the kids at the end of the street. "It fell on a house!"

The second one falls much too far to the left. "It fell on another house, move to the right a little bit!"

The third one falls something like 10 metres away from us, but doesn`t explode. The fourth lands by the Americans, and detonates. "Ten dead, I saw it with my own eyes!" shouts another kid. The fifth doesn`t leave the tube, and he has to up-end the tube and shake it.

In all, the firefight lasts for an hour, at which, after a few more rounds and a few more civilian houses destroyed,the fighters jump into their car and drive away.

Then the RPG session starts, kids aiming at the Americans and hitting whatever target they fancy. As one prepares to fire his RPG, the rusted rocket doesn`t launch.

"Come, you can use mine," says a man who is standing by, watching. Helpfully, he goes to his nearby home and returns with his RPG, as if he were lending a neighbour his Hoover.

Then, "They are coming, they are coming!" and everyone starts to run; the 50 or so kids who have gathered to watch the game, break into a sprint. We jump into the first open door, where a man pulls us inside and closes the door.

The house is nothing but two rooms and an open courtyard; home to two families with countless tiny kids. "So they shoot and run, and soon the Americans will come and start breaking into the houses and firing at us," says the man.

Within a few minutes we hear a Humvee pull up by the door, and - boom! boom! boom! - they start firing what sounds like a heavy machine gun. Everyone jumps to the ground, and Ali is asked once again to show his mercy upon us. "This has been our life for the past few weeks; we don`t know when we will be killed and who will kill us," says the father. After a while the Humvees go, and we hear the sound of the kids in the streets again. Everything back to normal.

That evening, after another session of shooting and counter-shooting, we are sitting with the fighters by the office of Moqtada al-Sadr. We are prepared for a long night waiting for American mortar shells. I think to myself, here we go, another dozen houses gone.

A young muj extends his hand and says: "Do you want a beer?" I am stunned, and what remains of my religious belief rapidly evaporates. But the beer is good and I sit all night with the great religious fighters, drinking beer and waiting for the shells that never come.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Steve Sack, Minnesota, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

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Rebels display ability to strike with impunity as handover looms
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad

25 June 2004

The attacks in the cities and towns of central and northern Iraq show that the insurgents have achieved a level of co-ordination not seen before. They were able to strike at police stations and Iraqi government facilities from Mosul in the north to Fallujah and Ramadi west of Baghdad.

The attacks also show that the US army has an uncertain grip on swaths of Iraq. The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) even warns its own employees only to use the airport road at certain times of the day.

The CPA and the US army had predicted an upsurge in violence at this time, suggesting that the rebels would want to spoil the supposed hand-over of power to an interim Iraqi government. But the ease with which the insurgents were able to mount the attacks shows that guerrilla warfare is likely to escalate.

Many of the dead yesterday wereIraqi policemen of whom there are 89,000, mostly ill-equipped. One of the many extraordinary aspects of the US occupation is that after a year of heavy military expenditure Iraqi policemen still lack effective submachine guns, bullet-proof vests and armoured vehicles. Even farmers are often better armed than the police.

The attacks also underline what has been evident from the first days of the insurgency. The US does not have enough soldiers here. It is already stretched trying to keep 138,000 in the field in Iraq. It has in addition 23,000 soldiers from assorted allies, notably Britain, but many of the others either will not fight, like the Ukrainian contingent, or have said they will only engage in humanitarian or reconstruction work, such as the Japanese.

It is not in fact the raids by rebels armed with AK-47s, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers which cause most of the casualties to the US troops. The most lethal weapon used against them is the roadside bomb, usually made out of several heavy artillery shells, to which the US army has found no answer.

Although the attacks yesterday were much better co-ordinated than anything seen in the past, the resistance is still fragmented. The fighting was all in Sunni Muslim areas. It was also in places that have seen fighting before. Fallujah and the mid-Euphrates area remains the heart of the rebellion though there are also centres of resistance at Balad and Baqubah. Outside Kurdistan, the US occupation is unpopular throughout Iraq. The CPA`s own poll in May showed that 92 per cent of Arab Iraqis say they consider the Americans as occupiers and just 2 per cent see them as liberators. Soon after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, polls showed Iraqis to be almost equally divided on this question.

The base of Saddam`s regime was the rural Sunni Arabs from outside Baghdad and the largest cities. The urban Sunni had flourished under the monarchy. It is not surprising they were the first to rebel, especially when Paul Bremer, the US viceroy, dissolved the army and security services where so many of them served. The rebels are nationalist and religious. The US always appears to underestimate the strength of Iraqi nationalism. Militant Islamic groups have flourished in western Iraq. In Fallujah they have been searching for shops that might sell alcohol, warning barbers against Western haircuts and demanding women wear the veil.

It has always appeared that there is a difference between the broader resistance movement and the car-bombing campaign. The latter, carried out regardless of Iraqi civilian casualties, has long appeared to be centrally co-ordinated. It has been able to strike in Arbil in the far north and against Iraqi oil facilities in the Gulf far to the south. The men who kill themselves are often foreign but the safe houses, intelligence, purchase of cars and support is Iraqi.

The US has long pushed the idea that a Jordanian called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, linked to al-Qa`ida and supposed head of the Tawhid and Jihad movement, is the organising genius behind the suicide attacks. This may be so but the evidence for his role is still slight, consisting of a long letter he is believed to have written and statements on Islamic websites. Many members of the present Iraqi government say they believe that Syrian and Iranian intelligence play a much bigger role in the anti-US campaign than is generally appreciated.

But most of the resistance in Iraq is intensely local. The US army has found to its cost that if a town or city is threatened then all the young men are likely to join the battle. They are united by bonds of religion, nationality, tribe, locality and family.

Iraqis in general distinguish between the suicide bombers and the resistance who attack the Americans, condemning the former and approving the latter. The attacks yesterday show how difficult the guerrilla war will be to end while the occupation continues and until there is a general political settlement.


25 June 2004 14:59

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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THE NATION
Bush Purposely Misled the Public, Gore Says
He accuses the president of lying about a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and warns about "too much power in the hands of one person."
By Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writer

June 25, 2004

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday accused President Bush of lying about connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and warned that Bush`s accumulation of power since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks threatened the foundations of American democracy.

In a hard-hitting speech delivered to an enthusiastic audience at Georgetown University Law School, Gore accused Bush of increasing his own power at the expense of the other branches of government and individuals` civil liberties.

The greatest danger to the United States, said the man who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election, is not terrorism but the possibility that Americans "will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person."

Gore`s comments came amid a political firestorm over a report from the special commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks — and the way the media have characterized the report.

The commission`s staff determined that the Iraqi regime had contacts, but not a "collaborative relationship," with Al Qaeda, and many news organizations contended that the finding undercut one of the administration`s key rationales for invading Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney, in turn, denounced the media as mischaracterizing the report and the administration`s position.

But in remarks sure to fuel the controversy, Gore accused Cheney and Bush of deliberately misleading the public about the connections between Al Qaeda and Hussein. "If Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us, then that means the president took us to war when he didn`t have to," Gore said.

The president, he added, "is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."

Responding to Gore`s speech in a conference call with reporters, Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said that "what we`re up against is [presumed Democratic nominee] John Kerry`s coalition of the wild-eyed." He added: "Today, Al Gore delivered another gravely false attack on the president."

Gore was sarcastic but controlled as he delivered his remarks, in sharp contrast to his demeanor last month, when his attack on the administration`s Iraq policy provoked criticism from some Democrats as well as Republicans.

In that speech, he seemed to lose control as he angrily demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George J. Tenet and other officials resign over their "twisted values and atrocious policies" in Iraq. Tenet subsequently resigned, citing personal reasons.

Before Gore`s remarks Thursday, the Republican National Committee issued a news release accusing him of having "anger management" issues. The release cited disapproving commentaries offered by conservative columnists and other political analysts after Gore`s remarks last month.

Although Gore kept his voice low and his delivery measured Thursday, the words were no less harsh.

The president, Gore said, plays on Americans` fear of global terrorism to justify "his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts and every individual citizen."

Gore reserved his most scathing remarks for what he called the "curious question of why Bush continues" to claim that "there was a working cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

Citing the Sept. 11 commission staff`s findings that no meaningful relationship existed, Gore described the president and the vice president as either lying or incompetent.

"If they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with Al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps [of evidence], then who would want them in charge?" he asked to laughter and applause from the audience of several hundred people.

"They dare not admit the truth, lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever," Gore said. "Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government."

Times staff writer Nick Anderson in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY
Limbaugh Has No Place on the Front Line
By Mike Farrell

June 25, 2004

"Do the right thing." These were Secretary of State Colin Powell`s words of advice to the Wake Forest University class of 2004 in his May 17 commencement address. Then Powell issued an incontrovertible condemnation of the actions of U.S. soldiers` abuse of Iraqi prisoners: "Our nation is now going through a period of deep disappointment, a period of deep pain over some of our soldiers not doing the right thing at a place called Abu Ghraib…. All Americans deplored what happened there."

Well, perhaps not all Americans. There`s at least one American who has publicly praised, condoned, trivialized and joked about the abuse, torture, rape and possible murder of Iraqi prisoners. This American does not appear to be going through "a period of deep pain." This American has instead called the abuse "a brilliant maneuver" and compared it to a college fraternity prank: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation," he said.

He excused the actions of our soldiers this way: "You know, these people are being fired at every day. I`m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?"

Who is this American so unlike "all Americans," as Powell described us? Rush Limbaugh, host of the nationally syndicated radio program, "The Rush Limbaugh Show."

Limbaugh, of course, is entitled to express his views, however bizarre, ill considered and offensive. I would never dream of telling him what he should or shouldn`t say. But that doesn`t mean that radio stations have to pick him up. Just as he can speak his mind, they can choose to air his show or not.

That`s why I was stunned to learn that one full hour of "The Rush Limbaugh Show" is broadcast every weekday directly to our soldiers in Iraq and around the world — to nearly 1 million U.S. troops in more than 175 countries and U.S. territories. Moreover, it is the only hourlong partisan political talk show broadcast daily to the troops.

Limbaugh`s show is broadcast by the Department of Defense`s American Forces Radio and Television Service, or AFRTS. According to its website, "The AFRTS mission is to communicate Department of Defense policies, priorities, programs, goals and initiatives. AFRTS provides stateside radio and television programming, `a touch of home` to U.S. service men and women, DoD civilians and their families" outside the continental United States.

Why should American taxpayers pay for the broadcasting of such inexcusable views to U.S. troops? Why, at a combustible moment like this one, would we be funneling Limbaugh`s trivializations to our men and women at the front? Does Limbaugh`s pro-torture propaganda really qualify as "a touch of home"?

On CNN on June 2, Pentagon official Allison Barber defended the continued broadcasting of Limbaugh, saying broadcast decisions are "based on popularity here in the States." But Barber also acknowledged that AFRTS based its programming decisions not only on ratings but on content too. Barber explained that AFRTS did not carry Howard Stern`s radio show — which draws more than 8 million listeners a week, but which has also recently been the target of massive FCC fines for "indecency" — because "his issue is one of content that is not appropriate." AFRTS carries programming from National Public Radio, but only news and features. It does not carry any partisan political talk show other than Limbaugh`s.

By choosing the Limbaugh show over any other, even in the wake of Limbaugh`s recent remarks, the Pentagon and indeed Congress, which holds AFRTS` purse strings, deems his content to be "appropriate." I disagree, and along with 30,000 other Americans I signed a petition at the website mediamatters.org calling for Limbaugh`s removal from AFRTS.

In general, I believe all reasonable views should be aired. Quite aside from the Abu Ghraib controversy, I`d like to see AFRTS broadcast a fuller range of political views to our troops rather than giving Limbaugh a monopoly at the microphone — and I applaud the Senate for approving an amendment to the defense authorization bill offered by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) that calls on AFRTS to provide political balance in its news and public affairs programming. But in this case, nothing short of removing Limbaugh will suffice. The issue goes beyond ideological balance — this is an issue of national security and national unity.

Limbaugh`s comments, and their tacit endorsement by the U.S. government, send a message to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen that torture is not a subject to be taken seriously and that these are actions that can be excused. Nothing could be more wrong than that.

*

Mike Farrell is an actor, human rights activist and former Marine.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Who Will Save The Children?!
Aww, heck. The FCC says curse words now cost $500,000! And your child might just hear one, and explode!
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 25, 2004

The world, it is a teeming reeking cauldron of wicked malevolent demons, with sharp pointy teeth and filthy mouths and really impressive porn collections, and each and every one of them wants nothing more than to suck the juicy pith from your helpless innocent child like Donald Rumsfeld drains color from the sky.

It`s true, isn`t it? Senators believe it, the Christian Right believes it, the FCC believes it, half a million stunned nipple-horrified Super Bowl viewers who complained to the FCC believe it, the clenched morality police of this nation chant it like a mantra, John Ashcroft has it tattooed on his shriveled colon. This, after all, is the prevalent American view.

Why the incessant outcry? What are these demons that threaten our kids so horribly? Why, the demons of profanity, of course. Swearwords. And sex. And drugs. And violent video games and J.Lo and illegal MP3s and sex, gangsta rap and sniffing glue and Janet Jackson`s nipple and Howard Stern and naughty billboards and low-slung jeans and hardcore porn and Marilyn Manson and shocking flotillas of appalling swearwords coming from the mouths of celebs and rock stars of sufficient tone and timbre to make Tony Montana blush. That`s what.

This is the mental image we are to believe, happening right this moment, across this fine nation: One hundred million honest, hard-working, sexually terrified parents are running around their homes with their hands to their heads, each thinking oh my freaking God what if our beautiful wee one just so happens to walk by the TV on his/her way to get an innocent glass of pure clean innocent Coca-Cola to wash down the pure innocent kiddie Prozac, and s/he just so happens to hear Tony Soprano call someone a "motherf-- " on TV? Why, our child, s/he would surely quiver and tremble and explode! Yes s/he would!

It`s all about the kids, you know, and who will protect their so-called innocence, their nubile unfiltered dreams, and how, and with what sort of laws and guns and lawsuits and ridiculous fines and sneering Bible-thumping misguided misinformed self-righteous indignation.

Does it matter whether this seems to contradict everything you naturally intuit about child development? Does it matter whether our warped puritanism is causing the nation ideological whiplash? Does it matter if the notion that our kids are ever threatened by nudity and swearwords insults your intelligence and your cursing ability and your parenting skills on roughly 100 different levels? No it does not.

But what actually should matter is that there are forces at play right now that are far more intent on devouring your child`s nubile soul -- like, say, ultraviolent war images, and rampant obesity, and organized religion, and pharmecuetical companies, and the Olsen Twins -- enerrgies that are molesting his/her sense of the world more than any hot genital reference or wanton exposed nipple could ever dream.

No matter. The horrified senators, they all imagine that very same image of millions of distraught American parents, and they furrow their oily brows and respond accordingly. How? Well, for example, by voting 99-1 in approval of a snide little bill that will now allow the FCC to fine the living bejeezus out of any broadcaster who lets slip an errant "f--" or "s--" or boob shot in any major media outlet anywhere (cable excluded, praise Jesus), up to $275,000 per incident (or, in the House version of the bill, $500K), up to $3 million per day. For starters.

And, verily, you could hear a pin drop in the Senate floor as the bill sailed through a few days ago, tacked on to a completely unrelated massive defense bill like a leech on a diseased whale.

There was no debate. There was no discussion. The senators were all cowering and whimpering and scrunching their faces, and not a single one dared speak out and say gosh, you know what? This bill we`re approving here? This insipid FCC thing? This bill is just, you know, totally effing moronic.

Of course, they don`t dare. They may be dumb, but they ain`t stupid. Go ahead. Try and suggest, in the era of BushCo and Ashcroft and Michael Powell and Dubya making his churchly rounds and working the rabid evangelical right-wing set into a get-out-the-homophobic-fundamentalist-vote furor -- go ahead and stand atop your soapbox and suggest that swearwords and sexually suggestive materials might not be, you know, the most harmful things a kid can encounter in his or her little innocent life.

Boom. You are so dead.

Just watch as you are instantly branded a heathen whore pervert. Just watch as you instantly lose your lead in the polls or your position in the TV ratings or your job at the media empire and have your head served to you on a platter. Sure it may be true. But don`t you dare say it.

This is what you are not to forget, ever: We are a nation wherein it is perfectly OK to show a dozen vaguely nauseating ads for erection pills and a hundred more touting the merits of slamming a sixer of Bud Light at halftime as you and your frat buddies ogle that chick at the bar as meanwhile the wife stays home and prances around the kitchen, high on the fumes from her new Swiffer WetJet. But a shot of a woman`s breast? Inappropriate and traumatizing, pal. Don`t like our hypocrisy? Move to France with the other perverts.

Aww hell. Let`s try and spell it out anyway. Let`s just say it right here: The kids are fine. Kids are not traumatized by much of anything we think they are. Kids are not scarred for life by hearing Howard Stern crack a penis joke with a porn star. Kids are not scarred for life by seeing one quarter-second of a famous nipple on national television. Kids are not scarred for life by reading the word "f--" in this column, which of course they can`t, because we can`t print it, because if they saw it they would explode and die.

You know what scars kids? You know what traumatizes our youth and stabs at their innocent spirits like Dick Cheney thrusts at integrity? Kraft Lunchables, that`s what. Drug-happy shrinks. Refined sugar. Abstinence-only sex education. Gutted school-music programs. McDonald`s marketing gimmicks. Joe Camel`s head shaped like a giant penis. Bovine growth hormones. Homophobic adults with guns. Rampant hypocrisy, like legal Zoloft but illegal pot, or being sent to Iraq at 18 but you can`t have a beer until you`re 21.

You want the trauma of youth? Try learning how BushCo`s Big Industry cronies are being allowed to poison the air and the water and the food supply. Try self-righteous organized religions that tell kids their bodies are evil and their beautiful natural urges are sinful and their new Messiah is Mel "Gushin` Blood" Gibson and never mind that priest staring at you so longingly, sweetie.

Try senators and FCC honchos and attorney generals and religious morality police who make life feel like a disease to be suffered rather than a pile of random messy bliss to be rolled around in.

Really, now, is there any scar more grievous than that? Anything more traumatic than teaching our kids that, no, you are not a healthy potent sexually burgeoning self-defined being of potential and love, but, rather, you are prey, ever put upon, ever under duress, ever meek and misinformed and ever requiring armed, patronizing protection. What a wonderful lesson.

As Tom Robbins says, "There`s many ways to victimize people. The most insidious is to convince them that they`re victims."



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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Cops and cars, topless bars

22.Teil vorheriger unter #17963

LOS ANGELES - Cruising the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible, top down, a warm breeze blowing, listening to the Beach Boys on 95.5 KLOS ("the legendary"), one may have waves of reasons to believe that the California Dream will never die.

Los Angeles is still the key node of the sixth-largest economy in the world - California is only behind the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and France. If LA county (with a population of 10 million) were a country, it would still be the 16th-largest economy in the world, ahead of Russia.

It`s not only the exuberance of the intellectual capital available that is overwhelming - constantly creating software extravaganzas or the latest from biotech to nanotech. It`s the explosive, ostentatious wealth. Malibu beach houses, hordes of Aston Martin convertibles, galaxies of boutique hotels and restaurants, dazzling Laurel Canyon glitzy parties, the serpent of red and white lights on the freeways, caravans of deluxe customized Hummers (the wet dream of US Marines deployed in the Muslim world), millions of perfectly toned bodies, which can afford to go holistic instead of ballistic. Compared to Gaza, Fallujah and Kandahar, this is outer space.

Still, the grid is not so remote from the succession of "cops and cars, topless bars" immortalized by The Doors. The epitome of cool and the epitome of trash, junk and gore coexist in California. In the world`s most unequal industrialized economy, California is one of its most unequal states. Driving from ultra-affluent Santa Monica, via the quintessential Sunset Boulevard, toward downtown LA, especially at night, one swings from the California Dream to post-Terminator no-man`s-land, with side excursions to mini-Asias (China town, Japan town, Korea town and Thai town).

California does not have a race problem - even though some WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) may fear Mexifornia (in 2040 the population is expected to be 48% Latino and 31% WASP). But it definitely has an education problem (not to mention an energy problem and a transportation problem). Just under 45% of students in California`s public schools are Latino (a staggering 70% in Los Angeles). They may be learning English, but are they learning enough skills to get something better from life than mere day-labor jobs?

WASP students go to private schools or schools in safe, small suburban districts. There are not enough public schools in California to educate a majority of Latino kids - although LA, for instance, always finds torrents of dollars when it comes to building the spectacular Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall or the Staples Center. California ranks as the 30th American state in terms of per capita spending on education.

California`s comparative economic advantage has everything to do with networks, crucial nodes and enterprising spirit. LA business is not only Hollywood and aerospace, it`s also jewelry, furniture, carpets, toys and, of course, pornography (in San Fernando Valley). All Japanese car multinationals have their creative headquarters in southern California.

Suburbia rules
If southern California is the empire of suburbia, the inland empire - the suburban sprawl in Riverside and San Bernardino counties - is its new key hub. About 660,000 of these 3.6 million inlanders (and counting) arrived in the 1990s - and 550,000 are Latino (talk about integration). Here, the California dream is ubiquitous - manifested by the detached suburban home with attached flotilla of sport utility vehicles (SUVs). Nine out of 10 Californians reportedly want to live in a single-family detached home. In Victorville - sort of the heart of the inland empire - these houses are affordable. In Orange County they`re not. According to Steve Pon Tell, an inland empire specialist, the first imperial rule of attraction is its multimodality. We`re talking about an integrated circuit, where if you`re willing to spend most of your life on the freeway you`re able to move anywhere. This is supposedly what freedom is all about.

It may never rain in California, as the pop cliche goes, but chic movie-star hangout Palm Springs is sprinkled with mini-nozzles. Roman Polanski`s Chinatown, written by Angeleno Robert Towne, was a fabulous movie about who controls LA water. Today, 80% of California`s water is used for agriculture - but agriculture represents only 2% of California`s economy. Talk about government inefficiency.

Recently, Californians were bombarded with the public relations campaign for the new Disney attraction - the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. No irony intended, of course. It`s a national sport to dismiss Californians as apolitical - or as a wacky bunch of voters. But attitudes are changing. Surfers in Topanga Canyon may now mock "CNN bubbleheads". Or take this Jewish-American family in Beverly Hills, who impeccably voted Republican all their lives. They may not be exactly familiar with the fine print of the Patriot Act. But now they say "it looks like we`re living in the former Soviet Union. There`s total infringement on our civil liberties." They`ll vote Democrat in November.

Ah-nuld
And then there`s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - or Ah-nuld, Arnold Inc, Conan The Governor, The Deregulator, the Gubernator, the Ubermensch or The Terminator, as he is variously known from LA to the Bay Area and from San Diego to the inland empire. From an anthropological point of view, Ah-nuld is the ultimate model to understand what makes post-everything America tick.

Ah-nuld shot to the heights of political power as in a movie plot, on a mission maybe not from god - like the Blues Brothers or George W Bush and John Ashcroft - but a sacred mission nonetheless: to rescue California`s economy from the evil forces of corruption and to restore the California Dream to its righteous citizens. He set out to prove that the sixth-largest economy in the world - where the most advanced technology coexists with appalling infrastructure - is actually manageable.

Ah-nuld used one of California`s famed propositions - number 57 in this case - to borrow US$15 billion to cover some of its budget deficit, currently running at $1 billion a month. He coupled the move with another proposition requiring the California legislature to come up every year with balanced budgets.

He must be doing something right. Last May, Moody`s raised California`s debt rating from BBB to A3. It`s still the worst among the 50 states - but at least this is the first time California gets a decent grade in four years. The economy is expected to grow by 4% in 2004.

Trojan lessons Brad Pitt didn`t learn
Ah-nuld is a tautological universe: he always elicits a horde of clones of Ah-nuld (much more than Bush breeds Bush clones). When he goes on blitz mode, he blurs all borders between Hollywood, business, special effects, the me ethos, self-help, super-fitness, perfect health and politics. Michael Blitz and Louise Krasniewicz, authors of the delightful Why Arnold Matters (Basic Books, 2004), go as far as saying that "Arnold Schwarzenegger defines the essence of the American Dream in a time when Americans have had to recognize the vulnerability and near impossibility of that dream."

In this true revolution in cultural politics, Ah-nulds`s target is to make the world over in Ah-nuld`s image. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tries the same thing in Italy, but he only travels with subtitles. The essence of Ah-nuld the politician is always a monstrous public relations exercise to the benefit of Ah-nuld. But the process has been so effective that he has managed to morph Ah-nuld into California itself.

Ah-nuld is a program that can be run anywhere, but he may be the ultimate Trojan Horse: a program disguised as a harmless application which is able to infiltrate and destroy a computer`s hardware, software or both. He may already be doing so to the American political-cultural grid - and soon no one will be complaining about it.

No wonder Ah-nuld conducted his whole campaign in 2003 in malls. Malls and theme parks are so successful because they represent an extremely regulated vision of happiness and well-being. They are the perfect image for democratic participation in a not-too-politicized republic. Ah-nuld`s "Disneylandization" of American politics is a complex process involving carefully controlled maximum simplification, scaling down, cleansing, elimination of any kind of disorder, creation of an atmosphere of harmony, guided behavior and total mass control. Karl Rove Machiavellians and brutal neo-cons in the Bush administration would have everything to learn from Ah-nuld`s tactics.

But what does it mean for Republicans?
California Republicans (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan) usually have the ability to morph into Terminators for the party nationally: after all, they carry a state of 35 million people with 54 electoral votes.

Ah-nuld is a classic, not hardcore, conservative. His priorities are paying the bills, balancing the budget and cutting off costs mercilessly to achieve it (the poor and the needy be damned). But he is also pro-choice; he worries about the environment (even promising to convert one of his Hummers to natural gas and hydrogen); and he`s deeply influenced by wife Maria Shriver of the Kennedy clan.

Kerry the Yankee should not take California for granted next November. Iraq has made Bush lose an avalanche of votes in California, according to the latest polls. Nixon won over John F Kennedy in California in 1960. Bill Clinton and AL Gore won by landslides in the 1990s. In the 2003 Ah-nuld gubernatorial triumph, he was shattered in the Bay Area and lost in Central LA, but he won by huge margins in the southern California suburbs and in the Central Valley.

This does not mean that an Ah-nuld victory in 2003 will translate into a Bush win in 2004. But southern California may still yield a huge surprise. The last northerner to win California was Franklin Roosevelt. The other Democrats who won afterwards came from Missouri (Harry S Truman), Texas (Lyndon Johnson), Arkansas (Clinton) and Tennessee (Gore).

Vast sections of America seem to be redefining democracy in essentially militaristic terms. In a society that is increasingly shallow and extremely materialistic ("a tawdry cheapness/ shall outlast our days", wrote the great Ezra Pound, a native from Idaho), the polls say that at least half of the American population now see the military as the last refuge of democratic values (Abu Ghraib notwithstanding). But Ah-nuld, as usual, has gone one step ahead: he`s the only one who knows how to seduce conservative voters with shopping mall democracy.

The future of the republic
Enter the closest California has in terms of a resident sage: Chalmers Johnson, 72, former navy officer and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) consultant, for years the head of University of California Berkeley`s political science department and the Center for Chinese Studies. In 2000, Johnson published the best-selling Blowback, warning that retribution against American imperial policies would be inevitable. His new book, The Sorrows of Empire, is even more devastating, detailing the entrails of the global garrison managed by the Pentagon and the CIA.

In this must-read book, Johnson shows how what could be called a military-petroleum complex turned America into the new Rome - with all the hubris, nepotism, corruption and savagery this implies. Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale had warned in the 1980s about the dangers of imperial overstretch. Johnson enumerates the four greatest dangers: perpetual war (George W Bush, on the record, has called for regime change in 60 countries); the end of the democratic republic; institutionalized disinformation (disseminated by corporate media); and bankruptcy.

Johnson, a lover of Goethe, lives with his wife in beautiful La Jolla, north of San Diego, in a home with a view of the Pacific. He`s still astonished at how most students nowadays are "passive and apolitical" and "indifferent to the world": he`s talking about young Californians. He`s in favor of dismantling the CIA: "Their intelligence on Iraq should have been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature."

Johnson`s view of America`s future is gloomy. He does not believe that "the political system is capable of saving the republic": "It is hard to imagine that any president of either party could stand up to the powerful vested interests surrounding the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies. Given that 40% of the defense budget is secret and that all of the intelligence agencies` budgets are secret, it is impossible for Congress to do effective oversight of them even if it wanted to." He believes that "if the republic is to be saved it will be as a result of an upsurge of direct democracy".

This is the progressive view. In the real world, California political experts usually joke that in America the political candidate whose life makes the best Hollywood movie always wins. Who could possibly beat Ah-nuld in the future if he and his followers successfully lobby to get a constitutional amendment to allow him to run? Don`t underestimate the Trojan Horse. Kahl-eee-fohr-nya may be just a test tube experiment. Direct democracy - of the shopping mall kind - may be next. And then, to crown the ultimate California Dream, he`ll be back - as the Presidator.


(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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Mehr zu Chalmers Johnson. Wird erwähnt in dem vorhergehenden Posting von Pepe Escobar.

Imperialismus

Das fragile Imperium

Ein Prophet des Untergangs: Chalmers Johnson sieht die Vereinigten Staaten auf dem Wege zur Überdehnung ihrer Hegemonialmacht

Von Herfried Münkler

Seit Jahren warnt der in Kalifornien lehrende Politikwissenschaftler Chalmers Johnson, ursprünglich ein Ostasienspezialist mit Schwerpunkt Japan und China, vor den verhängnisvollen Rückwirkungen der US-Hegemonialpolitik, die zunächst zur Zerstörung der amerikanischen Demokratie, zu der schrittweisen Suspendierung zentraler Verfassungsartikel sowie einer Politik systematischen Belügens und Betrügens der Bevölkerung durch die eigene Regierung und zuletzt zum Niedergang und Verfall der amerikanischen Machtstellung in der Welt führen werde. Johnson hat dafür in seinem vor einigen Jahren erschienenen Buch Ein Imperium verfällt bereits den Begriff des Rückstoßes geprägt, wie er nunmehr verstärkt in den Gegenreaktionen auf das selbstherrliche Auftreten der USA beobachtet werden kann.

Freilich habe, so Johnsons zentrale These, die Selbstzerstörung der amerikanischen Demokratie durch den Aufbau eines weltumspannenden Imperiums nicht erst in jüngster Zeit begonnen, wie die Kritiker der so genannten Neocons und ihres Einflusses auf die Politik der Bush-Administration meinen, sondern sie reicht zurück bis in die Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und hat ihre Wurzeln im späten 19. Jahrhundert, als die USA in der Karibik und im Pazifik zu einer Politik der maritimen Expansion übergingen und ihren Einfluss zunehmend auch mit militärischen Mitteln geltend machten. Doch der Imperialismus der USA, den Johnson anklagt, ist keineswegs bloß militärischer Art, sondern bedient sich auch, zumal wenn er von intelligenten Politikern betrieben wird, der sanfteren Mittel ökonomischer Durchdringung und Beherrschung. Bill Clinton, so Johnson, war darum der geschicktere Imperialist als George W. Bush.

Theodore Roosevelt gegen Woodrow Wilson

Eine derartige Ausweitung des Imperialismusbegriffs hat jedoch weitreichende Folgen, und deren politische Auswirkungen scheint Johnson nicht wirklich zu überschauen. Den Vergleich von Clinton und Bush junior nämlich hat er, was naheliegend ist, in die Vergangenheit zurückprojiziert und neben den handfesten Imperialisten Theodore Roosevelt, der die militärische Expansionspolitik der USA in den karibischen und pazifischen Raum forcierte, den idealistischen Imperialisten Woodrow Wilson, den Verkünder des Selbstbestimmungsrechts der Völker als Grundlage einer friedlichen, demokratischen Weltordnung, gestellt. Imperien, so Johnson, brauchen immer eine Leitidee und eine Mission, und die hat nach seiner Auffassung Wilson und nicht Theodore Roosevelt geliefert. Und dass Wilson den Eintritt der USA in den Ersten Weltkrieg aufseiten der Westmächte aus wirtschaftlichen Gründen forciert habe, steht für Johnson ohnehin außer Frage.

Der Erste Weltkrieg war danach also ein Krieg unterschiedlich gearteter, konkurrierender Imperialismen, und der am Schluss erfolgreichste Imperialismus war der der USA. Diese Sicht war zeitgenössisch nicht nur bei Lenin und seinen Anhängern, sondern ebenso auch bei den politischen Rechten in Deutschland zu hören. Stellte für Lenin die Alternative zu fortgesetzten imperialistischen Kriegen die Errichtung einer weltumspannenden Sowjetrepublik dar, so zog die deutsche Rechte aus der Annahme kriegerisch konkurrierender Imperialismen die Konsequenz, dass man sich auf die nächste Konfrontation besser vorbereiten und in ihr geschickter agieren müsse, als dies das kaiserliche Deutschland getan habe. Dieses Projekt ist zwischen 1939 und 1945 dann mit schrecklichen Folgen gescheitert. Wie also sieht Johnsons Alternative zu dem aus, was er als immer weiter ausgreifende imperiale Politik der USA beklagt?

So entschieden Johnson in seiner Kritik der amerikanischen Imperiumsbildung auftritt, so vage und unentschieden ist er, wenn es darum geht, Alternativen zur US-Dominanz in der Weltpolitik zu formulieren. Im Prinzip laufen seine Vorschläge darauf hinaus, die weltumfassende Imperiumsbildung der USA auf eine Hegemonialstellung in der westlichen Welt zurückzuführen, auf diese Weise eine Fülle von Konflikten zu beenden und darauf zu vertrauen, dass der Rückzug der USA aus der Weltpolitik zu einer friedlichen Ordnung mit mehr fairem Interessenausgleich führen werde. So etwas kann man hoffen, für besonders realistisch halten muss man es nicht. Es handelt sich um eine Variante des klassischen amerikanischen Isolationismus, die nicht nur mit nationalen Interessen, sondern zugleich mit den Wünschen der gesamten Menschheit argumentiert.

Die mitunter frappierende Naivität, mit der Johnson seine stellenweise überaus klaren und scharfsinnigen Analysen der US-Politik unterlegt, ist das Ergebnis einer methodisch-theoretischen Vorentscheidung, die alle Analysen imperialer Machtbildung zu treffen haben, über die sie sich jedoch nur selten hinreichend Rechenschaft ablegen: Resultiert die Imperiumsbildung wesentlich aus den inneren Dynamiken der vorherrschenden Macht, oder ist sie eher das Ergebnis von Konflikten und Zerfallsprozessen an ihrer Peripherie, die der Vormacht die Expansion nicht bloß ermöglicht, sondern eigentlich abverlangt haben? Oder anders formuliert: Ist Imperiumsbildung die Ursache oder die Folge der auftretenden Probleme? Geht man von Ersterem aus, dann ist der Verzicht auf Imperiumsbildung die Lösung. Nimmt man dagegen an, dass eher Letzteres der Fall ist, so ist mit dem Rückzug der imperialen Macht und ihrer Selbstbescheidung auf eine Hegemonialposition nichts gewonnen.

Machtstreben und Sendungsbewusstsein

Johnson hat sich dafür entschieden, die amerikanische Imperiumsbildung ausschließlich auf interne Dynamiken der USA zurückzuführen: auf eine Mischung aus Machtstreben und idealistischem Sendungsbewusstsein bei den Politikern, auf die Interessen des Militärs und der Rüstungsindustrie, den einmal errungenen Einfluss und das Auftragsvolumen beizubehalten und eher auszuweiten als einschränken zu lassen, und schließlich auf das Interesse des amerikanischen Kapitals, seine Anlage- und Profitchancen in aller Welt zu vergrößern. Ob in die amerikanische Imperiumsbildung auch nachhaltige Interessen der US-Bevölkerung verwoben sind, wir es also mit einer Form von Sozialimperialismus zu tun haben, lässt Johnson offen. Er bringt eine Reihe von Beispielen, die nahe legen, dass dem so ist. Das freilich hätte zur Folge, dass die Mehrheit der amerikanischen Bevölkerung kein Interesse daran haben würde, die Imperiumsbildung aus eigener Kraft, also mit demokratischen Mitteln, zu stoppen und rückgängig zu machen. Vor dieser Konsequenz scheut Johnson zurück, zumal dann seine These von der „Selbstzerstörung der amerikanischen Demokratie“ in sich zusammenfallen würde.

Tatsächlich liegt das Problem der amerikanischen Imperiumsbildung, das Johnson über weite Strecken seines Buches anschaulich und empiriegesättigt beschreibt, tiefer: Neben den internen Dynamiken, deren Vorhandensein nicht bestritten werden soll, haben bei der Ausdehnung der US-amerikanischen Macht nämlich immer auch externe Faktoren eine erhebliche Rolle gespielt, und wer, wie Johnson, diese außer Acht lässt, verfehlt die Dynamik von Imperiumsbildung ums Ganze. Das lässt sich auch und gerade an Wilsons Entscheidung zum Eintritt der USA in den Ersten Weltkrieg aufzeigen. Noch deutlicher ist dies beim Eintritt in den Zweiten Weltkrieg der Fall. Auf einen „Leistungsvergleich“ imperialer Machtbildungen, wie er sich mit Blick auf die Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts angeboten hätte, hat sich Johnson nicht eingelassen. Er hätte nämlich gezeigt, dass die Anwesenheit amerikanischer Soldaten und die Existenz von Militärstützpunkten, die in seiner Darlegung die spezifische Form des US-Imperialismus sind, keineswegs immer und überall auf Ablehnung oder gar Widerstand stoßen. Von anderen Hegemonialmächten bedroht, haben sich viele gerne in den Schutz der USA begeben und so einen Beitrag zur Ausweitung ihrer imperialen Präsenz geleistet.

Das lässt sich gerade an der Entwicklung der US-Militärpräsenz am Persischen Golf verdeutlichen. Die Entstehung von Imperien erfolgt immer in Auseinandersetzung mit konkurrierenden Mächten und als Reaktion auf machtpolitische Vakuen an den Rändern dynamischer Staaten: dass dabei auch jene eine Rolle spielen, die das Imperium wollen, weil sie von ihm profitieren, ist nicht zu bestreiten. Chalmers Johnson freilich hat nur Letzteres in den Blick genommen.

π Chalmers Johnson: Der Selbstmord der amerikanischen Demokratie

Aus dem Englischen von Hans Freundl und Thomas Pfeiffer; Karl Blessing Verlag, München 2003; 480 S., 23,– ¤

(c) DIE ZEIT 11.12.2003 Nr.51

http://www.randomhouse.de/specials/chalmersjohnson_selbstmor…

Published on Tuesday, June 1, 2004 by TomDispatch.com
Twelve Questions for President Bush Meant to Help Strengthen His Remaining Speeches about Iraq
by Chalmers Johnson



1. Please tell us more about your notion of "full sovereignty" for Iraq. Will this be like our returning Okinawan sovereignty to Japan in 1972, when we retained exclusive control over the 38 military bases on the island and the deployment and behavior of American forces on them?

2. Please tell us: If we plan to return Iraq to the Iraqis, why is the U.S. currently building fourteen permanent bases there?

3. Presumably the American troops to be stationed on these bases will remain under the control of the Pentagon and beyond the legal reach of any "sovereign" Iraqi state. Such arrangements are usually covered by a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) that we normally impose on the government in whose territory our bases are placed. Who will sign the SOFA on the Iraqi side? What are its terms? Will it be binding on the new government you hope the Iraqis will elect early next year?

4. The sovereignty discussion has been focused mainly on the question of who will control the actions of what troops -- Iraqi or American -- in the coming months. But American advisers will be stationed in every Iraqi "ministry"; the new government will evidently be capable neither of passing, nor abrogating laws or regulations laid down by the occupying power; and the economy, except for oil, will remain open to all foreign corporate investors. Please tell us if this really strikes you as "full sovereignty"?

5. You say that we will tear down Abu Ghraib prison if the Iraqis so wish. What if they wish to preserve it as a monument to our cruelty as well as Saddam Hussein`s?

6. Your administration has recently confirmed that while captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters were not, in your eyes, covered by the Geneva Conventions, Iraqi prisoners and detainees were. The acts in Abu Ghraib prison contravened those conventions. We now know that teams of interrogation experts were sent by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commandant of our Guantánamo prison from Cuba to Abu Ghraib to teach Americans working there "better" interrogation techniques. If these contravened the Geneva Conventions, should General Miller be brought to trial for this? If General Miller acted at Guantánamo and elsewhere on the basis of guidelines and urgings from his superiors in the Pentagon and the military chain of command, should they face the same? Your views on this would be appreciated.

7. If it turns out to be true that some of the acts of torture in Abu Ghraib prison were, in fact, committed by members of the Israeli intelligence services, who were placed in the prison via our independent contractors, does this not further confuse American policy in the Middle East with that of Ariel Sharon`s Israel? Is this really a good idea?

8. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the war and occupation in Iraq by 130,000 U.S. troops now costs close to $5 billion per month, or $60 billion a year. So far the war has cost American taxpayers $186 billion in direct military expenses. You`ve asked for another $425 billion in defense appropriations for the 2005 Pentagon budget, plus another $75 billion for Iraq, $25 billion for the development of new generations of nuclear weapons, and untold billion for such things as military pensions and veterans` health care. Not included in these figures are the multibillions in secret amounts spent on the CIA and other intelligence activities, not to speak of other Department of Defense "black budget" activities kept out of the appropriations process. Where is all this money going to come from? Why is our government putting all this money on the tab for future generations to deal with?

9. Speaking of military pensions and health care, would you please address the fact that something like 30% of the troops who participated in the first Gulf War are now seeking disability payments for illnesses contracted there -- chiefly as a result of our use of depleted uranium shells. Would you please discuss some of these long-term dangers of modern warfare (even when our initial short-term casualties seem relatively modest)? How will our military hospitals be able to care for all the soldiers who are likely to develop cancer or give birth to children with birth defects as a result of the current war?

10. On June 1, 2002, in your West Point speech enunciating your new doctrine of preventive war, you said there were 60 countries that were potential targets for regime change. Would you please list those 60 countries for us, and are you still determined in a second term to proceed down this list?

11. If you are determined to start new wars, or if the Iraq war drags on and not enough soldiers re-enlist, will you reinstate the draft?

12. Why do you usually give your speeches to the American people before audiences of servicemen and women at military academies, on bases, and the like, where they have been ordered by their superiors to attend and to applaud? Why not give one of your speeches -- especially if you`re going to propose reinstating the draft -- at a large state college?

Chalmers Johnson is the author of `The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic` and of an earlier volume, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, among other works.

Copyright C2004 Chalmers Johnson

Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt, a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves.

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

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Friday, June 25, 2004

107 Killed, Including 3 US Soldiers:
321 Hurt in 6 Iraqi Cities

Edmund Sanders of the LA Times and AP report that within a six-hour period, guerrillas launched bombings, ambushes and small arms fire in six cities in the Sunni heartland. Three US soldiers were killed, along with 104 others, and 321 were wounded. Those hurt were mostly bystanders at bombings in the northern city of Mosul.

Al-Hayat says Iraqis are calling it "Black Thursday."

Although these attacks have been viewed as "coordinated," I am not sure they really were, or at least that all of them were. There has been serious fighting around the northeastern city of Baquba for the past week, so the violence there has been ongoing and is not the result of a region-wide campaign. Attacks took place, as well, in Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mahaweel and Baghdad. Again, the fighting in Fallujah has a local history. The al-Tawhid organization of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took responsibility for all of them on its web site, but this is grandstanding. Former Saddam Fedayeen seem likely to be the actual responsible party in Ramadi, e.g., as interim PM Iyad Allawi noted. He blamed Zarqawi for the huge carbombs in Mosul. Many of Thursday`s attacks were aimed at police stations. Presumably this disruption of policing was aimed at undermining the caretaker government due to take power on June 30.

The violence first broke out in Baquba early Thursday morning, with an ambush on a US patrol. Two soldiers were killed and seven wounded. Guerrillas then attacked the city`s municipal building, a police station and Iraqi police. They killed 20 or so Iraqi policeman. Al-Hayat says the US called in airstrikes on the guerrillas. Wire services reported eyewitnesses saying that the guerillas` headbands were inscribed with the words, "Battalions of Monotheism and Holy War." If this were true, it would suggest that Islamists are leading the Baquba insurrection, but Allawi seems to discount it. The group gave out pamphlets saying, "The flesh of those working with the Americans is more delicious than American flesh itself," one read. Guerrillas in Baquba burned down the home of the police chief, who had been attempting to organize a response to their attacks.

The fighting in Fallujah was a breakdown in the truce with the Marines. The mosques of Fallujah called for calm, and a semblance of order returned. The guerrillas in Fallujah are a mix of ex-Baathists and Islamists. From several press accounts, it appears that Islamists now control the city and it is being run after the manner of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Police in Mosul announced a curfew in the wake of the horrible car bombing there.

Sanders reported that many Iraqis, fearful of violence, have fled to Jordan or Syria for the time being. US military in Iraq are apparently being kept from going out much until after the so-called transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

It is truly amazing that Iraqis are now fleeing their country again. That so many had been chased out, and that so many Iraqis had been killed under the Saddam regime, were among the justifications for the war. But we seem to be back to the beginning. These attacks are part of a long-term on-going guerrilla insurgency. They may want to make a statement, what with a new prime minister coming in, that the attempt to cause the pro-American government in Iraq ot collapse will not cease with the "transfer" of "sovereignty."

posted by Juan @ 6/25/2004 09:47:05 AM

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June 25, 2004
Presidential Race Tied as Americans Shift on Iraq and Economy
Majority now say war in Iraq was mistake


by Frank Newport

http://www.gallup.com/content/print.aspx?ci=12139

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- The latest Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll reflects attitude changes among Americans on both Iraq and the economy. The public has become significantly more likely to say that the war in Iraq was a mistake, while on the domestic front, President George W. Bush`s job approval rating on handling the economy has grown more positive.

On other issues, there has been little change. Bush is seen as being able to do a better job than presumptive Democratic candidate John Kerry on terrorism, Kerry beats Bush on the economy, and the two candidates are tied when Americans are asked who would better handle the situation in Iraq.

All in all, the race for president is now statistically tied, marking a slight improvement for Bush over the last several weeks, even though Bush`s overall job approval rating, 48%, is virtually the same as Gallup has measured for several months.

Iraq

Fifty-four percent of Americans now say that the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, marking the first time since the war in that country began that a majority have held this negative view.

This trend is important because it allows some comparability to the Vietnam War, during which Gallup consistently asked this same "mistake" question. In the early stages of that war, in late August and early September 1965, only 24% said that the United States had made a mistake in sending troops to that country. That percentage slowly rose over the next several years, and by August 1968, the tide turned and 53% said that Vietnam had been a mistake.

Gallup has asked this same question about Iraq nine times since March 2003. The previous high "mistake" percentage was 44% in May 2004. The current reading marks a major change from as recently as the June 3-6 poll, in which 41% said that the war was a mistake, and 58% said it was not.

Another Gallup measure on the Iraq war, "All in all, do you think it was worth going to war in Iraq, or not," has been more consistently negative in recent months. Although as many as 76% of Americans said that the Iraq war was worth it in April 2003, by May 2004, a majority said that it was not worth it. In the current poll, 46% say the war was worth it, while 51% say it was not.

It is highly likely that the increase in terrorism in recent months is a factor in this change in attitudes toward Iraq. Fifty-five percent of Americans in the current poll say that the war with Iraq has made the United States less safe from terrorism, marking a significant shift from last December (just after the capture of Saddam Hussein), when a majority said that the war had made the United States safer from terrorism.

Economy, Iraq, and Terrorism

The current poll included a series of measures on the public`s views of the two major candidates on three key issues: the economy, Iraq, and terrorism.

Economy

There is positive news in the latest poll for Bush in relationship to the public`s view of the economy. The president`s approval rating on handling the economy has gone from 41% across the last three polls to 47% in the June 21-23 poll. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who disapprove of his handling of the economy has dropped from 58% to 50%. That`s the lowest disapproval rating for Bush on the economy since late January of this year.
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In historical context, this economic rating puts Bush close to the economic ratings Bill Clinton received at this point in 1996 -- 49% -- and much better than the position of his father in 1992, when the elder Bush`s approval rating on the economy was right around the 20% level.

At the same time, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, Kerry still has a significant lead over Bush when Americans are asked who would better handle the economy, and this has not changed from early May.



Iraq

Bush`s job approval rating for handling the situation in Iraq remains stable but low, at 42%. That`s essentially what he has received across four polls conducted since early May.
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Bush and Kerry are tied when Americans are asked which candidate can do the better job of handling the situation in Iraq, little changed from early May.



Terrorism

There has been no significant change in Bush`s position on his handling of terrorism, either in terms of his overall approval rating, or in terms of his positioning on terrorism against Kerry. Bush gets a 54% approval rating on handling terrorism, continuing to make it a relative area of strength. In early June, he received a 56% approval rating on terrorism and 54% and 52% in two polls conducted in May. All of these numbers are much lower than the ratings he received earlier this year and in 2003.
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Bush maintains a 14-point lead over Kerry when Americans are asked which of the two men can do the best job handling terrorism -- essentially unchanged from May.


Overall Job Approval Rating

Despite the changes in attitudes on Iraq and Bush`s handling of the economy, the president`s job approval rating in the June 21-23 Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll is 48%, virtually unchanged from his ratings in the last four polls extending back to early May. Indeed, Bush`s job approval rating has been within a narrow range of 46% to 53% going all the way back to mid-January, and has averaged 50% across the 15 polls conducted from mid-January to the late June poll. In short, despite everything that has happened in American politics over the last five months, the public`s views of the president have remained remarkably consistent.

All of this puts Bush in an essentially "gray zone" as far as historical context is concerned. His job approval rating certainly is not as low as was the case for the two most recent presidents who were defeated in their bids for re-election: George H.W. Bush (38% in late June 1992) and Jimmy Carter (31% in late June 1980). At the same time, Bush`s job approval is below the readings of the five presidents who were re-elected -- Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Clinton -- in June of their election years. The current president`s job approval rating most closely resembles that of Gerald Ford in 1976 (45% in June of that year), and it will be remembered that Ford went on to a close two-point loss to Carter in November.

Trial Heat

Bush`s currently in-the-middle positioning in the presidential race is underscored by the results of the poll`s trial heat balloting. Bush and Kerry are essentially tied for the lead among likely voters both in a two-way matchup and in a three-way matchup including Ralph Nader. Bush and Kerry have been relatively close in every Gallup Poll conducted since March.
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Favorability Ratings

Kerry now has a more favorable image in the eyes of the American public than does Bush. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have a favorable image of Kerry (35% unfavorable, with 7% having no opinion), compared with 53% who have a favorable image of Bush (with 45% unfavorable and only 2% with no opinion).
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When one takes into account the net difference between favorable and unfavorable opinions, Kerry looks even better, with a net +23 rating, compared with Bush`s net +8 rating.

The Bush campaign spent roughly $80 million on advertising across the last several months, largely in an avowed attempt to cast Kerry in an unfavorable light as his image was being developed in the minds of many Americans who did not know much about him before this year. Did it make a difference?

Kerry does now have a slightly less favorable image than he did in mid-February. He had a 60% favorable and 26% unfavorable rating at that point, or a net +34, slightly higher than his current +23. On the other hand, Kerry`s image in March and April was actually worse than it is now, suggesting that for whatever reason, Kerry is now better situated than he has been in recent months.

Survey Methods

These results are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national sample of 1,000 adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 3-6, 2004. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ±3 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

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Bush will have nothing to celebrate if he comes here

A presidential visit would be a furtive and humbling affair
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Friday June 25, 2004

The Guardian
What kind of Iraq will George Bush see when he comes here next week to celebrate the handover of sovereignty to the country`s new interim government? It will certainly not be the scene that Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, must have hoped for when he hatched the idea last autumn of bringing his boss into the heart of downtown Baghdad for the ceremony.

Huge crowds of adoring Iraqis would line the streets as the presidential motorcade passed. George Bush would mount a platform at the very spot where Saddam Hussein`s statue was toppled in April 2003, the Great Liberator addressing the Iraqi nation and wishing them well as they embarked on the road to freedom and democracy. God Bless Iraq. God Bless America.

Now it will be a much more humble and humbling affair. There will be a speech, of course, but only after a helicopter dash to the heavily-fortified "green zone" where the occupation authorities have held sway for the past 14 months, handshakes with a small group of carefully selected Iraqis in the government which the Americans had a decisive role in appointing, and some hasty photo-ops with US troops.

Even this hole-in-corner performance will be enough to embarrass John Kerry, which is, after all, its main purpose. Like the Thanksgiving turkey platter which Bush carried out from behind a curtain in a hangar at Baghdad airport last November, next week`s publicity coup will be hard for the Democratic party`s candidate to denounce. You can`t sneer at patriotism or deride a president for visiting the trenches.

By any wider scale of measurement Bush`s Baghdad visit will only serve to highlight the failures of his overall Iraq strategy. Instead of enjoying peace and prosperity, Iraq is in a state of war.

The Bush visit has not been announced, and may yet be cancelled for security reasons, leaving Colin Powell, the secretary of state, or perhaps not even him, to come in the president`s place. But like clues in a treasure hunt, telltale hints of the Bush/Rove plan are there for the finding.

First, the extraordinary coincidence that Bush will be attending a Nato summit in Istanbul on June 28 and 29, the eve of the sovereignty transfer in Iraq. From there it is barely 90 minutes` flight to Baghdad. When was this convenient date selected? Certainly some time after June last year, when Nato foreign ministers met in Madrid to plan the alliance`s next summit. At that stage, according to the Nato website, the summit was to be held in May 2004.

The next time the ministers met - in Brussels last December - they changed the date to June. This scheduling adjustment occurred less than three weeks after the US occupation authorities had made an agreement with Iraq`s governing council to transfer sovereignty at the end of June this year. Well done, Karl Rove.

The second piece of evidence is decoy stuff. The Americans and their British allies have been downplaying next week`s transfer of power to an extraordinary degree. "It won`t be Hong Kong," as a senior official in the Coalition Provisional Authority put it. No flags coming down masts. No 21-gun salutes. No fireworks (except perhaps from the resistance).

Other officials have been suggesting the ceremony will consist of little more than Paul Bremer, the outgoing US overlord, handing a formal document to the chief justice of Iraq`s supreme court before the latter swears in the new president and prime minister. "Bremer might not even stay for that. It is the Iraqis` show," said another CPA man.

If in the end Bush decides not to take the security risk of coming to Iraq, it will be a major disappointment for him. But his sense of letdown will be as nothing compared to the disappointment that the vast majority of Iraqis feel about the American performance since April last year. The superpower that toppled the dictatorship in three weeks of war was expected to restore the economy, provide security, and create a climate of renewal.

Instead, as Iraqis see it, the Americans stood idly by and failed to get basic services working while looters ran amok. When Iraqis started to hold protests, they were treated with high-handed disdain at best, and cruelty at worst. When resisters took up the gun and planted home-made bombs, US forces overreacted with clumsy house-searches and mass detentions, provoking further resistance.

As the clumsiness of the military side of the occupation mounted, people were reluctant to denounce the resistance, let alone inform on those involved in it. Deprived of useful intelligence, the Americans went from blunder to blunder, laying siege to the Sunni city of Falluja and underestimating the popularity of the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.

On the political front, they were too slow to hand power to Iraqis. CPA officials argue that an occupation of only 14 months is short compared to the seven years it lasted in post-war Germany and Japan. But the comparison is unjustified. A majority of Germans and Japanese supported their previous systems. Finding people willing to set up alternative institutions necessarily took time.

Iraq was different. Most Iraqis hated Saddam and his crony dictatorship. When he fell, all they wanted was for the Americans to clean up the short-term mess and leave them alone. The presence of foreign troops was humiliating. "All done, go home", said a line of graffiti which appeared less than a month after the regime`s fall on the plinth where Saddam`s statue had stood.

In July last year, the Americans appointed an Iraqi governing council and asked it to pick a cabinet that would work alongside US advisers. The government that takes office next week is almost a clone of its predecessors, chosen largely from the same group of people. Was it at least elected? Not at all. It was appointed on exactly the same basis of private consultation.

This parallelism poses the question: why didn`t the occupation end a year ago? If Iraq had had a government last July which was as free to take its own decisions as this one is claimed to be, would nationalist resentment and frustration have reached today`s peak? Would all of us in Baghdad, whether Iraqis or foreigners, be living in as much anxiety as we are?

No, the American occupation authorities were not only bent on toppling Saddam Hussein. They also wanted to put their stamp on another people`s life and behaviour as well. Alas, the old imperial delusion that foreigners know best has taken its toll again. So if Bush appears in Iraq next week, he will have to come furtively rather than in style.

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ublished on Friday, June 25, 2004 by the Daily Camera / Boulder, Colorado
E-voting? Only with Paper Trail
by Molly Ivins


Heads up, team, the voting-machine situation requires sustained attention, but not panic or paranoia. There is time to act, but act we must.

Yes, it is high time to "view with alarm" (an editorial page cliche rivaled only by "point with pride"), and with bipartisan alarm at that. It`s in everyone`s interest to have the cleanest, fairest elections possible — that`s one of those things you can watch even the most partisan politicians serving on legislative elections committees figure out in no time. The only way to make sure nobody`s ox gets gored is to keep it clean. If you don`t think there are just as many bright, 14-year-old hackers who would rig a vote in favor of Democrats as there are who would rig it for Republicans, you`ve been neglecting the 14-year-old hacker set.

I suppose I`ve been calmer about the possibility/probability that electronic voting machines can be rigged than some others who are now looking at the bad news because it`s an old story to me. Ronnie Dugger, a veteran Texas journalist (despite the fact that he`s taken to living in, of all places, Cambridge, Mass.), has been on this case for years. I suppose I mentally assigned it to some "Ronnie`s taking care of that" category.

But as Dugger`s questions and predictions keep turning out to be more and more eerily prescient, it`s clear this is something about which the general public needs be aroused and even plenty upset.

The problems with electronic voting machines are numerous and grave, starting with the fact that the software which runs them is considered "proprietary information" by the companies that make them. In other words, they won`t tell anyone what it is, how it works or anything else about the systems, meaning we have no way of knowing if they`re clean, reliable or even functional.

That uncomfortable situation was rather dramatically underlined when Walden (Wally) O`Dell, chairman and CEO of Diebold Election Systems and a Bush campaign "Pioneer" (meaning he raised at least $100,000), wrote in a 2003 fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." At the time, Diebold was trying to get on Ohio`s "favored vendor" list and is now on it. Elections Systems and Software, the country`s largest maker of the machines, also has a GOP pedigree.

It`s a shame Diebold isn`t a big Democratic fund-raiser who said he was committed to delivering Ohio for Kerry, so the Republicans could see how they like that. But I`m sure there are enough Republican conspiracy theorists to contemplate the happy proposition that, while chairmen and CEOs may lean Republican, there are any number of partisan Democrats lurking in engineering departments and liberal moles in software-writing offices.

Last July, a team of computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and Rice universities studied the Diebold machines and concluded they are "a threat to democracy." Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," reports electronic voting machines are "designed for fraud." Apparently, you can rig these things so that Osama can win an election. One experiment in how long it took to open one up and swipe its software produced a record of 10 seconds.

Making the software for voting machines both bug-less and hacker-proof simply may not be possible, but as many have observed, the things as they stand are an open invitation to voter fraud. As The New York Times pointed out, slot machines in Las Vegas are held to far higher standards of transparency and inspection.

The simplest way to make sure the machines aren`t miscounting is to require a paper trail on each ballot. In California, the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel recommended the machines be shelved, and then Secretary of State Kevin Shelley revoked certification of Diebold`s paperless electronic voting machines.

Eight other states now require a paper trail, something that is not difficult to design or install, despite Diebold`s initial protests that it is oh-so-hard. Florida, scene of so many painful voting memories in 2000, had a single race election in January in Palm Beach where the victory margin was 12, but the machines registered more than 130 blank ballots. You think 130 people came to the polls to not vote? There was no recount because the machines had no paper records.

There are bills in both the U.S. Senate and House to require paper trails in time for the 2004 election, but they`re stuck in committee. Take pen in hand and write (or email) your elected representative, ASAP. Then bask in the benign glow of civic rectitude that follows. Well done.

Copyright 2004, The Daily Camera

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Chalmers Johnson: Militarism and the American Empire
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Distinguished social scientist and public intellectual Chalmers Johnson, joins host Harry Kreisler for a conversation on the nature of the American Empire and its costs and consequences for the future of American democracy and power in the world. Video
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June 26, 2004
Army Used Speed and Might, Plus Cash, Against Shiite Rebel
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD, Iraq — In April, as festering resistance exploded into full-fledged rebellion, soldiers of the First Armored Division were given their final mission in Iraq: to wrest control of a string of southern towns from a radical Shiite militia intent on disrupting the scheduled transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

These American soldiers, some of whom had already left Iraq and others just short of leaving after a year in combat, would instead spend nearly three months in one of the most significant campaigns of the war.

The division`s operation against the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric, is already being studied by an Army struggling to learn the lessons of a war that continues to evolve even as the formal occupation of Iraq changes gears next week.

As described by top commanders in Iraq and senior policy makers in Washington, the campaign was a mix of military tactics, political maneuverings, media management and a generous dollop of cash for quickly rebuilding war-ravaged cities — a formula that, if it survives the test of time, could become a model for future fighting against the persistent insurrections plaguing Iraq.

But on the eve of the transfer of power, the question is whether the tactical successes the commanders are quick to claim have guaranteed a lasting strategic victory.

As the division`s new date for departure approaches, Mr. Sadr remains at large. Despite an Iraqi arrest warrant for the murder of a rival cleric, he recently hinted that he would challenge the new government in the political arena.

When the First Armored Division got orders to mount its counterattack against the Sadr militia, one-fourth of its 30,000 soldiers and more than half of its 8,000 tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces had already left Iraq. The division, along with the Second Light Cavalry Regiment, also under its command, did an about-face, recalling troops, unpacking gear and receiving unwelcome orders to extend its stay by 90 days.

"I called together all my commanders, and I told them that we were going to demonstrate that a heavy force could be agile — to put heavy and agile in the same sentence, a place where they had never been before," said Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, whose signature weapon is the 70-ton Abrams tank.

"And 15 hours later, from a standing start in Baghdad, we moved 170 kilometers down to Najaf, and were in contact with the enemy," General Dempsey said, referring to a distance of just over 100 miles.

As quickly as the military spent its ammunition, though, it spent its money in an effort to heal some of the wounds it was inflicting, and those dealt by the militia as well.
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An Iraqi man, in the ruins of his home in Kufa, held a poster of Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel cleric, during clashes between American troops and rebel forces in May.
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From the moment the Americans recaptured Kut, the first town where they reclaimed control, officers switched from military to civil operations. Having scattered the enemy, they pulled them back together and put them to work in an amusement park destroyed in the fight.

"These are young men who have been poisoned, unemployed, disenfranchised and very poorly led," General Dempsey said. "We found a local tribal sheik who said he could corral them. We hired him to repair the amusement park, and he in turn hired these young men."

The example was repeated in Diwaniya and all across south-central Iraq, where General Dempsey spent several hundred thousand dollars to pay locals to remove rubble, rebuild roads and finance claims for damaged homes and businesses.

The campaign against the Sadr militia in south-central Iraq also had to be fought elsewhere — inside military headquarters in Baghdad, in the command-and-control "Tank" at the Pentagon, inside the National Security Council at the White House and even at the United Nations, as senior commanders debated with civilian policy makers how best to counter this menacing militia presence that grew in the shadows of the American occupation.

On one side were those who believed that Mr. Sadr could be sidelined, and that to attack him would only stoke support among his followers in Iraq and beyond its borders. This view was convincing to the uppermost level of commanders in Iraq, and certainly was the stance of Bush administration officials, especially after they heard the opinions of Iraq`s own nascent leadership. On the other side were those, mostly field commanders, who argued that Mr. Sadr was a growing threat in advance of the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, and that eventually he would have to be arrested or eliminated to guarantee the future of a stable and democratic Iraq.

Mr. Sadr had taken refuge in one of the shrines in Najaf, the holiest site in all of Shiite Islam, making a direct assault on him very difficult without inflicting large civilian casualties and possibly damaging the shrines.

"We never had an operation to go after Sadr inside the holy city," said Maj. Gen. John Sattler of the Marine Corps, director of American military operations for the Middle East. "We did not want to endanger the holy shrines. We stayed clear of those."

So the plan focused on chipping away at the Sadr militia with controlled strikes, and working behind the scenes with more moderate Shiite clerics to isolate him and undercut his local support.

"The more he and his followers occupied towns like Najaf and Kufa, the more Iraqis were becoming fed up with the negative impact on their towns," General Sattler said. "We felt very strongly he was being marginalized."

During this period, other Shiite leaders made public calls for Mr. Sadr to withdraw his forces from the holy cities and return the cities to police and civil defense units operating under American command.

Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, said this did not mean ceding territory. But others, even within the military, worried that the Americans had in effect allowed large parts of southern Iraq to slip out of their control.

A number of field officers had argued — as a few still do — for a swift strike at Mr. Sadr himself.

One senior administration official said that after June 30, the decision about how to deal with him "is no longer up to us." The new Iraqi government will be making those calls.

But back in early April, officers and policy makers were wondering whether America was about to lose Iraq. General Dempsey, whose troops had previously been in charge of securing Baghdad and its suburbs, planned a far-reaching campaign to seize control of provincial capital after provincial capital.

"In Baghdad, our area of operations was 750 square kilometers, and now we were looking at 20,000 square kilometers," General Dempsey said. "In Baghdad, we had strictly urban terrain, and now we were looking at a complex mix of rural, tribal and some urban elements. My immediate decision was that we really didn`t need to control the white spaces between the urban areas."

"What Moktada al-Sadr was trying to do was take a very narrow uprising — it was not a broad-based popular uprising; it was narrow — and demonstrate his ability to stand up to the coalition and in so doing broaden his support base," General Dempsey said. "We decided that we can`t allow that to happen. It had to be dealt with very aggressively, very rapidly, very decisively."

His division would retake Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and then Kufa and Najaf, and in that order.

He issued the order, and 19 hours later a brigade and 112 combat vehicles had made the 180-mile trip from Najaf to Kut.

The Americans first had to cross a bridge that engineers said could withstand the weight of their tanks — maybe.
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A G.I. at the Karbala mosque, taken after heavy fighting.

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Instead, General Dempsey sent smaller, armor-plated Humvees of the Second Light Cavalry charging over the bridge into the militia forces. The heavier tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles sidestepped 46 miles north to a stronger bridge at Numaniya and then back south along the river bank to Kut, attacking simultaneously and catching the militia fighters in the pincer.

Within 48 hours, the Americans recaptured the municipal building, the local TV station and bridges in and out of Kut. The Americans then took back Diwaniya, relieving a Spanish brigade that then withdrew after the new Spanish prime minister summoned them home, and securing a provincial capital that sits between two of the occupation forces` major supply routes.

The offensive into Karbala presented the Americans with their first battle in a town with a shrine, as Sadr militiamen had taken over a holy site and the adjacent main thoroughfare. Seventy-two hours of intense fighting brought hundreds of Iraqi casualties, but the militia still could not be dislodged.

"We didn`t want to take our combat vehicles right up to the shrine, so we conducted a feint," General Dempsey said. "We ran a tank company team on each side of the ring road, north and south of the holy shrine."

The militiamen left the mosque area to confront the rolling and dismounted troops, not knowing that General Dempsey had put a pair of AC-130 gunships aloft to attack the exposed militiamen with devastating Gatling guns, cannons and howitzers.

"By the next day," General Dempsey said, "they had disappeared."

It was important, though, to prevent the militiamen, wherever they were encountered, from shooting and escaping to fight another day. "If you drive through an ambush, or get ambushed and seek shelter before returning fire, they will get away from you," the general said. "This is not going to be something where they can get away with shooting and scooting."

Yet another goal was to discredit Mr. Sadr inside Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, a First Armored Division assistant commander whose responsibilities include information operations, said the Americans "advertised" what Mr. Sadr had done on radio and TV and with handbills and posters. The list of accusations included stealing money from shrines and mosques to finance his organization, running an illegal religious court in all the major cities, using amusement parks in Kut, Najaf and Karbala to store weapons, establishing illegal checkpoints to shake down travelers and ruining businesses during pilgrimage periods in Najaf and Karbala.

Commanders wanted their offensive to be seen as "deliberate, patient, sensitive and precise" in its broader goals, in particular that the shrine in Najaf — the holiest site in Shiite Islam — would not be violated, General Hertling said. But other mosques would be hit if they were used as snipers` nests or arms depots, and soldiers and the news media accompanying them — Arabs as well as British and American reporters — were urged to document those militia violations of the laws of war.

On the battlefield, though, "we wanted to be seen as rapid, overwhelming, lethal and relentless," General Hertling said. Reporters were brought on missions for that reason, too.

The militia uprisings were set off in April after L. Paul Bremer III decided to crack down on Mr. Sadr by shutting down a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al Hawza, which American officials said had become a mouthpiece for Mr. Sadr`s incendiary criticisms of the Americans. But Mr. Bremer`s order caught American commanders by surprise.

A few days later, allied forces arrested a cleric who was a senior aide to Mr. Sadr, Mustafa al-Yaqubi. Within 24 hours, Mr. Sadr decided to escalate his fight, and Sadr militiamen were rampaging all across south-central Iraq.

The scale of the uprising caught Americans by surprise, but General Dempsey argued that the timing turned out to hurt Mr. Sadr in the end. "The enemy made a strategic error in timing its uprising when it did," he said. "If he had waited two more weeks, I was gone. First Armored would have been home. The American military never runs out of options. Other forces would have taken the mission. But these options all had a greater degree of risk."

General Dempsey lost soldiers during the Sadr campaign, soldiers who might otherwise be home alive if the division`s tour had not been extended.

Asked what he would say to those families, General Dempsey replied, "I don`t think they would expect me to say anything different than I would have to the family of a soldier who was killed in our first week here."

At the beginning of the uprising, commanders thought there were perhaps 200 hard-core militiamen in Kut and the same number in Diwaniya; that number is now down to under a dozen in each city. In Karbala, there were perhaps 750 armed Sadr supporters at the start, and there is no remaining evidence of the militia today. In the twin cities of Najaf and Kufa, commanders estimated about 2,000 militiamen at the start of the insurgency. Today, there are estimated to be 150 to 200 remaining, mostly inside the shrine in Najaf. They are contained, at least for now, though it is not clear whether they could regroup, since Mr. Sadr remains at large, and the arrest warrant against him was never executed.

In April and May, "Moktada al-Sadr could move with impunity, he and his militia, in virtually any of those places," General Dempsey said. "Now he moves with impunity around the holy shrine in Najaf, and that`s it."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Kann ein Mensch mit dieser Meinung ein Verbündeter der USA sein?
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"Zionism is behind it. It has become clear now. It has become clear to us. I don`t say, I mean...it is not 100 percent, but 95 percent that the Zionist hands are behind what happened."
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June 24, 2004
A Global Power Shift in the Making
By JAMES F. HOGE, JR.

From the July/August 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.

James F. Hoge, Jr. is Editor of Foreign Affairs. This article is adapted from a lecture given in April at Johns Hopkins University`s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The transfer of power from West to East is gathering pace and soon will dramatically change the context for dealing with international challenges -- as well as the challenges themselves. Many in the West are already aware of Asia`s growing strength. This awareness, however, has not yet been translated into preparedness. And therein lies a danger: that Western countries will repeat their past mistakes.

Major shifts of power between states, not to mention regions, occur infrequently and are rarely peaceful. In the early twentieth century, the imperial order and the aspiring states of Germany and Japan failed to adjust to each other. The conflict that resulted devastated large parts of the globe. Today, the transformation of the international system will be even bigger and will require the assimilation of markedly different political and cultural traditions. This time, the populous states of Asia are the aspirants seeking to play a greater role. Like Japan and Germany back then, these rising powers are nationalistic, seek redress of past grievances, and want to claim their place in the sun. Asia`s growing economic power is translating into greater political and military power, thus increasing the potential damage of conflicts. Within the region, the flash points for hostilities -- Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and divided Kashmir -- have defied peaceful resolution. Any of them could explode into large-scale warfare that would make the current Middle East confrontations seem like police operations. In short, the stakes in Asia are huge and will challenge the West`s adaptability.

Today, China is the most obvious power on the rise. But it is not alone: India and other Asian states now boast growth rates that could outstrip those of major Western countries for decades to come. China`s economy is growing at more than nine percent annually, India`s at eight percent, and the Southeast Asian "tigers" have recovered from the 1997 financial crisis and resumed their march forward. China`s economy is expected to be double the size of Germany`s by 2010 and to overtake Japan`s, currently the world`s second largest, by 2020. If India sustains a six percent growth rate for 50 years, as some financial analysts think possible, it will equal or overtake China in that time.

Nevertheless, China`s own extraordinary economic rise is likely to continue for several decades -- if, that is, it can manage the tremendous disruptions caused by rapid growth, such as internal migration from rural to urban areas, high levels of unemployment, massive bank debt, and pervasive corruption. At the moment, China is facing a crucial test in its transition to a market economy. It is experiencing increased inflation, real-estate bubbles, and growing shortages of key resources such as oil, water, electricity, and steel. Beijing is tightening the money supply and big-bank lending, while continuing efforts to clean up the fragile banking sector. It is also considering raising the value of its dollar-pegged currency, to lower the cost of imports. If such attempts to cool China`s economy -- which is much larger and more decentralized than it was ten years ago, when it last overheated -- do not work, it could crash.

Even if temporary, such a massive bust would have dire consequences. China is now such a large player in the global economy that its health is inextricably linked to that of the system at large. China has become the engine driving the recovery of other Asian economies from the setbacks of the 1990s. Japan, for example, has become the largest beneficiary of China`s economic growth, and its leading economic indicators, including consumer spending, have improved as a result. The latest official figures indicate that Japan`s real GDP rose at the annual rate of 6.4 percent in the last quarter of 2003, the highest growth of any quarter since 1990. Thanks to China, Japan may finally be emerging from a decade of economic malaise. But that trend might not continue if China crashes.

India also looms large on the radar screen. Despite the halting progress of its economic reforms, India has embarked on a sharp upward trajectory, propelled by its thriving software and business-service industries, which support corporations in the United States and other advanced economies. Regulation remains inefficient, but a quarter-century of partial reforms has allowed a dynamic private sector to emerge. Economic success is also starting to change basic attitudes: after 50 years, many Indians are finally discarding their colonial-era sense of victimization.

Other Southeast Asian states are steadily integrating their economies into a large web through trade and investment treaties. Unlike in the past, however, China -- not Japan or the United States -- is at the hub.

The members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), finally, are seriously considering a monetary union. The result could be an enormous trade bloc, which would account for much of Asia`s -- and the world`s -- economic growth.

THE STRAINS OF SUCCESS

Asia`s rise is just beginning, and if the big regional powers can remain stable while improving their policies, rapid growth could continue for decades. Robust success, however, is inevitably accompanied by various stresses.

The first and foremost of these will be relations among the region`s major players. For example, China and Japan have never been powerful at the same time: for centuries, China was strong while Japan was impoverished, whereas for most of the last 200 years, Japan has been powerful and China weak. Having both powerful in the same era will be an unprecedented challenge. Meanwhile, India and China have not resolved their 42-year-old border dispute and still distrust each other. Can these three powers now coexist, or will they butt heads over control of the region, access to energy sources, security of sea lanes, and sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea?

Each of the Asian aspirants is involved in explosive territorial conflicts, and each has varying internal stresses: dislocated populations, rigid political systems, ethnic strife, fragile financial institutions, and extensive corruption. As in the past, domestic crises could provoke international confrontations.

Taiwan is the most dangerous example of this risk. It has now been more than 30 years since the United States coupled recognition of one China with a call for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question. Although economic and social ties between the island and the mainland have since grown, political relations have soured. Taiwan, under its current president, seems to be creeping toward outright independence, whereas mainland China continues to seek its isolation and to threaten it by positioning some 500 missiles across the Taiwan Strait. The United States, acting on its commitment to Taiwan`s security, has provided the island with ever more sophisticated military equipment. Despite U.S. warnings to both sides, if Taiwan oversteps the line between provisional autonomy and independence or if China grows impatient, the region could explode.

Kashmir remains divided between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Since 1989, the conflict there has taken 40,000 lives, many in clashes along the Line of Control that separates the two belligerents. India and Pakistan have recently softened their hawkish rhetoric toward each other, but neither side appears ready for a mutually acceptable settlement. Economic or political instabilities within Pakistan could easily ignite the conflict once more.

North Korea is another potential flash point. Several recent rounds of six-party talks held under Chinese auspices have so far failed to persuade Kim Jong Il to scrap his nuclear weapons program in exchange for security guarantees and aid to North Korea`s decrepit economy. Instead, the talks have brought recriminations: toward the United States, for offering too little; toward North Korea, for remaining intransigent; and toward China, for applying insufficient pressure on its dependent neighbor. Now recently disclosed evidence suggests that North Korea`s nuclear efforts are even more advanced than was previously believed. As Vice President Dick Cheney warned China`s leaders during an April trip, time may be running out for a negotiated resolution to the crisis.

SHIFTING PRIORITIES

For more than half a century, the United States has provided stability in the Pacific through its military presence there, its alliances with Japan and South Korea, and its commitment to fostering economic progress. Indeed, in its early days, the Bush administration stressed its intention to strengthen those traditional ties and to treat China more as a strategic competitor than as a prospective partner. Recent events, however -- including the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- have changed the emphasis of U.S. policy. Today, far less is expected of South Korea than in the past, thanks in part to Seoul`s new leaders, who represent a younger generation of Koreans enamored of China, disaffected with the United States, and unafraid of the North.

Japan, meanwhile, faced with a rising China, a nuclear-armed North Korea, and increasing tension over Taiwan, is feeling insecure. It has thus signed on to develop a missile defense system with U.S. aid and is considering easing constitutional limits on the development and deployment of its military forces.

Such moves have been unsettling to Japan`s neighbors, which would become even more uncomfortable if Japan lost faith in its U.S. security guarantee and opted to build its own nuclear deterrent instead. Even worse, from the American perspective, would be if China and Japan were to seek a strategic alliance between themselves rather than parallel relations with the United States. To forestall this, Washington must avoid, in all its maneuverings with China and the two Koreas, sowing any doubt in Japan about its commitment to the region.

Yet Japan, given its ongoing economic and demographic problems, cannot be the center of any new power arrangement in Asia. Instead, that role will be played by China and, eventually, India. Relations with these two growing giants are thus essential to the future, and engagement must be the order of the day, even though some Bush officials remain convinced that the United States and China will ultimately end up rivals. For them, the strategic reality is one of incompatible vital interests.

Militarily, the United States is hedging its bets with the most extensive realignment of U.S. power in half a century. Part of this realignment is the opening of a second front in Asia. No longer is the United States poised with several large, toehold bases on the Pacific rim of the Asian continent; today, it has made significant moves into the heart of Asia itself, building a network of smaller, jumping-off bases in Central Asia. The ostensible rationale for these bases is the war on terrorism. But Chinese analysts suspect that the unannounced intention behind these new U.S. positions, particularly when coupled with Washington`s newly intensified military cooperation with India, is the soft containment of China.

For its part, China is modernizing its military forces, both to improve its ability to win a conflict over Taiwan and to deter U.S. aggression. Chinese military doctrine now focuses on countering U.S. high-tech capabilities -- information networks, stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, and precision-guided bombs.

Suspicious Americans have interpreted larger Chinese military budgets as signs of Beijing`s intention to roll back America`s presence in East Asia. Washington is thus eager to use India, which appears set to grow in economic and military strength, as a counterbalance to China as well as a strong proponent of democracy in its own right. To step into these roles, India needs to quicken the pace of its economic reforms and avoid the Hindu nationalism espoused by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which suffered a surprising defeat in recent parliamentary elections. Officials of the victorious Congress Party pledged to continue economic reforms while also addressing the needs of the rural poor who voted them back into office. Bullish in victory, Congress spokespersons said that they would push to increase India`s annual growth rate to ten percent from its current eight percent.

Unless Congress follows its secular tradition in governing, it will undercut any utility India might have for the U.S. campaign to counter the influence of radical Islamists. To date, the aberrant religious ideology that opposes all secular government has developed only moderate traction among the large Muslim populations of India and the surrounding states of Central and Southeast Asia. For example, fundamentalist Islamic political parties fared poorly in winter and spring parliamentary elections in Malaysia and Indonesia. In other ways, however, radical Islamists are becoming a serious threat to the region. Weak governments and pervasive corruption there provide fertile ground for back-shop operations: training, recruitment, and equipping of terrorists. Evidence points to a loose network of disparate Southeast Asian terrorist groups that help each other with funds and operations.

Recent public-opinion polls show that sympathy is growing for the anti-American posturing of the radical Islamists, in large part due to U.S. activities in Iraq and U.S. support of the Sharon government in Israel. The full impact of outrage over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is still to be determined. But deep anger is already in place among Muslim communities worldwide over the perceived slighting of Palestinian interests by the Bush administration. A settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not end terrorism, and Muslims themselves must lead the ideological battle within Islam. Yet the United States could strengthen the hand of moderates in the Muslim world with a combination of policy changes and effective public diplomacy. The United States must do more than set up radio and television stations to broadcast alternative views of U.S. intentions in the Middle East. It must replenish its diminished public diplomacy resources to recruit more language experts, reopen foreign libraries and cultural centers, and sponsor exchange programs. Given the large number of traditionally tolerant Muslims in Asia, the United States must vigorously assist the creation of attractive alternatives to radical Islamism.

NEEDED CHANGES

To accommodate the great power shift now rapidly occurring in Asia, the United States needs vigorous preparation by its executive branch and Congress. The Bush administration`s embrace of engagement with China is an improvement over its initial posture, and the change has been reflected in Washington`s efforts to work with Beijing in the battle against terrorism and negotiations with North Korea. The change has also been reflected in the reluctance to settle trade and currency differences by imposing duties. In other ways, however, Washington has yet to shift its approach. On the ground, the United States appears undermanned. Despite a huge increase in the workload, the work force at the U.S. embassy in China numbers approximately 1,000, which is half the employees envisioned for the new embassy in Iraq. Training in Asian languages for U.S. government officials has been increased only marginally. As for the next generation, only several thousand American students are now studying in China, compared to the more than 50,000 Chinese who are now studying in U.S. schools.

Going forward, the United States must provide the leadership to forge regional security arrangements, along the lines of the pending U.S.-Singapore accord to expand cooperation in the fight against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It must also champion open economies or risk being left out of future trade arrangements. The United States must also avoid creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of strategic rivalry with China. Such a rivalry may in fact come to pass, and the United States should be prepared for such a turn of events. But it is not inevitable; cooperation could still produce historic advancements.

At the international level, Asia`s rising powers must be given more representation in key institutions, starting with the UN Security Council. This important body should reflect the emerging configuration of global power, not just the victors of World War II. The same can be said of other key international bodies. A recent Brookings Institution study observed, "There is a fundamental asymmetry between today`s global reality and the existing mechanisms of global governance, with the G-7/8 -- an exclusive club of industrialized countries that primarily represents Western culture -- the prime expression of this anachronism."

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has embraced the idea of elevating to heads-of-state level the meetings of the G-20 group, which is composed of 10 industrialized countries and 10 emerging market economies. This could incorporate into global economic governance those countries with large populations and growing economies.

The credibility and effectiveness of international bodies depends on such changes; only then will they be able to contribute significantly to peace among nations. Although hardly foolproof, restructuring institutions to reflect the distribution of power holds out more hope than letting them fade into irrelevance and returning to unrestrained and unpredictable balance-of-power politics and free-for-all economic competition.

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So is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi really the missing link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?
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June 26, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
This Terrorist Is Bad Enough on His Own
By PETER BERGEN

WASHINGTON — Despite the finding by the 9/11 commission staff that there is no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, Bush administration officials continue to insist the two worked together. As evidence, they frequently cite Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the 37-year-old Jordanian who is arguably the most dangerous terrorist in the world today. Mr. Zarqawi, who fled his Afghan training grounds after the American invasion and found safe haven in Iraq, was most likely behind the string of bombings across Iraq on Thursday that killed more than 100; in May, he beheaded Nicholas Berg, an American communications engineer working in Iraq.

The day after the 9/11 staff report came out, Vice President Dick Cheney again put forward Mr. Zarqawi. "After we went in and hit his training camp, he fled to Baghdad," Mr. Cheney said, adding that Mr. Zarqawi "ran the poisons factory in northern Iraq out of Baghdad." The administration has also pointed out that American intelligence believes Mr. Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad in 2002.

So is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi really the missing link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? Actually, the evidence of his relationship with either is far from clear cut. Mr. Zarqawi runs an organization separate from Al Qaeda called Tawhid. One indication of his independence is that when he founded his training camp in Afghanistan in 2000, he did so near the western city of Herat, on the Iranian border, hundreds of miles away from Al Qaeda`s camps.

Roger Cressey, who was a counterterrorism official on the National Security Council staff at that time, told me that Mr. Zarqawi`s camp was set up "as much in competition as it was in cooperation" with Al Qaeda. Indeed, Shadi Abdullah, a Tawhid member apprehended in Germany in 2002, told investigators that his group saw itself to be "in rivalry" with Mr. bin Laden`s, according to a German official privy to the details of the interrogation.

And in January, American forces found a letter believed to have been written by Mr. Zarqawi to Al Qaeda leaders hiding on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It requested aid in fighting the Shiites of Iraq: "You, gracious brothers, are the leaders, guides and symbolic figures of jihad and battle. We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you if you are convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy; we will be your readied soldiers." The tone of the letter is clearly that of someone outside Al Qaeda appealing for its help. And Al Qaeda`s leaders seem little interested in fomenting a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq; in the audiotapes he has released in the past year, Osama bin Laden has made no mention of the Shiites.

"The central question the administration has failed to answer is: Was there guidance or direction from the Al Qaeda leadership to Zarqawi?" Mr. Cressey, the former counterterrorism official, told me. "The evidence presented so far is there was not." At a briefing on June 17, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to agree with that assessment, saying of Mr. Zarqawi that "someone could legitimately say he`s not Al Qaeda."

Mr. Zarqawi`s connections to Saddam Hussein are equally tenuous. After fleeing Afghanistan, he probably spent as much time living in Iran as in Iraq. What Mr. Cheney described as the "poisons factory" Mr. Zarqawi ran was actually in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, an area protected by American jets since 1991. Mr. Rumsfeld had more control than Saddam Hussein over that part of Iraq.

As for the medical treatment Mr. Zarqawi supposedly received in Baghdad, for some time American officials thought it was a leg amputation. However, the footage of Mr. Zarqawi in the video of Mr. Berg`s execution seems to show a man in possession of both limbs. And last week Mr. Zarqawi released an audiotape on a jihadist Web site containing a blistering critique of Saddam Hussein, whom he described as a "devil" who "killed the innocent."

Mr. Zarqawi is a ruthless murderer, and capturing or killing him would be a major step toward pacifying Iraq. But if he is, as President Bush has said, the "best evidence" of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the administration`s case is a weak one.

Peter Bergen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of "Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Cheney Defends Use Of Four-Letter Word
Retort to Leahy `Long Overdue,` He Says

By Dana Milbank and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 26, 2004; Page A04

Vice President Cheney on Friday vigorously defended his vulgarity directed at a prominent Democratic senator earlier this week in the Senate chamber.

Cheney said he "probably" used an obscenity in an argument Tuesday on the Senate floor with Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and added that he had no regrets. "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it," Cheney told Neil Cavuto of Fox News. The vice president said those who heard the putdown agreed with him. "I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."

The forceful defense by Cheney came as much of Washington was discussing his outburst on the Senate floor in which a chance encounter with Leahy during a photo session in the usually decorous Senate chamber ended in colorful profanity. The obscenity was published in yesterday`s editions of The Washington Post.

President Bush had made his vow to "change the tone in Washington" a central part of his 2000 campaign, calling bipartisan cooperation "the challenge of our moment."

"Our nation must rise above a house divided," he said in his victory speech in December 2000. "I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we will seize this moment and deliver."

Cheney said yesterday he was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with Leahy because Leahy had "challenged my integrity" by making charges of cronyism between Cheney and his former firm, Halliburton Co. Leahy on Monday had a conference call to kick off the Democratic National Committee`s "Halliburton Week" focusing on Cheney, the company, "and the millions of dollars they`ve cost taxpayers," the party said.

"I didn`t like the fact that after he had done so, then he wanted to act like, you know, everything`s peaches and cream," Cheney said. "And I informed him of my view of his conduct in no uncertain terms. And as I say, I felt better afterwards."

Leahy, crossing the aisle to the Republican side of the chamber Tuesday, tried to make small talk with Cheney. Cheney yesterday referred to the incident as "a little floor debate in the United States Senate," although the Senate was not in session at the time. According to Leahy`s staff, the Vermont senator answered Cheney`s complaint about Halliburton with Democrats` complaints that the White House sanctioned a smear of Catholic Democratic senators over their objections to Bush`s judicial nominees.

"Ordinarily I don`t express myself in strong terms, but I thought it was appropriate here," Cheney said on Fox.

David Carle, Leahy`s spokesman, said: "It appears the vice president`s previous calls for civility are now inoperative."

As news spread on Thursday of the Cheney-Leahy exchange, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) appealed to colleagues of both parties to rise above "partisan retaliation" and find a "common ground" for lawmaking.

Speaking first with reporters and then addressing the full Senate, Daschle acknowledged that earlier efforts by Democrats and Republicans to restore the Senate`s once-cherished comity have yielded meager results. "But we have to try . . . to build a better relationship" between the political parties, regardless of which controls the Senate after the November elections, he said.

Daschle denied that he made his own civility proposals to boost Democratic campaigns, including his own hard-fought bid for reelection in South Dakota this fall. But his pitch for more bipartisanship -- coupled with a similar appeal Wednesday by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) -- underscored the perceived significance of voters` impatience with the partisan squabbling in Washington.

Daschle outlined what he called "fundamental commitments" that would undergird his efforts: to "deal in good faith with the executive branch"; to exert the "historical role of the Senate" on budget, oversight and nomination matters; to respect minority party rights, and to "end the cycle of partisan retaliation."

Among his proposals was full participation by both parties on House-Senate conference committees.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Aws Khafaji, right, a spokesman for Moqtada Sadr in Baghdad`s Sadr City slum, decried attackers as "lunatics" bent on destabilizing the country.
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washingtonpost.com

Foes of U.S. in Iraq Criticize Insurgents
Clerics and Militiamen Decry Violence

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 26, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, June 25 -- Key Iraqi opponents of the U.S. occupation expressed unease Friday over the wave of insurgent attacks that killed more than 100 Iraqis a day earlier, and rejected efforts by foreign guerrillas to take the lead in the insurgency and mate it with the international jihad advocated by Osama bin Laden.

The objections -- from anti-U.S. Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders, including rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr, and even from militia fighters in the embattled city of Fallujah -- arose in part from revulsion at the fact that victims of the car bombings and guerrilla assaults in six cities and towns Thursday were overwhelmingly Iraqis. But they also betrayed Iraqi nationalist concerns that the fight against U.S. occupation forces risked being hijacked by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom U.S. officials describe as a paladin in bin Laden`s al Qaeda network.

"We do not need anyone from outside the borders to stand with us and spill the blood of our sons in Iraq," Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae, a Sunni cleric with a wide following, declared in his Friday sermon at Umm al Qurra mosque in Baghdad.

Since they were appointed three weeks ago, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and members of his U.S.-sponsored interim government have railed against the car bombings and other attacks. But Friday`s show of disgust -- expressed in mosques and, in Sadr`s case, with fliers calling for cooperation with Iraqi police -- marked the first time anti-occupation clerics and fighters sided against violence associated with the insurgency, for which Zarqawi has increasingly asserted responsibility.

In that light, it could be an important moment in the U.S. struggle to win acceptance for the military occupation and for the interim government scheduled to acquire limited authority next Wednesday. While far from embracing the U.S. occupation or the new government, the anti-occupation leaders seemed to disavow the bloodiest edge of the violence and Zarqawi`s attempt to make it part of al Qaeda`s vision of international jihad.

"Which religion allows anyone to kill more than 100 Iraqis, destroy 100 families and destroy 100 houses?" raged Samarrae in his sermon. "Who says so? Who are those people who do this? Where did they come from? . . . It is a conspiracy to defame the reputation of the Iraqi resistance by wearing its dress and using its name falsely. These people hurt the Iraqis and Iraq, giving the occupier an excuse to stay longer."

Samarrae said he had learned that some Iraqi insurgent leaders have begun to clash with Zarqawi loyalists, insisting the jihadists do not represent the "right and true resistance." He warned against those who he said want to tear the country apart in the name of Islam and suggested they were foreigners who should not be part of Iraq`s conflict.

In a similar vein, a group of masked fighters in Fallujah stood before Reuters television cameras and read a statement insisting that the city`s violent struggle against surrounding U.S. Marines is being carried out by Fallujans, not Zarqawi or other foreign fighters.

"The American invader forces claim that Zarqawi, and with him a group of Arab fighters, are in our city," said one of the heavily armed men, reading from a paper. "We know that this talk about Zarqawi and the fighters is a game that the American invader forces are playing to strike Islam and Muslims in the city of mosques, steadfast Fallujah."

Shortly after their declaration, the U.S. military launched precision weapons against what it called a Zarqawi safe house, the third such strike in less than a week.

In Baqubah, where scores of fighters proclaiming allegiance to Zarqawi attacked police stations and government buildings in Thursday`s offensive, clerics called on the faithful not to support such attacks. The attackers, they said in their Friday sermons, were foreigners attacking Iraqis.

"This is the first time we have heard the minaret broadcast support for the Iraqi government," said Edward Peter Messmer, the occupation authority`s coordinator for the Baqubah region, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. "And it couldn`t come at a better time."

Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has fought U.S. troops in the Sadr City slum in eastern Baghdad and in Najaf, 90 miles to the south, ordered his followers to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi police in Sadr City to "deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness."

"We know the Mahdi Army is ready to cooperate actively and positively with honest elements from among the Iraqi police and other patriotic forces, to partake in safeguarding government buildings and facilities, such as hospitals, electricity plants, water, fuel and oil refineries, and any other site that might be a target for terrorist attacks," said an order from the Mahdi Army distributed in Sadr City.

Interior Minister Falah Naqib said Sadr`s militiamen were welcome to join the police or army as individuals, but not to patrol alongside regular police units.

Abdul Hadi Darraji, a Sadr spokesman in Sadr City, said Sadr`s order was issued in part to see whether U.S. occupation authorities were serious about transferring power to Allawi`s government. If they were, he suggested, Sadr`s movement could continue cooperating with Iraqi authorities in combating terrorists who, he said, come from outside the country.

"This gesture is designed to distinguish between honorable, legal resistance against the occupation and the dishonorable resistance, which does not target the occupation, but targets the Iraqi people," he said.

Aws Khafaji, a cleric in Sadr`s militantly political stream of Shiite Islam, disowned Thursday`s violence even more clearly in a sermon at the Hikma mosque in Sadr City.

"We condemn and denounce yesterday`s bombings and attacks on police centers and innocent Iraqis, which claimed about 100 lives," he said. "These are attacks launched by suspects and lunatics who are bent on destabilizing the country and ruining the peace so that the Iraqi people will remain in need of American protection."

Sadr`s militia, as far as is known, has not been involved in the car bombings and assaults against Iraqi police and government officials across the country in recent weeks. His fighters concentrated their battle against U.S. troops in Sadr City and the Najaf area, although they also fought with Iraqi police seeking to patrol Najaf until a cease-fire was established there earlier this month.

Shiite political leaders have sought for several months to persuade Sadr to disband his militia and transform his organization into a political movement. He has expressed a tentative willingness to do so. But his lieutenants have refused to participate in choosing a national congress due to convene next month, citing what they call a skewed formula for representing Iraq`s ethnic and religious groups.

Correspondent Scott Wilson in Baqubah contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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In a 1996 photo, a U.S. soldier wipes his eyes as others confer at a blasted building in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where 19 servicemen were killed.
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washingtonpost.com

9/11 Panel Links Al Qaeda, Iran
Bin Laden May Have Part in Khobar Towers, Report Says

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 26, 2004; Page A12

While it found no operational ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that Osama bin Laden`s terrorist network had long-running contacts with Iraq`s neighbor and historic foe, Iran.

Al Qaeda, the commission determined, may even have played a "yet unknown role" in aiding Hezbollah militants in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, an attack the United States has long blamed solely on Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors.

The notion that bin Laden may have had a hand in the Khobar bombing would mark a rare operational alliance between Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups that have historically been at odds. That possibility, largely overlooked in the furor of new revelations released by the commission last week, comes amid worsening relations between the United States and Iran, which announced on Thursday that it would resume building equipment necessary for a nuclear weapons program.

The Sept. 11 panel`s findings on Iran have been eclipsed by the continuing political debate over Iraq, which the commission said had not developed a "collaborative relationship" with al Qaeda despite limited contacts in the 1990s. That appeared to conflict with previous characterizations made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials in their justifications for launching the war against Saddam Hussein.

In relation to Iran, commission investigators said intelligence "showed far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and al Qaeda than many had previously thought." Iran is a primary sponsor of Hezbollah, or Party of God, the Lebanon-based anti-Israel group that has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

The commission`s Republican chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean, also said in a television appearance last week that "there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq."

But perhaps most startling was the commission`s finding that bin Laden may have played a role in the Khobar attack. Although previous court filings and testimony indicated that al Qaeda and Iranian elements had contacts during the 1990s, U.S. authorities have not publicly linked bin Laden or his operatives to that strike, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen. A June 2001 indictment of 14 defendants in the case makes no mention of al Qaeda or bin Laden and lays the organizational blame for the attacks solely on Hezbollah and Iran.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads the Washington office of Rand Corp., said that although bin Laden`s then-fledgling group was an early suspect in the blasts, "the evidence kept pointing to an Iranian connection, so people tended to discount a bin Laden connection."

"What the commission report is raising is that the relationship might have been much tighter and was in fact operational and not just spiritual," Hoffman said.

U.S. officials who have worked on the Khobar case are more skeptical. A law enforcement source with knowledge of the case, who declined to be identified because of the ongoing criminal investigation, said authorities searched carefully for an al Qaeda connection but found no basis for it.

The broader notion of links between bin Laden`s group and Hezbollah or hard-line elements in Iran`s security forces has been a hot topic in U.S. law enforcement and intelligence circles for years. Many analysts have viewed such an alliance as dubious, largely because of ancient animosities between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Several leaders of al Qaeda, a Sunni organization, have issued rabidly anti-Shiite proclamations.

Nonetheless, the United States previously compiled evidence of limited contacts between Iranian interests and al Qaeda. U.S. officials alleged that Iran was harboring al Qaeda militants who had fled neighboring Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion there.

Iran has denied that al Qaeda was operating from its territory, and announced earlier this year that it would put on trial a dozen suspected members of the terrorist group.

The original U.S. indictment of bin Laden, filed in 1998, said al Qaeda "forged alliances . . . with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States."

But the Sept. 11 commission`s findings regarding Khobar Towers, if confirmed, would deepen the known relationship between al Qaeda, Iran and Hezbollah. A commission staff report issued June 16 said that in addition to evidence that the attack had been carried out by Saudi Hezbollah with assistance from Iran, "intelligence obtained shortly after the bombing . . . also supported suspicions of bin Laden`s involvement.

"There were reports in the months preceding the attack that bin Laden was seeking to facilitate a shipment of explosives to Saudi Arabia. On the day of the attack, bin Laden was congratulated" by al Qaeda militants, the report says.

The report recounts some of the previously alleged contacts between al Qaeda and Iran or Hezbollah and concludes, "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 also says that several years before the Khobar attack, "bin Laden`s representatives and Iranian officials had discussed putting aside Shia-Sunni divisions to cooperate against the common enemy." A group of al Qaeda representatives then traveled to Iran and to Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon for "training in explosives, intelligence and security," the report says.

Bin Laden himself, the report added, "showed particular interest in Hezbollah`s truck bombing tactics in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 U.S. Marines."

Flynt L. Leverett, a Middle East expert in the Clinton and Bush administrations who is now a Brookings Institution scholar, said active cooperation between al Qaeda and Iran "cannot be ruled out as wholly implausible."

"There are going to be serious structural limits to how much al Qaeda and Iran might cooperate," Leverett said. "Within those limits, though, there is some room for very tactical and self-serving cooperation between al Qaeda and some parts of Iranian intelligence." Leverett cited as an example the allegations that Iran had harbored al Qaeda operatives fleeing Afghanistan.

But Daniel Benjamin, a national security official in the Clinton administration, said he was "still skeptical" of any link between al Qaeda and Khobar, arguing that the evidence shows "that Saudi Hezbollah was very much a creature of some in Iran."

"I don`t quite see the need that this operation had for assistance from al Qaeda," Benjamin said. "Second of all, my understanding of the larger relationship between Iran and al Qaeda suggests that while there were plenty of contacts, many more than there were with Iraq, it was never clear they developed a serious cooperative relationship."

Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Was ist los im `White House`? Viele Links!
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washingtonpost.com

Testy, Testy, Testy

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, June 25, 2004; 11:43 AM

Do you get the sense things are a little tense at the White House these days?

Let`s see.

On Tuesday, right on the Senate floor, Vice President Cheney snarled obscenely at a Democratic senator.

We can only imagine what it was like in the Oval Office yesterday morning when President Bush -- attended only by his new private lawyer -- faced 70 minutes of questions from prosecutors about the outing of a CIA operative.

But not long after that meeting, Bush got downright snippy with an Irish TV reporter when she tried to move him beyond his stock answers.

Let`s start with the historic meeting in the Oval Office.
CIA Leak Investigation

Starting about 10:30 a.m. yesterday, Bush was interviewed for 70 minutes by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald and members of Fitzgerald`s team.

The only other person in the room was James E. Sharp, a private trial lawyer and former federal prosecutor who has now been formally hired by Bush.

Susan Schmidt writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush was interviewed for more than an hour yesterday by a special prosecutor investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer last summer. . . .

"Bush`s session with prosecutors is unusual but not unprecedented. Bill Clinton testified or was interviewed at the White House in criminal investigations at least seven times during his presidency, on matters that included a probe of the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster Jr., campaign finance irregularities, the Whitewater inquiry and the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that led to his impeachment."

Richard W. Stevenson and David Johnston write in the New York Times: "Mr. Fitzgerald appears to be moving into the final stages of the investigation, suggesting that he could reach a decision during the heat of the presidential campaign on whether to charge anyone and whether to issue a public report on the investigation if he does not file charges. . . .

"[T]he investigation has unsettled some current and former White House aides, and the presence of prosecutors in the Oval Office even though there is no indication that they suspect Mr. Bush of playing any direct role in the leak was hardly one the administration relished."

So what happened in there? There`s lot of speculation but little or no actual information.

David Gregory reported on NBC News that the investigation has expanded beyond the initial leak. "This inquiry is also now focused on whether anyone has lied to investigators," Greogory said -- but he didn`t say how he knew.

Here`s the text of press secretary Scott McClellan`s briefing on the meeting.
Cheney and the `F-Word`

At a photo session on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Cheney ran into Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. That sparked an exchange about Cheney`s ties to Halliburton and the White House`s bare-knuckle tactics on judicial nominees.

Helen Dewar and Dana Milbank write in The Washington Post: "The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

" `Fuck yourself,` said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency. . . .

"As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the `Defense of Decency Act` by 99 to 1. . . .

Dewar and Milbank also note: "This was not the first foray into French by Cheney and his boss. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pointed out a New York Times reporter to Cheney and said, without knowing the microphone was picking it up, `major-league [expletive].` Cheney`s response -- `Big Time` -- has become his official presidential nickname. . . .

Here`s the transcript from CNN`s Inside Politics yesterday, when Ed Henry broke the news to Judy Woodruff:

"Judy, there`s been an unrelenting Democratic assault on Vice President Dick Cheney, mostly over his ties to the company Halliburton, which he used to run. This spilled over, it looks like it might have gotten to Cheney a little bit on Tuesday. CNN confirms that the Vice President used the `F` word as he confronted Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor Tuesday. This occurred when all 100 Senators were taking the official Senate photo. This is supposed to be a happy occasion, but the smiles turned to snarls. What we`re told happened, is that Vice President Cheney went up to Leahy, who has been leading the assault about Halliburton, and said he is not happy about the investigation. Leahy responded that Cheney once called him a bad Catholic. To that, Mr. Cheney used the `F` word, right back to Leahy. This has been spreading around among Senators. Senator Leahy confirmed this to CNN, let me read to you what he told us:

" `I think he was just having a bad day. I was shocked to hear this kind of language on the Senate floor.`

"We also have a statement from the Vice President`s office. Spokesman Kevin Callums tells CNN, `That doesn`t sound like the kind of language the Vice President would use, but I can confirm that there was a frank exchange of views.`

"Bottom line, Judy, as if we needed another sign this Presidential campaign is underway. Tempers are flaring, nerves are frayed, and this is just another example, Judy."

Here`s the cover of the Boston Herald today.

And here`s an AP photo of Cheney, taken just a little while before his outburst.

He does look cranky. And here`s one possible reason why: It appears that, unlike his boss, he reads the newspaper. Look for the telltale clue.
The Irish Incident

Shawn Pogatchnik writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq and insisted most of Europe backed the move during a tense interview Thursday on Irish television.

"On several occasions during the 15-minute interview, Bush asked RTE correspondent Carole Coleman not to interrupt him.

"When Coleman said most Irish people thought the world was more dangerous today than before the Iraq invasion, Bush disagreed and responded, `What was it like Sept. 11th, 2001?` "

Here`s the video of the interview with Coleman in the Map Room. Irish television viewers saw it prefaced by a report about how much Europe hates Bush, the "Toxic Texan."

Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

Coleman: "The world is a more dangerous place today."

Bush: "Why do you say that? . . . "

Coleman: "I think there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off Al Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place? I saw four of your soldiers lying dead, on the television, the other day. . . . "

Bush: "You know, listen, nobody cares more about the death than I do.

Coleman: "Is there a point at which --

Bush: "Let me finish. Please, please, let me finish, then you can follow up, if you don`t mind. Nobody cares more about the deaths than I do. I care about it a lot. But I do believe that the world is a safer place, and becoming a safer place. . . .

"People join terrorist organizations because there`s no hope and there`s no chance to raise their families in a peaceful world where there is not freedom . . . so the idea is to promote freedom and at the same time protect our security."

RTÉ News, meanwhile, also reports that "Thousands of soldiers and Gardaí have begun sealing off areas around Shannon airport and Dromoland Castle ahead of this evening`s arrival of the US President George W Bush for the EU-US summit."

Bush also gave an interview to a Turkish journalist yesterday.

Reuters reports: "President Bush pledged to work with Turkey and the new Iraqi government against Turkish Kurd militants in northern Iraq in an interview with Turkish television aired Friday."

Here`s the transcript of the interview from NTV-MSNBC. But it`s in Turkish. For instance, here`s an excerpt:

"NTV: Sayin Baskan, gelecekte bir gün, daha çok vaktiniz oldugunda sizi Türkiye`ye tatil için bekliyoruz.

"Bush: Evet. Bir gün çok isterim. Ama su anda biraz mesgulüm."

Sounds sort of testy to me.
Bad Year

Whither the tension? Well, you might wonder if the Dump-Cheney rumors are getting to the vice president. You might wonder if Bush has reason to believe the CIA leak investigation is going to blow up in his face.

But Ron Fournier of the Associated Press makes the case that it`s not been a bad week for Bush. It`s been a bad year.

"From his unremarkable State of the Union address to the 360th slain U.S. soldier in Iraq, this has been a disastrous year for President Bush. And yet, he`s tied with John Kerry in his race for re-election.

"How can that be?"

Fournier examines alternate theories -- then provides a bulleted list of 23 "lowlights" of the past year.
Cheney`s Good News

Yesterday actually brought some really good news for the White House.

Charles Lane writes in The Washington Post: "The Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court yesterday to give Vice President Cheney another chance to shield the internal workings of the 2001 energy policy task force he headed, all but ensuring that none of its alleged contacts with industry lobbyists will be aired before the November elections. . . .

"At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan welcomed the ruling, saying: `We believe that the president should be able to receive candid and unvarnished advice from his staff and advisers. It`s an important principle.`

"Democrats renewed their charges of excessive White House secrecy, with the presidential campaign of John F. Kerry declaring that the `Nixon legacy of secrecy is alive and well in the Bush White House.` "

Linda Greenhouse writes in the New York Times: "The lawsuit had the potential to embarrass the administration, especially given Mr. Cheney`s former role as chief executive of Halliburton and the close ties of other administration members to the energy industry."

Here is the text of the opinion.
The AP Lawsuit on Bush`s Service

Here`s a copy of the lawsuit filed by the Associated Press on Tuesday seeking access to microfilm of all of Bush`s military service records.

From the argument: "A significant controversy has arisen in the ongoing campaign over the President`s military service during the Vietnam War, and specifically whether he performed his required days of service during a period between May 1972 and May 1973. Allegations have been made that the military personnel file for George W. Bush released to the press earlier this year is not complete. The public has an intense and legitimate interest in knowing the validity of these claims, which may well be answered by reviewing the microfilm copy of the personnel file in the Texas archives."

Associated Press Assistant General Counsel Dave Tomlin told me yesterday that AP reporters began trying to get the documents back in February, but hit roadblock after roadblock.

Tomlin said the AP has been informed that the microfilm in question does indeed exist. Tomlin said that because paper records can vanish and be tampered with, the microfilm "would erase any questions."
WMD Commission

The WMD Commission met Wednesday and Thursday, in secret, and nobody seems to care. Here`s the press release.
Innovation

Jodi Wilgoren and David E. Sanger write in the New York Times: "Having paid less attention than their predecessors to Silicon Valley for much of the campaign, Senator John Kerry and President Bush today announced new proposals to aid the growth of high-tech businesses. Not surprisingly, each argued that the other`s plans would stifle innovation."

Here`s the text of Bush`s remarks. "Today, I want to talk about how to make sure America is the best place to do business in the world," he said.
The Gore Critique

Michael Janofsky writes in the New York Times: "Former Vice President Al Gore accused President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday of undermining American democracy by using the Iraq war to empower the executive branch at the expense of civil liberties, Congress and the court system."

Here`s the text of his speech.
The Reagan Critique

Rene Sanchez writes in The Washington Post: "With more than 35 million television viewers across the country watching, Ronald Prescott Reagan first hinted at his disdain for the Bush administration this month when he delivered a eulogy during his father`s sunset burial service in Southern California. . . .

"Since then, in a series of nationally televised interviews, his comments about Bush have become less oblique and much harsher."

But "the GOP still has the other Reagan son in its corner: Michael Reagan, the nationally syndicated conservative radio talk show host."
The Clinton Critique

Bill Clinton speaks in the most candid terms yet about his successor in an interview with Joe Conasaon in Salon.
The Moore Critique

Martin Kasindorf and Judy Keen write in USA Today: "For months, from Hollywood to the White House, storms as well as speculation have surrounded `Fahrenheit 9/11,` the 116-minute assault by the outspokenly liberal [Michael] Moore on President Bush and the war in Iraq. The $6 million movie opened in New York City on Wednesday and opens in 868 theaters nationwide today."

Jeff Zeleny writes in the Chicago Tribune: "With Election Day slightly more than four months away, filmmaker Michael Moore has infuriated the White House with the release of `Fahrenheit 9/11,` which depicts President Bush in the most unflattering of lights."

The movie is getting mostly rave reviews from movie critics. The Rotten TomatoesWeb site, which links to 95 reviews at last count, gives it an 82% on the tomatometer. That`s "Certified fresh."

ABC News`s The Note reports: "Communications Director Dan Bartlett was asked by Diane Sawyer early this morning whether he intended to see the movie. `I`m busy these days and I doubt that will elevate to the top of my movie watching list. If I wanted to see a good fiction movie I might see Shrek,` Bartlett quipped.

"He continued, criticizing Moore: `Mr. Moore has made it a habit of his not to pay attention to facts. And he comes from a very extreme ideology which he in fact opined that we shouldn`t have a military response to 9/11 and bin Laden. He`s outside the main stream.` "
Stewart Critique

Jon Stewart on Comedy Central Wednesday night lambasted Bush for -- once again -- not being able to pronounce the name of the Abu Ghraib prison. Stewart shows footage from Bush`s photo-op with the Hungarian prime minister Wednesday, in which Bush calls it "Abu-gareff," and then looks sort of confused.

Says Stewart: "When you mispronounce the name of the prison that is at the center of the prison abuse scandal, it does give the public the sense that you don`t [expletive-laced euphemism suggesting a lack of caring]."
CIA Director Watch

Mike Allen and Walter Pincus write in The Washington Post: "President Bush has decided he needs to choose a new CIA director to replace George J. Tenet before the election, and the leading candidate is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss, senior administration officials said yesterday....

"Bush advisers said naming a replacement for Tenet would show that the president was taking seriously the need for changes in the intelligence community. But several Democrats noted yesterday that if Kerry won the November election, it would be unlikely that he would keep Goss, should he win Senate approval."
More About the Trip

Mike Allen and Robin Wright write in The Washington Post: "President Bush heads overseas today for twin summits amid increasing signs that he will win token -- but politically important -- support from NATO for the fledgling Iraqi government, administration officials said yesterday.

"[A]dministration officials say they are optimistic that Bush will be able to join in an announcement of a new international commitment to Iraq at the end of a NATO summit in Istanbul on Monday and Tuesday. . . .

"The summit -- part of a five-day trip for a European Union summit in Ireland and the NATO meeting in Turkey -- may be one of Bush`s last chances to chalk up a victory overseas before he faces reelection."

Here`s the text of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice`s briefing on the trip yesterday.
Calabresi Watch

Gail Appleson reports for Reuters: "A U.S. appeals judge on Thursday apologized for comparing the way President Bush took office after the disputed 2000 election to the rise of dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

"Guido Calabresi, a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, sent a letter to his chief judge expressing `my profound regret` for the comments made at a legal conference in Washington on Saturday."
Poll Watch

Susan Page writes in USA Today: "Most Americans now say that sending U.S. troops to Iraq was a mistake, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll finds. For the first time, a majority also says that the war there has made the nation less safe from terrorism. . . .

"Souring attitudes toward the war could present challenges to President Bush, who plans to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq even after the hand-over of power. While he has linked the war to the fight against terror, 55% of those polled now say that the war has increased U.S. vulnerability to terrorism."

Here are the complete poll results. They show Bush`s approval rating down one tick from two weeks ago, to 48 percent, with 49 percent disapproving. But the poll also finds that among "likely voters" nationwide, Bush leads Kerry 48% to 47%, with independent candidate Ralph Nader at 3%. Three weeks ago, Kerry led 49% to 43%.
More Backdrop Troubles

John Nolan writes for the Associated Press: "A former bookkeeper praised by President Bush for turning around her life with help from a social-services agency still owes at least $300,000 to the company she was convicted of stealing from, according to court records and the business owner. . . .

"During a visit Monday to Talbert House, a Cincinnati social-service agency that helps former convicts, Bush praised [Tami] Jordan as a `good soul` and an `inspirational person` who was making the best of her second chance.

The business owner, Susan Morin, said she was stunned to see Jordan with Bush. "After her story appeared in newspapers Thursday, Morin said she received an e-mailed apology from the White House and a telephoned apology from the Talbert House."

Here`s that Thursday story, by Barry M. Horstman in the Cincinnati Post.

Here`s a White House photo of Bush giving Jordan a big thumbs-up.

Here`s the text of Bush`s remarks in Cincinnati. "There`s nothing like having a story like this to be able to share with people," he said after Jordan spoke.

© 2004 washingtonpost.com

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WOODRUFF: Ron Reagan, the son of the late president and former first lady, Nancy Reagan, has never shied away from controversy. He raised eyebrows at the former president`s funeral in california by speaking critically of politicians who he said wear their faith on their sleeves in order to gain political advantage. Well, earlier today, in a wide-ranging conversation, I talked with Ron Reagan, and I started by asking his opinion about the enormous public outpouring in reaction to his father`s death.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

Reagan: Well, obviously, a lot of it was just affection for him. So I give some credit to my father. I think also that the funeral came at a moment where it sort of caught the crest of a wave of dissatisfaction and dismay in this country over where some of our government`s policies are, particularly involving Iraq.

I mean, you`ve seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib. We`ve heard about the memos seeking to, you know, end run the Geneva Convention around torture. And I think that the public was just hungry for somebody that they could feel, you know, unalloyed respect for, a good man. And that was my father.

I think a lot of people don`t feel so good about their government right now. And with some justification, I must say.

WOODRUFF: What is it that -- is it the war that bothers you the most, or what? I mean, about what`s going on right now.

REAGAN: Well, there are plenty of things to -- to bother anybody, I think. I don`t think that any American feels sanguine about seeing their country trying to devise ways to torture enemy combatants. We may not like these people, they may be the enemy, but America is not supposed to be a torturing nation.

So that -- that bothers me. It shames this country. And doing it, and seeking to justify it, endangers the lives of men and women who are over there in Iraq and Afghanistan right now.

There are reasons we signed on to the Geneva Convention, and, you know, the treaties involving torture. We don`t want our own people to be tortured. We want to hold the moral high ground that way. And so this has been very disturbing these last few weeks. WOODRUFF: Was it hard for you to be around? I mean, you have been critical of president`s policies, President Bush. Was it hard for you to be around him on the day of your father`s funeral?

REAGAN: No, not in particular. I -- that -- those days, that week, was for me about my father. It wasn`t about anybody else.

So, no, it`s not hard for me to be around him. I may not agree with his policies. But I have no personal animus towards him. I don`t know the man. He might have found it hard to be around me, I`m not sure.

(LAUGHTER)

WOODRUFF: Well, he -- you know, the people around George W. Bush have compared him to your father. Many of them have said he`s much closer to your father than he is to his own father in terms of his politics. What do you think about that?

REAGAN: Well, if you want to make political comparisons, I suppose that`s fair enough. They both have an interest in cutting taxes. Although my father realized at a certain point his tax cuts weren`t working, and he raised taxes again.

I don`t think my father would have gone into Iraq because it was an unnecessary and optional war. We still haven`t been told by this government why they were actually doing it, although I`m sure they do have their reasons.

I bridle the comparisons between the two men as men, because from what I`ve seen, at least -- and again, I don`t know Mr. Bush personally -- but from what I`ve seen, they`re just two very different people.

WOODRUFF: The Reverend Jerry Falwell was quoted a couple of days ago, a few days ago, as saying your father really -- or rather that -- yes, that your father served as, you know, as a mentor to George W. Bush, that George W. Bush was a protege.

REAGAN: No, that`s not true. My father really didn`t know George W. Bush from Adam. He met him, of course. He was the son of his vice president.

WOODRUFF: I want to ask you something about what you said at your father`s burial service in California at the library. You started out by saying, "Dad was also a deeply unabashedly religious man." And then here`s what you said.

REAGAN: ... but he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage.

WOODRUFF: A lot of people thought you were referring to George W. Bush. Were you?

REAGAN: There was only one person I had on my mind when I delivered that eulogy, and that was my father. I hadn`t been watching much TV after that. And -- and so a couple of days later, people told me that this, you know, little storm had erupted in Washington of people saying that I was talking about George W. Bush.

And I didn`t really understand it at first. I hadn`t mentioned him, of course, by name. I was talking about my father`s faith, what it was, and what it was not, which was a political tool in his mind.

Now, people close to Mr. Bush assumed that I must be talking about him. And since they know him better than I do, perhaps I was and I just didn`t realize it. I thought that was all very telling, frankly.

WOODRUFF: Do you think they were upset about it? Did -- were people -- did people let you know they were upset about it?

REAGAN: Oh, I heard from other people that there were folks that were saying some -- some things that weren`t terribly flattering. But I don`t really worry about that. Again, my only concern was doing right by my father. And I hope I did that. You know, I -- the last thing I had on my mind, believe me, was George W. Bush.

WOODRUFF: You have said, Ron Reagan, that you are not a Republican. Were you ever a Republican?

REAGAN: No, I`ve never joined any political party and have no plans to do so. I`m fully Independent.

WOODRUFF: Why not? Why not be a Republican?

REAGAN: Well, I couldn`t join a party that, frankly, tolerates members who are bigots for one thing. Homophobes, racists. You know, there`s no way I could be a part of a party like that. Just no way.

WOODRUFF: You`ve also said, I think, that you did not vote for George W. Bush in 2000. You haven`t made secret of that. What are you going to do this year?

REAGAN: I`ll vote for the viable candidate who is capable of unseating George W. Bush.

WOODRUFF: And presumably, that`s John Kerry.

REAGAN: That`s how it looks right now, yes.

WOODRUFF: So John Kerry? I mean...

REAGAN: Well, he would be the viable candidate, yes.

WOODRUFF: What -- what do you think -- I mean, have you talked to your mother about this? Does she -- what does she say about it?

REAGAN: Well, we don`t talk about politics all that much, particularly electoral politics. We talk about stem cell research, for instance, embryonic stem cell research, which she`s very involved in and I think will continue to be very involved in. This is something she takes very seriously, something I take very seriously, too. And it`s shameful this administration has played politics with an issue that is -- you know, this could be the biggest medical breakthrough in history. This could be bigger than antibiotics.

This administration is pandering to the most ignorant segment of our society for votes and throwing up roadblocks to this sort of research. It`s absolutely shameful.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WOODRUFF: More of my interview with Ron Reagan coming up a little later on INSIDE POLITICS, including more of his comments about whether his father would support embryonic stem cell research.

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Skull And Bones
June 13, 2004

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main5763…

As opposite as George Bush and John Kerry may seem to be, they do share a common secret - one they`ve shared for decades, and one they will not share with the electorate.

The secret: details of their membership in Skull and Bones, the elite Yale University society whose members include some of the most powerful men of the 20th century.

Bonesmen, as they`re called, are forbidden to reveal what goes on in their inner sanctum, the windowless building on the Yale campus that is called the Tomb.
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Skull and Bones is an elite secret society at Yale University that includes some of the most powerful men of the 20th century.
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When 60 Minutes first reported on Skull & Bones last October, conspiracy theorists, who see Skull and Bones behind just about everything that goes wrong, and even right, in the world, were relishing the unthinkable - the possibility of two Bonesman fighting it out for the presidency.

Over the years, Bones has included presidents, cabinet officers, spies, Supreme Court justices, captains of industry, and often their sons and lately their daughters, a social and political network like no other.

And to a man and women, they`d responded to questions with utter silence until an enterprising Yale graduate, Alexandra Robbins, managed to penetrate the wall of silence in her book, “Secrets of the Tomb,” reports CBS News Correspondent Morley Safer. "I spoke with about 100 members of Skull and Bones and they were members who were tired of the secrecy, and that`s why they were willing to talk to me,” says Robbins. “But probably twice that number hung up on me, harassed me, or threatened me.”

Secret or not, Skull and Bones is as essential to Yale as the Whiffenpoofs, the tables down at a pub called Mory`s, and the Yale mascot - that ever-slobbering bulldog.

Skull and Bones, with all its ritual and macabre relics, was founded in 1832 as a new world version of secret student societies that were common in Germany at the time. Since then, it has chosen or "tapped" only 15 senior students a year who become patriarchs when they graduate -- lifetime members of the ultimate old boys` club.

“Skull and Bones is so tiny. That`s what makes this staggering,” says Robbins. “There are only 15 people a year, which means there are about 800 living members at any one time.”

But a lot of Bonesmen have gone on to positions of great power, which Robbins says is the main purpose of this secret society: to get as many members as possible into positions of power.

“They do have many individuals in influential positions,” says Robbins. “And that`s why this is something that we need to know about.”

President Bush has tapped five fellow Bonesmen to join his administration. Most recently, he selected William Donaldson, Skull and Bones 1953, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the President, he`s taken the Bones oath of silence. Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer, has become obsessed with cracking that code of secrecy.

“I think there is a deep and legitimate distrust in America for power and privilege that are cloaked in secrecy. It`s not supposed to be the way we do things,” says Rosenbaum. “We`re supposed to do things out in the open in America. And so that any society or institution that hints that there is something hidden is, I think, a legitimate subject for investigation.”

His investigation is a 30-year obsession dating back to his days as a Yale classmate of George W. Bush. Rosenbaum, a self-described undergraduate nerd, was certainly not a contender for Bones. But he was fascinated by its weirdness.

“It`s this sepulchral, tomblike, windowless, granite, sandstone bulk that you can`t miss. And I lived next to it,” says Rosenbaum. “I had passed it all the time. And during the initiation rites, you could hear strange cries and whispers coming from the Skull and Bones tomb.”

Despite a lifetime of attempts to get inside, the best Rosenbaum could do was hide out on the ledge of a nearby building a few years ago to videotape a nocturnal initiation ceremony in the Tomb`s courtyard.

“A woman holds a knife and pretends to slash the throat of another person lying down before them, and there`s screaming and yelling at the neophytes,” he says.
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Apart from presidents, Bones has included cabinet officers, spies, Supreme Court justices, statesmen and captains of industry.
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Robbins says the cast of the initiation ritual is right out of Harry Potter meets Dracula: “There is a devil, a Don Quixote and a Pope who has one foot sheathed in a white monogrammed slipper resting on a stone skull. The initiates are led into the room one at a time. And once an initiate is inside, the Bonesmen shriek at him. Finally, the Bonesman is shoved to his knees in front of Don Quixote as the shrieking crowd falls silent. And Don Quixote lifts his sword and taps the Bonesman on his left shoulder and says, ‘By order of our order, I dub thee knight of Euloga.’"

It’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, says Robbins, but it means a lot to the people who are in it.

“Prescott Bush, George W`s grandfather, and a band of Bonesmen, robbed the grave of Geronimo, took the skull and some personal relics of the Apache chief and brought them back to the tomb,” says Robbins. “There is still a glass case, Bonesmen tell me, within the tomb that displays a skull that they all refer to as Geronimo.”

“The preoccupation with bones, mortality, with coffins, lying in coffins, standing around coffins, all this sort of thing I think is designed to give them the sense that, and it`s very true, life is short,” says Rosenbaum. “You can spend it, if you have a privileged background, enjoying yourself, contributing nothing, or you can spend it making a contribution.”

And plenty of Bonesmen have made a contribution, from William Howard Taft, the 27th President; Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine; and W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat and confidant of U.S. presidents.

“What`s important about the undergraduate years of Skull and Bones, as opposed to fraternities, is that it imbues them with a kind of mission for moral leadership,” says Rosenbaum. “And it`s something that they may ignore for 30 years of their life, as George W. Bush seemed to successfully ignore it for quite a long time. But he came back to it.”

Mr. Bush, like his father and grandfather before him, has refused to talk openly about Skull and Bones. But as a Bonesman, he was required to reveal his innermost secrets to his fellow Bones initiates.

“They`re supposed to recount their entire sexual histories in sort of a dim, a dimly-lit cozy room. The other 14 members are sitting on plush couches, and the lights are dimmed,” says Robbins. “And there`s a fire roaring. And the, this activity is supposed to last anywhere from between one to three hours.” What’s the point of this?

”I believe the point of the year in the tomb is to forge such a strong bond between these 15 new members that after they graduate, for them to betray Skull and Bones would mean they`d have to betray their 14 closest friends,” says Robbins.

One can`t help but make certain comparisons with the mafia, for example. Secret society, bonding, stakes may be a little higher in one than the other. But everybody knows everything about everybody, which is a form of protection.

“I think Skull and Bones has had slightly more success than the mafia in the sense that the leaders of the five families are all doing 100 years in jail, and the leaders of the Skull and Bones families are doing four and eight years in the White House,” says Rosenbaum.

Bones is not restricted to the Republican Party. Yet another Bonesman has his eye on the Oval Office: Senator John Kerry, Democrat, Skull & Bones 1966.

“It is fascinating isn`t it? I mean, again, all the people say, ‘Oh, these societies don`t matter. The Eastern Establishment is in decline.’ And you could not find two more quintessential Eastern establishment, privileged guys,” says Rosenbaum. “I remember when I was a nerdy scholarship student in the reserve book room at, at the Yale Library, and John Kerry, who at that point styled himself ‘John F. Kerry’ would walk in.”

“There was always a little buzz,” adds Rosenbaum. “Because even then he was seen to be destined for higher things. He was head of the Yale Political Union, and a tap for Skull and Bones was seen as the natural sequel to that.”

David Brooks, a conservative commentator who has published a book on the social dynamics of the upwardly mobile, says that while Skull & Bones may be elite and secret, it`s anything but exciting.

“My view of secret societies is they`re like the first class cabin in airplanes. They`re really impressive until you get into them, and then once you`re there they`re a little dull. So you hear all these conspiracy theories about Skull and Bones,” says Brooks.

“And to me, to be in one of these organizations, you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for tedium `cause you`re sittin` around talking, talking, and talking. You`re not running the world, you`re just gassing.”

Gassing or not, the best-connected white man`s club in America has moved reluctantly into the 21st Century.

“Skull and Bones narrowly endorsed admitting women,” says Robbins. “The day before these women were supposed to be initiated, a group of Bonesmen, including William F. Buckley, obtained a court order to block the initiation claiming that letting women into the tomb would lead to date rape. Again more legal wrangling; finally it came down to another vote and women were admitted and initiated.”

But Skull & Bones now has women, and it’s become more multicultural.
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Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer, has become obsessed with cracking that code of secrecy.
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“It has gays who got the SAT scores, it`s got the gays who got the straight A`s,” says Brooks. “It`s got the blacks who are the president of the right associations. It`s different criteria. More multicultural, but it`s still an elite, selective institution.”

On balance, it may be bizarre, but on a certain perspective, does it provide something of value?

“You take these young strivers, you put them in this weird castle. They spill their guts with each other, fine. But they learn something beyond themselves. They learn a commitment to each other, they learn a commitment to the community,” says Brooks. “And maybe they inherit some of those old ideals of public service that are missing in a lot of other parts of the country.”

And is that relationship, in some cases, stronger than family or faith?

“Absolutely,” says Robbins. “You know, they say, they say the motto at Yale is, ‘For God, for country, and for Yale.’ At Bones, I would think it`s ‘For Bones.`”



©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Falls es nicht wahr ist, ist wenigstens gut erfunden, auch die Anklageschrift. Und das Schönste ist, `Focus` wirbt auf der Seite. Das läßt natürlich tief blicken.


Here Comes The Judge
State: Bounce Oklahoma jurist for "pumping it up" on bench

JUNE 24--While seated on the bench, an Oklahoma judge used a male enhancement pump, shaved and oiled his nether region, and pleasured himself, state officials charged yesterday in a petition to remove the jurist. According to the below complaint filed by the Oklahoma Attorney General, Donald D. Thompson, 57, was caught in the act by a clerk, trial witnesses, and his longtime court reporter (these unsettling first-hand accounts will make you wonder what`s going on under other black robes).
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Visitors to Thompson`s Creek County courtroom reported hearing a "swooshing" sound coming from the bench, a noise the court reporter said "sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up." Thompson, the complaint charges, even pumped himself up during an August 2003 murder trial. The AG`s petition quotes Thompson (pictured above) as admitting that the pump was "under the bench" during the murder case (and at other times), but he denied using the item, which was supposedly a "gag gift from a friend." (9 pages)

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Saturday, June 26, 2004
War News for June 25 and 26, 2004 draft

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Seven Iraqis killed in three attacks in Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in Baghdad ambush.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi Kurd killed, 40 wounded by car bomb in Arbil.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi policeman killed, one wounded by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US troops reported fighting insurgents in Diyala province.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi policeman killed, one wounded in ambush near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting and airstrikes reported in Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Explosions reported in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Five ICDC recruits wounded in mortar attack near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Two decapitated bodies discovered near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed, one wounded in RPG attack in Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: US convoy ambushed in Najaf.

Flowers and music. “‘Cultural training takes 10 seconds,’ he said: ‘The Iraqis hate us. They want to kill us. That`s all you need to know.’ Such sentiments are now commonplace among the rank-and-file troops the Star surveyed during visits to three U.S.-led coalition bases in and around the Iraqi capital this week. Take the temperature of the average soldier, and you will find it high with frustration.”

More troops. “In his confirmation hearing before the US Senate on Thursday, General George Casey - who will soon take over as the commander of coalition forces - said the US Central Command was planning for an increase in troop numbers in the face of the growing challenge. ‘The insurgency is much stronger than I certainly would have anticipated,` he told the senators.”

Coalition of the Clueless. “Armitage, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators that they continue to believe that the insurgency is made up of a small minority of extremists and former members of Saddam Hussein`s government who are bent on disrupting the drive for democracy in Iraq. But what was previously envisioned as a faltering insurgency has evolved into a significant security problem and a largely unknown quantity.”

“We’re making good progress.” “Everything changed with the war. Her middle brother, Ali Muhammad Maarouf, 20, a soldier, was shot and killed in the first few days of the fighting in the southern port city of Basra. And a few weeks later, after major combat was declared over but when law and order had yet to be established, her husband was shot in the head one night by a business associate. Halla said that her husband was still alive when she arrived at the hospital and that he managed to tell her, ‘Halla, be a good girl,’ before he died. Halla insisted on spending the night at the morgue, hugging Walid`s body and weeping. At daybreak, one of her brothers came and gently carried her away.”

Iraqi casualties. “A total of 1,258 Iraqis were killed across this Arab nation between May 4 and June 17, according to a Health Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity. During the same period, 4,317 Iraqis were wounded.”

After-action report. “This is an account of the 60-day campaign as it was seen by dozens of the soldiers who fought in key battles from April 8 through June 4 and by the commanders who guided them. It is also drawn from a tour of the area. Many of the battles took place in four cities -- Kut, Karbala, Najaf and Kufa. The soldiers were led by four lieutenant colonels, all in their early forties, each seasoned by a year in the country.”

Retired Marine NCO sounds off. “Retired Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey is one of an increasing number of US Army veterans and families speaking out about the actions of the occupation forces in Iraq. Mr Massey will talk to the crowds from his home in North Carolina via a telephone link-up. And the ex-marine, who was honourably discharged in December after serving 12 years with the army, will detail the horrors he witnessed while on duty in Iraq.”

Commentary

Analysis: “Well-equipped and highly coordinated, the insurgents demonstrated a new level of strength and tactical skill that alarmed the soldiers facing them. By the end of the day, infantry and armoured patrols had driven the insurgents from the battered centre of the city. Two US soldiers were killed in the fight. `They were definitely better than what we normally face,` said Lieutenant T.J. Grider, 25, whose platoon fought for more than 12 hours.”

Analysis: “The simultaneous offensive six days before the handover of sovereignty on June 30 to the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had two political objectives. One was to cast doubt on the reality of the handover by showing that Allawi`s survival depended on the presence of 140,000 U.S. troops. Without the intervention of the U.S. Air Force, things could have gone seriously wrong on Thursday. This dependence was common knowledge to officials. The insurgents staged a blockbuster to deliver the message to the whole nation. June 30 would be a sham: The Americans will still be in charge. The second aim was to demonstrate that Sunni insurgents and other militant groups -- in this case Zarqawi`s al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War) organization -- could work together against the common enemy.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: North Carolina Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Georgia Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Wisconsin soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: California Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Wisconsin soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: New Hampshire Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: New Hampshire Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Three Oregon Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:35 AM
Comment (0) | Trackback (0)
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Note to Readers, June 24, 2004

Due to my work schedule and domestic chores, it`s almost impossible for me to research and update this site on Thursdays and Fridays.

After a cursory examination of today`s news, it`s apparant there is another major, coordinated uprising underway in Iraq. Unfortunately, I don`t have the time to give this story appropriate attention.

Alert readers, please post links to news stories in comments. Let`s make this a cooperative effort for the the next two days. Try to stay on topic and I`ll see you all on Saturday morning.

Thanks, YD.

86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 5:34 AM
Comments (73) | Trackback (0)

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The multibillion robbery the US calls reconstruction

The shameless corporate feeding frenzy in Iraq is fuelling the resistance
Naomi Klein
Saturday June 26, 2004

The Guardian
Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the $18.4bn in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can meet. Sure, electricity is below pre-war levels, the streets are rivers of sewage and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has contracted the British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from "assassination, kidnapping, injury and" - get this - "embarrassment". I don`t know if Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent attack, but embarrassment? I`d say mission already accomplished. The people in charge of rebuilding Iraq can`t be embarrassed, because, clearly, they have no shame.

In the run-up to the June 30 underhand (sorry, I can`t bring myself to call it a "handover"), US occupation powers have been unabashed in their efforts to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people. The state department has taken $184m earmarked for drinking water projects and moved it to the budget for the lavish new US embassy in Saddam Hussein`s former palace. Short of $1bn for the embassy, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul". In fact, he is robbing Iraq`s people, who, according to a recent study by the consumer group Public Citizen, are facing "massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhoea, nausea and kidney stones" from drinking contaminated water.

If the occupation chief Paul Bremer and his staff were capable of embarrassment, they might be a little sheepish about having spent only $3.2bn of the $18.4bn Congress allotted - the reason the reconstruction is so disastrously behind schedule. At first, Bremer said the money would be spent by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently someone had a better idea: parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John Negroponte can use it as leverage. With $15bn outstanding, how likely are Iraq`s politicians to refuse US demands for military bases and economic "reforms"?

Unwilling to let go of their own money, the shameless ones have had no qualms about dipping into funds belonging to Iraqis. After losing the fight to keep control of Iraq`s oil money after the underhand, occupation authorities grabbed $2.5bn of those revenues and are now spending the money on projects that are supposedly already covered by American tax dollars.

But then, if financial scandals made you blush, the entire reconstruction of Iraq would be pretty mortifying. From the start, its architects rejected the idea that it should be a New Deal-style public works project for Iraqis to reclaim their country. Instead, it was treated as an ideological experiment in privatisation. The dream was for multinational firms, mostly from the US, to swoop in and dazzle the Iraqis with their speed and efficiency.

Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans, Europeans and south Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as a recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign invasion of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the reconstruction itself became a prime target.

The contractors have responded by behaving even more like an invading army, building elaborate fortresses in the green zone - the walled-in city within a city that houses the occupation authority in Baghdad - and surrounding themselves with mercenaries. And being hated is expensive. According to the latest estimates, security costs are eating up 25% of reconstruction contracts - money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or telephone exchanges.

Meanwhile, insurance brokers selling sudden-death policies to contractors in Iraq have doubled their premiums, with insurance costs reaching 30% of payroll. That means many companies are spending half their budgets arming and insuring themselves against the people they are supposedly in Iraq to help. And, according to Charles Adwan of Transparency International, quoted on US National Public Radio`s Marketplace programme, "at least 20% of US spending in Iraq is lost to corruption". How much is actually left over for reconstruction? Don`t do the maths.

Rather than models of speed and efficiency, the contractors look more like overcharging, underperforming, lumbering beasts, barely able to move for fear of the hatred they have helped generate. The problem goes well beyond the latest reports of Halliburton drivers abandoning $85,000 trucks on the road because they don`t carry spare tyres. Private contractors are also accused of playing leadership roles in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A landmark class-action lawsuit filed by the Centre for Constitutional Rights alleges that Titan Corporation and CACI International conspired to "humiliate, torture and abuse persons" in order to increase demand for their "interrogation services".

And then there`s Aegis, the company being paid $293m to save the PMO from embarrassment. It turns out that Aegis`s CEO, Tim Spicer, has a bit of an embarrassing past himself. In the 90s, he helped to put down rebels and stage a military coup in Papua New Guinea, as well as hatching a plan to break an arms embargo in Sierra Leone.

If Iraq`s occupiers were capable of feeling shame, they might have responded by imposing tough new regulations. Instead, Senate Republicans have just defeated an attempt to bar private contractors from interrogating prisoners and also voted down a proposal to impose stiffer penalties on contractors who overcharge. Meanwhile, the White House is also trying to get immunity from prosecution for US contractors in Iraq and has requested the exemption from the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi.

It seems likely that Allawi will agree, since he is, after all, a kind of US contractor himself. A former CIA spy, he is already threatening to declare martial law, while his defence minister says of resistance fighters: "We will cut off their hands, and we will behead them." In a final feat of outsourcing, Iraqi governance has been subcontracted to even more brutal surrogates. Is this embarrassing, after an invasion to overthrow a dictatorship? Not at all; this is what the occupiers call "sovereignty". The Aegis guys can relax - embarrassment is not going to be an issue.

· A version of this article first appeared in the Nation

www.nologo.org
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Al-Qaeda`s thumbs up for Bush
By Craig B Hulet

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

A new book by an author going by the name Anonymous (a senior US intelligence official) , contains an outright and strong condemnation of America`s counter-terrorism policy. The author argues that the West is losing the war against al-Qaeda and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden`s hands.

The book, due out in the first week of July, titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that bin Laden and al-Qaeda are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.

In Record of Terror, I noted US conventional military force is the vehicle to prosecute these wars, when it was and is US military intervention all over the world that has been a primary cause for individuals to form groups and retaliate against that very intervention. US military intervention has been identified as the major cause for terrorist acts against Americans and American facilities, corporate, military and governmental by none other than the US Pentagon`s Defense Science Board DSB):

As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America`s position in the world invited attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
(Source: October, 1997 Summer Study Task Force on Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats, DSB)

In an interview with the Guardian, Anonymous described al-Qaeda as a much more proficient and focused organization than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them".

He said that bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organization from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" last week with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaeda`s protectors in the Waziristan tribal belt. (Source: "Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden`s hands and al-Qaeda may `reward` American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says." - Julian Borger in Washington, Saturday June 19.)

Another widely respected expert on international relations noted something similar when he wrote:

If steps to deal with the problem in terms of capabilities are limited, can anything be done to address intentions - the incentives for any foreign power or group to lash out at the United States? There are few answers to this question that do not compromise the fundamental strategic activism and international thrust of US foreign policy over the past half century. That is because the best way to keep people from believing that the United States is responsible for their problems is to avoid involvement in their conflicts.
(Source: Richard K Betts: Foreign Affairs Vol 77, No 1, page 40)

On our relentless war in Afghanistan, 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 Pakistani President General 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."

The Guardian reported this important difference in the new book`s release, stating:

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.

(Ibid, Julian Borger)

Another author who has read the new book`s manuscript, one Peter Bergen, the author of two books on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, 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 argument was oil and the economic global regime`s thirst for this commodity all along. Anonymous is to the point on Bush`s alleged reasons for going to war:

Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even willful failure to recognize 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-Qaeda 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. (Ibid, Borger)

Bush has repeated his assertion that bin Laden was cornered and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice". But 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 ... I don`t think we`ve laid a glove on him ... What I think we`re seeing in al-Qaeda is a change of generation ... the people who are leading al-Qaeda 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-Qaeda. They`re just much more careful across the board in the way they operate.

(Ibid)

Recall just how vulnerable the West is to the kinds of attacks like September 11. In the aftermath of that event, Time magazine quoted a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official and counterterrorism expert who stated the following:

The worldwide dragnet has snared 600 alleged al-Qaeda operatives. And yet the bottom line is sobering: after six months of gumshoe work by just about every law-enforcement official in the US, the number of al-Qaeda sleeper cells that have been busted inside the country is precisely zero. Does that mean bin Laden`s men have gone further underground? "We don`t know," says an FBI official. "If you go back and look at the hijackers, they had zero contact with any known al-Qaeda people we were looking at. They didn`t break laws. They didn`t do anything to come to anybody`s attention. Are there other people in the US like that? We don`t know.

(Source: Can We Stop the Next Attack? Time, page 35, March 11, 2002)

As for weapons of mass destruction, The Guardian reported that Anonymous thinks that if al-Qaeda 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-Qaeda`s own experts, many of them trained in the US and Britain.

The most profound assertion the author made (Anonymous), who published an analysis of al-Qaeda 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. Bush is good for the Islamists the world over who want to make war on America and the West. Anonymous again:

I`m very sure they can`t have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president. In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war." - Evan Luard, International War

Along with Anonymous` enormously important work, and angered by Bush administration policies, 26 retired US diplomats and military officers contend the administration policies endanger national security. They are urging Americans to vote Bush out of office in November, although the group, which calls itself "Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change", does not explicitly endorse Democrat John Kerry for president in its campaign.

Among the group are 20 ambassadors appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, other former State Department officials and military leaders whose careers span three decades. Prominent members include retired Marine General Joseph P Hoar, commander of US forces in the Middle East during the administration of Bush`s father; retired Admiral William J Crowe Jr, ambassador to Britain under president Bill Clinton and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under president Ronald Reagan; and Jack F Matlock Jr, a member of the National Security Council under Reagan and ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991. "We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential," said William C Harrop, the first president Bush`s ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries, in reported comments. "The group does not endorse Kerry, although it more or less goes without saying in the statement," Harrop said.

Harrop said he listed himself as an independent for years for career purposes but usually has voted Republican. The former ambassador said diplomats and military officials normally avoid making political statements, especially in an election year. "Some of us are not that comfortable with it, but we just feel very strongly that the country needs new leadership," Harrop said. He said the group was disillusioned by Bush`s handling of the war in Iraq and a list of other subjects, including the Middle East, environmental conservation, AIDS policy, ethnic and religious conflict and weapons proliferation.

One would think Bush would listen to such experts, whose warnings seem to go not just unheeded, but the administration`s elite neo-conservatives positively vilify their critics. The White House has yet to comment publicly on the book 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". (Ibid, Borger) The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency of his warnings about al-Qaeda led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job in the late 1990s. But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the Central Intelligence Agency`s counter-terrorism center, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."

Anonymous believes Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.

It`s going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to ourselves: "What is going on?"

(Source: Borger)

Bush`s reaction? Bush`s next move?
One must question not only what the administration is doing presently but what it will do should it return to office after the November elections; upcoming wars against other nation-states (which clearly have been targeted) are on the Pentagon`s desk. Further evidence that the latter is officially on the agenda is below: This was dated Monday, February 17, 2003:

US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is under secretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It`s important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said.

(Source: "US official to Israel: We`ll deal with Syria, Iran after Iraq war", Monday, February 17, 2003, by Haaretz correspondents, Haaretz Service and Agencies.)

Add to that that French intelligence services have seen more on the horizon than Americans would:

It has been reliably reported that the American president and his closest military advisors, in conjunction with the highest military commands, have determined that military operations should be prepared for and executed against two main targets. The first and primary ones are in the Middle East and comprise Iraq and most especially Iran. The secondary object is North Korea. The use of conventional US ground troops is counter-indicated. US ground troops are being withdrawn from South Korea (2nd Infantry Division etc) ostensibly for replacement duties in Iraq, but in fact to remove these units from any collateral damage from projected nuclear attacks on North Korea. There are insufficient personnel available for either operation at the present time and increasing their size is not politically viable. Therefore, a determination is made for both a show of force and the ability to launch a powerful attack against these targets if and when the commander in chief deems it necessary. In furtherance of this policy, the United States naval forces will be utilized as the focus of the attack forces. These units will not be subject to counter attacks because they can stand off at a distance and attack their targets with complete impunity. Naval personnel will not be subject to guerrilla warfare in any sense and will supply a very powerful attack force capable of delivering deadly blows against designated targets.

(Source: TBRNEWS –special edition of June 17.)

Immediately below is a quote from an e-mail I received from a federal intelligence agent now at the Department of Justice after a thorough review of this office`s original working paper "Record of Terror" 2002:

Well don`t you paint a happy picture! Perhaps we should pull out of Korea and some of these other conflict zones and let the parties resolve their own issues? I think you underestimate the logic of your position. If one actually reads what you are saying (assuming the reader is willing to set aside personal agendas) I really think you make a lot of sense. But then again logic has very little to do with anything anymore, be it justice or foreign policy!

(Source: A federal agent with Justice/Homeland Security)

The following data is supplied for the reader to comprehend the level of military operations necessary to fight a global war on terrorism, a war that cannot be won.

Because terrorism is one of the few dimensions on which the US does not have an advantage, it is a promising tool for those who feel strongly about interests they believe have suffered because of other dimensions of US power.

(Source: Paul Pillar, Terrorism, Page 57)

Empirical evidence that there is a causal relationship between terrorism and what we do as nation-state in these foreign lands was supplied by defense specialist Ivan Eland of the Cato Institute. Listing incidents that could be proven to have a direct correlation to US military intervention in regions of the world where we did not belong, in both the view of terrorists and none too few American experts, Eland begins as early as 1915 and ends through September 1998. The title of his briefing, "Does US Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record", Eland observed:

Although the Defense Science Board noted a historical correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States, the board apparently believed the conclusion to be so obvious that it did not publish detailed data to support it. Some analysts apparently remain unconvinced of the relationship.

Another component of US vulnerability is that Americans tend to view transnational threats singularly. That is, terrorist incidents ... tend to look like individual events that do not evidence a campaign against US policies or interests. Deeper investigation shows that a number of transnational adversaries have planned campaigns of unconventional warfare.

- Defense Policy Board, 1997, Vol 1, Pg 15

Paul R Pillar, whose book Terrorism and US Foreign Policy was a staple for reading in counterterror circles and private security specialists like myself, pre-September 11. He notes this regarding the afore mentioned arguments:

More than anything else, it is the United States` predominant place atop the world order (with everything that implies militarily, economically, and culturally) and the perceived US opposition to change in any part of that order that underlie terrorists` resentment of the United States and their intent to attack it.

(Pillar, Terrorism, Page 60)

The Defense Science Board`s 1997 Summer Study Task Force on "Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats" notes a relationship between an activist American foreign policy and terrorism against the United States:

As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America`s position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.

Given the evidence immediately below, one cannot but admit that Bush and his gruesome crew are going to continue the path they have selected as the chosen elite to administer peace through strength under a new definition.

US naval deployment as of June 15, 2004
USS Enterprise - Atlantic (unknown location - possibly headed for the Middle East)
USS George Washington - en route to the Gulf of Arabia
USS John F Kennedy - Atlantic (unknown location - possibly headed for the Middle East)
USS Roosevelt - Atlantic, heading for the Middle East
USS Harry S Truman - Atlantic
USS Kitty Hawk - normally stationed in Japan, now moving towards China (Korea Operation)
USS Stennis - Pacific - headed for Taiwan (Korea Operation)
USS Carl Vinson – Pacific - headed for Taiwan (Korea Operation)
USS Abraham Lincoln - Pacific (backup-Korea Operation)
USS Ronald Reagan - port visit in Rio De Janiero, Brazil
USS Nimitz - Still in drydock, refueling its reactor
USS Eisenhower - Still in drydock, refueling its reactor

Note: Most ships left port with little notice and were markedly understaffed.

Navy personnel
Active duty: 376,185
Officers: 55,793
Enlisted: 317,213
Midshipmen: 3,179 ready reserve: 147,622 (As of April 30)
Selected reserves: 83,719
Individual ready reserve: 63,903
Reserves currently mobilized: 2,535 (as of June 9)
Personnel on deployment: 49,604
Navy department civilian employees: 181,701 (as of April 30)

Ships and submarines
Ships: 295
Ships underway (away from homeport): 164 (56% of total)
On deployment: 108 ships (37% of total)
Submarines underway (away from homeport): 30 submarines (57% of submarine force)
Submarines on deployment: 8 submarines (15% of submarine force)

Ships underway (other than carriers)
Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) Two
USS Wasp (LHD 1)(22 MEU) - Arabian Gulf
USS Leyte Gulf (CG 55) - Arabian Gulf
USS Yorktown (CG 48) - Gulf of Oman
USS Shreveport (LPD 12) - Indian Ocean
USS Whidbey Island (LSD 41) - Arabian Gulf
USS McFaul (DDG 74) - Arabian Gulf

Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) Three
(11th Marine Expeditionary Unit)
USS Belleau Wood (LHA 3) - Pacific
USS Denver (LPD 9) - Pacific
USS Comstock (LSD 45) - Pacific

Amphibious Ships
USS Tarawa (LHA 1) - Pacific
USS Nassau (LHA 4) - Atlantic
USS Peleliu (LHA 5) - Pacific
USS Essex (LHD 2) - Pacific
USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) - Atlantic
USS Boxer (LHD 4) - Pacific
USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) - Pacific
USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) - Atlantic
USS Austin (LPD 4) - Atlantic
USS Duluth (LPD 6) - Pacific
USS Dubuque (LPD 8) - Pacific
USS Juneau (LPD 10) - Pacific
USS Ponce (LPD 15) - Atlantic
USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43) - port visit, Singapore
USS Tortuga (LSD 46) - Atlantic
USS Rushmore (LSD 47) - Pacific
USS Ashland (LSD 48) - Atlantic
USS Harpers Ferry (LSD 49) - Sunda Sea
USS Carter Hall (LSD 50) - Atlantic
USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) - port visit, Mayport, Fla
Aircraft (operational): 4,000+

Craig B Hulet was Special Assistant for Special Projects to Congressman Jack Metcalf (Retired); he is periodically a consultant to federal law enforcement ATF&E of Justice/Homeland Security; he has written four books on international relations and philosophy, his latest is The Hydra of Carnage: Bush`s Imperial War-making and the Rule of Law - An Analysis of the Objectives and Delusions of Empire.

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

(Copyright 2004 Craig B Hulet and The Artful Nuance)



Jun 24, 2004

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June 27, 2004
Kerry`s Campaign Has Soared From Poorhouse to Penthouse
By GLEN JUSTICE

WASHINGTON, June 26 - John Kerry may be only a candidate for president, but he and his entourage travel like kings. A month ago, his campaign began chartering a gleaming 757, packed with first-class seats, fine food, sleeping accommodations - even a stand-up bar. They hardly shy away from fancy hotels, like the Four Seasons in Palm Beach and the St. Regis in Los Angeles.

Late last year, Mr. Kerry`s campaign was so broke that the senator had to mortgage his own home to keep the presidential effort in motion. Now its finances are soaring, the result of a surge of more than $100 million in contributions after the Super Tuesday primaries in March. That has given Mr. Kerry the distinction of being the best-financed challenger in presidential campaign history.

The swelled coffers, spurred by money raised over the Internet, has allowed Mr. Kerry to pour money into the race at a pace that rivals spending by President Bush`s campaign. In fact, he spent more than the president in both April and May.

``At our Monday morning meetings, our fund-raising people give their reports and there is a lot of cheering,`` Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry`s campaign manager, said Friday.

Mr. Kerry`s financial success has significant implications for how he mounts his campaign. Aides say they no longer worry so much about having the money to compete against President Bush`s vast political fortune, which has grown to a record $213 million. However, the president still held a 2-to-1 advantage in money in the bank last month.

More than anything else, the money has allowed the Kerry campaign to sharply increase its television advertising. The campaign has spent $43 million on commercials since May, aides said. That is less than the $85 million Mr. Bush has spent since March but enough to reduce the Kerry campaign`s dependence on advocacy groups that provided television support for the campaign in leaner days.

The campaign has also been able to expand the size of its paid staff, adding on-the-ground organizers in swing states. Ms. Cahill said the infusion of money has helped her recruit talent like J. Terry Edmonds, who directed Bill Clinton`s speechwriters

at the White House. The campaign`s travel budget has also vastly increased.

There were also smaller expenditures. In May alone, the campaign spent $10,500 for photographers at its events; more than $200,000 to dispense Kerry hats and T-shirts and other promotional material, and at least $6,500 for parking.

``We are narrowing the gap,`` said Peter Maroney, a longtime Kerry fund-raiser now working at the Democratic National Committee. ``They are hearing our footsteps.``

Presidential campaigns are inherently expensive, costing millions to move the candidate around the country, advertise on television and otherwise get the message out.

Yet lavish spending does not always guarantee success. In 1980, John B. Connally famously spent $12 million to capture one delegate to the 1980 Republican convention. In the Democratic race earlier this year, Howard Dean set fund-raising records over the Internet, only to exhaust roughly $50 million on a spending spree that helped him win only his home state of Vermont.

``Any campaign has to worry about financial discipline,`` said David Magleby, an authority on campaign finance at Brigham Young University.

It is only natural that Mr. Kerry would raise - and spend - far more now that he is the expected nominee. But the transformation in his spending patterns is striking.

President Bush spent almost $50 million in March, primarily on a barrage of advertisements designed to attack Mr. Kerry as he emerged from the primaries; Mr. Kerry spent $14.6 million. But by April, the competition was more even: President Bush spent about $31 million and Mr. Kerry about $35 million. By May, Mr. Kerry was far surpassing President Bush in spending, $32 million to $22 million, as the president cut back.

Mr. Kerry is benefiting not simply from his operation`s fund-raising prowess but from the outpouring that would flow to any Democrat who emerged as the party`s nominee. Fund-raisers nationwide point to the powerful anti-Bush sentiment running through the party that is manifesting itself through money.

``The money is not just money,`` said Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is raising money for Mr. Kerry. ``It`s a proxy for enthusiasm.``

But many Democratic fund-raisers give Mr. Kerry credit for moving energetically to help his campaign withstand severe dips in the polls last year and into the early primaries. The campaign made an important decision last November when it declined public financing and the spending restrictions that come with it. The decision left Mr. Kerry free to raise and spend money without limits - a critical ingredient to getting the outpouring of money that flowed in the last three months.

At the time, some Democrats warned that rejecting millions in public money could be a mistake for a flagging campaign. Mr. Kerry limped through the final months of last year as his poll numbers sank and Howard Dean rocketed to the front. Mr. Kerry, who had once led the presidential pack, loaned his campaign $6.4 million as his fund-raisers struggled.

Larry Stone, a California fund-raiser who has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars, recalled that last December he struggled to take in his goal of $25,000 for a campaign event. ``I raised $10,000,`` he said, adding that the money ``came harder than anything I`ve ever done at the presidential level.``

The campaign entered 2004 with more debt on the books than money in its bank account.

But all that changed in Iowa, where Mr. Kerry`s come-from-behind victory began to generate money immediately. Louis Susman, the campaign`s national finance chairman, issued instructions for top fund-raisers to collect $10,000 each immediately.

Many fund-raisers recall a brief conference call with Mr. Kerry as he departed a bus to campaign in New Hampshire, the crowd roaring in the background. He delivered a clear message: it was time for the finance team to do its job.

But it was the campaign`s Internet site that was most beneficial.

Throughout most of 2003, Mr. Kerry had collected money the traditional way, relying on large events and large checks. He raised only about $1 million online, as Dr. Dean brought in tens of millions.

But a group of campaign staff members and advisers had been working for months to change that. David Thorne, Mr. Kerry`s brother-in-law from his first marriage and longtime friend, headed an effort designed to enhance the campaign`s appeal online. The campaign recruited Josh Ross, a Silicon Valley executive with political experience, to head the team.

The campaign scrutinized strategies pioneered by the Dean campaign, which experimented heavily with different Internet techniques, and evaluated what worked and what did not. At first, some Kerry campaign veterans resisted raising money through the Internet, several campaign officials said.

``This was a new phenomenon and nobody who grew up in a traditional campaign environment really believed it could happen,`` Mr. Thorne said. ``We kept trying to get John and the campaign to mention the U.R.L. I don`t think anybody was comfortable with that.``

But the team convinced the campaign`s senior staff to put Mr. Kerry`s Web address in the Iowa victory speech. The plug paid off. Campaign aides said the mention on national television caused a tenfold spike in Internet traffic in an instant. In the subsequent days, hundreds of thousands turned into millions as Mr. Kerry continued to win contests and his campaign was fueled by the cash that was instantly available through the Internet.

Even after his victories, Mr. Kerry was struggling to raise as much as he was spending. The campaign was so strapped that after Mr. Kerry`s victory in the New Hampshire primary, one California fund-raiser wrote an e-mail to several dozen colleagues asking how much they were raising. The campaign was basing its budget on projected donations - not on money in hand. ``The campaign is literally spending every dollar that`s coming in,`` he wrote.

In early March, when he had emerged from the Democratic pack, Mr. Kerry had roughly $2.5 million in the bank: 45 times less than the president.

By mid-March, the campaign rolled out a schedule sending Mr. Kerry on a 20-city fund-raising tour with an overall goal of raising $100 million by the summer. There were many meetings of Mr. Kerry`s top fund-raisers, including one in which Mr. Susman required each to bring $10,000 in checks to get in the door.

Kerry officials had also been actively recruiting Democratic fund-raisers from rival campaigns, a move that significantly expanded the fund-raising network.

``There was a lot of reaching out,`` said John Merrigan, Mr. Kerry`s mid-Atlantic finance chairman. ``We were identifying the leaders in every campaign and getting them to join with us.``

Fund-raisers and donors are not without egos, of course, and some campaign officials said it was sometimes difficult to integrate Democrats from rival campaigns into the fund-raising operation. At one point, Mr. Susman banned titles for the top fund-raisers to prevent intense negotiations over who was called what.

There was also the potential for friction between newcomers and veterans. Some Kerry fund-raisers had taken to wearing buttons reading ``4JKB4IA,`` meaning ``for John Kerry before Iowa.`` Aides said the senator himself put a stop to those button after catching sight of one backstage at an event in Virginia.

``He said, `take those off, we are all together now,``` recalled a spokesman who was there, Michael Meehan.

The aides working on Internet fund-raising also intensified their efforts, and launched a drive to raise $10 million in 10 days. With the Democratic Party apparatus uniting behind a single candidate, the campaign was able to use appeals from party luminaries like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and the strategist James Carville.

``That was a time when people wanted to see unity,`` Mr. Ross said. ``That was a great way to say it.``

The campaign`s fund-raising took off two days after Mr. Kerry won Super Tuesday, when it took in $2.6 million online, a record for a single day. March turned out to be a prosperous month for fund-raising over all as the campaign brought in $43 million, with more than half coming in online.

The pattern continued. Of the more than $100 million Mr. Kerry raised since Super Tuesday, roughly three-quarters has come as a result of mail and Internet solicitations.

Mr. Kerry has now raised $44 million through the Internet and $31 million through mail and phone solicitations. The campaign has sent out more than 15 million letters seeking new donors and several million more asking people who have given to donate more.

The campaign said it had received as many as 40,000 letters a day, and the company that opens Mr. Kerry`s mail was so overwhelmed that it dropped the Kerry account.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 27, 2004
FRANK RICH
The Best Goebbels of All?

THANKS to the 9/11 commission, we now know that the movie got the story right. The administration was repeatedly warned in advance that disaster could strike America. The planning for that contingency was nonexistent. Once hell broke loose, there was only chaos at the top. As New York collapsed into terror, the amiable but overmatched president turned in desperation to his older, arrogant vice president and asked, "What do you think we should do?"

The movie I describe is not "Fahrenheit 9/11" but a Hollywood special-effects extravaganza that beat it to the theaters by a month: Roland Emmerich`s "The Day After Tomorrow." Justly ridiculed by critics for its lame characters and junk-science plot (global warming instantaneously triggers a new Ice Age), it nonetheless piled up many more box-office dollars than Michael Moore`s documentary is likely to. The movie was ludicrous in most of its details, and yet it held a packed Manhattan multiplex audience of all ages in deathly silence the afternoon I attended. Crabby middle-aged couples settled down; packs of teenagers turned off their cellphones. We were watching a (barely) encoded re-enactment of 9/11, and we knew it. Lower Manhattan was being obliterated again, and once again the powerful government of the most powerful nation in the world was unable to stop it.

The fear tapped by that movie is the elephant in the room for the entire country, elephants and donkeys alike, and perhaps for New Yorkers most of all. What if the government fails to prevent another domestic terrorist attack? The unknowable answer always lurks at or just beneath the surface of our culture and our politics, often jostling both in tandem during this election year. It was just before "The Day After Tomorrow" sidled into some 3,400 theaters on Memorial Day weekend that John Ashcroft staged one of his elaborate doomsday performances, declaring that terrorists would "hit the United States hard" either on the Fourth of July or during the political conventions or on Election Day or whenever.

Two days after that grim warning came the stellar opening weekend of "The Day After Tomorrow." Jim Gianopulos, the chairman of the studio releasing it, Fox, told Entertainment Weekly that audiences would not "make that connection" to 9/11. Who was he kidding? The film`s most fevered scenes of panic take place downtown and a Dick Cheney look-alike was cast as vice president. (The movie`s hero, played by Dennis Quaid, is a Richard Clarke-like alarmist whom the White House ignores to its own peril.) The studio`s agenda was transparent enough: it didn`t want any escapist holiday ticket buyers to be chased away by intimations of reality. But in this case, such worry was misplaced. The fear on screen was synergistic with the fear at loose in the country, as it often is. The broad outlines of "The Day After Tomorrow," including its use of an arctic meltdown to unleash the plot, were uncannily reminiscent of "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," a surprise low-budget sci-fi hit of 1953. That movie, too, preyed on its audience`s collective terror (of the bomb) by acting out what it called "the worst disaster in New York`s history" (180 dead, 1,500 wounded) with scenes of crushed buildings and fleeing office workers in lower Manhattan.

"The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" was the first movie to be adapted from a Ray Bradbury story. This month Mr. Bradbury, now 83, complained that Michael Moore had appropriated the title of "Fahrenheit 451," his classic novel about book-burning totalitarianism, without permission. Mr. Moore hijacked the title because he knows it elicits fear, and his right-wing radio critics liken him to Goebbels because of his willingness to manipulate facts to whip up an audience accordingly. Sometimes they have a case. Mr. Moore is not aspiring to journalistic objectivity when he stirs Prince Bandar, various bin Ladens, the Carlyle Group and the Bush family into a malevolent conspiracy of grassy-knoll dimensions.

Yet Goebbels is in fashion everywhere these days. As Mr. Moore implies that the Bush administration is in cahoots with the native country of 15 of the 9/11 hijackers, so the Bush administration has itself used a sustained campaign of insinuation to float the false claim that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with those hijackers, too. As Mr. Moore seeks to shape the story of what happened on 9/11, so the White House, President Bush included, collaborated on a movie project with the same partisan intent, "D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis," seen on Showtime last fall. Instead of depicting Mr. Bush as continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to second graders for nearly seven minutes while the World Trade Center burned (as "Fahrenheit 9/11" does), "D.C. 9/11" showed the president (played by Timothy Bottoms) barking out take-charge lines like "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me — I`ll be home!"

In this fierce propaganda battle over the war on terrorism, the administration has been battling longer and harder than Michael Moore. And in John Ashcroft it has an even bigger camera hog in the starring role — no mean feat. While his on-screen persona needs work — he tries to come off like Robert Stack in "The Untouchables" but more often conjures up W. C. Fields in "The Bank Dick" — the attorney general`s resources as a showman are considerable. He has a bigger budget than most filmmakers and can command far more free TV time for promoting his wares. His press conferences, whether to showcase his latest, implicitly single-handed victory in the war on terror or to predict the apocalypse he wants to make certain we won`t blame him for, are now as ubiquitous as spinoffs of "C.S.I." and "Law & Order." While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.

His creative gifts were in particular evidence in that televised pre-Memorial Day warning that al Qaeda would hit us hard by the year`s end. Flanked by the F.B.I. director and photos of seven wanted terrorists, he enlisted us all as junior G-men — "be aware of your surroundings, remain vigilant" — even as he sowed the seeds of hopelessness that would bind us to him with fear. "Unfortunately, we currently do not know what form the threat may take," he said. "And that is why it is so important that we locate the seven individuals."

Mr. Ashcroft`s show looked plausible enough when it led the evening newscasts. Only on further examination did it prove to have more slanted evidence than "Fahrenheit 9/11." The seven individuals he had asked us to help track down are not believed to be in the United States, other officials soon told The New York Times. Six of the seven culprits, in fact, were recycled from previous warnings, one of them dating back to a similar Ashcroft press conference of 28 months earlier. Maybe C-Span 3 could be turned into a Justice Department TV Land to rerun the old Ashcroft episodes.

Another fictional flourish was the attorney general`s claim that a Qaeda "spokesman" had "announced" in March that preparations for the attack were 90 percent complete. The announcement was not from al Qaeda at all, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported two days later, but from a Web site run by a group that "has no known operational capability and may be no more than one man with a fax machine." (The same "group" had also taken credit for last year`s Northeast power blackout.)

This may explain why Tom Ridge did not appear with Mr. Ashcroft and did not raise the color-coded threat level. Instead the secretary of homeland security went on CNN that morning to propose that we "enjoy living in this great country and go out and have some fun." The fun many of us turned out for, as it happened, was "The Day After Tomorrow."

Whether Mr. Ashcroft`s alarming presentation led to the thwarting of a single terrorist remains unknown. What it did do was take our minds off Abu Ghraib and the rest of the metastasizing bad news from Iraq. Like a master Hollywood showman plotting the release schedule of a movie, Mr. Ashcroft always times his productions exquisitely. Two years ago he held off the announcement of the arrest of the supposed "dirty bomber," Jose Padilla, by a month, at which point that press conference fortuitously drowned out the stir created by Coleen Rowley, the F.B.I. agent who blew the whistle on the incompetence on Mr. Ashcroft`s watch before 9/11. This month he changed the subject from Justice Department memos justifying torture by announcing that he had foiled a terrorist plot targeting a shopping mall in "the American heartland" (Ohio, coincidentally the Republicans` most crucial swing state ).

It will take more creativity than this for the administration to distract us from the 9/11 commission, which is refuting Mr. Ashcroft and company`s absurd claims to pre-9/11 battle-readiness as firmly as it shot down Mr. Moore`s account of the post-9/11 airlifting of bin Laden relatives. A lot is at stake in a re-election campaign. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that in just two months Mr. Bush has lost his entire 21-point advantage as the most-trusted leader in fighting terrorism; capturing Saddam can`t give America a bye forever for failing to nab Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and the anthrax perpetrators. Mr. Ashcroft`s well-worn shtick also has its limits; his cases against presumed terrorists keep evaporating in and out of court. Meanwhile, just a week before the 9/11 commission staff reports were surfacing, the Capitol had to be evacuated when the Federal Aviation Agency failed to notify Washington air defense of a plane`s approach in restricted air space during the heightened alert of the Reagan funeral.

If Hollywood had concocted that hapless scene — or imagined that more federal homeland security money would be lavished on protecting the citizens of Wyoming than those of New York — it would be a Will Ferrell vehicle. But as the 9/11 commission also reminds us, there`s another, more inspiring movie to be drawn from 9/11: the story of the only people who actually fought the terrorists that day, those on United Flight 93. These passengers used in-flight phone calls to their families to figure out the big picture (including the World Trade Center) with no help from either the clueless White House or anyone else in government. They and the crew saved countless lives by preventing their hijacked plane from reaching its likely target of the Capitol or the White House.

Remember Todd Beamer and "Let`s roll"? Don`t expect the Bush administration to bring that up now. The real heroism under fire on United 93 only calls attention to the emptiness of the heroic poses Mr. Ashcroft strikes while celebrating his own terror-fighting prowess on TV. Those who find Michael Moore`s propaganda hard to take can luxuriate in the knowledge that the only office he`s likely ever to run for is Best Director. The idea that Mr. Ashcroft might be the guy standing between us and Armageddon, on the other hand, is already a reality and scarier than anything in "The Day After Tomorrow."

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COMPLETE COVERAGE
A Guide to the Memos on Torture
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

he New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have disclosed memorandums that show a pattern in which Bush administration lawyers set about devising arguments to avoid constraints against mistreatment and torture of detainees. Administration officials responded by releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified documents related to the development of a policy on detainees.

2002

JANUARY A series of memorandums from the Justice Department, many of them written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. The memorandums, principally one written on Jan. 9, provided legal arguments to support administration officials` assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the war in Afghanistan.

RELATED SITES
• Yoo`s Memo on Avoiding Geneva Conventions (PDF document)
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JAN. 25 Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department`s advice in the Jan. 9 memorandum was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban and Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty.

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• Gonzales`s Memo to Bush (PDF document)
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JAN. 26 In a memorandum to the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the advantages of applying the Geneva Conventions far outweighed their rejection. He said that declaring the conventions inapplicable would "reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." He also said it would "undermine public support among critical allies."

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• Powell`s Memo to White House (PDF document)
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FEB. 2 A memorandum from William H. Taft IV, the State Department`s legal adviser, to Mr. Gonzales warned that the broad rejection of the Geneva Conventions posed several problems. "A decision that the conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in which our armed forces are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the conventions in the event they are captured." An attachment to this memorandum, written by a State Department lawyer, showed that most of the administration`s senior lawyers agreed that the Geneva Conventions were inapplicable. The attachment noted that C.I.A. lawyers asked for an explicit understanding that the administration`s public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.

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• Taft`s Memo on Rejection of Geneva Conventions (PDF document)
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FEB. 7 In a directive that set new rules for handling prisoners captured in Afghanistan, President Bush broadly cited the need for "new thinking in the law of war." He ordered that all people detained as part of the fight against terrorism should be treated humanely even if the United States considered them not to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the White House said. Document released by White House.

RELATED SITES
• Bush`s Directve on Treatment of Detainees (PDF document)
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AUGUST A memorandum from Jay S. Bybee, with the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, provided a rationale for using torture to extract information from Qaeda operatives. It provided complex definitions of torture that seemed devised to allow interrogators to evade being charged with that offense.

RELATED SITES
• Justice Dept. Memo on Torture (PDF document)
• Letter by Author of Memo on Torture to White House Counsel
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Dec. 2 Memo from Defense Department detailing the policy for interrogation techniques to be used for people seized in Afghanistan. Document released by White House.

RELATED SITES
• Defense Dept. Memo on Afghanistan Detainees (PDF document)
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2003

MARCH A memorandum prepared by a Defense Department legal task force drew on the January and August memorandums to declare that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation`s security. The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.`

APRIL A memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to Gen. James T. Hill outlined 24 permitted interrogation techniques, 4 of which were considered stressful enough to require Mr. Rumsfeld`s explicit approval. Defense Department officials say it did not refer to the legal analysis of the month before.

RELATED SITES
• Rumsfeld`s Memo on Interrogation Techniques (PDF document)
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DEC. 24 A letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross over the signature of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was prepared by military lawyers. The letter, a response to the Red Cross`s concern about conditions at Abu Ghraib, contended that isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their significant intelligence value was a "military necessity," and said prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals.

Other Memorandums

Some have been described in reports in The Times and elsewhere, but their exact contents have not been disclosed. These include a memorandum that provided advice to interrogators to shield them from liability from the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty and the Anti-Torture Act, a federal law. This memorandum provided what has been described as a script in which officials were advised that they could avoid responsibility if they were able to plausibly contend that the prisoner was in the custody of another government and that the United States officials were just getting the information from the other country`s interrogation. The memorandum advised that for this to work, the United States officials must be able to contend that the prisoner was always in the other country`s custody and had not been transferred there. International law prohibits the "rendition" of prisoners to countries if the possibility of mistreatment can be anticipated.

Neil A. Lewis contributed to this report. Online Document Sources: Findlaw.com and National Security Archive, George Washington University (gwu.edu)




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June 27, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Are They Losing It?
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

One thing you`ve got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground.

This week, it`s not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it`s bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won`t even find described in Bill Clinton`s "My Life."

While Democratic lawmakers delayed final passage of a defense spending bill so they could mingle with Michael Moore, the once sweat-free Bushies were acting jangly.

First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11 commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Then Paul Wolfowitz called the reporters risking their lives in Iraq craven rumormongers. Then came Mr. Cheney`s F-word. (Not Fox, the other one.)

Finally, President Bush got agitated when an Irish TV interviewer said most of the Irish found the world more dangerous now than before the Iraq invasion. "First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq," Mr. Bush declared. (It`s all in how you define "Europe.")

Even as Tom Daschle proposed bipartisan family retreats to heal the harsh mood, even as the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act," Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing Halliburton`s getting no-bid contracts.

"I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.

He said he had no regrets about his "little floor debate in the United States Senate." He didn`t want to go along with Mr. Leahy`s attitude that "everything`s peaches and cream" when the Democrat had just been jawing about Halliburton war profiteering. Peaches and cream have never been on the Bush-Cheney menu, only brimstone and gall.

By playing on the insecurities of an inexperienced leader, Mr. Cheney has managed to change W. from a sunny, open, bipartisan, uniter-not-a-divider, non-nation-builder into a crabby, secretive, partisan, divider-not-a-uniter, inept imperialist. Vice is bounding around the country, talking to his usual circumscribed audiences of conservatives, right-wing think tanks and Fox News anchors. No need to burrow in the bunker when you`ve turned America into one.

As they used to say about the Soviet Union, the defensive Bush imperialists have to keep expanding because they`re encircled. Mr. Cheney`s gloomy, scary, contentious world view has fueled a more gloomy, scary, contentious world.

After disastrously dividing the world into the strong (Bush hawks) and the weak (everyone else), Vice turned his coarseness into another macho, tough-guy moment against a Democrat considered a pill by many Republicans. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue," he preened.

The conservatives defending Mr. Cheney are largely the same crowd that went off the deep end because of a glimpse of breast on the Super Bowl, demanding everything from fines to new regulations to protect red states from blue language.

Mr. Cheney`s foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On Fox, he again belabored his obsession with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to bolster his faux case.

But the Thom Shanker story he cited said only that in the mid-1990`s, Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda and that a request from Osama "to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered."

Rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda? As a threat to U.S. security, that`s right up there with Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Mr. Cheney assured Fox`s anxious viewers that he would stay on the ticket and in the White House until January `09. (No four letter words, dear Democrats.) Vice said of W., "he knows I`m there to serve him."

Mr. Bush must have missed that classic "Twilight Zone" episode where the aliens arrive with a book entitled, "To Serve Man." It turns out to be a cookbook.

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June 25, 2004
Q&A: Iraq`s Most Wanted

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 25, 2004

What is the status of the high-ranking Baathist leaders on the coalition`s most-wanted list?

The majority of the 55 individuals pictured on a deck of cards distributed to coalition troops at the start of the war have been captured or killed. The 12 individuals still at large, most experts say, support the violent insurgency against coalition forces and the Iraqi Interim Government, but their control over the insurgents has waned.

How many on the list have been captured?

Forty-one, including three who surrendered. Saddam Hussein, the No. 1 target on the list, was taken into custody December 13, 2003, at his hiding place at Al Dawr, about nine miles from his hometown of Tikrit. Two fugitives on the list--Saddam Hussein`s sons Uday and Qusay--were killed while attempting to evade capture. Other U.S. attempts to kill leaders on the most-wanted list failed, according to a Human Rights Watch report entitled "Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq," released in December 2003.

Who remains at large?

Following is a list of the 12. Amatzia Baram, senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and an expert on Iraqi tribes, helped provide biographical information about some of them.

* No. 6: Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, former vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) and deputy commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Second in command to Saddam Hussein in the RCC, Iraq`s top decision-making body, Ibrahim was considered an important force behind the insurgency in its early stages and continues to have influence now, some experts say. Analysts say he was one of the targets of the failed air strikes against top Iraqi leaders early in the war. Ibrahim`s "not a great genius, but he`s very dedicated to bringing the Baath Party back to power and glory," Baram says. He suspects Ibrahim is involved in some of the attacks that have taken place in northern Iraq, including explosions targeting the northern oil pipeline and suicide bombings in Mosul. Baram says Ibrahim, who is rumored to have leukemia, is likely in hiding somewhere between Mosul and the Turkish border, paying people to carry out insurgency operations.
* No. 7: Hani abd al-Latif al-Tilfah al-Tikriti, director of the Special Security Organization and responsible for security and investigations. He was an assistant to Qusay Hussein and is Saddam Hussein`s nephew on his mother`s side. Al-Latif has a long history as an intelligence operative--he rose through the ranks of the Muhabarat, Iraq`s secret police--and was known as an expert in torture.
* No. 14: Sayf al-Din Fulayyih Hasan Taha al-Rawi, chief of the Republican Guard. He is a professional Army officer from the city of Rawa on the Euphrates River. He is not connected to Saddam Hussein`s family or tribe, but advanced through the ranks on his own, Baram says, based on merit and loyalty. Some experts say he is likely involved with the insurgency.
* No. 15: Rafi abd al-Latif al-Tilfah al-Tikriti, head of the Directorate of General Security. He was also one of the targets of the air strikes and is now thought to be playing a part in the insurgency. He is related to Saddam Hussein`s mother`s family and is a "classic internal security guy," Baram says: a loyal, professional, intelligence apparatchik.
* No. 16: Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and another member of Saddam Hussein`s extended family.
* No. 21: Rukan Razuki abd al-Ghafar Sulayman al-Nasiri, one of Saddam Hussein`s senior bodyguards, a member of his inner circle, and head of Tribal Affairs in his government. Razuki is related to Saddam Hussein on his mother`s side and was his trusted bodyguard for nearly 30 years. He was one of the dictator`s three "foremost companions" who accompanied him everywhere, and led his personal safety battalion of 40 other "companions." Razuki is thought to be active in the insurgency.
* No. 24: Taha Muhyi al-Din Maruf, an Iraqi vice president and member of the RCC. A Kurd, he abhorred serving Saddam Hussein but was forced to act as his nominal vice president, Baram says. "I would suggest that the Americans stop looking for him," he says. "It`s a waste of their time. He never killed a mouse." Captain Bruce Frame, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), says al-Din was a member of Saddam Hussein`s government and so a legitimate target. "We went in there to get rid of the Saddam regime and provide the means to a free Iraq, and these people were leaders in the brutal former regime," he says.
* No. 36: Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti, presidential adviser and half-brother of Saddam Hussein.
* No. 40: Abd al-Baqi abd al-Karim al-Abdallah al-Sadun, regional chairman of the Baath Party in the Diyala region.
* No. 44: Yahya Abdullah al-Ubaydi, regional chairman of the Baath Party in the Basra region.
* No. 45: Nayif Shindakh Thamir Ghalib, regional chairman of the Baath Party in the Najaf region.
* No. 49: Rashid Taan Kazim, regional chairman of the Baath Party in the Anbar region.

What is the fugitives` impact on the insurgency?

Many experts say the Baathists leaders initially led and funded the insurgency. Kenneth Katzman, senior Iraq analyst at the Congressional Research Service, says some $1 billion in Central Bank funds were taken by Baathists as Baghdad fell. Some $600 million has been recovered, he says, but the rest is being used by leaders to buy weapons and pay for operations such as suicide bombings and assassinations. Private funding for the insurgency also comes from Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, Baram says.

Do the fugitives control the insurgency now?

No. Many experts say that, as the insurgency has expanded, the older Saddam Hussein-era leaders have been supplanted by younger Islamist radicals. "The younger faction has largely taken the lead," Katzman says. "[The Baathists] lit the spark, but at this point it`s being run by young men." Baram says. "None of the [Baathists] is in charge of the whole thing, no way." In fact, Baram says, "so far there`s no evidence" that any single group or entity is directing all the attacks. The insurgents are organized into regional hubs based in certain areas--Baquba and Mosul, for example, or Falluja and Ramadi--and coordinate and carry out operations in their own areas, Baram says. Given the level of coalition surveillance and pressure on insurgents, "it`s too difficult to conduct country-wide operations," he says.

Why have the Baathists surrendered leadership of the insurgency?

They`ve done it unwillingly, some experts say, as international terror groups increase their influence on the current fighters. "The resistance is very Islamicized and internationalized," Katzman says. "The insurgents have more in common with [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi, [Osama] bin Laden, Hamas, or Hezbollah than Izzat Ibrahim or members of Saddam Hussein`s old regime." But other experts disagree. "Foreign fighters haven`t assumed any public leadership role," says Jeffrey White, an expert on Iraq`s military and security at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace. "I don`t think they`re actually running the insurgency."

Are coalition forces pursuing the leaders on the most-wanted list?

"They`re supposedly still chasing them, although probably a little less aggressively after Saddam was caught," Katzman says. Pursuing insurgents across Iraq is a tough job, according to experts. "This is `Battle of Algiers` stuff," White says. "The Sunni resistance [led by former high-level Baath leaders] has a measure of public support and seems to be very broadly embedded across the Sunni community. It`s hard to find real allies [there] willing to prosecute a war against the resistance." David Gompert, an adviser on Iraqi national security to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), said in an interview with Agence France Press June 14, "If you take away the head, which is what happened as the deck of cards was collected, what`s left is a distributed collection of killers and executioners and the like who by virtue of becoming more autonomous and self-sufficient are more difficult to locate."

Who will be in charge of pursuing the fugitives after the June 30 handover?

Experts say not much will change after June 30: the U.S.-led coalition will lead the hunt for the fugitives, with Iraqi forces contributing as they are able. U.N. Resolution 1546 states that "the multinational force shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq ... including by preventing and deterring terrorism." It also gives the coalition the right to take prisoners and confiscate weapons in the course of security operations. "Iraqis can contribute to the hunt, but [the United States] would still retain the right to do it after the handover," Katzman says. "The resolution gives us that authority." Frame says that the coalition and the Iraqi security forces, working as partners, will continue to pursue insurgents, but after June 30 Iraqis will be in charge of the prisons where fugitives are held. "When we capture people, we`ll turn them over to Iraqis. It`s their country," he says.

Is the most-wanted list still relevant?

Some experts say no. "I hope we`re not spending much time on" pursuing the last members of the most-wanted list, says Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The list is not directly connected to the insurgency campaign." Katzman agrees: "It`s an old list at this point. They`ve largely been taken over by events. Even if all 12 were captured today, I don`t think the resistance would end." The insurgency is now creating its own leaders, experts say. "We`ve killed or captured most of the first wave, but those guys have been replaced," White says. "New members are stepping up."

-- by Esther Pan, staff writer, cfr.org

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June 25, 2004
US proposal for Iraqi army sparks disagreement
By Judy Dempsey in Brussels and Victoria Burnett in Kabul

Nato was on Friday trying to avert a serious argument at its Istanbul summit on Monday, after Germany and France opposed a US proposal that the alliance should move into Iraq to train the Iraqi army.

The differences emerged in response to a request sent to Nato by Iyad Allawi, Iraq`s interim prime minister, who asked the military alliance for "technical assistance and training" for the country`s security forces.

Despite hours of debate by the North Atlantic Council, Nato`s top political body comprising its 26 ambassadors, there was no consensus by the late afternoon.

Germany and France said the training could be carried outside Iraq, but the US and some other Nato countries said that was not practical.

Several European diplomats said they did not want Nato to become a "subcontractor" for the US when sovereignty is handed over to an interim Iraqi government next week. Nor did they want Nato to become embroiled in Iraq unless it had a precise mandate from the United Nations that gave it a quick exit strategy.

There was also haggling over how to provide more military assistance to Afghanistan. Lieutenant General Rick Hillier, commander of the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force, said Afghanistan badly needed more Nato peacekeeping troops in the north as it prepared to hold elections in September. Member countries` failure to fulfil its promise to provide them could have a "significant impact", he told the Financial Times in Kabul.

"The expectation. . . is very high that Nato is going to do more, because Nato said it was going to do more," he said.

Nato agreed in November to deploy at least five civil-military affairs teams in the north, but member states have not offered the necessary troops and hardware. Outside Kabul, Isaf has just one, German-led, civil-military unit, known as a Provincial Reconstruction Team, based in the northern province of Konduz.

Many Afghan and foreign officials see a wider Isaf presence as vital to maintaining calm during elections in September and making sure voters are not intimidated by provincial commanders. Jean Arnault, United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, said this week that new peacekeeping troops should be deployed by the end of July - eight weeks ahead of elections - to maximise their impact.

Gen Hillier said he expected to receive orders in the next few days on the initial stage of expansion, which would involve Nato taking command of a PRT in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and opening at least one other, smaller team in the north. The plan also includes a quick reaction force to support the new teams.

Gen Hillier said new PRTs could be established by August if the order came soon. But he said no force structure had been identified for the second phase of expansion, which would cover western Afghanistan.

Isaf is struggling to convince Nato members to provide support facilities and hardware to cover its current mission in Kabul and Konduz. Gen Hillier said nobody had stepped up to provide a hospital, requested in March, for the Kabul force. After battling for many months for helicopters, the force is now well equipped but needs aircraft, he said. Four countries have provisionally offered aircraft, but none has yet been delivered.

Gen Hillier said recent attacks in Konduz, including the murder of 11 Chinese road workers, should "remove any complacency among any of the member nations" that the government did not need Isaf support in the region.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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June 27, 2004
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Mirage in the Desert
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF


t has been a charged and burdened time -- the D-Day commemorations, the death of a president, the daily carnage in Iraq, the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, a July 4 just over the horizon -- the sublime and the squalid, the decent and the desperate in American life so overlaid upon one another that it is hard to reconcile the high rhetoric of one moment with the terrible reality of the other. As Americans remembered the boys of Pointe du Hoc and the president who immortalized them, they had to read reports of government lawyers telling their superiors that ``the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture.`` The discordance between the high sentiments heard at President Reagan`s funeral and the lawyers` attempts to justify the unjustifiable left you unable to determine whether the rhetoric of the funeral was a moment of spiritual reaffirmation or just an exercise in organized amnesia. The memoranda from White House counsel, and from Department of Justice and Department of Defense lawyers, gave new meaning to Robert Lowell`s phrase ``savage servility.`` Their argument that ``the president`s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign`` rendered the United States` obligations under the Torture Convention ``inapplicable`` to interrogations conducted pursuant to his command left you wondering if they had ever heard of the Nuremberg tribunal. You might have thought that after Justice Robert Jackson`s great opening speech at the war crimes trials of Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, no American lawyer would ever dare to use obedience to superior authority as justification for inhuman acts of abuse. In the memos that filled the pages of our newspapers, there was more than servility. There was also a terrible forgetting.

You will say: Remember the departed president. Don`t stain his memory with painful associations. But this is just not possible. The clash between the rhetoric of American democracy and the reality of American life is eternal. Indeed, it is the very essence of the American story. Ask the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education how long they had to wait for ``separate but equal`` to be overthrown. Ask the teachers of segregated American public schools if the promise of Brown has been realized even today. America has never been equal to its rhetoric, and sometimes it can sustain belief in itself only by forgetting.

Only willed blindness could maintain the magic moments of presidential mourning. At the funeral service in the National Cathedral, former Senator John C. Danforth evoked the Puritan vision of John Winthrop: ``The eyes of the world would be on America because God had given us a special commission, so it was our duty to shine forth.`` The eyes of the world these past months would not have been on Winthrop`s city upon a hill, but instead on a hooded figure standing on a box in a prison cell. At the funeral, President Bush`s father spoke of an America that was made in the departed president`s image: ``hopeful, bighearted, idealistic, daring, decent and fair.`` Iraqis have met Americans like this, but their reputation has been blackened by the grinning few in Abu Ghraib.

To deflect their own accountability, American leaders confidently proclaim that the guilty ones are just a few rotten apples in an otherwise sweet American bushel basket. We are told that the abusers do not represent America. The reality, as always, is more painful. Go out and ask Americans what they think about Abu Ghraib. An ABC News/Washington Post poll recently found that 46 percent of Americans believed that physical abuse short of torture is sometimes acceptable, while 35 percent thought that outright torture is acceptable in some cases.

Again, you will say: Let`s not exaggerate. Let`s not lose our nerve here. But no other democracy is so exposed by these painful moral juxtapositions, because no other nation has made a civil religion of its self-belief. The abolition of cruel and unusual punishment was a founding premise of that civil religion. This was how the fledgling republic distinguished itself from the cruel tyrannies of Europe. From this sense of exceptionalism grew an exceptional sense of mission. President Reagan`s funeral was a high Mass of rededication to that eternal mission. The question is whether these reaffirmations still inspire Americans to be better than they actually are, or whether the nation`s rhetoric has degenerated into a ritual concealment of what the country has actually become.

Yet concealment is not altogether possible, because even America`s most haunting symbols have a duality that reminds its citizens, at first, of the matchless traditions of American leadership, and then, lest sentimentality take hold, forces them to recall its equally matchless traditions of political violence. Who, thinking back on the week of mourning for Ronald Reagan, will forget the riderless horse, the empty saddle, the boots reversed in the stirrups? In that image, it was so easy to conjure one president, the smiling cowboy in the California sun, and forget the other one, clutching his throat, pitched forward in the Lincoln, death already on his face.

Theodore Sorensen, who as a young man wrote President Kennedy`s best speeches, gave a commencement speech of his own recently that was not so much an address as a cry of anguish. He remembered a time when you could go overseas and walk down avenues named after Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Hardly anyone is naming streets after Americans in the cities of the world these days. ``What has happened to our country?`` Sorensen exclaimed. ``We have been in wars before, without resorting to sexual humiliation as torture, without blocking the Red Cross, without insulting and deceiving our allies and the U.N., without betraying our traditional values, without imitating our adversaries, without blackening our name around the world.``

Sorensen`s anguish was genuine, but it was forgetful. He forgot Vietnam, the stain that formed on his martyred president`s watch and went on to blight American prestige and power for decades. Iraq is not Vietnam, but still it is salutary to remember Vietnam and to recall that America does not always prevail in the end. It is time to admit that America`s story includes defeat and failure. For if the country needs anything as it faces up to Iraq, it is to put away the messianic and missionary oratory of presidential funerals and learn some humility while there is still time.

At Abu Ghraib, America paid the price for American exceptionalism, the idea that America is too noble, too special, too great to actually obey international treaties like the Torture Convention or international bodies like the Red Cross. Enthralled by narcissism and deluded by servility, American lawyers forgot their own Constitution and its peremptory prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Any American administration, especially this one, needs to learn that in paying ``decent respect to the opinions of mankind`` -- Jefferson`s phrase -- America also pays respect to its better self.

Abu Ghraib and the other catastrophes of occupation have cost America the Iraqi hearts and minds its soldiers had patiently won over since victory. To say this is to say that America has lost the power to shape Iraq for the better. Accepting this will not be easy. America has as much trouble admitting its capacity for evil as for recognizing the limits of its capacity to do good.

This does not mean Iraq has been lost, as Vietnam was lost before it. The new interim government is struggling to convince Iraqis that it serves them, rather than the Americans. As the Iraqi government acquires legitimacy, the hateful resistance -- which has killed many more Iraqis than Americans -- will lose its standing. If the interim government, together with the United Nations mission, can guide the country toward a constitutional convention in 2005 and free elections by 2006, Iraq will become what Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani says it should be: a country ruled by the will of the people.

The modish cynics who take failure in Iraq for granted underestimate the people of Iraq. The country is not a failed state, the United Nations adviser Lakhdar Brahimi reminds us, but a powerful nation with a trained middle class and huge potential oil wealth. Even the disasters of the past year have taught all Iraqis a harrowing lesson in the necessity of prudence and restraint. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds now have objective reasons, even if they distrust one another, to avoid the descent into civil war -- and there now exists at least a path to elections that may lure the gunmen into politics.

Iraqis may not have full sovereignty yet, but America needs to understand that Iraqis, not Americans, are already sovereign over events there. America would be a better nation-builder if it acknowledged this, but its history does not encourage humility. During the D-Day celebrations, the old newsreel footage of dusty G.I.`s riding into Rome and Paris in 1944 burnished America`s incorrigible mythology of its own omnipotence. In Iraq, even the locals succumbed to it, expecting that the world`s most powerful country must be able to get water, electricity and security running in no time. It was a rude surprise to discover how chaotic, incompetent and downright violent the godlike liberators turned out to be. America had the Bradleys and the Abrams, but it knew next to nothing about Iraq, and soon ignorance -- of the language, tribal alliances and family and clan networks -- left U.S. soldiers ambushed and outwitted in the deadly alleyways of Falluja and Najaf.

Ordinary American ignorance was compounded by the administration`s arrogance. Gen. George C. Marshall began planning the postwar occupation of Germany two years before D-Day. This administration was fumbling for a plan two months before the invasion. Who can read Bob Woodward`s ``Plan of Attack`` and not find his jaw dropping at the fact that from the very beginning, in late 2001, none of the civilian leadership, not Rice, not Powell, not Tenet, not the president, asked where the plan for the occupation phase was? Who can`t feel that U.S. captains, majors and lieutenants were betrayed by the Beltway wars between State and Defense? Who can`t feel rage that victorious armies stood by and watched for a month while Iraq was looted bare?

Someone like me who supported the war on human rights grounds has nowhere to hide: we didn`t suppose the administration was particularly nice, but we did assume it would be competent. There isn`t much excuse for its incompetence, but equally, there isn`t much excuse for our naivete either.

Still, the United States did one thing well in Iraq, and nobody else could have done it -- it overthrew a dictator. Everything else was badly done, and some of what was done -- Abu Ghraib -- was a moral disgrace and a strategic catastrophe.

The United States has only one remaining task in Iraq: to prevent civil war and the dismemberment of the country. Sending in more troops will only turn them into targets and delay the day when Iraqis are required to defend themselves. The troops should be there to train enough Iraqis loyal to the national government to prevent Kurds from turning on Sunnis or Shiites from turning against both. America cannot defend Iraq from its demons of division: it can only help Iraqis do so. When there is a freely elected government, the United States should come home. January 2006 is the date for return set by the United Nations resolution. By then the oil should be flowing, the coffers of the Iraqi state should be filling up and what Iraq will do with the money will be up to the Iraqis, not us. America may not be able to shape Iraq for the better, but it cannot abdicate its responsibility to prevent the worst. Intervention amounted to a promise. The promise -- of eventual peace and order -- needs to be kept.

The signal illusion from which America has to awake in Iraq and everywhere else is that it serves God`s providence or (for those with more secular beliefs) that it is the engine of history. In Iraq, America is not the maker of history but its plaything. In the region at large, America is not the hegemon but the hesitant shaper of forces it barely understands. In the Middle East, it stands by, apparently helpless, as Israelis create more facts on the ground and Palestinians create more suicide bombers. All this shows that the world does not exist to be molded to American wishes. It is good that the United States has wanted to be better than it is. It is good that the death of a president gave it a week to revive its belief in itself. But it cannot continue to bear this burden of destiny. For believing that it is Providence`s chosen instrument makes the country overestimate its power; it encourages it to lie to itself about its mistakes; and it makes it harder to live with the painful truth that history does not always -- or even very often -- obey the magnificent but dangerous illusions of American will.

Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is author, most recently, of ``Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror`` (Princeton University Press).


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U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq`s Leadership

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, June 26 -- U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq`s legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.

Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq`s interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country`s democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.

The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi`s choices on the elected government that is to take over next year.

Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer corrupt government officials for prosecution.

Some Iraqi officials condemn Bremer`s edicts and appointments as an effort to exert U.S. control over the country after the transfer of political authority. "They have established a system to meddle in our affairs," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council, a recently dissolved body that advised Bremer for the past year. "Iraqis should decide many of these issues."

Bremer has defended his issuance of many of the orders as necessary to implement democratic reforms and update Iraq`s out-of-date legal code. He said he regarded the installation of inspectors-general in ministries, the creation of independent commissions and the changes to Iraqi law as important steps to fight corruption and cronyism, which in turn would help the formation of democratic institutions.

"You set up these things and they begin to develop a certain life and momentum on their own -- and it`s harder to reverse course," Bremer said in a recent interview.

As of June 14, Bremer had issued 97 legal orders, which are defined by the U.S. occupation authority as "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people" that will remain in force even after the transfer of political authority. An annex to the country`s interim constitution requires the approval of a majority of Allawi`s ministers, as well as the interim president and two vice presidents, to overturn any of Bremer`s edicts. A senior U.S. official in Iraq noted recently that it would "not be easy to reverse" the orders.

It appears unlikely that all of the orders will be followed. Many of them reflect an idealistic but perhaps futile attempt to impose Western legal, economic and social concepts on a tradition-bound nation that is reveling in anything-goes freedom after 35 years of dictatorial rule.

The orders include rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in "emergency conditions only" and requires a driver to "hold the steering wheel with both hands."

Iraq has long been a place where few people pay taxes, where most movies and music are counterfeit, where children often hold down jobs and where traffic laws are rarely obeyed, Iraqis note.

Other regulations promulgated by Bremer prevent former members of the Iraqi army from holding public office for 18 months after their retirement or resignation, stipulate a 30-year minimum sentence for people caught selling weapons such as grenades and ban former militiamen integrated into the Iraqi armed forces from endorsing and campaigning for political candidates. He has also enacted a 76-page law regulating private corporations and amended an industrial-design law to protect microchip designs. Those changes were intended to facilitate the entry of Iraq into the World Trade Organization, even though the country is so violent that the no commercial flights are allowed to land at Baghdad`s airport.

Some of the new rules attempt to introduce American approaches to fighting crime. An anti-money-laundering law requires banks to collect detailed personal information from customers seeking to make transactions greater than $3,500, while the Commission on Public Integrity has been given the power to reward whistleblowers with 25 percent of the funds recovered by the government from corrupt practices they have identified.

In some cases Bremer`s regulations diverge from the Bush administration`s domestic policies. He suspended the death penalty, and his election law imposes a strict quota: One of every three candidates on a party`s slate must be a woman.

Iraqis have already scoffed at some of the requirements. Judges on the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, who were appointed by Bremer, have refused to impose 30-year sentences on people detained with grenades and other military weapons. At the same time, many Iraqi politicians contend that banning the death penalty was a mistake. Several have said they will push to reinstate capital punishment after the transfer of political authority.

Some of the Iraqis recently appointed by Bremer as inspectors and commissioners said they should have been given their jobs months ago. Had that happened, they insisted, they would have had more time to build support for the activities.

"There are some doubts about my work," said Nabil Bayati, the inspector general in the Ministry of Electricity, who is charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. People in the ministry, he said, "don`t understand it yet."

Siyamend Othman, the chief executive of the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission, said his fellow commissioners were only appointed three weeks ago. "Had this commissions been set up six months ago, we would have been in a far more secure position than we are today," he said. "We would have had six months to prove and to show to the Iraqi people our worth and what we`re capable of doing, and why this commission is such an important institution."

In recent weeks, Bremer has issued orders aimed at setting policy for a variety of controversial issues, including the future use of radioactive material, Arab-Kurd property disputes and national elections planned for January.

On June 15, Bremer signed an order establishing the Iraqi Radioactive Source Regulatory Authority as an independent agency regulating radioactive material in Iraq. His order forbids, even after the transfer of sovereignty, any activity involving radioactive material except under requirements established by the agency.

On June 19, in an effort to keep unemployed Iraqi weapons scientists from working for other nations, Bremer established the Iraqi Non-Proliferation Programs Foundation, a semi-governmental organization set up to provide grants and contracts to people who worked on Saddam Hussein`s chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs. An initial grant of $37.5 million was set aside by Bremer to pay the scientists` expenses to attend international conferences so they can be retrained for non-weapons employment.

The foundation, which has been exempted from a ban on government support to former high-ranking members of Hussein`s Baath Party, is also supposed to establish a venture capital fund to promote the commercial development of products and technologies by former employees of Iraqi weapons programs, according to the order setting up the foundation.

On May 28, Bremer signed an order establishing a Special Task Force on Compensating Victims of the Previous Regime. The task force, appointed by Bremer, is to devise a means for determining the number of victims, estimate fair compensation and recommend a system under which claims could be made and adjudicated. An endowment of $25 million was set aside from oil income to be used to compensate victims and their families, according to the order authorizing the task force.

But perhaps Bremer`s most far-reaching and potentially contentious order is the election law, which he signed June 15. The law states that no party can be associated with a militia or get money from one. It also requires the electoral commission to draft a code of conduct barring campaigners from using "hate speech, intimidation, and support for, the practice of and the use of terrorism."

The law, signed last week, is intended to establish the framework and policies that will govern next year`s national elections to select a 275-member national assembly. But experts in Arab world elections have questioned how the law will be received by the Iraqi people once its terms are widely known. Some predicted that the rules would be challenged and perhaps ignored by the interim Iraqi government.

"I foresee real political conflict about these rules," said Amy Hawthorne, an Arab specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies elections.

"The laws came out from behind a curtain while armed conflict is going on," said Hawthorne, who expects people and parties to challenge the laws after July 1 because "they were created under the [occupation] authority and their legal status is a bit murky."

"The notion of [the U.S.] decreeing election law prior to June 30 is unfortunate," said Leslie Campbell, who has worked in Iraq for the National Democratic Institute.

Financing elections, difficult in the United States, could be an even greater problem in Iraq where not only the wealthy but also foreign countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and even the United States are openly putting money into political parties and politicians. The Bremer law calls on parties to "strive to the extent possible to achieve full transparency in all financial dealings" and calls on the electoral commission to consider issuing regulations.

Campbell said such a law "may be a lot cleaner than letting the commission have it out with the interim government in a messy way, but it is not good that the electoral commission is not promulgating key parts of the law."

Campbell said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce the provision separating militia members from politics since all the major Iraqi political parties are associated with armed organizations. Although the occupation authority has attempted to demobilize militias, most have not yet disbanded.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in Iraq, said the appointed electoral commission`s power to eliminate political parties or candidates for not obeying laws would allow it "to disqualify people someone didn`t like."

He likened the power of the commission to that of religious mullahs in Iran, who routinely use their authority to remove candidates before an election. "In a way, Mr. Bremer is using a more subtle form than the one used by hard-liners in Iran to control their elections," Cole said.

Pincus reported from Washington.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Twin Car Bomb Blasts South of Baghdad Kill 40


Reuters
Sunday, June 27, 2004; 5:08 AM

By Andrew Marshall

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Twin car bomb blasts killed 40 people south of Baghdad in a fresh attempt to derail the transition to an Iraqi government in three days, the U.S. military said Sunday.

It said 22 people were wounded in Saturday evening`s blasts in Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) from Baghdad.

In a new videotape, militants led by suspected al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi vowed to behead three Turkish hostages unless Turks stop working with U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

Al Jazeera television showed footage of three men crouching before masked gunmen and holding up their passports. It said it had received the footage and a statement from Zarqawi`s Tawhid and Jihad group threatening to kill the men within 72 hours.

The statement warned the hostages would be killed unless "Turkish forces and companies that support the occupation forces in Iraq" left by the deadline.

Turkey is not part of the U.S.-led force in Iraq but many nationals work as drivers and support staff for U.S. forces.

Zarqawi loyalists have staged a series of kidnappings ahead of the June 30 transition. The group beheaded a South Korean last week after Seoul rejected a demand to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and last month decapitated a U.S. captive. Both killings were filmed and posted on Web sites used by Islamists.

The group`s deadline is before the end of a NATO summit Monday and Tuesday in Istanbul to be attended by President Bush, who will discuss a NATO role in Iraq.

Zarqawi has also claimed responsibility for a series of bloody attacks, most recently a wave of suicide bombings and armed assaults in five cities Thursday that killed more than 100 Iraqis and three U.S. soldiers.

More than 20 car bombs have exploded across Iraq this month.

Underscoring the frail security situation, a loud explosion sounded across central Baghdad Sunday and smoke could be seen rising from inside the Green Zone headquarters of the U.S.-led administration, a favored target for insurgents.

"EFFECTIVE TERRORIST"

Washington has offered $10 million for Zarqawi`s capture.

"He remains the number one target inside this country. He is a very effective terrorist," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. military in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad Saturday.

U.S. forces have mounted three "precision strikes" in the rebellious Iraqi city of Falluja over the past week aimed at destroying Zarqawi`s safe houses and killing his followers.

Kimmitt said the latest strike, Friday, may have come close to killing the Jordanian-born militant. Senior military officials said 20 to 25 militants were killed in Friday`s strike.

Iraqi guerrillas and tribal leaders in Falluja have denied Zarqawi is in the city, where hundreds of Iraqis were killed in April in fierce fighting between U.S. Marines and guerrillas. Critics say Falluja is now a safe haven for foreign militants.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said violence could force a delay in national elections due to be held by the end of January, a key step in the transition to democracy.

"It`s not absolute yet," Allawi said of the election date, according to excerpts of an interview with CBS News.

"We are committed to elections and one of the tasks is really to work toward achieving these objectives. However, security will be a main feature of whether we will be able to do it in January, February or March."

Writing in London`s Independent Sunday newspaper, Allawi said he would consider an amnesty for Iraqis who resisted U.S. occupation out of a sense of indignation not destabilization.

"We are drawing up plans to provide amnesty to Iraqis who supported the so-called resistance without committing crimes, while isolating the hardcore elements of terrorists and criminals," he wrote.

Witnesses in Hilla said the car bombs exploded in a busy street in the largely Shi`ite town shortly after dark. The U.S. military said they were detonated near a mosque.

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Transition in Iraq



Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page B06

IN CONCRETE TERMS, not much will change in Iraq Wednesday, when sovereignty shifts from the U.S. occupation force to an interim Iraqi government. The Iraqi armed forces won`t suddenly become more capable. The enemies of democracy inside the country, who have been escalating their attacks in recent weeks, will not subside; if anything, they are likely to work harder to discredit the new government and prevent movement toward elections planned for December or January. For U.S. forces, life will become more complicated but not less dangerous, as they attempt to provide security while coordinating with untested Iraqi leaders and armed forces.

Nevertheless, the United States and its British, Polish and other allies are right to formally turn control of Iraq back to Iraqis. The occupier label proved poisonous for allied troops, and many Iraqis saw little reason to fight against terrorists or insurgents when they felt as though they were fighting for U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer. Iraq`s new leaders believe that Iraqi forces will now fight harder when it is clearly for their own country and on orders from their countrymen.

One among many dangers is unrealistic expectations. Initial polls suggest that Iraq`s government takes office with a reservoir of some goodwill. But Iraqis who expected the U.S. occupation to quickly bring order and improve their lives were disappointed; now they may hope that the new government will deliver where the Americans failed. But Iraqi forces are far too scanty, ill-equipped and untrained to take over. And American forces, already stretched thin, must now take on a training mission as a priority even as they continue to fight the insurgency. It would help if U.S. aid, already appropriated, would begin flowing more quickly -- and to Iraqis, not just to U.S. and other foreign contractors. It would help also if NATO allies and other nations that have refused to contribute to the war now assisted in training and maybe in guarding borders and other missions. But even if Iraq wins new help, it is a long way from being able to secure itself.

For U.S. troops there`s a three-pronged challenge: fight a war, while receding in visibility, while assuring Iraqi allies (and persuading foes) that the Americans won`t be leaving too soon. The latter goal is aided by Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, who has responsibly joined with President Bush in refusing to set an arbitrary date for U.S. withdrawal. "Success is a secure, peaceful and pluralistic Iraq," said former national security adviser Samuel K. "Sandy" Berger, who is advising Mr. Kerry, and the United States cannot settle for anything less. "We cannot think about dates or elections as barometers," agreed former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, also speaking for the Kerry campaign last week. "There are real things that need to be done."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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The Logic of Torture

By Tom Malinowski

Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page B07

"I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"

So reads a note scrawled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a memo released by the Pentagon this week, in which he approved for Guantanamo interrogations techniques such as forcing them to stand, stripping detainees nude and threatening them with dogs.

With his characteristic cut-through-the-bull bluntness, Rumsfeld raised a valid question. If interrogators can use methods designed to inflict pain on prisoners, why should they be made to stop before the pain becomes difficult to bear? After all, forcing a prisoner to stand, so long as it`s only for a short time, is a bit like allowing the use of hot irons, so long as they`re only slightly above room temperature. The contradiction Rumsfeld noticed may help us understand how decisions made by senior officials and military commanders led to the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

The policymakers apparently tried to have it both ways, approving highly coercive interrogation techniques, but with limits designed to assuage their consciences and satisfy their lawyers. They authorized or proposed painful "stress positions," but said that no one position could be used for more than 45 minutes. They allowed forced standing, but only for four hours; sleep deprivation, but only for 72 hours; exposure to heat and cold, but with medical monitoring; hooding, but not in a way that limits breathing; and nudity, but not the stacking of nude bodies.

Once these methods were applied in the field on prisoners considered to be hardened terrorists, however, interrogators did not respect the lawyers` boundaries. Indeed, they could not have respected them while still achieving their aim of forcing information from detainees. For by definition, these methods, euphemistically known as "stress and duress," can work only when applied beyond the limits of a prisoner`s tolerance. Torture works only (if ever) when it truly feels like torture.

Perhaps one reason these stress and duress techniques were approved at all is that they sound innocuous. But as anyone who has worked with torture victims knows, they are the stock in trade of brutal regimes around the world. For example, the Washington Times recently reported that "ome of the most feared forms of torture cited" by survivors of the North Korean gulag "were surprisingly mundane: Guards would force inmates to stand perfectly still for hours at a time, or make them perform exhausting repetitive exercises such as standing up and sitting down until they collapsed from fatigue."

Binding prisoners in painful positions is a torture technique widely used in countries such as China and Burma, and repeatedly condemned by the United States. Stripping Muslim prisoners nude to humiliate them was a common practice of the Soviet military when it occupied Afghanistan. As for sleep deprivation, consider former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin`s account of experiencing it in a Soviet prison in the 1940s:

"In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget. . . . Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it. . . . I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them -- if they signed -- uninterrupted sleep!"

Rumsfeld eventually rescinded his approval of these cruel methods for Guantanamo. But they still ended up being authorized by commanders and used on prisoners throughout Afghanistan and Iraq. Former detainees report being forced to stand, sit or crouch for many hours, often in contorted positions, deprived of sleep for nights on end, held nude, doused with cold water and exposed to extreme heat.

It`s not likely anyone was holding a stopwatch during this treatment or making sure that only "mild" pain and suffering resulted. Why would they have? For the limits that might have made the treatment more humane would also have rendered it ineffective in the eyes of interrogators.

Stress and duress interrogation techniques were invented in the dungeons of the world`s most brutal regimes for only one purpose -- to cause pain, distress and humiliation, without physical scars. When Bush administration officials and military commanders told soldiers to use methods designed for that purpose, while still treating detainees "humanely," they were being naive at best and dishonest at worst. They should have known that once the purpose of inflicting pain is legitimized, those charged with the care and interrogation of prisoners will take it to its logical conclusion.

The writer is Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

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THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Estimate of Heinz Fortune Doubled
John F. Kerry`s wife oversees assets worth about $1 billion, a new Times analysis indicates.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer

June 27, 2004

Teresa Heinz Kerry, through a network of investments in blue-chip corporations, venture capital funds and municipal bonds, controls a family fortune worth an estimated $1 billion, an examination of public records shows.

The $1-billion figure is double the estimates of her wealth that are widely cited in news stories about her husband, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

The couple would rank as the wealthiest to occupy the White House, far surpassing such storied presidential fortunes as the Kennedys`. Their assets are so vast and far-reaching that they mirror the U.S. economy, and will likely raise questions about conflicts of interest.

"She represents a new ballgame in terms of her wealth and in terms of the wealth she controls," said Kevin Phillips, a political commentator and author of the history "Wealth and Democracy."

Heinz Kerry`s investments, worth an estimated $500 million in 1995, have grown over the last nine years to $1 billion or more, even accounting for large living expenses and charitable contributions, according to an analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Senate financial disclosure reports, probate documents and other public records.

Since key details of Heinz Kerry`s investments are not in the public record, a precise valuation is not possible. The Times analysis produced estimates as low as $900 million and as high as $3.2 billion.

Three senior executives at investment firms that handle accounts for wealthy clients reviewed The Times` study and said the $1-billion valuation was a fair and conservative estimate.

Heinz Kerry has declined requests by The Times in recent months for interviews. Campaign representatives for Sen. Kerry and his wife said the couple regarded their assets as private. The representatives also declined to provide answers to written questions over the last two weeks.

Heinz Kerry`s money is actively managed every day of the year, providing capital to Gannett, Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer and Procter & Gamble, among many others. It helps finance municipal sewer systems, technology start-ups, schools and more.

The trust accounts are held at Mellon Financial Corp., the Pittsburgh institution that has long handled the affairs of the Heinz family. She inherited the family`s fortune in the food business 13 years ago.

In 2003, the Heinz trusts made 890 trades in stocks, bonds, funds and other investments — more than three trades for every day that securities markets were open. In dozens of cases, the trades were for assets valued above $1 million, and scores of other trades involved assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Heinz Kerry`s net worth is usually estimated at half a billion dollars, though these estimates are not explained in documentation. In its latest annual ranking, Forbes magazine did not include her among the world`s billionaires; the last time the magazine estimated her wealth was in 2002, when it said she was worth $550 million.

But The Times examined financial disclosures as far back as 1982 filed by Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.), who died in 1991, and Kerry. In 1995, H.J. Heinz Co. filed an SEC document that showed Heinz Kerry was the beneficiary of trusts that held $400 million of Heinz stock. Separately in 1995, the year they married, Kerry filed a Senate disclosure report that showed Heinz Kerry had other assets worth an estimated $100 million.

The Times examined the portfolio of stocks and bonds for each year since 1995, and concluded that it grew to roughly $1.3 billion, in part by diversifying out of Heinz stock.

Records and public statements show that charitable contributions and family living expenses could have drained no more than $300 million out of the trust fund. Last month, she disclosed that she had income of about $5.1 million in 2003, apparently representing some of the income generated by the trusts.

"If you had $500 million in 1995, I don`t see how you couldn`t be close to $1 billion today with any reasonable equity strategy," said L. David Tisdale, chief executive of Starbuck, Tisdale & Associates, a Santa Barbara investment advisor who reviewed The Times` work.

Certainly, the Kerrys would be among the richest families to ever occupy the White House, eclipsing even President Kennedy and well ahead of the other moneyed chief executives over the last century.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office, he left an estate valued at $1 million, according to his presidential library. That would be worth about $11 million today when adjusted for inflation. Herbert Hoover had roughly $8 million when he entered office in 1929, according to archivists at the Hoover presidential library — an amount worth $88 million today.

Lyndon B. Johnson was worth an estimated $14 million in 1966, Life magazine said at the time. That would be worth $82 million today. The magazine Trusts & Estates estimated Johnson`s worth at $20 million in 1973, worth $85 million today.

President Bush`s disclosure statement shows assets estimated by The Times at about $13 million, including his large ranch in Texas. The value of the Bush family assets, managed by former President George H.W. Bush, is not known.

The most difficult former president to assess is Kennedy, whose father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was still alive during his presidency and was worth perhaps $200 million to $400 million, according to historians at the Kennedy library — an amount equal to $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion when adjusted for inflation.

President Kennedy`s share of the income from the Kennedy trust was $500,000 annually, according to the book "Wills of the Presidents." Political experts say that Kennedy was personally worth perhaps only $20 million when he was elected president, or $124 million today. But Kennedy enjoyed the largess of his father, including payments for his wife`s personal expenses, the use of family yachts, and access to estates in Cape Cod and Florida.

If Kerry is elected, he will join a long list of presidents who were helped by their wife`s wealth. Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, LBJ and William McKinley also married into wealth, said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a leading authority on first ladies.

"George Washington married the wealthiest woman in the colony of Virginia," he added.

Heinz Kerry inherited a vast fortune from Sen. Heinz, who was killed in a 1991 private aircraft accident. Heinz, formally H.J. Heinz III, was the fourth generation of the Pittsburgh family famous for its ketchup and other food products.

The money is held mainly by seven trust funds and several other investment accounts set up to benefit her and her three children, as well as to provide for charitable contributions. Heinz Kerry`s money is generally kept separate from her husband`s, according to the Senate disclosure report.

The business affairs are managed by the Heinz Family Office, located in an upscale office building just two blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Besides overseeing the family business, the office helps manage Heinz Kerry`s many public policy programs.

In addition to her family holdings, Heinz Kerry controls three large nonprofit corporations in Pittsburgh and Washington that have a combined $1.2 billion in assets, according to Internal Revenue Service filings. They have a wide-ranging agenda, supporting the arts, education, women`s health, the environment and much more.

Tax records show that she supplements those activities with separate money from family trusts. For example, she provides at least $6.5 million annually to the Heinz Family Foundation, a nonprofit corporation, to help its activities.

She also separately supports half a dozen programs that involve environmentalism and archeology in another unregistered organization — the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation — that does not file tax returns.

Political experts predict the Kerrys will be compelled to disclose more about their assets and perhaps place them in a blind trust if Kerry wins the election.

Heinz Kerry has not said whether she will continue to oversee her personal assets or the family trusts if Kerry is elected. A Kerry spokesman said Friday that these issues had yet to be seriously considered. However, she has said repeatedly that she would not step down from her leadership of her philanthropic corporations.

A key issue is whether a Kerry presidency would be hobbled by conflicts of interest or the appearance of them because of her holdings or active trading. "It is hard to imagine that it would not cause conflicts," said Phillips, the author. "They should have thought of this long ago."

Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton, agreed that although the amount of Heinz Kerry`s wealth was not a campaign issue, it could cause problems if Kerry were elected.

"They will have to seriously consider putting it in a blind trust," Panetta said. "All of us who have served in government have had to do that. In the end, it is the better way to go, because it removes any suspicion that a decision is self-serving. You have enough problems just making a decision, without dealing with the concern you may be putting money in your pocket."

(Trusts are legal vehicles dating back hundreds of years that hold assets for the benefit of others. They are generally used by the wealthy to minimize taxes and eliminate long probate proceedings. A blind trust puts management of money outside the view of its beneficiaries.)

No specific law requires the president, much less the first lady, to put assets in a blind trust, said Stan Brand, a federal government ethics expert and Washington attorney. In fact, federal law says almost nothing about the first lady, though she does get protection and funding for an office.

Since Heinz Kerry owns such a broad portfolio of U.S. and foreign stocks, the actions of a Kerry administration could have a daily effect on companies in which his wife has millions of dollars invested, said Robert M. Stern, a financial disclosure expert and president of the Center for Governmental Studies.

"Almost any decision Kerry makes will affect one of her companies," Stern said. "It might help the situation if the wealth were put into a blind trust."

President Bush has placed his assets in a trust that is invested almost exclusively in certificates of deposit, according to his financial disclosure statement on file with the federal Office of Government Ethics.

Political experts say Americans have a natural curiosity about the personal wealth of their leaders, though it seldom becomes a central political issue. Far from holding grudges against the rich, voters often elect wealthy individuals and even admire their lifestyles, the experts say.

Heinz Kerry owns a Gulfstream jet and several properties around the country, including a $5-million ski chalet in Idaho, a $9-million oceanfront summer house in Nantucket, Mass., and a $4-million estate in western Pennsylvania. After marrying nine years ago, the couple purchased a five-story mansion assessed at $6.9 million in one of Boston`s poshest neighborhoods.

For all the wealth, however, the couple does not live ostentatiously, according to friends and associates. Among Heinz Kerry`s vehicles is a 1989 Jeep that she keeps in Idaho, state records show. "If you go to Teresa`s homes, you could take the furniture and put it in any home," Jeffrey Lewis, chief of staff for Heinz Kerry, said in an earlier interview. "It is comfortable, not ostentatious."

Maxwell King is president of the Heinz Kerry endowments in Pittsburgh. He said the 65-year-old heiress, who was born in Mozambique to a prominent doctor and was educated in South Africa and later Geneva, has her mind on many matters other than her wealth.

"For some people, having great wealth is a heavy burden," said King, a former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "She doesn`t carry it heavily at all. She has a pragmatic view of her money. She doesn`t view it as important, but as a vehicle to do things. She holds close to Heinz values."

The Heinz family has long been known for its philanthropy, and Heinz Kerry is but one wing of a family that has funded art museums, scholarships, university chairs, charities for the poor, hospitals, literary awards, symphonies, public service television, programs for women`s health, architectural competitions and much more.

Still, the fortune helped elect Sen. Heinz, and it has played a limited but key role in Kerry`s primary campaign.

At a pivotal juncture, Kerry took out a $6.4-million loan in December on the Boston property. The big loan, requiring interest payments that exceed Kerry`s Senate salary of $154,700, is nearly as much as the assessed value of the property. It came from Mellon Trust of New England.

"It was absolutely necessary for him to do that, and the wealth at that point helped him," said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington. "It was not an issue in the primaries, and I do not think it will become an issue in the campaign. There is so much money rolling in now from small contributions that he doesn`t need to go to the personal wealth."



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SOVEREIGNTY WITHOUT SECURITY
In Darkness, Waiting for Dawn
The incoming sovereign government will need skill and luck to cure Iraq`s ills, which confounded the occupation.
By Alissa J. Rubin and Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writers

June 27, 2004

The deep "booms" come many mornings now. The explosions, often from artillery shells wired together in the trunk or backseat of a car, shear through the blazing summer heat. If you`re close, you`re dead. A few steps removed and you`re maimed. To those who are spared, the odor of burnt flesh both sickens and reminds that luck has been a partner today.

There is a backbeat, too, to these attacks — a barrage of bullets pumped into a car or perhaps a single shot to the back of the head. Iraq`s assassination victims by now number as many as 1,000, although there is no official count. Some were academics, doctors and lawyers; others were Iraqis suspected of working with the U.S.-led occupation authority; still others were suspected former Baathists and followers of Saddam Hussein.

There are kidnappings, too. They seem mild by comparison because most captors merely seek a ransom, and the victim survives. But their spread has driven many of the country`s professionals out of the country.

The United States and its allies have ruled Iraq for more than a year and can cite a list of successes. The most important is that Iraq is free of Hussein`s tyrannical grip. People can say what they want, mostly, and are debating in a democratic way for the first time in memory.

But the occupation government has also failed notably in its attempts to restore security — and as the restoration of sovereignty approaches, that reality is what dominates life for most Iraqis.

Beginning Wednesday, Iraqis selected by the United Nations and the United States will get a chance to repair their broken country. If they are skilled and lucky, and if they can persuade thousands of their countrymen to fight in the new security forces, they may achieve their goal: a country stable enough to hold free elections early next year. If skill and luck run out, the insurgency could intensify, and the simmering strife among Iraq`s three major groups — Sunni Muslim Arabs, Shiite Muslim Arabs and Kurds — could spiral into civil war.

The recent coordinated attacks against American troops and Iraqi police dominated headlines — and obscured the signs of what awaits if security is not restored. On Saturday, insurgents believed to be Sunnis besieged a Shiite political party`s headquarters in Baqubah, about 30 miles north of Baghdad, killing three workers. Last week, six Shiite truck drivers were killed in the Sunni town of Fallouja after taking shelter in a police station. Last weekend, Kurds captured a handful of Sunni Arabs near Kirkuk after Arab attacks on Kurds. In recent days, Shiite factions faced off in southern Iraq for control of mosques and cities.

Iraqis and their American partners still face daunting hurdles in restoring public safety. Many of the Iraqis who once welcomed Americans as liberators now disdain them as occupiers. Yet the 163,000 U.S. and allied troops now in the country have no timetable for leaving. Quite the contrary: Over the coming year, their numbers are likely to grow.

For Americans, the price of occupation has already been far higher than the White House imagined — in dollars, loss of life and erosion of U.S. credibility in the world. Before the invasion, the Bush administration predicted the new Iraq would be a self-governing, self-financing country that, with a little help, would quickly become a stable, prosperous and reliable ally. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said it was "hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself." Under the Pentagon`s initial timetable, most U.S. troops were supposed to be home by now.

But the administration`s expectations turned out to be based on bad intelligence and wishful thinking. Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, deliberately sent the minimum number of troops necessary to Iraq, with little provision for unpleasant surprises. Bush and his aides, who disdained "nation-building," did little to plan for what has become their principal foreign policy problem.

As a result, the administration was unprepared when the reality of Iraq fell short of its ideal. After the invasion, Baghdad`s police force and civil service disappeared overnight. Looters destroyed the government offices to which U.S. advisors had been told to report. The economy, the oil industry and public utilities were not self-starting. An underground insurgency launched by what occupation authorities called "former regime loyalists" grew, and Shiite radicals and Sunni nationalists began their own military efforts, the latter with assistance from foreign fighters.

U.S. fighting units designed and equipped for war against Hussein`s conventional army attempted to retool to battle guerrillas. The results, predictably, were mixed. American soldiers with no experience in the Arab world and no facility with its language found themselves kicking in the doors of terrified villagers.

Some Bush administration officials acknowledge that many of their initial expectations turned out to be wrong. "Of all the things that were underestimated, the one that almost no one that I know of predicted … [was] the resilience of the regime that had abused this country for 35 years," Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month.

As a result, the United States is likely to remain deeply engaged in Iraq, with many thousands of troops on the ground and billions of dollars in spending, for years to come. The cost thus far — the lives of 850 American troops and perhaps $120 billion — is certain to rise.

It is far from clear that this commitment will win the prizes the administration sought: a real democracy in Iraq, a stable U.S. ally in the Arab world, a vital political and military base for a larger war against terrorism.

Instead, the question now is whether the United States and its Iraqi allies can succeed in staving off a far worse outcome: a bloody, dispirited Iraq, riven by civil strife, hostile to Americans — and, in a worst-case scenario, hospitable to terrorists.

*

From Liberators to Occupiers

On a hot day last summer in Baqubah, three American soldiers were guarding the city`s largest hospital. They sat in front of the main entrance playing cards. As one of the soldiers dealt a hand, a grenade fell among them and exploded. All three were torn to shreds. The grenade was dropped from one of the hospital`s upper floors.

The incident was shocking at the time, since there seemed to be no point to killing soldiers protecting a hospital. Now it looks like a symbol of what was beginning to go wrong for American hopes: The liberators were becoming occupiers.

Now, many months later, even being remotely associated with Americans brings danger. "The situation scares me," confessed Hachim Hassani, minister of industry in the new interim government. "I cannot go walking around protected by U.S. soldiers; that would not be a good idea in this country. I have to protect myself with guards, but they are not well-trained — and the people carrying out these bombings are well-trained."

When it comes to large-scale firepower, the U.S. has won every battle it has joined. But military officers say quelling a grassroots insurgency also requires training local security forces, amassing intelligence and winning hearts and minds in the civilian population.

"It`s not that we don`t know what to do," said Bruce Hoffman, a RAND Corp. military expert who served in Baghdad as an advisor to the occupation authority. "There are no original answers here. We need more [U.S.] troops. We need to train more indigenous forces. We need to secure the borders."

A basic rule of fighting an insurgency, he added, is to avoid heavy-handed tactics such as wide-scale searches of homes that alienate civilians who are on the fence about the foreign military presence. U.S. units have often broken that rule in Iraq, he said, convincing many Iraqi nationalists to support the insurgency.

"This is where we`re losing the counterinsurgency," Hoffman said. "We`ve alienated them. This was the silent majority, if you will."

Over the last year, U.S. commanders have sought to apply those lessons. But much time has been lost, military officers acknowledge. The question now is whether the new Iraqi government and its fledgling security forces can stop more of the bombings and assassinations.

*

Filling the Security Vacuum

American plans for new Iraqi security forces are nothing if not ambitious: an army of 35,000, including elite commando units and a national task force devoted to the counterinsurgency effort; a police force of 90,000, all trained in humane methods of law enforcement and equipped with modern weapons and body armor; a national guard, border patrol and security guards for buildings, oil pipelines and electricity facilities to reach a total of more than 260,000.

But training and equipment have come slowly. Fewer than a third of Iraqi policemen have completed even minimal training. Most still don`t have body armor, radios or vehicles. The projected army now stands at about 7,000.

Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. officer in charge of police training, said it will be months before the new Iraqi security forces are capable of shouldering most of the burden. "On 1 July, you`re not going to see a switch flipped that will transition from coalition to Iraqi security forces," he told a congressional committee this month.

One problem, paradoxically, is that Iraq has too many police officers, because occupation authorities hired thousands of recruits pell-mell. Petraeus said he plans a buyout to trim one-quarter of the police force, mainly senior holdovers from the Hussein era.

"We`re keenly aware that it`s quality, not quantity, when it comes to police," he said.

More important, though, has been the failure of the occupation authority to provide weapons and equipment for the new forces — a problem that has caused tension between military officers and civilian bureaucrats. Several U.S. military officers described the delays as maddening and inexplicable.

Maj. Basel Abdul Aziz, who helps direct four Iraqi police stations in central Baghdad, said the American military promised him radios, flak jackets and vehicles for each station five months ago.

"At first they brought us 10 flak jackets, good ones, so we gave three to each station, then they brought us only the used ones," he said.

He held up a battered bulletproof vest — a hand-me-down from the U.S. military — and shook his head. "Feel it," he said with a smile. "It doesn`t have a plate in it; we experimented with them. We took them out in our courtyard and shot it, and the bullets went right through."

Just last month, Iraqi security officers ordered to Najaf to help rout rebel cleric Muqtada Sadr`s Al Mahdi army refused to work because they had no bulletproof vests, were given nowhere to stay and had food they viewed as inedible.

Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in the so-called Sunni Triangle for seven months, blamed the equipment logjam on the civilian bureaucracy of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. "It was being treated as `ho hum,` " he said. CPA officials denied treating the issue as unimportant, but acknowledged that funding had moved too slowly.

In any case, Petraeus said, the program is now being run by the U.S. Army.

"The equipment is flowing. It`s not flowing fast enough yet, but it is starting to come in," he said.

He said the Iraqi National Guard should soon receive its full complement of "vehicles, body armor, uniforms, radios, weapons, ammunition, night vision and binoculars."

Training every new member of the security forces will take longer — well into 2005 at the current pace, and possibly beyond, officials estimated. Petraeus said his goal is to get "as many capable Iraqi security forces as we can" by the January target for Iraq`s first national election.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops will continue patrolling Iraq`s cities and launching sweeps and searches against suspected insurgents — operations that, almost inevitably, make it difficult to win the hearts and minds of civilians in their paths.

When U.S. Marines responded to the killing and mutilation of four American contractors in the Sunni city of Fallouja by mounting a siege, many Iraqis who had merely tolerated the insurgents began to openly support them. A 13-year-old girl from Fallouja looked puzzled when asked whether she was afraid when the insurgents came to her house. She said they were "polite," a word no Iraqi uses to describe the American military. An elderly aunt sitting nearby said, "These are our sons, our brothers, our cousins."

Jawad Romi Lab Dainy, 61, a former officer in the Iraqi army, described his distress when American soldiers kicked open his front door and began flinging open cupboards, medicine chests and wardrobes. "We had some locked closets and I said, `I will open them for you — here, I have the keys,` but they would not listen," said Dainy, who was arrested, held for five months and released without charges.

"I was at a checkpoint [in April], and they were searching women," said Hassani, the newly appointed Cabinet minister. "Why are they doing that?" she said to her companion. "I`m sure they don`t understand how much this incites people. And then I went and introduced myself to this [American] officer, and he was very cooperative. And that minute, he told them to stop it. But that tells you how things get worse — because the soldiers don`t understand."

This cultural tone-deafness has caused the U.S. military unnecessary setbacks, some officers believe. "You have to be very surgical and precise in your application of lethal force … so you don`t alienate 99% [of the population] in trying to take down 1%," said Swannack, who battled insurgents in Fallouja.

"In my view, we are winning tactically and losing strategically," he said.

*

Winning Over the People

Battles for hearts and minds are waged not only with military force, but with good government and skilled salesmanship. But there, too, the occupation authority has struggled.

After a transitional constitution was hammered out by the coalition-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in March — one of the occupation authority`s high points — a strategic communications plan was supposed to kick in, said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford`s Hoover Institution who served as a political advisor to L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator who heads the CPA.

"We hired a very expensive advertising company based in Britain — very good at what they do — to do television ads selling the [constitution] once it was adopted. These ads began in a very moving way, with the lullaby the young child sang at the [signing] ceremony on March 8. It`s a song all Iraqis know, Kurds and Sunnis and Shias alike.

"The television ads were due out maybe in early April. There was a campaign for leaflets to be produced. It was going to be beautifully orchestrated….

"Meanwhile, within a few days of the signing, crude leaflets came out all over the country denouncing the [constitution] on a number of key points," he said. "They charged that the Iraqi people didn`t have involvement in the process, that it was a sellout to the Kurds…. They got there first, with a leaflet that they probably turned out on Xerox machines, and our elaborate multimillion-dollar stratcom campaign was simply preempted.

"And that`s a metaphor for the failure of stratcom. They weren`t close to the people. They weren`t adept. They couldn`t move quickly."

That wasn`t the only failure to communicate. The occupation authority`s most ambitious outreach effort, its creation of a new Iraqi television network, has been, in the words of a senior official in Washington, "a debacle."

The CPA signed an initial $30-million contract with SAIC, a major defense contractor with no media experience. "SAIC put a lot of money into terrestrial towers for [traditional] broadcasting … when Iraqis were busy buying satellite dishes," said Charles A. Krohn, a former Army public affairs officer who worked in the occupation last year. (SAIC gave up the contract last fall.)

"The crime is that we fooled ourselves into thinking we were communicating our most vital messages to the Iraqi public, when in fact people were watching [independent satellite channels] Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya instead" — and getting an anti-occupation message.

Such failures are laid at the doorstep of the CPA, which came with several built-in bureaucratic problems. It faced a mission for which few U.S. officials had training. "There was no relevant experience anywhere," Bremer said. "We haven`t done this in 50 years — gone in and tried to rebuild a country like this."

To make matters worse, some U.S. officials who had relevant experience — State Department officers who had worked in places like Somalia and Haiti — said they were initially locked out by a hostile Pentagon, which didn`t trust their views.

Instead, the CPA was staffed by a wide variety of volunteers — State Department officials, members of other federal agencies, congressional aides, business executives and academics — who sometimes came with more enthusiasm than expertise. Many signed up for stints that lasted only 90 days, barely long enough to begin understanding Iraq`s complexities. The three-month policy was changed when Bremer arrived. Subsequently, people had to serve six-month terms.

Some were Republicans devoted to Bush`s vision of a free-market democracy in Iraq as a beachhead for reform in the Arab world. They included Scott Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.); Dan Senor, a former aide to then-Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.); Williamson Evers, a Hoover Institution education expert who was an advisor to the 2000 Bush presidential campaign; and Jay Hallen, a 24-year-old Yale graduate who applied for a job at the White House and instead landed the assignment of reopening the Baghdad Stock Exchange. (It hasn`t reopened yet.)

To be sure, there were Democrats in the CPA as well, including Walter Slocombe, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration (he once called himself, jokingly, a "former regime loyalist"), and Noah Feldman, who did legal work for Al Gore`s presidential campaign in 2000.

It was only natural that most civilians who volunteered for service in Baghdad were committed to Bush`s vision. But the administration made that commitment an explicit part of its hiring policy. A senior State Department aide said the Pentagon recently urged that "passion" be a requirement for any foreign service officer who gets a job in the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Bremer also had to contend with frequent intervention and advice from higher-ups in Washington. His controversial early decrees to disband the Iraqi army and ban most former Baath Party members from government jobs, for example, carried out orders from Rumsfeld. Bremer agreed with both policies, but eventually found that he had to soften them.

What Iraqis noticed about Bremer`s inner circle was its startling youthfulness, significant in a traditional, hierarchical society in which older people rarely take orders from anyone younger.

"Bremer is a first-class politician," said Hassani, the minister of industry. "But he can`t do it alone, and he doesn`t have too many smart people around him. But Iraq right now needs high-caliber people — experienced people."

Many Iraqis expected the United States to fix their country`s sagging infrastructure in a matter of weeks after last year`s invasion. After all, the U.S. military needed only 21 days to bring down the Hussein regime. American officials made plenty of promises, beginning with a vow to restore Iraq`s prewar level of electricity by June 2003. But the job turned out to be more difficult than the Americans expected, and the promises went unfulfilled.

The result was disillusionment. "Their perception was that we were so capable and so brilliant … and now the lights were not on," a former Bremer aide said. "I had [Iraqi] people say … `You`ve got all the money in the world, why can`t you fix this? We expected more from you.` "

There were several reasons for the holdups. Iraq`s infrastructure was more decrepit than American planners had expected. The first U.S. contractors arrived with instructions to begin building a state-of-the-art electrical generating system that would be ready in two years, not to make quick fixes to the hodgepodge of equipment in place. Occupation authorities quickly switched gears.

"We scrounged some generators and said, `To hell with efficiency, let`s get some generators up,` " Slocombe recalled. But by then, anti-American insurgents had begun shooting at repair crews and sabotaging power lines. The equipment to repair power plants had to come to Baghdad by land, a dangerous nine-hour journey from Kuwait, five hours from Jordan.

By this April, security was so lacking that contractors pulled out in droves, including some of those working on key electrical facilities. The Doura power plant, which helped supply Baghdad, was all but abandoned by foreign technicians. By the end of April, most workers for Siemens, the giant German engineering firm, left. So did technicians for General Electric. By the end of May, the last Russian power contractor pulled out as well.

The newly free economy only made the problem worse. Iraqis were buying more air conditioners and other appliances, straining the system further. The CPA made the decision to distribute electricity equitably around the country, reversing Saddam`s policy of supplying plenty of power to Baghdad at the expense of the provinces. That made life in rural areas easier but didn`t improve moods in the capital.

American officials compounded the problem by making frequent announcements that progress was being made, despite the evidence Iraqis saw in their daily lives. Last October, Bremer announced that the goal of restoring prewar electricity levels had been reached, only to see production slip because of mechanical breakdowns and sabotage. The CPA said the goal was finally reached this month — nationwide, but not in Baghdad.

*

Sectarian Rifts Widen

When the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani demanded late last year that elections be held to choose an interim government, large numbers of Iraqis applauded — at first. But soon Sunni Muslims became suspicious, fearing that the goal was to use the large Shiite population to gain political control.

"We can say frankly that these elections proposed by Sistani are only for the benefit of Sistani and his followers," said Sheik Mohammed Bashar Faidi, spokesman for the Board of Clergy and Scholars, one of the leading Sunni organizations in Iraq.

"First he showed flexibility, but then it turned out there is no flexibility," he said.

Such signs of strife between Iraq`s religious and ethnic groups are still relatively minor, especially when compared to the widespread and devastating attacks on Iraqi security forces, civilians and foreigners. Iraqis often insist they will not succumb to fitna, the Arabic word for sectarian hatreds.

But ancient animosities are rising.

Barely beneath the surface is a bitter fight over which group can claim more people. For the most part, political power has been allocated — in both the interim Governing Council, which was recently dissolved, and the newly appointed Iraqi government — according to each group`s share of the population.

"The general belief of all Sunni people is that we`re the majority if the Kurds are counted as Sunnis," Faidi said.

Shiites, however, routinely claim they are 60% or 65% of the population. Kurds insist they are 25%. The demographic debate is reminiscent of Lebanon, where Christians, Sunnis and Shiites have argued for decades about which group is the largest.

Ghazi Ajil Yawer, the new interim president of the country, sees an increasing tendency for people to identify with their ethnic or sectarian group.

"No one speaks about being Iraqi anymore," he lamented in an interview with The Times shortly before being named president this month.

"If you look at the Governing Council, all of us were retreating to our corners more than before. Somebody is trying to manipulate the sectarian issues."

Last week, Shiite political parties and religious organizations formed a council to represent their views, prompted by fears that Shiites may not get their fair share of influence in the new government, according to some prominent Shiites.

In May, the U.S. National Security Council`s Robert Blackwill, the United Nation`s Lakhdar Brahimi and Bremer met over and over as they tried to glue together a government that satisfied the ethnic and sectarian factions. They managed, but barely, and now the question is whether the new ministers and their affiliated groups can trust one another enough to push a united agenda.

The price of failure is apparent. Armed militias in Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish territories have routinely set up checkpoints and occasionally imposed their own order. Some attacks have occurred. The fear is that once armed activity starts, it cannot be contained. The experience of Lebanon, where Beirut fractured into neighborhoods rife with armed groups allied with political and sectarian factions, could be writ large in Iraq.

A former senior CPA official said civil strife "was one of the demons in the box" let out when Hussein was ousted. "That`s precisely the thing we worry about. For instance, really conservative Sunnis think Shiites are apostates," the official said.

An American diplomat with long experience in the Arab world described three possible scenarios for Iraq in the years to come. One, he said, is dictatorship. Another is civil war. A third is a new government too weak to protect itself that depends on U.S. and allied forces to survive.

The scenario U.S. officials hope for — the slow creation of a recognizable democracy — looks increasingly unlikely, he said.

The new government`s officials "are either going to strike deals with [Hussein-era] commanders and units and people to be able to bring about some order or … the alternative movement is in the direction of civil war," the diplomat said.

He and others say that although it is risky to bring in former military leaders "because generals with militaries can topple governments … that`s one road toward some stability."

*

New Government`s Opportunity

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 expecting to take temporary custody of a modern state and a civil society that, with a little American advice and economic help, could quickly become a model for the Arab world.

Although that expectation was mistaken, a problem like Iraq stems from many causes. If Pentagon planners had anticipated the collapse of Iraq`s police forces and other basic services; if they had sent enough military police to stop the looting; if U.S. intelligence agencies had realized that Baath Party loyalists would melt away, regroup underground and launch an insurrection; if Bremer had not dismantled the Iraqi military and barred Baathists from the government so abruptly — postwar Iraq still would have been no easy ride.

After July 1, Iraq will be under new management, both Iraqi and American. They do not have the luxury of a fresh start, but they can at least attempt a fresh approach.

"What I`ve been telling everybody is, once these folks are … in charge of the country, then the disorder that is taking place in the country is no longer directed toward us," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview. "Even though our soldiers may be getting hurt, it`s directed toward this new Iraqi government. So what do they want? A Hussein Iraqi government instead of this Iraqi government?

"That alone — just having their own leaders, political leaders, in charge of them — should boost their capability in the security field," Powell said.

"Iraq is today a much better place than it was 15 months ago," Bremer said.

"And they`re on a path now which gets them to a still better place, when they have a representative government and a decent economy."

Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister who will be the public face of the new government — and has already been the target of assassination threats — is more sober about what he will inherit.

"I can tell it will be more dangerous" in the first months after June 30, he said. "All the indicators show the graph is going up. I think it will be difficult to bring it under control."

As for his government`s principal goal, holding elections in early 2005, he said: "I really don`t know. I think it will be difficult."

Iraqis and Americans once hoped that the return of Iraq`s sovereignty would be a celebration of the country`s recovery from tyranny and war. Instead, it is opening another uncertain chapter in a long saga.

*

Rubin reported from Baghdad and McManus from Washington. Times staff writers Mary Curtius and Paul Richter in Washington also contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL
The Disaster of Failed Policy

June 27, 2004

In its scale and intent, President Bush`s war against Iraq was something new and radical: a premeditated decision to invade, occupy and topple the government of a country that was no imminent threat to the United States. This was not a handful of GIs sent to overthrow Panamanian thug Manuel Noriega or to oust a new Marxist government in tiny Grenada. It was the dispatch of more than 100,000 U.S. troops to implement Bush`s post-Sept. 11 doctrine of preemption, one whose dangers President John Quincy Adams understood when he said the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."

In the case of Vietnam, the U.S. began by assisting a friendly government resisting communist takeover in a civil war, though the conflict disintegrated into a failure that still haunts this country. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, under Bush`s father, was a successful response to Iraq`s invasion and occupation of Kuwait — and Bush`s father deliberately stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.

The current president outlined a far more aggressive policy in a speech to the West Point graduating class in 2002, declaring that in the war on terror "we must take the battle to the enemy" and confront threats before they emerge. The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly.

The planned transfer Wednesday of limited sovereignty from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government occurs with U.S. influence around the world at a low point and insurgent violence in Iraq reaching new heights of deadliness and coordination. Important Arab leaders this month rejected a U.S. invitation to attend a summit with leaders of industrialized nations. The enmity between Israelis and Palestinians is fiercer than ever, their hope for peace dimmer. Residents of the Middle East see the U.S. not as a friend but as an imperial power bent on securing a guaranteed oil supply and a base for U.S. forces. Much of the rest of the world sees a bully.

The War`s False Premises

All the main justifications for the invasion offered beforehand by the Bush administration and its supporters — weapons of mass destruction, close ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, a chance to make Baghdad a fountain of democracy that would spread through the region — turned out to be baseless.

Weeks of suicide car bombings, assassinations of political leaders and attacks on oil pipelines vital to the country`s economy have preceded the handover.

On Thursday alone, car bombs and street fighting in five cities claimed more than 100 lives. Iraqis no longer fear torture or death at the hands of Hussein`s brutal thugs, but many fear leaving their homes because of the violence.

The U.S. is also poorer after the war, in lives lost, billions spent and terrorists given new fuel for their rage. The initial fighting was easy; the occupation has been a disaster, with Pentagon civilians arrogantly ignoring expert advice on the difficulty of the task and necessary steps for success.

Two iconic pictures from Iraq balance the good and the dreadful — the toppling of Hussein`s statue and a prisoner crawling on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison with a leash around his neck. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to a hero`s welcome and a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."

A year later, more than 90% of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country. The president boasted in July that if Iraqi resistance fighters thought they could attack U.S. forces, "bring them on." Since then, more than 400 personnel have been killed by hostile fire.

Iraqis hope, with little evidence, that the transfer of limited sovereignty to an interim government will slow attacks on police, soldiers and civilians. Another goal, democracy, is fading. The first concern remains what it should have been after the rout of Hussein`s army: security. The new Iraqi leaders are considering martial law, an understandable response with suicide bombings recently averaging about one a day but a move they could hardly enforce with an army far from rebuilt.

The new government also faces the difficulty of keeping the country together. In the north, the Kurds, an ethnically separate minority community that had been persecuted by Hussein, want at least to maintain the autonomy they`ve had for a decade. The Sunnis and Shiites distrust each other. Within the Shiite community, to which the majority of Iraqis belong, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the violent Muqtada Sadr are opponents. Sadr was a relatively minor figure until occupation officials shut his party`s newspaper in March and arrested one of his aides, setting off large protests and attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. carries its own unwelcome legacies from the occupation:

• Troops are spending more time in Iraq than planned because about one-quarter of the Army is there at any one time. National Guard and Army Reserve forces are being kept on active duty longer than expected, creating problems at home, where the soldiers` jobs go unfilled and families go without parents in the home.

• The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has raised questions about the administration`s willingness to ignore Geneva Convention requirements on treatment of prisoners. Investigations of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay must aim at finding out which high-ranking officers approved of the abuse or should have known of it. The U.S. also must decide what to do with prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention requires they be released when the occupation ends unless they have been formally charged with a crime. The International Committee of the Red Cross says fewer than 50 prisoners have been granted POW status. Thousands more detained as possible security threats also should be released or charged.

• The use of private contractors for military jobs once done by soldiers also demands closer examination. Civilians have long been employed to feed troops and wash uniforms, but the prevalence of ex-GIs interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison raises harsh new questions. For instance, what, if any, charges could be brought against them if they were found complicit in mistreatment?

Investigate the Contracts

The administration also put private U.S. contractors in charge of rebuilding Iraq. Congress needs to take a much closer look at what they do and how they bill the government.

Halliburton is the best-known case, having won secret no-bid contracts to rebuild the country. A Pentagon audit found "significant" overcharges by the company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney; Halliburton denies the allegations.

Iraqis say they want the Americans out, but most understand they will need the foreign forces for many more months. A U.S. troop presence in Iraq should not be indefinite, even if the Iraqis request it. By the end of 2005, Iraq should have enough trained police, soldiers, border guards and other forces to be able to defend the country and put down insurgencies but not threaten neighboring countries.

The Bush administration should push NATO nations to help with the training. Once the Iraqis have a new constitution, an elected government and sufficient security forces, the U.S. should withdraw its troops. That does not mean setting a definite date, because the U.S. cannot walk away from what it created. But it should set realistic goals for Iraq to reach on its own, at which time the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad becomes just another diplomatic outpost. It also means living up to promises to let Iraq choose its own government, even well short of democracy.

France, Germany and others that opposed the war seem to understand that letting Iraq become a failed state, an Afghanistan writ large, threatens them as well as the U.S. and the Middle East. But other nations will do little to help with reconstruction if Iraq remains a thinly disguised fiefdom where U.S. companies get billion-dollar contracts and other countries are shut out.

A Litany of Costly Errors

The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation`s unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm`s length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.

It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world`s most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans` memory banks.

Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Sunday, June 27, 2004
War News for June 27, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Forty Iraqis killed, 22 wounded by two car bombs in Hilla.

Bring ‘em on: Two ICDC members, one Iraqi policeman killed in ambushes near Mahmoudiyah.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline bombed near Latifiyah.

Bring ‘em on: Explosions, smoke, reported in Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents threaten three Turks with beheading.

Bring ‘em on: Coalition patrol ambushed near Hindiyah.

Elections. “Premier Iyad Allawi said the January 2005 elections may be delayed by two months if attacks continue and threaten the political process.”

State of emergency. Some form of martial law looks increasingly likely in at least parts of Iraq after its caretaker government takes power on June 30. The country has remained dangerously unstable since the US-led invasion last year.

Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer hands over “sovereignty.” “Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq`s interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country`s democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support. The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi`s choices on the elected government that is to take over next year.”

L. Paul Bremer packs up his extensive wardrobe. “Adel Abdel Mahdi, Iraq`s new finance minister, served on the Iraqi Governing Council as a representative of an Islamic party with a reputation for working well the United States. Bremer, he said, was surrounded by a cadre of political advisers and Iraqi exiles who often shielded him from the reality of problems like cleric Moqtada al-Sadr`s following or the likely public fallout of an offensive against insurgents in Fallujah. ‘Who do you think he listens to?’ he said ‘He took a lot of bad advice.’” Bad advice? What do you expect when you staff an organization with refugees from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute? Bremer is a posturing fool who could fuck up a wet dream. He’s the man who put the FU in FUBAR.

Winning tactically and losing strategically. “To make matters worse, some U.S. officials who had relevant experience — State Department officers who had worked in places like Somalia and Haiti — said they were initially locked out by a hostile Pentagon, which didn`t trust their views. Instead, the CPA was staffed by a wide variety of volunteers — State Department officials, members of other federal agencies, congressional aides, business executives and academics — who sometimes came with more enthusiasm than expertise. Many signed up for stints that lasted only 90 days, barely long enough to begin understanding Iraq`s complexities. The three-month policy was changed when Bremer arrived. Subsequently, people had to serve six-month terms. Some were Republicans devoted to Bush`s vision of a free-market democracy in Iraq as a beachhead for reform in the Arab world. They included Scott Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.); Dan Senor, a former aide to then-Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.); Williamson Evers, a Hoover Institution education expert who was an advisor to the 2000 Bush presidential campaign; and Jay Hallen, a 24-year-old Yale graduate who applied for a job at the White House and instead landed the assignment of reopening the Baghdad Stock Exchange. (It hasn`t reopened yet.)”

Salvadoran troops evacuate Najaf.

1st Armored Division prepares to depart Iraq (again). “Their time here has left many soldiers, from veteran tank drivers to young company commanders, with a confused picture of the Iraqis who never took up arms against them. Many share tales of intimate kindnesses by individual Iraqis. But they also acknowledge that the tactics they used against an elusive insurgency, while killing many enemy fighters, created new adversaries among civilians caught in the crossfire.”

Commentary

Analysis: “The insurgents have no intention of laying down their arms. Indeed, the nature of the insurgency in Iraq is fundamentally changing. Time reported last fall that the insurgency was being led by members of the former Baathist regime, who were using guerrilla tactics in an effort to drive out foreign occupiers and reclaim power. But a Time investigation of the insurgency today—based on meetings with insurgents, tribal leaders, religious clerics and U.S. intelligence officials—reveals that the militants are turning the resistance into an international jihadist movement. Foreign fighters, once estranged from homegrown guerrilla groups, are now integrated as cells or complete units with Iraqis. Many of Saddam`s former secret police and Republican Guard officers, who two years ago were drinking and whoring, no longer dare even smoke cigarettes. They are fighting for Allah, they say, and true jihadis reject such earthly indulgences.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Louisiana soldier killed in Iraq.


Off Topic

From the Fuckin` Honor and Dignity department. “’These things happen from time to time,’ said White House spokesman Scott McClellan when asked what Bush`s reaction to Cheney`s remark had been. ‘You`re talking about one incident involving a private exchange,’ McClellan told reporters traveling with Bush on a trip to Ireland and Turkey. ‘It`s not an issue with the president. The president is looking ahead.’”



86-43-04. Pass it on.



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Where Children Laugh at Bombs
by Dahr Jamail | Posted June 25, 2004 at 01:44 PM Baghdad time

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How much worse does it need to get here before the occupiers consider changing their policy? One hundred dead every day? In light of what happened here yesterday, it appears as though we’re heading in that direction. For those of you who think June 30th will signify a decrease in the number and magnitude of attacks against the occupation forces after the “transfer of sovereignty” -- think again.

After having coffee and listening to the Coalition Provisional Authority`s "Green Zone" receive its morning mortars, I was out the door to get some things done, as my time here is drawing to a close. After over 11 weeks back in Iraq, I’ve never been as exhausted as I am now.

Baghdad seems ever closer to lockdown today. I took a cab over to the Palestine Hotel -- a small “Green Zone” where so many corporate journalists and mercenaries live behind suicide walls, razor wire, and soft checkpoints. It closely resembles another mini-“green zone” over at the Al-Hamra and Al-Dulaymi hotels, where journalists and mercenaries are hunkered down behind concrete suicide barriers and checkpoints.

En route to the Palestine to run an errand, there were Iraqi Police and Iraq Civil Defense Corps on nearly every street corner. My cabbie pointed to them and laughed while shaking his head. “La, la Amerikia,” he says (No, no America). The absurdity of it all increases daily -- so many of the ICDC wear face masks. Not that I blame them, for if their identities were known by the mujahideen, they and/or their families would be dead. Not a good time to have any affiliation with the occupiers -- consider yesterday`s attacks as a case in point.

There certainly weren’t any inside Baquba yesterday, where I was faced with another great irony. During all of my five months in Iraq from my two trips here, the only two times I’ve been shot at have both been by US troops. Yesterday was yet another example of this, when our car was shot at five times by troops in a Bradley which sat in a nearby palm field as we passed.

Warning shots, for sure, or I wouldn’t be typing this right now. But the adrenaline flows about the same when bullets are whizzing near the car. This occurred while we watched two Apaches engaged in strafing part of the city, bobbing above the date palms in dive bomb-like flight patterns, then swooping back out of sight as they trailed smoke behind their blazing guns.

The city was a ghost town. Inside it reminded me of Fallujah when I was there in April. The main roads sealed by the military, and the constant buzzing of unmanned military drones telling the residents that more air strikes were simply a matter of time. Just like Fallujah.

All the shops were closed, bits of plastic bags and garbage were blown about on the streets by a dry, hot wind. Torn Iraqi flags fluttered in the winds, dogs running here and there.

We had lunch in Baquba with a Sheikh I have become friends with. Just before lunch, several loud bombs exploded nearby. My friend Christian Parenti and I looked at each other with wide eyes while the Sheikh, his brother, Abu Talat, and an older man with us who is a Haji began to laugh. “This is normal, even my children laugh at the bombs now,” said the Sheikh.

In the next room the children were laughing excitedly.

The Sheikh remained calm throughout the blasts. He smiled and told me: “God will take us when it is time. People are killed in their homes by warplanes, yes. But people in the middle of fighting remain unharmed. It is up to God. We are a people of faith.”

While these people were in no way connected to the resistance, their anger towards the occupiers seemed to fuel their acceptance of the mujahideen in their city.

“The mujahideen are fighting for their country against the Americans,” said the Haji. “This resistance is acceptable to us.”

His opinion is reflective of those held by more and more Iraqis I talk with nowadays.

When we were exiting the embattled city, we drove slowly past a bullet-riddled car on the median of the main road. It appeared as though the car was trying to turn around. The drivers’ body lay in the middle of the road, feet the only parts uncovered by a black mourning flag draped over his corpse.

Fifty meters further down the road there were patches of pavement mangled by tank tracks. Near these sat a large pile of empty machine gun shells, glistening gold in the hot sun.

The scene had all the classic signs of an Iraqi seeing a checkpoint and attempting to turn around quickly... which appears to have led to yet another indiscriminate killing of a civilian.

A bit shaken by this, we continued on and saw several Humvees and soldiers blocking our exit further down the road. We pulled the car over, and while Abu Talat waited, Christian and I walked the quarter mile towards the soldiers.

“We are unarmed journalists,” we took turns yelling while holding our press credentials in the air. “Please do not shoot! We just want to leave the city!”

The walk felt like it took 4 hours... halfway there I noted three soldiers who knelt down and kept us in the sights of their guns. I looked behind us to see a string of cars in a wedding party approaching. The timing could not have been worse.

I walked towards the side of the road, but Christian wisely suggested we stay in the middle and keep walking. Our pace quickened, our shouts grew louder and thankfully the wedding party turned around.

Needless to say, the soldiers are a little touchy about cars that approach them these days, as Iraq has averaged more than a suicide car bomb per day this month.

The soldiers understood our situation when we approached them and asked to be allowed to leave. Christian went back to get Abu Talat and bring the car up.

I spoke with a Sergeant, and said, “After seeing that bullet riddled car and the corpse back there, we thought it’d be better to approach you guys on foot.” He told me that the car had rammed a tank, so they had to shoot it. “Crazy mother-fucker, that guy was,” he added.

Since I recalled that, aside from being completely riddled with bullets, the car was intact -- particularly the front end of it -- I kept my mouth shut.

Two photographers were there with the soldiers. They were very scared, and one of them asked me, “Did you see any bad guys in there?”

I said, “I did not see any mujahideen inside the city.”

I wondered why they, like so many other journalists here, won’t venture out amongst Iraqis to report on how the occupation is affecting them. Of course it’s dangerous, but then, why else are we here?
Ask Dahr: 7 Questions and Answers with Dahr Jamail
by Brian Dominick | Posted June 24, 2004 at 08:07 AM Baghdad time

The other night, I sent Dahr Jamail a batch of seven questions, culled from the first several dozen emails his readers sent in response to my recent appeal for letters. I sent the originals along as well. Dahr is reading them all and doing his best to reply to those which requested a response.

Here is the first set of questions and answers...

Q: It seems obvious that at least some of the "mujahideen" are causing as much damage to Iraq as they are to the occupiers; maybe more. I desperately want to be able to support some group or movement in Iraq. Am I missing something, or is no one -- including the resistance -- worth rooting for?

Referring to the mujahideen as one group is a misnomer. They are comprised of numerous factions, many of which loathe one another. Their bombs (IEDs) continue to kill Iraqi civilians on a regular basis... yet, overall, they are responsible for far fewer civilian deaths than the US military, which has killed at the very least 10,000, including the invasion and occupation.

If you want to support a group in Iraq, I suggest the Red Crescent Society or Doctors without Borders -- they both do very good work here for the Iraqi people. I suggest avoiding any group affiliated with the occupation (CPA). Any funding or supplies you donate will only be guaranteed to reach Iraqis directly and timely if you go through the aforementioned aid agencies. In addition, that way you would help keep the corruption here (which is rampant) to a minimum.


Q: Is there much bribery or black market trade in day-to-day life; and if so, how is it affecting people? Has it increased or decreased since Saddam Hussein left power?

Bribery has decreased since Saddam has been removed because there is less paperwork and bureaucratic interference for people needing help, and needing paperwork for identification. However, this is on the rise again as the US has encouraged the Ministries to build effective walls inhibiting access to various officials.

As far the black market, it is alive and well. This has increased very much. And without it, people would suffer even more. For instance, many medications are only available on the black market. Oftentimes, patients at hospitals are asked by doctors to go get the medications/supplies they need from the black market in order to get proper care, for the hospitals are unable to obtain what they need from the Ministry of Health.

Also, if it weren`t for black market fuel, those who can afford to purchase it would be forced to wait 4-6 hours in petrol lines.


Q: How are Iraqis reacting to the recent U.S. missile strike in Fallujah? Was there a noticable surge in anger, or has the violence become so constant that it`s anger is jus always high, always at a peak?

Most are enraged. There has been an extremely noticeable surge in anger, on top of the already high level of violence here. Most Iraqis do not believe that Zarqawi or his group are in Fallujah, and believe the strike was retribution for the people of Fallujah effectively ejecting the US military from the city in April/May. Most Iraqis I`ve spoken with about it believe it is yet another war crime committed by the occupiers.


Q: My question regards your ability to witness such suffering and death and yet maintain psychological balance. I am certain I would be unable to tolerate for 12 hours the conditions you witness and experiences for months on end. How do you manage?

Honestly, I have allowed myself to become a workaholic. Intentionally not giving myself too much time to think about the atrocities and suffering, because any time I do I find myself getting very depressed, very fast. However, I do take time to read books, and laughing at the insanity of it all with other westerners at my hotel helps to decompress. It is inescapable here though... for even holing up in the hotel for a rest day I hear the bombs and gunfire, and friends call with bad news on a regular basis.


Q: Your work is a lifeline for many of us, but I cannot understand how someone comes to the conclusion that providing information to others is worth the risks it seems you take, which seem far greater than those being taken by most other journalists. Why are you willing to put your life on the line doing the reporting that you are doing?

Thank you for the kudos. The risks I take are nothing more than those Iraqis face in going about their daily lives. I believe that witnessing and documenting the horrendous nature of this brutal occupation is necessary. I believe the reason the US and British governments are getting away with war crimes and the looting of Iraq is due to the lack of information being provided to people back in those countries. I believe if most people came here and witnessed what I have, they would do the same thing.


Q: I am desperate to believe that the Iraqis do not hate us, Americans, as people. Do the Iraqi people know that there is a huge percentage of Americans who oppose the war, and always did? Do they know that many of us work tirelessly to end the occupation and the ravaging of their country?

Most Iraqis I speak with are quick to differentiate between the US government and the citizens of the US. I make it a point to tell Iraqis, those who do express anti-American sentiment, that there are millions of Americans who opposed the invasion, and oppose the occupation, and are working very hard to help this situation.

Most Iraqis blame the US government, not the people of the US. They are quick to point out that they remember the worldwide demonstrations against the invasion, as well as that they believe Mr. Bush was never elected president; thus, the idea of true democracy existing in the US has been usurped by a small group.


Q: To what extent is Iraq being "re-Baathified", so to speak? We see the managerial class, the civil service sector and police chiefs, army chiefs, former Mokhabarat (secret police) people in key positions. How is this affecting ordinary people`s hopes for a new Iraq?

It is being `re-Baathified` on many levels -- the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, Iraqi Police, army, government posts, and many positions in the ministries. Mixed feelings on this - the response depends on who I talk with. But overall, most Iraqis are so desperate for security and a return of some type of basic infrastructure that they are willing to allow this re-Baathification.

I must point out that most Iraqis were considered Baathists before the invasion, due to that fact that in order to obtain a decent job, you had to claim yourself as a member of the Baath Party. So many of these who are being allowed back into their posts were never `active` Baath Party members to begin with.

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Kerry’s God Problem
By Amy Sullivan, Gadflyer
Posted on June 25, 2004, Printed on June 27, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/19054/

The Democrats have a religion problem. You know it, I know it, and David Brooks knows it. According to a recent Time magazine poll, only 7 percent of Americans think that John Kerry is a "religious" man -- this, in a country in which 70 percent of voters say that they want their president to be a "man of faith."

As we all know, the first step toward recovering is recognizing that you have a problem. And while there is plenty of time to change course, too many national Democrats still run the other way when the topic of religion comes up, instead of dealing with it directly.

There are a number of reasons for this. But ultimately, there are no good excuses.

To begin, many Democratic operatives still think of religion mostly as a constituency problem -- that is, they want to know how many Catholic votes in the Rust Belt they can "get" by employing a certain strategy, how many endorsements they can get from religious leaders, and have yet to be convinced that religious Americans are "their" voters. One immediate problem with this mindset is that faith leaders are under special restrictions -- whether legal or self-imposed -- that don`t similarly bind the leaders of other constituencies. Although many would argue that recent statements by Catholic leaders regarding pro-choice politicians amount to endorsements of Republicans, strictly speaking a Catholic priest cannot endorse a candidate. Ministers may come out in support of a particular candidate in their role as individual citizens, but only if they have the support of their congregations -- if a pastor appears to be leveraging his position for political influence, he can very quickly find himself in hot water with parishioners. All this is to say that assembling a "who`s who" list of religious leaders that support Democratic candidates is a bit harder than finding key labor or African-American or environmental group leaders to give their endorsement.

In addition, this attitude treats religion as a purely functional tool, boiling it down to, "If we do X, we will get Y million religious votes." And that`s not how it works. Millions of Americans look to the faith of their political candidates as a proxy for a general moral worldview. Many voters understand that it is possible to be a good and moral person without necessarily having religious faith. But in the midst of a campaign, it can be hard to get a good sense of what moral compass a candidate has. A moderate Democratic congressman from the South who represents a district with a large military base told me that in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, many of his constituents wanted to know that he was a man of faith because he was casting a vote about whether to send their sons and husbands and daughters off to put their lives in danger. Those voters wanted to know whether he believed in souls because they were very personally grappling with the consequences of war.

As David Brooks put it in a recent column, for many Americans, "Their president doesn`t have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim." A candidate doesn`t have to hit people over the head with "Jesus talk" to do this. He doesn`t have to use exclusive language and he doesn`t have to parade his piety. What he can do is frame his message in moral terms. Even better, Kerry already did this early in his campaign as the presumptive nominee, drawing a clear distinction between those who talk the talk (an indirect but pointed jab at Bush) and those who walk the walk. Yet that kind of language has all but disappeared from his speeches.

Another reason Democrats avoid the topic of religion is that they believe it will offend what they see as their secular base. Here`s what they should know: There are two groups of people who want to think that there is a secular hold on the Democratic Party -- secularists and conservatives. The truth, however, is that while the power of secularists in the Democratic ranks is legendary, it is just that -- a legend. While Democratic political offices are staffed by a higher percentage of secularists than can be found among the general population, they are not representative of the party as a whole.

In his column, Brooks cites a study that has become a favorite of conservatives (who cite it constantly) because it appears to indict Democrats as overrun by secularists and as generally intolerant of religion. The problem with this conclusion is that it overlooks a major flaw in the analysis done by Baruch College professors Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio. They identified secularists within the ranks of Democratic convention delegates by looking at attitudes about fundamentalists. Anyone who held negative feelings about religious fundamentalists (I believe the Christian Coalition is specifically named) was considered to be a secularist. I don`t know about you, but I know plenty of people -- and plenty of religious Republicans, for that matter -- who don`t think terribly kindly of fundamentalists but who would never ever identify themselves as secularists.

It would be dangerous to dismiss this as some picky point between social scientists. This is the kind of "fact" that conservatives will point to over and over because it fits their argument that liberals hate religion. And it would be equally risky for secular Democrats to point to the same study as proof that they need not reach out to religious Americans.

Because although conservatives like Brooks like to point to secularism as a rising trend within Democratic politics, just the opposite is true. More and more liberals are starting to talk about the importance of religion. Just a few weeks ago, the Center for American Progress held a day-long conference on "Faith and Progressive Politics" that attracted hundreds of political types and policy wonks in D.C. The Democratic Leadership Council has now devoted several sessions of national conferences to the topic of religion. Hillary Clinton has been talking to Democratic Senators about the importance of reclaiming the concepts of "values" and "morality" from conservatives. And former Clinton administration bigwigs have all but begged the Kerry campaign to pay attention to this issue.

Finally, John Kerry has a special discomfort with religion that comes simply from his specific religious tradition. Although both are part of the Christian community, southern evangelical Protestants and northeastern Catholics often speak completely different languages. The phrases and scriptural quotes that rolled off the tongues of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are not a natural part of Kerry`s religious vocabulary. Cradle Catholics don`t talk about "the good Lord" like Wes Clark did on the stump. They don`t give testimonials or talk about conversion experiences because that`s not part of their personal religious histories. None of that means that Kerry is insincere when it comes to faith. Nor should it matter. Because voters don`t need to know how often their political candidates read the Bible or pray or attend church.

What they do need to know is that their candidate understands that religion is an important part of many Americans` lives. That -- as with race and ethnicity and other individual characteristics -- it influences and informs how people make political judgments. Unfortunately, too often the Kerry campaign has conflated personal religious belief with the general acknowledgement of religion. Because Kerry is uncomfortable talking about his own faith (a perfectly reasonable thing), they have steered clear of all mention of religion (a potentially fatal political move).

No matter how resistant some old-school party operatives are to the idea, liberals are moving toward an understanding and acknowledgement of the importance of religion, not away from it. Ten or fifteen years from now, appeals to religious Americans will be an accepted part of liberal politics, just as Democrats are slowly beginning to change their reputation -- and orientation -- on national security and foreign policy. There is virtually no political downside to reaching out to people of faith, there is enormous political potential to build a broader, stronger electoral coalition, and it has the added benefit of being the right thing to do.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/19054/

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Faschismus
Das politische „F-„Wort der Nachrichtenmedien
von Norman Solomon
ZNet 25.06.2004
Wenn ein Bundesrichter George W. Bush mit Benito Mussolini vergleicht, ist das keine Nachricht wert? Die konservative Tageszeitung New York Sun hatte eine Story über die Rede eines Richters vom ‘2nd Circuit Court Of Appeals‘ (Berufungsgericht) namens Guido Calabresi veröffentlicht, aber nur wenige Medien fanden was er sagte auch nur der Erwähnung wert. „Im Grunde ist das schon früher passiert, aber in den USA kommt es selten vor... jemand kommt durch die illegitime Handlungsweise einer legitimen Institution an die Macht, die rechtlich in der Lage ist, jemanden in die Macht einzusetzen“, so Richter Calabresi vor Anwälten und Jurastudenten anlässlich des Jahrestreffens der ‚American Constitution Society‘ am 19. Juni. „(Genau) das tat der Oberste Gerichtshof im Falle Bush versus Gore. Er setzte jemanden in die Macht ein“. Richter Calabresi ist 71 Jahre alt. Er stammt aus Mailand. 1939 verließ seine Familie Italien. Calabresi fügt hinzu: „Der Grund, weshalb ich dies betone, ist, genau das ist passiert, als Mussolini vom König von Italien eingesetzt wurde“. Und Calabresi, der frühere Dekan an der Yale Law School, fährt fort: „Der König Italiens war rechtlich in der Lage, Mussolini einzusetzen, obwohl der keine Wahl gewonnen hatte und ihn zum Premierminister zu machen. Das passierte auch, als Hindenburg Hitler einsetzte. Nicht für einen Moment lege ich nahe, dass Bush Hitler ist. Lassen Sie mich das klarstellen, dennoch eine extrem ungewöhnliche Situation“. Und Bezug nehmend auf die Entscheidung des Obersten Gerichtshofs nach der US-Wahl 2000 sagte Richter Calabresi: „Wenn jemand auf diese Weise reinkam, hat er manchmal versucht, nicht viel Macht auszuüben. In diesem (Bushs Fall – Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin) wie in Mussolinis Fall, hat er aber außerordentliche Macht ausgeübt“.

Dass die Zitate stimmen, daran scheint es keinen Zweifel zu geben. Der Reporter, der die Story für die Sun verfasste, Josh Gerstein, sagte mir, er hätte die Zitate vom mitgeschnittenen Band transkribiert. Was genau „Faschismus“ ist, darüber liefern sich Politwissenschaftler und andere Leute heiße Debatten. Im Lexikon steht zum Beispiel, Faschismus sei ein „Regierungssystem, das gekennzeichnet ist durch stringente sozioökonomische Kontrolle, durch eine starke Zentralregierung, der im allgemeinen ein Diktator vorsteht, häufig mit einer kriegstreiberischen nationalistischen Politik“. Andererseits sollte klar sein, Faschismus wird nicht notwendigerweise eingeläutet durch Soldaten, die im Gänsemarsch marschieren bzw. Schurken in Braunhemden mit Nazi-Insignien. Vor etwa einem Dreivierteljahrhundert kommentierte ein Populist aus Louisiana namens Huey Long: „Wenn der Faschismus nach Amerika käme, wäre er Teil des Amerikanismus-Programms“. Nun, der Faschismus ist nicht in die Vereinigten Staaten gekommen – täglich üben hier Millionen Menschen essentielle Freiheiten aus, wie Rede- und Pressefreiheit. Aber wir sollten erkennen, die Reaktion der US-Regierung auf den 11. September beinhaltet einige faschistoide Elemente.

Sehen wir uns zum Beispiel die Einschätzung Stuart Taylor Juniors an. Taylor ist ein gewissenhafter Mainstream-Journalist, spezialisiert auf Rechtsthemen. In der Ausgabe des National Journal vom 12. Juni steht ein Artikel von ihm, in dem es hauptsächlich um Memos und Berichte zu Folterrichtlinien und Richtlinien für Verhöre aus dem Innern der Bush-Administration geht. Taylor schreibt: „Diese windschiefen Analysen, das ist nicht nur die Arbeit einiger weniger Juristen, die sich von cleverer Rechtsverdrehung hinreißen ließen“, so Taylor. „Sie (die Analysen) reflektieren eine Haltung tief verankert in George Bushs Weißem Haus – inklusive Bush, Dick Cheney und Gonzales (Alberto Gonzales, Rechtsberater des Weißen Hauses) – dass, wann immer der Präsident sich auf die nationale Sicherheit beruft, er fast-diktatorische Macht genießt und quasi buchstäblich über dem Gesetz steht“. Die Schlussfolgerung Taylors sollte allen Gänsehaut verursachen, die durch das Konzernmedien-Geplapper noch nicht völlig abgestumpft sind oder durch die selbstgefällige Haltung, vier weitere Bush-Jahre im Weißen Haus würden auch nichts mehr ausmachen. Taylor: „Diese Pervertierung des Rechts würde es Bush erlauben, jeden auf der Welt festzunehmen, einzusperren und zu foltern, zu jeder Zeit und aus jedem Grund, den er (Bush) mit nationaler Sicherheit assoziiert. Die Gestalter (der Verfassung) hätten wohl kaum vermutet, dass ihre Verfassung durch einen Präsidenten verzerrt wird, der für sich eine Macht in Anspruch nimmt, die eher an die römischen Kaiser, die russischen Zaren oder an König Georg III erinnert“.

Theodore Lowi, Professor für Regierungsangelegenheiten an der Cornell University, beschreibt die Administration des George W. Bush treffend als „toxische Kombination aus Gottesrhetorik, Geld, Vetternwirtschaft und einer massiven moralischen Hierarchie, die für unsere Nation eine reale Faschismus-Bedrohung darstellt“. Dabei geht es nicht darum, locker mit dem Wort ‚Faschismus‘ um sich zu werfen. Schließlich genießt unsere Gesellschaft noch immer eine breite Palette an Freiheiten. Andererseits, faschistische Repression hat die Neigung, sich stufenweise zu entwickeln. Jeder, der genau verfolgt hat, was John Ashcrofts Justizministerium nach dem 11. September tat, erkennt, auch in den USA können Elemente des Faschismus Einzug halten, vor allem in Krisenzeiten. Und die Einschätzung, so etwas könne hier nicht passieren, vergrößert die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass es passiert.

Norman Soloman hat zusammen mit dem Auslandskorrespondenten Reese Erlich das Buch verfasst: „Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You‘.

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Photo/ The Associated Press
U.S. soldiers from the First Infantry Division take positions along a wall as they make house to house searches at Baqouba, Iraq, Saturday.
Tension rises in Fallujah
By HAMZA HENDAWI
Associated Press Writer

FALLUJAH, Iraq - As a U.S. spy drone whirs overhead, a bearded militant lurking on a street corner Saturday gave his vision for the days ahead as Iraq regains its sovereignty: "Jihad will not stop until the last American leaves."

Anti-U.S. gunmen and policemen waved cheerily to each other in this normally turbulent city, which the American military had sought but failed to tame in 14 months of gunbattles, security raids, searches and detentions.

Days ahead of the handover of power to a new Iraqi government on Wednesday, tension is rising again in Fallujah. U.S. forces have mounted three airstrikes against suspected terrorist hideouts in the past week.

Gunbattles since Thursday on the edge of the city threaten to re-ignite the insurgency at a time when U.S. and Iraqi security forces are stretched thin, amid warnings of possible large-scale attacks to sabotage the transfer of power.

"By God, and by God again, all of us would rather die than let them back into the city," the militant, a 26-year-old cleric who gave only his first name, Abdel-Azeem, said of the American Marines stationed near the gates of Fallujah.

"If we run out of ammunition, we will fight them with knifes," he said.

On Saturday, Abdel-Azeem and a handful of other mujahedeen - or holy Muslim warriors, the phrase Fallujah fighters prefer - mused to a reporter on the occupation, Iraq`s future and whether Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is truly behind a series of horrific bombings as the Americans claim - or whether he exists at all.

Thin and bespectacled, Abdel-Azeem was in black pants and top over which he wore a green military-type belt. Others wore similar attire. One, a 24-year-old seminary student who gave only his first name Baha`a, wore a white turban. Everyone carried an assault rifle.

They stopped and thoroughly searched the car that brought the reporter to their spot, a few yards away from a house destroyed Friday in a U.S. airstrike. The military said the strike hit a hideout of al-Zarqawi.

The fighters later apologized for the search and offered the reporter and his companion ice water served in metal cups from a clay pot kept in the shade.

Speaking with zeal as intense as the midday heat - 110 degrees - they cited their faith as the main motivator for fighting the Americans and dismissed claims by the U.S. military that al-Zarqawi or members of his group are in Fallujah.

They vowed to fight the Americans and sharply criticized the new interim Iraqi government, calling it an "American creation."

"Who appointed the government? The Americans, right? We hate the Americans, so you can imagine how we feel about those appointed by America," said Waiel Sarhan, a 24-year-old barber-turned-fighter, in a separate interview that began over a meal of kebab, rice and cooked vegetables in a busy Fallujah restaurant and continued in a private home.

A U.S. military presence in Fallujah, a conservative city of some 250,000 people, is often cited by the fighters as the main reason behind the insurgency. In the 14 months since U.S. forces first moved into the city, the only periods of calm came when the Americans stopped patrolling Fallujah.

"We are happy and safe so long as the Americans stay out of Fallujah," said Sheik Mohammed al-Rawi, a 25-year-old Muslim cleric who teaches at an Islamic school in central Fallujah.

U.S. Marines besieged Fallujah for three weeks in April in a bloody operation that ended with an agreement handing security to a new "Fallujah Brigade" made up largely of local residents and commanded by officers of Saddam Hussein`s former army.

At the time, American military officials hailed formation of the brigade as a great success - "an Iraqi solution to Iraqi problems."

But from the American perspective, the experiment has been a disaster. Islamic militants have since asserted their influence in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad.

Some were active in defending the city against the Marines and have profited by a perception in the city and elsewhere in Iraq that the mujahedeen defeated a superpower.

On Saturday, Abdel-Azeem and his comrades warmly waved to Fallujah Brigade patrols that drove past. The area`s mukhtar, or mayor, later took the reporter on a tour of the destroyed house that the Americans said was an al-Zarqawi safehouse.

The U.S. military said Saturday that 15 people were killed in Friday`s airstrike, but the area`s mayor, Hussein Ali, said the house was empty. Its owner, Youssef Kanash, his wife and seven children vacated the house the previous day to move into a safer part of the city, said Ali.

"If this animal is a member of the al-Zarqawi group, then I congratulate the Americans on their victory," said Ali, pointing at the Kanash family pet, a black rabbit lying dead in the front yard.

"Does al-Zarqawi really exist? Or do they just use the name to bomb our homes?" asked Baha`a, the turbaned fighter.

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New Iraqi police fight US troops who trained them

By Damien McElroy in Baghdad

06/27/04 "The Telegraph" -- With american fighter jets and helicopters buzzing the skies overhead, an officer in Iraq`s new police force approaches a group of fighters on Fallujah`s front lines with an urgent call to arms.

"I need a man who can use an RPG," says Omar, who wears the uniform of a first lieutenant. Four hands shoot up and a cry rings out: "We are ready." He chooses a young man, Bilal, and they drive to an underpass on the outskirts of the city.

There, on Highway One, an American Humvee is driving east. Bilal aims and fires his rocket propelled grenade, turning the vehicle into a smoking, twisted, metal carcass. The fate of its occupants is unknown.

First Lt Omar is sworn to uphold the law and fight the insurgency that threatens Iraq`s evolution into a free and democratic state. Instead, he is exploiting his knowledge of US tactics to help the rebel cause in Fallujah.

"Resistance is stronger when you are working with the occupation forces," he points out. "That way you can learn their weaknesses and attack at that point."

An Iraqi journalist went into Fallujah on behalf of the Telegraph on Wednesday, a day on which an orchestrated wave of bloody rebel attacks across the country cost more than 100 lives.

Inside the Sunni-dominated town, he met police officers and units of the country`s new army who have formed a united front with Muslim fundamentalists against the Americans, their resistance focused on al-Askeri district on the eastern outskirts of the town.

That morning, US marines had taken up "aggressive defence" positions on one side of Highway One. On the other side, militant fighters were dug in, ready for battle.

Their preparations were thorough. Along the length of a suburban street in al-Askeri, they had dug foxholes at the base of every palm tree. Scores of armed men lined the streets. Most had scarves wrapped around their heads but others wore the American-supplied uniform of Unit 505 of the Iraqi army, and carried US-made M-16 rifles. Yet more were dressed in the olive green uniforms worn by Saddam Hussein`s armed forces. Since April, when a US offensive failed to crush an uprising by Islamic fighters and Ba`athist loyalists, Fallujah has been effectively a no-go area for American troops.

A newly formed, 2,000-strong force known as the Fallujah brigade, led by a Saddam-era general, Mohammed Latif, was supposed to disarm the rebels. Instead, the town remains a hotbed of resistance. Now, once again, US military pressure is being brought to bear.

Three separate air strikes have been launched on houses in the town in recent days, aimed at killing an al-Qaeda leader believed to be based in Fallujah. The Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is believed to be behind the wave of kidnappings and terror attacks across Iraq.

US officials say that they narrowly missed their target on Friday, in their most recent strike on a house where he was suspected of hiding. Up to 25 people were killed.

On the ground in al-Askeri, tension was once again rising under the US attacks. Strangers had to seek permission from the "district commander", a local imam called Sheikh Yassin who controls a broad coalition of Saddam loyalists and Islamic radicals, to move beyond the rebel lines. The sheikh, who has emerged as the neighbourhood strongman since the uprising against American occupation, has used his following to unite all strands of resistance under his leadership.

His radio buzzed constantly as scouts, moving incognito in private cars, sent in reports about US positions around the suburb. The ground shook as F-16 Falcons dropped precision-guided 500lb bombs on rebel positions near the football stadium, half a mile away.

US commanders have spoken of their frustration over the Fallujah Brigade`s failure to rein in rebels, and the ineffectiveness of the political deal struck with local tribes in April. "We`ve been prepared to pull the plug on it three or four times, but each time we detect a faint heartbeat," a senior marine officer said. To Sheikh Yassin, the supposedly anti-rebel brigade is a useful tool, providing support for his fighters. "We respect the Fallujah brigade - it never interferes against us," he says. He openly acknowledges that his coalition was a marriage of convenience, bringing together the secular Saddam faithful and Muslim fundamentalists.

The imam, who wants Iraq to be governed by Islamic law, points to one of his companions - a colonel in the disbanded Iraqi army - and asks why he is still fighting.

The colonel is blunt. "Fallujah is the starting point of the return of the Ba`ath Party," he says. "Our comrades in Baghdad and other provinces are joining our struggle. Here already we are free. No one can touch us."

In violence yesterday, a car bomb in the predominantly Shia city of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed at least 15 people according to the Arabic satellite news channel al-Jazeera.

Six guerrillas and several other people were killed in Baquba, north of Baghdad, when rebels blew up the local party headquarters of Ayad Allawi, Iraq`s prime minister, and attacked a moderate Shia political party`s office. Another car bomb killed a man in the Kurdish city of Arbil.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited

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Iraq`s Repairman
Mission impossible? David Petraeus is tasked with rebuilding Iraq`s security forces. An up-close look at the only real exit plan the United States has—the man himself.

By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
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July 5 issue - The doors have been taken off our Blackhawk helicopter to accommodate heavy machine guns, so there`s a blast of 100-degree heat blowing in everyone`s face at 100 miles an hour. The view below is not inspiring: dreary streets, concrete buildings, uncollected trash everywhere. Block after block of Baghdad slips by, rooftop laundry flapping wildly in the backwash of the chopper`s rotor blades. Only a fool wouldn`t consider the possibility of an Iraqi insurgent down there, armed with a surface-to-air missile or a rocket-propelled grenade.
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That`s why the Blackhawk flies fast and low, says Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, shouting over the roar of the engine. By painful experience, pilots have learned the insurgents won`t have time to fire if the helicopter skims the tops of buildings, appearing and disappearing quickly. Although 22 helicopters have gone down in this war, only two have been lost in the past couple of months. (As Petraeus explains this, he looks around for a piece of wood to tap, but there`s only metal and nylon.) "Look at all the satellite dishes down there," he says hopefully. It`s true: even though electricity comes on only for about six hours a day, hardly a building is without a cluster of dishes, which were banned during Saddam`s time.

Petraeus is on his way to visit a military training program, where Iraqi officers like Col. Shaker Faris are trying to create effective fighting units from scratch. Colonel Faris`s men are among the soldiers who eventually are supposed to take over from U.S. forces in Iraq, and it`s General Petraeus`s job to make that happen. President George W. Bush himself has made the training and arming of Iraqi national forces a top priority, and every American official from the president on down has adopted the same mantra: soon, Iraqis themselves are going to handle the insurgency and take responsibility for the security and safety of their own country. The process officially begins this week, with the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government. Then, "every day the Iraqis get better at securing their nation is a day sooner that our troops can come home," says National Security Council spokesman James Wilkinson. General Petraeus, in short, is the closest thing to an exit strategy the United States now has.

From Baghdad, our Blackhawk flies north into the Sunni Triangle. The door gunners keep their guns pointed down, eyes on anyone who moves. Stomachs jerk as the chopper lifts abruptly to clear high-tension wires; several times the pilot makes sudden, sickening turns to confuse potential enemies. We cross and recross the Tigris River before dropping down in front of Saddam`s biggest palace, now headquarters for the U.S. Army`s First Infantry Division. As Petraeus steps out onto the helipad, every hair is in place, his uniform neat and tidy. Not a bead of sweat shows. The civilians accompanying him look like rag dolls run over by a truck.

"So, Shaker, how many of these thousand can you really count on?" Petraeus asks Colonel Faris, referring to his 1,000-man battalion. Shaker is earnest and cheerful, but he`s reluctant to put too much of a gloss on a grim situation. "There are about 20 guys I would call special, General," he says. "If there were really bad terrorists, they still couldn`t get through these 20." "Well, we`ll have to see what we`re going to do about the rest of them," Petraeus replies, unfazed—at least as far as anyone can tell.
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Lt. General Exit Strategy? Petraeus visits a coalition base
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Leadership is always a bit of a confidence game. Project authority, display ability and power, and others will follow. Few do this as well as Petraeus. When a fellow Army Ranger, a twentysomething, recently asked the 51-year-old Petraeus how many push-ups he could do, the general offered a contest, dropped to the ground and won after doing 75 in a minute. He`s got legs and lungs to match: just before the war, he finished the Army 10-miler in 63 minutes, a time only the fittest of young men could equal. ("And that was after I hurt my pelvis," he says.)

But Petraeus`s most important asset may be his intellect, and his knack for politics. He graduated in the top 5 percent of his class at West Point, which means he`s just what the Army likes (smart, but please God, not brilliant). He also married the daughter of the West Point superintendent. Graduating in 1974, he was too late for Vietnam, and he spent the gulf war serving as aide to the Army chief of staff. In 1991, Petraeus nearly died in a training exercise, when an infantryman tripped and discharged his M-16, firing a bullet into Petraeus`s chest. The wounded Petraeus was medevaced to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., where a young surgeon rushed off the golf course to operate on him. The surgeon, Dr. Bill Frist, is now the Senate majority leader. The two men are firm friends.

Oddly, Petraeus saw combat for the first time only in March last year, and that`s where the whispered questions arise. Everyone agrees that Petraeus is ambitious, intense, competitive to the point of obsession and a driven leader of soldiers. No one doubts that he`s smart: he got a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1987, with a provocative dissertation on lessons the Army drew from Vietnam. (One of his conclusions: "American involvement in low-intensity conflict is inevitable," and the military had better prepare for it.) But what, exactly, does that add up to on the battlefield?

Nobody seems neutral. His fans believe he`s a new-style officer for a new type of warfare, where battles can be won with superior technology and firepower, but true victories can be secured only by good peacemaking and politics. They say he proved himself—and his methods—in the aftermath of the war last year. (It`s widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus.) These boosters include many in the White House. "People`s body language shifts" when they talk about Petraeus there, says one official. Yet critics regard Petraeus as one of a type they call "perfumed princes," a derisive term for officers who have advanced from one staff job to another, essentially working as efficient courtiers to the four-stars. They say he won a short-term peace in Mosul at the expense of allowing insurgents to organize themselves mostly unmolested. They rankle at Petraeus`s penchant for self-promotion and PR.
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Big Thinker: Petraeus, with wife Holly, upon earning his PhD from Princeton in 1987
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Such voices are mostly muted now, if only because so much is riding on his mission. Petraeus rarely fails to tell Iraqis that it was the president who appointed him: "When the president personally tells you something is important—and I was still a two-star at the time—you know he`s serious about it and we`re serious about it." Both the president and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz met with Petraeus before he was sent back to Iraq with his third star. "They told me, `Whatever you need, you`ve got it`."
The last guy on the job didn`t have that kind of backing. "I would just love it if we could get our troops out of the cities and just worry about the external security," says Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the man Petraeus is replacing. "I would just love that." And so would most Iraqis. The latest American-commissioned poll shows that a large majority want American troops to leave the country immediately. If only Iraqi security forces could become more visible and effective, it would be easier for the new government to convince a skeptical public that sovereignty is real. But as Eaton wryly notes (quoting an old Army maxim), "Hope is not a method."

Iraqi police have turned and run in most places where they`ve been challenged by insurgents. They`re backed up by a numerous and more heavily armed group, the Iraqi National Guard (until last week, called the Civil Defense Corps), but its record has been little better. In Samarra two months ago, entire units switched sides to the insurgents. The nascent army, so far only 9,000 strong, has been sent into combat once, in Fallujah—and it mutinied. (It was General Eaton who dispatched the Iraqi battalion. "I really screwed up," he says. "A Marine major, faced with disgusted Iraqis, decided to stand the unit down, and God bless him for it.") Whether police or soldiers, the Iraqis have been under-equipped, poorly paid and demoralized. Whenever pressed, they have called for American troops to rescue them. Yet their reticence to engage the enemy hasn`t protected them: suicide bombers and other insurgents have targeted Iraqi police and recruits, killing more than 800.


Petraeus`s strategy now is to rebuild the Iraqi forces from the top down—"to support, assist and enable good Iraqi leaders." Instead of rushing to build up the numbers of foot soldiers, training programs have been changed to concentrate on officers and noncoms. Separately, Petraeus is pushing to get body armor and good weapons to the Iraqis. Money is not an issue: a billion dollars has already been spent on Iraqi forces, and an additional $2.4 billion is in the pipeline for the rest of the year. In just the last week, 13,500 Gluck pistols, 850,000 rounds of ammunition, 900 vehicles, 50,000 flak vests and 60,000 Kevlar helmets were delivered. "It`s really flowing in now," Petraeus said.

Quality—not quantity—is Petraeus`s aim when it comes to troops. Some Iraqi units are too large. The police, which are planned to number 90,000, currently total 120,000; the excess will be pensioned off. The Facilities Protection Service, which guards pipelines and key buildings, has 74,000 men, but most of them are poorly trained. They also have a high casualty rate. So the United States has increased their training from two to five days, added danger pay and organized better backup for them. Officers and noncoms in the undependable National Guard will be given special training and better weaponry. And they`re now being housed in barracks, where they`re less vulnerable to retribution. Finally, the Army itself will be reorganized. New units specializing in counterinsurgency, known collectively as the Iraqi National Task Force, have been undergoing training. Anyone joining them will get $100 monthly bonus pay. The first 660-man battalion will be deployed in Baghdad by June 30.
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New recruits: Iraqi soldiers at a coalition training camp are trained by Iraqis
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The Americans, mindful of Saddam`s tendency to use the military to stamp out local rebellions, initially wanted to keep the new Iraqi military focused on external threats. The change in emphasis, says Petraeus, was an initiative of the incoming Iraqi government (though the Americans applauded it). Petraeus says he`s not worried; he believes that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his civilian Defense minister "will ensure there`s no chance of a military dictatorship."

On a recent day, Petraeus went to pay a courtesy call on the minister of Defense. To make the two-minute drive from his own headquarters at the Republican Palace to the Defense Ministry, located in another palace in the Green Zone, Petraeus had to travel by armored car, with heavily armed civilian bodyguards. Even on a good day, Defense Ministry offices often seem "rather like an anthill sorting itself out after being stepped on," as one Western adviser puts it. But this wasn`t a good day. During the previous 48 hours, two deputy ministers in the interim government had been assassinated in separate attacks; the general in charge of the border police had come under fire and barely escaped; a suicide car bomb had killed five policemen at their station near Baghdad; three hostages had been murdered (a Lebanese and two Iraqis, all contractors), and three rockets had hit the Republican Palace.
The defense minister, Hazim Shaalan, is a former banker who more recently worked as a real-estate agent in London. "After June 30," said Shaalan, "we will hit these people and teach them a good lesson they won`t forget. Americans and allied forces have certain restrictions we won`t have." He declined to be more specific, except to say, "It`s our country, it`s our culture, and we have different laws than you do." (A few days later, after yet another suicide bombing, he was more blunt: "We will cut off their hands and behead them.")

In the hallway, where American, British and Iraqi officers and civilians come and go, Petraeus bumped into Lt. Gen. Amar Bakir al-Hashimi, the Iraqi Army`s new chief of staff. Amar was a high-ranking general during Saddam`s time; he retired in 1997. "The Coalition did a lot of things wrong, but now it`ll be our turn. Let the Iraqis do what they want," he said, "and they`ll know what to do." But he acknowledged the changes would come slowly, "like turning a supertanker," he told Petraeus, who approvingly repeats the expression to everyone he meets, and then adds his own simile: "Or like building an airplane while you`re flying it."

A week later Generals Petraeus and Amar are off in a pair of choppers for quick visits to Taji and Kurkush, where the American military is training Iraqi soldiers. "These are industrial-strength training facilities," Petraeus says; each covers several square miles of former Iraqi military bases. (There are others, as well, in both Jordan and Iraq.) Soldiers get an eight-week boot camp, similar to what the U.S. Army does; officers and noncoms, another two- to six-week refresher course, much less than the U.S. norm. So far only 66 percent of the Iraqi security forces have had any training at all. Police get only eight weeks, compared with a year during Saddam`s era.
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Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, but didn`t see combat until March 2003
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But Petraeus is pleased when he reviews a battalion of the Iraqi National Task Force, going through the paces of house searches and explosives training. "Be very careful," he tells a soldier hiding beside a doorjamb, rifle downward, "so your muzzle is not shooting your foot." He tells the American officers they need to get these soldiers some live-fire practice. When the recruits are mustered, General Amar gives them a pep talk on Iraqi patriotism. Petraeus follows with his stock speech: "In a few weeks you will be walking point for your nation. The eyes of your countrymen and the world will be on you. The missions you are going to perform are very important, but we will make sure they are doable."

Back in Baghdad, Petraeus breezes into his palace office, and his first question is "What blew up today?" This day it turns out to be a suicide bomber who tore into a crowd of young men waiting to enlist at a recruiting center in the heart of the capital; 35 were killed, and the center shut down. There`s more bad news: six Civil Defense Corps soldiers have been arrested in Ar Ramadi, suspected of helping insurgents set a bomb that blew up as a Marine Corps convoy passed by.


Petraeus is worried that once the Iraqis get sovereignty, they will be under extraordinary pressure to do too much, too soon. "One of the lessons learned in the early-April period was the sense of doable missions—set these units up for success. You want to accelerate, but not so that you risk failure. You don`t just flip a light switch. You don`t build an army or police in a matter of months. This is a perilous mission." Like building an airplane in flight.
It`s hard to talk to general Petraeus for more than five minutes before he veers back to his experience in Mosul, where as the 101st Air Assault Division commander he was, in effect, the viceroy of the north (or, as some Iraqis jokingly called him, "King David"). Virtually everyone agrees his command there was a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way. When troops went on cordon-and-search operations, they took care to tell each homeowner, "Thank you for allowing us to search your home." Civil-military-affairs teams returned to the neighborhood afterward to explain why they had been there. Posters were displayed in the 101st`s barracks, saying, what have you done to win iraqi hearts and minds today?


"I go back there and it`s like the return of the prodigal son," Petraeus says. "There`s even a street sign in Mosul named for the 101st Airborne, and you know it`s authentic because there are two misspellings in it." In the cause of nation-building, he was never short of ideas. He launched a television program called "Nineveh Talent Search," a sort of Iraqi Idol, that was popular enough to go into a second season. (Another program, "Iraqi Blues," a sort of homegrown "Cops," was less successful.) He hosted a call-in radio show with his favorite translator, a former New York cabby named Sadi Othman, who is still with him. And he wrangled so much money out of a program called CERP, which gives discretionary funds to U.S. commanders to finance local reconstruction projects, that he nicknamed the captain running his accounts Miss Moneypenny. When the CERP money ran dry, he enlisted his best friend in Congress—Majority Leader Frist—to goose the Pentagon for more. "This guy," says General Eaton, "he has a capacity to blow through bureaucracy that not many guys do. He doesn`t understand the nature of a wall; he`ll either go through it or over it or around it."

Petraeus also vividly remembers his worst day in Mosul. "We lost 17 men in one night, and that was hard. I often wonder how those division commanders in World War II handled the casualty numbers they had," he says, and just as quickly brightens. "But hey, that`s 17 reasons to get that thing right." He`s painfully aware that for all the smart soldiering, and the hard sacrifices, Mosul today is one of the most dangerous places in Iraq. Foreigners don`t dare use the hotels there. Last Thursday, suicide bombers and attackers with AK-47s and RPGs killed 62 people in the city, and earlier in the week a dean at Mosul University and her husband were assassinated. The sort of foot patrols Petraeus delighted in taking around Mosul a year ago are no longer remotely feasible. "Any army of liberation has a certain half-life before it becomes an army of occupation," he says, and shrugs.
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Critics say Petraeus won a short-term peace in Mosul, pictured after a car bombing last week, but allowed insurgents to get organized
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The game now is to get foreign soldiers out of Iraqi lives. "Completing these tasks allows us to reduce the size of our forces and helps us to go home," Petraeus says. But will Iraqi forces with far less training and weaponry be able to achieve what 138,000 Americans have not? In the 15 months of war in Iraq, nearly a thousand Coalition soldiers have been killed—more than died in all of America`s wars since Vietnam put together. And fully a fourth of those perished in just the past three months, as the insurgency exploded, backed by popular outrage in Iraq over attacks on Fallujah and Najaf and revelations of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, the Iraqi military will number only half the current American force by the end of this year. And Iraq is a perfect place for asymmetric warfare. "Awash with weapons... AK-47 assault rifles in every home," says Petraeus, ticking off the challenges. "Open borders. Elements in neighboring countries who want to make trouble. Criminal element let out of jail by Saddam. The enemy gets a vote in this thing, too." He muses on that for a while. "There are limits to what you can do." An uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt? Perhaps, but it passes quickly. "There are limits, but actually, damn few." To accomplish his mission, he`ll have to test every damn one.

With John Barry in Washington and Tamara Lipper traveling with the president

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Natural-born killers will not win hearts and minds

By Charles Clover

Financial Times

Published: June 25 2004 21:14

One of the more jarring memories from my experience covering the war in Iraq as a reporter "embedded" with US troops was of a young American soldier after a firefight in the streets of Najaf. During a shootout with a sniper, a blue Fiat raced into the the street, trying to escape. The soldier fired 15 rounds from his SAW (squad automatic weapon), killing the driver, who we found out was an unarmed university professor. An hour later, I heard the soldier complaining that his weapon had jammed, preventing him firing off more rounds. Meanwhile, fellow soldiers clustered around him, congratulating him on "busting his cherry" - making his first killing. It was not clear at the time i f he knew who he had killed and if it mattered.

I have always had difficulty understanding how someone like this, an American teenager who probably grew up in some suburb, like me, could have this attitude toward taking a life. I saw plenty more like him.

This group of young, violent Americans is the subject of one of the best books to come out of the Iraq war: Generation Kill by Evan Wright, who covered the war for Rolling Stone magazine as an embedded reporter with a US Marine reconnaissance battalion. One does not know quite how to categorise Generation Kill. It is not anti-war in its exposition, but the s um total of Wright`s observations lead to a harsh indictment of US conduct in Iraq. Like the generation it observes, the book has no moral compass, it is simply a grim ledger of conversations, deeds and misdeeds - all recorded in an adrenaline rush of intelligent prose.

The title says it all: this is a book about the contemporaries of the Columbine high school massacre in Colorado, blitzing their way across Iraq to spearhead the US campaign last year. They "represent what is more or less America`s first generation of disposable children", says Wright, who estimates that half his platoon are from absentee, single-parent homes: "Many are on more intimate terms with the culture of video games, reality TV shows and internet porn than they are with their own families."

The core of Generation Kill questions the dark intersection of war-making and this generation`s obsession with violence - how the largely virtual world of America`s teens seamlessly transposes itself onto the battlefield. Early on , Wright records one of the soldiers enthusing "I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush . . . Grand Theft Auto: Vice City", referring to a popular computer game. "I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of the windows, and the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool."

This generation will play a decisive role in America`s open-ended war on terror - for better or for worse. As Wright observes, the soldiers are so cynical they need no reason to do their grim jobs. Unlike the Vietnam generation for whom the war represented a loss of innocence, the Iraq generation has no innocence to lose, they are a generation "for whom the big lie is as central to government as taxation", according to Wright, and are perfectly happy to contemplate that the war is entirely a grab for oil.

From my perch covering the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two years, I have seen this group of socially maladjusted, heavily armed youths become America`s main international liability. Violent youth subculture in the US has long been a curiousity abroad, but it has now been driven to unprecedented levels of contact with an ancient civilisation which it does not understand, and which does not understand it. The result is grisly and tragic, and ultimately self-defeating for the US and its allies. More than anything, the decisive shift in Iraqi public opinion against the occupation in recent months has come about due to contact between Iraqis and these young men and women.

Rather than winning hearts and minds abroad, America`s military has become the most acute source of anti-American rage. It neatly symbolises the US national priority of producing missiles and aircraft carriers at the expense of education highlights the income inequality that has made mercenaries out of the poor.

The 374 men of the First Marine Recon battalion, in which Wright was embedded, epitomise the violent youth subculture. "We`ve been brainwashed a nd trained for combat. We must say `Kill!` 3,000 times a day in boot camp. That`s why it`s so easy", a soldier tells Wright.

Nathaniel Fick, a 25-year-old lieutenant and platoon leader, also explains the point. "In World War Two, when Marines hit the beaches, a surprisingly high percentage of them didn`t fire their weapons . . . Not these guys . . . These guys have no problem with killing."

Amid the bravado, however, there are powerful moments of remorse. One sergeant who mistakenly orders his turret-gunner to shoot a civilian house has to confront the consequence: a critically injured 12-year-old boy and a sobbing mother. "A pilot doesn`t have to go down and look at the civilians his bombs have hit. Artillery men don`t see the effects of what they do. But guys on the ground do. This is killing me inside," admits the sergeant.

But, observes Wright, this was not the first time innocent lives were taken, only the first time anyone got caught at it: "This only happened because this time, the battalion stopped moving long enough for the innocent victims to catch up with it."

`Generation Kill` is published by Bantam Press in the UK and by G.P. Putnam`s Sons in the US

The writer, an FT editor, was the FT`s Iraq correspondent in 2003-04

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Evan Wright(Rolling StoneMagazin) spricht über sein Buch `Generation Kill` s. auch Artikel von FT #18172[/TABLE]
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JUNE 18 - 24, 2004

Humvee Hell
Evan Wright talks about his two months riding with the Marines in Iraq, and his new book, Generation Kill
by Tom Christie and Joe Donnelly

War at 45M WriPH: Wright in
the back seat of the first
Humvee to invade Iraq
(Photos by Evan Wright)

There is embedded (Geraldo mugging with pistols bared) and there is embedded: Riding in the back seat of the lead Humvee of the lead platoon of the First Marines Reconnaissance Battalion — the elite Marines spearheading the assault on Iraq, nicknamed “First Suicide Battalion” — Evan Wright was embedded. Wright won a lottery and ended up in the front seat of a deadly, hyperspeed war machine, a seat other invited journalists declined to take. He often found himself in deadly battle miles ahead of any military support units, let alone cell phones, and totally reliant on the competence and composure of the handful of Marines in his Humvee. The combination of characteristics that punched Wright’s ticket to Baghdad — luck, bravery, commitment and a unique ability to seamlessly infiltrate the edgy margins of our society — are the very ones that made him the right reporter to bring back the first comprehensive, unsentimental, ground-eye view of the war.

Like Michael Herr’s Vietnam journal, Dispatches, Wright’s account of his two-month tour of duty is destined to become this generation’s essential read on our adventures in Iraq. Unlike Herr, though, Wright doesn’t give us an impressionistic view of the brutality and chaos of war, nor does he use stylistic language to reflect the cadence of the Marines. Generation Kill, based on an award-winning series of articles in Rolling Stone, provides a stark, undoctored picture of the men who formed the tip of the spear aimed at Baghdad. It is both a breakneck adventure story and a twisted morality play, one likely to leave the reader with empathy for the shooters and antipathy for the shot callers.


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Among the startling events Wright witnesses is the “unsurrendering” of Iraqi prisoners (a violation of the Geneva Convention) to an unknown fate, and the consistent failure to destroy Iraqi arms and munitions that may now be in use against U.S. troops. Wright also discovered the existence of a secretive course in which Marines and other high-risk military personnel, training to withstand enemy captivity, are locked in cages, beaten and subjected to the sort of psychological torture later seen at Abu Ghraib prison — including the use of hoods and leashes.

L.A. Weekly’s Tom Christie and Joe Donnelly caught up with longtime Weekly contributor Wright on the eve of Generation Kill’s publication for a characteristically frank discussion about our killer elite, civilian casualties, incompetent commanders and holding your shit during combat.

L.A. WEEKLY: What made you decide to put your life on the line for this story?

EVAN WRIGHT: In philosophical terms, I support the idea that a nation can go to war and defend itself through military means. I’m not a pacifist. Whether you support [the war] or not, whether or not you voted for this president, the nation was sending troops. I really thought it was important that we not just send military. The press has to go to war too. It’s our job. The military often portrays this liberal wimpy press, but in fact, in the first month of fighting, reporters died at a much higher rate than military personnel. And took much greater risks.

One of the issues is the embedding process. With the exception of the ground’s-eye view in this book, there’s been a real failure of bearing witness.

They would assign you to a unit, and let’s say they assign you to, like, a frontline unit such as the one I was in. The typical process was, the reporter would then hang out with the officers in a headquarters and support unit, which is to the rear of everybody else. And then they would sort of shoot forward and do temporary embeds with the fighting Marines or soldiers.

Do as you were told.

It was often the reporters themselves, for the reason that you still usually needed to have your satellite phone, your modem uplink and all the equipment to charge your batteries. And if you’re carrying all that stuff, they don’t want you riding in a front unit. So the media did a lot of self-censorship. The Pentagon actually gave a lot of latitude to the individual commanders. Since I was one of only two people writing for a magazine that was embedded with the entire first Marine division — which is kind of shocking — and I didn’t have a daily deadline, I did some horse-trading, and that’s why I got to go with this front team. And it’s why I was with these guys for a month and never saw any other reporters and seldom saw the officers. But the overall phenomenon of how reporters erroneously reported this war? I think that it’s because in America, television networks almost have — with Fox — branded themselves for their political bias, so that it was almost considered political if you asked a question that seemed to question the war effort itself. Although we have the image of hard-hitting, questioning-authority people, by and large reporters are the biggest bunch of kiss-asses on Earth. They gravitate toward power because power is where the information flows from. I would see these groups of reporters in Kuwait before the war started, kissing up to the officers and the guys in charge, and if the guy made an awful joke, they’d laugh at it. It was grotesque.

What about your own fear of dying or getting shot?

You go into denial. You think, I won’t get hit. That was my coping mechanism, at least. And then after the first time we were shot at really intensively, I thought, this will never happen again — because it was too incredible. Statistically, this doesn’t happen more than once in life. But then it did every day. I was in the point Humvee for the company, and often the company was on point for the battalion, and the battalion was often 20 kilometers ahead of the entire Marine force in central Iraq. So we were literally in the first Humvee invading the country, and with all the horrors of war, I was, like, I cannot leave this Humvee. I never thought that I would be invading a country, and I thought if I die doing this, it’s better than falling down a staircase in L.A.
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Did you hold your shit?

Yes. I did not shit in my pants. That was a big point of pride, actually. We were all told that 25 percent [in combat] will shit themselves.

You read it here first, folks. Which raises an important point: You kept yourself out of the book for the most part.

My technique for writing any story like this — a technique, incidentally, that I honed at the L.A. Weekly — is to spend as much time with the group of people as possible, listening to them.

For me, it was an adventure story, but who gives a fuck about me — I’m not the one who joined the Marines and went off to put my life on the line for a $20,000-to-$30,000-a-year job. It’s their story.

Did they resent your being there?

When I first came in, they were giving me a hard time, and some of them wouldn’t talk to me. They all thought I was gonna leave after the first firefight. And I didn’t. Once I stayed with them after they got shot at, I think they were really just flattered that someone thought it was important enough to be with them. I think they were, like, “God, he really cares about us. Like he wants to know what we’re going through.”

Did a lot of reporters leave after experiencing combat?

I’ve heard now that some of them tried to leave. I was just talking to a Marine from a different battalion, and this reporter had a nervous breakdown, and they couldn’t get him to leave the armored vehicle. A lot of reporters were endangered. I thought I was going to freak out, and I was always amazed when I didn’t.

Was part of you geeked on the adventure aspect?

Totally. I was totally geeked out, and the weird thing is that violence and destruction is so fucking cool. That’s why war is so horrible, because people are drawn into it. The people doing the shooting, they love it, you know? They hate it too, but they love it. It’s like heroin.

Obviously, many came into this adventure one way and came out another.

Within the Marine Corps there’s a particular psychology they sort of revel in, which is: If there’s gonna be a bunch of people fucked over in battle, outnumbered and surrounded by bad guys, it’ll be us. And that’s part of their lore. So they almost are looking forward to that. But, all of that said, once the war started . . . In the book, I describe only two scenes where the guys I was with started crying, but actually that was very common. It was just impossible to not react to the things they were participating in. Like the shooting of children or, you know, any civilian. And they changed.

It is that it’s so intense. You can have a moment like we did in Baquba up north of Baghdad. We were getting shot at continually for like 30 hours, and then had this breakout moment where the clouds lifted and the Air Force and the Marine helicopters came and just bombed the fuck out of the surrounding area. And then we had to drive into this flaming village, and initially everyone was really triumphant. The ground was littered with Republican Guard uniforms. The guys that had been shooting us fled or were blown up. There were bodies everywhere. And then this little girl comes, carried out of a culvert. She wasn’t injured, but she and her family were in shock. And then everyone realized, Oh my God, we Americans just burned down their village and bombed it. Some of the Marines I was with went from literally killing people to crying — and then five minutes later they’re back in combat. They had read about the horrors of war, but they were also really sensitive to it. They didn’t lose their humanity.




Outside this town called Ar Rifa one time, we had to wait for like six hours, and we were getting all these gunshots from the town. There were only 40 of us in this immediate position, and there’s tens of thousands of people in this town 15 meters away. My impulse was: Guys, call in the artillery strike. Just level this corner of the town. There’s probably like 15,000 people who live in this corner. Level it. And if I had been in charge, I would have had that impulse. They didn’t do that. And they could have.

You had a rare insight into the actual, in-your-face fog of war. What was it like?

Most books about war will describe a battle and all these different moving pieces, and these guys are shooting at these guys over here. But I realized immediately after these firefights that I had no clue as to what had actually happened. The guy next to me was the first one to see the enemy; the kid over there was shooting. I had no clue what was going on. And neither did they, actually. So what I realized is that when you are in combat, you’re completely in the dark. You might know a little bit about what’s within six feet of you. You might kind of know what the guy next to you is doing. But around the corner, you don’t know.

How does it happen that grunts can be competent but there is gross incompetence by their commanders?

I was constantly amazed at how calm the Marines were. If you can imagine being in this vehicle, you hear gunshots, machine guns and see muzzle flashes around you, and your vehicle starts getting hit with bullets. My reaction would be to panic. And they didn’t panic. Their response was very measured, talking calmly — guys were not screaming and shouting. So they’re very competent.

The enlisted guys in this kind of elite unit had to really go through hell to get into it. There are enlisted guys who serve for like 10, 15 years. The officer can come in fresh out of college, the Officer Candidate School, and he’s suddenly in command. But he has no experience. And it’s true: Some of the officers didn’t know the basics.

You get the sense that you were surrounded by idiosyncratic and iconoclastic people.

I’d been embedded with the Army in the past and then with the Marines, and the Marines actually struck me as much more competent than the Army. But the interesting paradox is that the Marines are really brainwashed when they go through training. And the Army is supposedly less brainwashed. It’s harder to do stories on Army guys in general because they’re much more institutionalized. They don’t have a lot of — well, if they have original thoughts, they’re not eager to share them. But you could have dropped me into any group of Marines, and you would have found, like, the same level of insanity. They say that the Army sells job skills, and the Marines sell, you know, “Become a warrior.” It’s a fantasy. A lot of them are really big fuck-ups, and the Marine Corps is what straightened them out. But they’re still, in their souls, iconoclasts.

The thing is that they’re also trained to violate the ultimate taboo of society — to kill people. As Sergeant Espera says in the book, “If we’d done this shit back in L.A., we’d all be in prison now.” And I think one of the ways they both deal with it and condition themselves for it is to violate every other taboo they can think of.

And yet it’s the commanders that seem callous to the killing.

The enlisted guy’s psychology is to operate much more as sort of a sensitive humanitarian individual, even though he’s also the one pulling the trigger and doing the hands-on killing. Commanders were much more callous about civilian deaths than the enlisted guys. They were pretty much happy with the road-block situation that we were operating under, where all these women and children and unarmed men were shot. [But] the enlisted men had this little mini-rebellion, where they’re like, “No, we’re gonna fire smoke grenades to warn them off.” The commanders were against that because they thought it was less aggressive and the Marines were putting their own lives in danger. Of course, it’s the commander’s job. He’s the one who sends people into battle, and he’s the one that actually sees the big picture and knows, I will lose this number of people today. But in a moral sense, to be a commander you do have to be a sociopath, you know?

They’re under pressure from above too, right?

The side story of the book is about the commander of First Recon, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando. He was a heartless motherfucker, and everyone hated him. He wanted to deny medical treatment to the kids they shot. It was only [after] a rebellion that the men fomented against his command that he relented and gave medical treatment. But he was one of the more successful battalion commanders in all of Iraq because the welfare of the men didn’t seem like a priority. And the [missions] he sent them on were insane. I mean, sending First Recon through that first ambushed town of Al Gharraf in open Humvees . . .

In the writing of the book, I tried to understate this because I didn’t want to be overly dramatic. But a lot of other commanders I talked to were, like, “That was insane.” Before First Recon went through Al Gharraf, there were Marines in armored vehicles and tanks that had been stopped; they took heavy fire in this major firefight, and I believe they took some deaths. In fact, the artillery unit lost people south of that town. They actually did this thing they almost never do: They turned their guns and aimed them directly into the town because they were taking such heavy fire from it. Well, that’s the same town that Ferrando was, like, “We’ll just drive through and surprise them.” And he said it to me like, “I thought we’d cause some problems for those motherfuckers, and we did.” That was his flippant attitude. And now he’s going to receive the Silver Star.

In the book, you can see the path of folly laid out, the one leading to all of the problems now. They’re just shooting through towns creating chaos and then moving on.

Yes. And it turns out that’s the easiest part of invading a country.

And you get the feeling that they were killing more civilians than anything else.

The problem is that they tended to see the civilian deaths more than the military deaths. The Marines probably killed dozens if not hundreds of armed Fedayeen or soldiers in the town of Al Gharraf. But we never saw the consequences because we just saw buildings falling down and flashes. They saw the civilian deaths more often because they were non-hostile situations at roadblocks.

There’s also the leveling of villages with bombs. Did you see a lot of indiscriminate bombing?

The indiscriminate bombing I saw was a bomb here and there from a lone F16. Everyone thinks of indiscriminate bombing as from airplanes. It’s the fucking artillery. The Marines in particular were using so much artillery that I have no idea what kind of killing we did. I tried to do little estimates with Nasiriyah. We were dropping these DPICM’s [dual-purpose improved conventional munitions] with cluster munitions. One round has between 60 and 90 rounds, and 15 percent of those don’t blow up until a kid picks it up later on and steps on it or plays with it because they’re brightly colored. I went back and I interviewed the artillery units and asked them how many rounds they fired on the city? It turns out we dropped 10,000 of those on one little city. It’s appalling.

Were there other situations where you found yourself feeling similarly appalled?

One thing I didn’t get to include in the book for space reasons was a scene in the beginning when these Iraqis surrendered to the unit I was with, and then we realized there were too many. So we had to unsurrender them and let them go even though they were begging for protection. Because they said there were Fedayeen death squads hunting them down and killing them — which everyone in the Marines, in the higher-ups, believed was true. They were carrying little leaflets saying we [the U.S. military] would protect them if they surrendered.

And we let them go. We said, “You’re no longer our prisoners. Bye, good luck, have fun on the road.” I did not know this at the time, but it was a Marine officer who later told me that that was a strict violation of a Geneva Convention.

I remembered [Major] General [James N.] Mattis [telling] me and other reporters before the war [that we’d] take all these surrenders, process them, treat them humanely. We didn’t do that because our stripped-down military did not have the personnel to process them. We betrayed them. I’m sure that those guys, if they survived, later became insurgents. You know, we lost their trust. Some of them probably turned into criminals. The other thing I didn’t report, or underreported in the book, was that we sped past mountains of munitions. Like RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], AK-47s. In Baghdad, some of the civilians were complaining to us that the price of an AK had dropped to the cost of a pack of cigarettes. I interviewed our explosive-ordinance-disposal technicians, who talked about 50,000 AKs in one hospital that we were unable to destroy. We would be digging holes and finding these Dragunovs, the best sniper rifle in the world, still sealed in their plastic bags. The Marines would just toss them out because it wasn’t their job to dispose of them. All of this stuff just flooded into Iraq.

Were there repercussions for your unit after the articles were published?

When the articles came out, the Marines were severely punished for what they said to me, and one guy was kicked out of the battalion. They got into a lot of shit, and were given a new commander and a new call sign. The company had been known as “Hit Man.” And they were to give it a new name. Part of it was just routine, but part of it was to erase their ugly history, as they saw it, with the Rolling Stone articles. And so they said, can you think of any new names? And according to my sources, Corporal Person, who was the driver of my Humvee, raised his hand and said, “How about ‘Baby Killer?’”

I was glad to see that even though they were getting punished and in trouble for all this, they didn’t knuckle under. It’s been my experience when I write about someone, and even though I always try to quote them accurately, they will often retract their quotes later on and say, “I didn’t say that, that’s bullshit.” None of these guys retracted their quotes. None of them took back what they said. In the end, they’re just really glad that someone was there to write about it. The thing that amazed me, though, is they all stuck by the articles.

That might be the most heroic thing they’ve done.

Fuck yeah. It’s better than any celebrity I’ve written about who, you say one little thing that they find offensive, and they threaten to sue you. Oh, here’s a great story: The Marines, they’re getting busted down. They put their lives on the line. They’re accused of cowardice for what they said in my articles. The one person who’s infuriated by my articles and is threatening all these horrific things is Justin Timberlake. Because one of the Marines dissed him. And Justin Timberlake’s people threatened all these horrible things because Corporal Person mocked Justin Timberlake’s musical abilities in the articles. It’s just a perfect comment on our culture.

You end the book after you and the Marines have come back, and some of them have returned to Iraq. Later, your old Humvee ran into some trouble in Fallujah.

Sergeant Kocher became the leader of Team One, in the point Humvee, which always rolls a little bit ahead. They reveal their positions, and then the ones behind it race in and kill the ambushers. That’s the classic way it should work. So they’re doing it again, and their intelligence officers say, “Expect ambushes, but there will be no more than 12 attackers.” So they’re rolling along, and Kocher is in the front right seat, and suddenly he sees these berms about 150 meters away on the right-hand side. He sees some movement, some weapons possibly, and he puts his M4 out the window, squeezes off three three-round bursts, and he sees the plumes of all these RPG rockets coming toward them. RPGs move very slowly, amazingly so. And he very quickly realizes that there’s between 75 and 125 ambushers out there.

One of the RPGs detonates outside the Humvee and blows up the tires. But another one actually comes in behind him. In the seat where I used to always sit, there’s a guy whose last name coincidentally is Wright, who’s sitting there with his weapon. The RPG hits his weapon, blows up inside the Humvee. And then the guy in the main gun, his nut sack is blown open. There’s another guy at the back window, he’s knocked unconscious. Everybody is sprayed with these penny-size pieces of shrapnel. They’re sticking out of their necks. And as Kocher later described it, the guy sitting in my seat, both his hands are blown off and most of one leg. He said it looked like a butcher shop — meat and fingers everywhere.

Kocher tells me that they finally come to a stop, and they’re taking this fire, and he turns around and the guy with no hands says, “Jeez, Eric, maybe we shouldn’t have gotten out of bed this morning.” And then he looks down at his stumps, which are spouting blood, and says, “Uh, I don’t look so good, do I?” The humor these guys have.

So Kocher jumps into the back seat. They’re now taking fire, and guys are advancing on them. And he takes bungee cords and he ties off Wright’s stumps and his legs, and he also does himself because he’s bleeding profusely. And then gets in the driver’s seat, because the driver was in shock. And the Humvee is burning, and the radios are all smashed. And the enemy’s advancing. Everybody’s disabled. And he turns the Humvee off because he thought it was in the “on” position but wasn’t running. But he realizes the engine had been running. So he’s trying to start this Humvee, which is burning.

What happened is, the rest of the platoon, as soon as Kocher’s team took fire, they drove part way into the berms, and then got out of their Humvees and advanced on the Iraqis and decimated them. But in the process of this, their new commander, Captain Brent Morel, took a bullet sideways under his armpit across both lungs. Kocher took his hand, and they poked a hole in Morel’s chest because he couldn’t breathe. Kocher said that Morel was 27. He was a redhead. That he was so pale, he said, even his hair seemed to turn white. And then he died.

But the weird thing is that as Kocher tells me this, he’s relating the jokes that they’re telling in the middle of this ambush. The guy with no hands is joking. These are guys who would tell jokes about kids with no arms and legs, you know, like those old bad jokes. But it shows me that even when they themselves land in that situation, their humor is still there.

Was the writing of this book cathartic?

Well, it’s really weird, because I was never this very emotional person, but there’s some stuff, like when Colbert treats this girl in Baghdad. We were outside of this insane amusement park, and this girl comes with shrapnel. I cried that day, and when I dictated the notes, I cried. And then, every time I would rework those paragraphs, I always cried. So, I think the catharsis is always there for me.

Generation Kill has such a great narrative. Did you have intentions beyond it?

My real intention with the book has always been to try to take that experience of being inside the Humvee and relating it. I’ve read a lot of war books, a lot of reporting, but I’ve read very few stories by people who were in this type of situation over and over again, of ambushes, and this leading unit. And so, when I was writing the book, some people I talked to thought I should analyze the war more. Even this one Marine was like, maybe you should tone down some of the more colorful stuff about the Marines. And my mantra for the book, every day when I was writing it, I would get up, and I’d just be like, Fuck everybody, fuck everything. I’m just gonna write exactly how it felt.

Evan Wright will read from Generation Kill at an L.A. Weekly–sponsored event at Boardner’s, 1652 N. Cherokee Ave. in Hollywood, Thursday, June 17, 7 to 9 p.m.

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The Killer Elite
Die Grundlage zu dem Buch, auf das in #18173 hingewiesen wird, ist ein Artikel aus dem `Rolling Stone`. Hier im Thread unter #3882/3/4 oder unter dem Link solange er noch geht.

http://www.rollingstone.com/features/featuregen.asp?pid=1696

The true story of bullets, bombs and a Marine platoon at war in Iraq

By Evan Wright


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The invaders drive north through the Iraqi desert in a Humvee, eating candy, dipping tobacco and singing songs. Oil fires burn on the horizon, set during skirmishes between American forces and pockets of die-hard Iraqi soldiers. The four Marines crammed into this vehicle -- among the very first American troops who crossed the border into Iraq -- are wired on a combination of caffeine, sleep deprivation, excitement and tedium. While watching for enemy fire and simultaneously belting out Avril Lavigne’s “I’m With You,” the twenty-two-year-old driver, Cpl. Joshua Ray Person, and the vehicle team leader, twenty-eight-year-old Sgt.
Brad Colbert -- both Afghan War veterans -- have already reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with “fucking retards." There’s the retard commander in their battalion who took a wrong turn near the border, delaying the invasion by at least an hour. There’s another officer, a classic retard, who has already begun chasing through the desert to pick up souvenirs thrown down by fleeing Iraqi soldiers: helmets, Republican Guard caps, rifles. There are the hopeless retards in the battalion-support sections who screwed up the radios and didn’t bring enough batteries to operate the Marines’ thermal-imaging devices. But in their eyes, one retard reigns supreme: Saddam Hussein -- “We already kicked his ass once," says Person, spitting a thick stream of tobacco juice out his window. “Then we let him go, and he spends the next twelve years pissing us off even more. We don’t want to be in this shit-hole country. We don’t want to invade it. What a fucking retard."

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WASHINGTON, DC (IWR News Parody) - President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney today issued a challenge to the Kerry Campaign to: "Let the mudslinging begin!".

To demonstrate their commitment to "getting down and dirty in 2004", the Bush-Cheney 2004 Campaign held a mud raking and wrestling match in the back yard of the White House. In attendance were: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Marc Racicot and Ann Coulter who all mud wrestled blow-up dolls that were labeled with a magic marker to identify the Democrat, whose name was symbolically being dragged through the mud.

"This is going to be dirtiest and slimiest campaign in US history," said Karl Rove as he socked a doll labeled "Hillary". "First we release our Nazi tape, then we release the Pedophile clip and finally we top things off with the Red Scare video release in late October," said Rove with a dung-eating grin.

"These f*cking goddamn liberals are angriest sons-of-bitches since Adolph Hitler and the Nazis," said Cheney as he foamed from the mouth.

At the end of the mud slinging, John Ashcroft hosed down the participants and then sang the ten commandments from the Bible.
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June 28, 2004
Courting Allies, Bush Ends Rift With the Turks
By SUSAN SACHS and ERIC SCHMITT

ISTANBUL, June 27 — President Bush reassured Turkey on Sunday that it was once again a friend in good standing, despite its refusal to support American troops in the invasion of Iraq last year.

Meanwhile, administration officials pressed other reluctant NATO allies to commit themselves to rebuilding Iraq`s security forces.

On the eve of a two-day NATO summit meeting that will be dominated by Iraq and the rifts caused by the American invasion, Mr. Bush concentrated on the theme of reconciliation and on refocusing the alliance to use its military muscle in new ways, especially in Iraq.

"We are going to work together to help make sure that NATO is configured militarily to meet the threats of the 21st century," he said before a meeting with the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

The meeting of 26 leaders will begin Monday at a conference center in central Istanbul. Security precautions have all but shut down the main business district and cleared the normally busy Bosporus waterway of most tankers, party boats and cargo ships. Nonetheless, thousands of demonstrators protesting Mr. Bush`s visit converged on the city on Sunday.

At a time of widespread anti-American feeling in the Islamic world, Mr. Bush also took pains to praise Turkey for building a secular democracy that could serve as an example to other predominantly Muslim nations.

Meeting with local Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders, he also described Turkey as a country that had fostered tolerance between its Islamic majority and its minority religious groups. "They represent the very best of Turkey, which is a country that is secular in politics and strong in its faith," he said.

He ended his remarks by thanking the assembled Turkish religious figures "for being so faithful to the Almighty God."

Turkey`s government and its powerful military establishment had been anxiously awaiting a resounding American endorsement after more than a year of strained relations between the two old allies.

The tensions stemmed from the Turkish Parliament`s refusal to allow American troops to pass through its territory for the invasion of Iraq.

The vote was an embarrassment for the powerful Turkish military, which had been eager to take an active part in the war. It also undermined the efforts of the newly elected government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to court favor with Washington.

Relations grew even more tense after the war, when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz openly criticized the Turkish military for not making good on its promise of support and called on Turkey to apologize for the decision of its Parliament.

But in meetings with Mr. Erdogan and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Mr. Bush was said to have declared that all was forgiven.

A senior American official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said, "These meetings today made clear that whatever the differences U.S. and Turkish governments had over Iraq, from this point forward — and both the Turkish president and the Turkish prime minister in their meetings made this clear — from this moment forward, Turkey sees its interests and the American interests in Iraq as parallel and consistent."

While Turkey and the United States appeared to put their differences behind them, divisions remained between the Bush administration and its allies over Iraq.

Intense negotiations in advance of the summit meeting centered on an appeal from Iraq`s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, for NATO training and technical assistance.

American officials expressed guarded confidence that NATO member nations would agree on some sort of limited commitment to help train Iraqis.

But differences persisted over how and where to provide the training, and over whether a training program could be under the aegis of NATO or merely coordinated by the alliance.

"We have a lot of work to do to find out what the Iraqi needs are, specifically what they have in mind, what NATO can offer," said the senior American official who briefed reporters. "This is a big deal. But I believe that NATO will agree that this is an urgent mission and it`s got to be carried out fast."

France and Germany, two of the strongest objectors to the war in Iraq, oppose sending in any of their personnel, even as trainers, even though Mr. Allawi had specifically asked NATO to provide such assistance inside Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was also in Istanbul for the summit meeting, supported that request.

Mr. Rumsfeld, as well as allied defense officials and American military officials here and in Iraq, acknowledged that many details about NATO`s training assistance in Iraq were still unresolved.

"There are no details yet how to do it," the Danish defense minister, Soren Gade, said in an interview.

Some training of Iraqi forces has been under way for months.

Police officers are being trained in Jordan by Jordanian and foreign law enforcement officers, and Germany has been training Iraqi security agents in the United Arab Emirates.

American defense officials suggested that the NATO training could fall under the control of Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, a former commander of the 101st Airborne Division who has been newly assigned to help oversee training of the Iraqi security forces, or at least be coordinated with General Petraeus`s efforts.

Simply turning out new Iraqi recruits and expecting them to perform well is insufficient, the officials said.

"These people, when they come out, have to be fit into a chain of command someplace," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

"They have to have a mentoring program so they have continuing training. It is a much more sophisticated task than simply putting somebody through school and then shoving him out of society."

Iraqi officials are considering increasing the training and improving the equipment for members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, and integrating it into the Iraqi Army, Mr. Rumsfeld said. The corps would be renamed a national guard to clarify its security role. Alliance members would help identify training needs for the new units.

"The new Iraqi government is making judgments about how it`ll recast the various security forces," Mr. Rumsfeld said in an interview with reporters traveling with him. "NATO will then work with the Iraqi chain of command, and new Iraqi government, and tasks will be assigned out."

While an accord on training would be a sign that the badly frayed alliance is still capable of consensus on Iraq, it would fall far short of the Bush administration`s initial hopes for NATO troops to supplement American, British and other occupation forces in Iraq.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 28, 2004
U.S. Transfers Sovereignty to Iraqi Govt.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:38 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government Monday, speeding up the move by two days in an apparent bid to surprise insurgents who may have tried to sabotage the step toward self rule.

Legal documents handing over sovereignty were handed over by U.S. governor L. Paul Bremer to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in a ceremony in the heavily guarded Green Zone.

``This is a historical day,`` Allawi said during the ceremony. ``We feel we are capable of controlling the security situation.``

Bremer will leave Iraq sometime Monday, coalition officials said on condition of anonymity.

The ceremony took place in a formal room with Louis XIV furniture. Bremer sat on the couch with Allawi and President Ghazi al-Yawer.

``We`d like to express our thanks to the coalition,`` al-Yawer said. ``There is no way to turn back now.``

In Istanbul, Turkey, where President Bush and other leaders were attending a NATO summit, the U.S. administration said it was pleased by the early transfer and said it was a proud day for the Iraqi people.

``You have said, and we agreed, that you are ready for sovereignty,`` Bremer said in the ceremony. ``I will leave Iraq confident in its future.``

Allawi said he requested that the sovereignty be transferred earlier, reflecting a preference to have Iraqis control their own destiny as soon as possible. Last Thursday, the coalition transferred the final 11 of the 26 government ministries to full Iraqi control, meaning Iraqis were already handling the day to day operations of the interim administration.

Bremer went on a series of farewell visits to areas throughout the country over the past few days.

With the transfer, the Iraqis now face the daunting task of securing law and order with the help of about 135,000 U.S. troops and about 20,000 more from other coalition countries.

``We have been laying down strategies for protecting our people,`` Allawi said after the ceremony, adding that he would spell out details at a news conference later.

``The blood that has been spilled in Iraq has been spilled for a very good reason,`` Allawi said, explaining that it was in the cause of democracy and freedom.

------

Associated Press writer Lourdes Navarro also contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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June 28, 2004
Families, Deep in Debt, Facing Pain of Growing Interest Rates
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

LANCASTER, Pa., June 25 — With the Federal Reserve about to raise interest rates for the first time in four years, Joyce Diffenderfer is beginning to wonder how she and her husband, Curtis, will deflect the growing cost of their $16,000 in credit card debt.

Not that her concern is a pressing issue yet; it is more like a fire drill in anticipation of a fire that she is still not convinced will occur. The Diffenderfers figure that a modest rate increase would initially add only $35 to their monthly card payments, which now total more than $600. Still, they have run out of ways to sidestep the cost of borrowing, and if the rates keep rising, as the Fed`s leaders suggest they will, then the only alternative, Mrs. Diffenderfer said, will be to seriously cut family spending.

The Diffenderfers are among the millions of American families who rode the recent wave of low interest rates to home ownership and the rapid accumulation of debt, and now they must cope as rates begin to swing upward. The process is almost certain to begin at a meeting of the Fed`s policy makers on Tuesday and Wednesday. They are widely expected to raise rates a quarter of a percentage point and follow that with similar increases periodically over the next 18 months.

"Unless there is a sizable jump in rates, let`s say two percentage points within a year, I`m not going to think much about it," said Mrs. Diffenderfer, 47, who earns $14 an hour fielding customer calls at Kunzler & Company, a manufacturer of sausages and frankfurters in this southern Pennsylvania industrial city on the fringe of Amish country.

"Less than two percentage points we can handle just by not eating out as much," she said, swiveling her chair away from her computer for an interview late in the day, after the phone calls died down. Her husband, 55, is a construction worker.

By several measures, Americans are more indebted than ever. Through the first quarter, they owed nearly $9 trillion in home mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, home equity loans and other forms of personal borrowing — accumulating nearly 40 percent of this total in just four years, according to published Federal Reserve data. But most of the debt is at fixed interest rates. Thus it will be unaffected initially as the central bank begins its much expected quarter-point increases in the so-called federal funds rate, now at a 46-year low of 1 percent. The federal funds rate, in turn, influences the interest rate cost of most household and commercial debt.

Only one-fifth of the $9 trillion in total household debt, or $1.8 trillion, is borrowed at variable rates. Variable rates, like those that the Diffenderfers pay on their four credit cards, often track what the Fed does, which means they are likely to rise one-quarter of a percentage point over the next few weeks. The immediate cost for the nation`s households as a result of this process could be as much as $4.5 billion, including the initial $35 increase in the Diffenderfers` monthly credit card bill.

The $4.5 billion is roughly 10 percent of the cost of the rise in oil prices so far this year. That is not a big number yet, but each quarter-point increase would be another step closer to matching the oil shock, which brought gasoline prices above $2 a gallon in many parts of the country.
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While the oil shock quickly raised the gasoline and heating oil bills of nearly every household, the burden of higher interest payments falls most heavily in the early stages on lower- and middle-income families. They are the biggest users of variable rate debt, particularly on credit cards, various studies show.

Upper income families, on the other hand - that is, families with more than $80,000 in annual income - are more likely to have fixed rate debt, particularly mortgages, and to owe relatively little on their credit cards. What variable rate debt they do have is usually at lower interest rates than lower income people. Lower income people, as a result, are 10 times more likely than upper income people to be devoting 40 percent or more of their income to debt repayment, the Economic Policy Institute reports. In addition, upper income people are the nation`s biggest savers, and a rate increase raises the return on their interest-bearing securities.

"If you are a household with a lot of variable-rate debt and little equity left in your home that you have not already borrowed against, this is going to be a scary time," said Mark Zandi, who is the chief economist at Economy.com.

The Diffenderfers have a combined income of nearly $70,000 a year, including the overtime he earns and the small payments she receives as assistant organist at her church. They have been married 17 years but they lived with her mother for the first 11, paying her rent. When they finally bought a house of their own in 1998, for $89,000, they had nothing saved for a down payment, and borrowed the entire amount through a 30-year mortgage. They also took out a second mortgage, for $30,000, which they invested in remodeling the home: aluminum siding, a new bathroom and a refinished living room with oak trimmed walls.

As interest rates fell, they refinanced both mortgages, locking in a 5.25 percent fixed interest rate for 30 years. Still, the remodeling continued, mainly on credit cards once the $30,000 was exhausted. Their three-bedroom house is now worth nearly $120,000, almost equal to the mortgage debt, Mrs. Diffenderfer estimates. That leaves the couple with no spare equity that can be extracted in cash through a bigger mortgage. Nor can they lower their $726-a-month mortgage payment. With mortgage rates already rising in anticipation of the Fed`s increases, that once lucrative route for millions of consumers is closing.

The Diffenderfers have only their salaries to meet the rising cost of their variable rate credit card debt, although for a while Mrs. Diffenderfer managed to reduce the interest payments by switching the balances to new credit cards whenever she could get a lower rate. The interest rates on her cards now average just under 10 percent, partly through her efforts to find teaser discounts and partly because credit card companies dropped their rates several percentage points, a decline now likely to be reversed.

"There are adjustments we could make in our spending," Mrs. Diffenderfer said. "Eating out is one. We could put remodeling of our home on hold and give ourselves a breather. We contribute $125 a week to our church. We don`t want to cut back on that but we would if our financial situation changed drastically. It would have to be pretty drastic."

Another notch up in home prices would give the Diffenderfers some relief; they could float a 4 to 5 percent home equity loan against the additional value of their home and use the loan to pay down credit card debt. Tens of millions of Americans have used this route to lower the interest cost of credit card debt. With homes appreciating more slowly, there is less collateral left to support home equity loans, and paying the outstanding balances will become more costly. They totaled $375 billion at the end of last year.Home prices are a big potential casualty of rising interest rates. Sales of new and existing homes surged in May, the government reported, as people apparently rushed to become homeowners before mortgage rates went any higher. The average 30-year mortgage is already up a percentage point since early spring.

But for Stephen Black, a homebuilder here, the surge in home sales is a false signal. The customer base is already shrinking for his basic product, a two-story house with four bedrooms and a two-car garage on nearly a quarter-acre, a home currently priced at $215,000.

The buyers were families with $50,000 to $70,000 in annual income. Now they are increasingly bunched at the high end. The low end is pulling back partly because mortgages are more costly, Mr. Smith says, but also because in the past year the cost of building materials rose $17,000 and his company, Stephen Black Builders, has been able to pass along only $14,000 of that. Even the higher-income families have resisted paying the last $3,000. "Sales of these homes had been averaging 20 to 22 a year," Mr. Smith said, "but I think they will drop to 18 to 20."

One antidote to rising interest rates could be the recent surge in employment, and all the new income that will accompany the one million jobs created since February - but that remains to be seen. "The question really is, are the people who are leveraged with debt, are they the ones getting the jobs and income?" said Richard Berner, chief domestic economist at Morgan Stanley. Employment growth has been fairly robust in Lancaster, but even so, Mr. Smith is seeing fewer customers as they react to rising prices and interest rates.

Across town, in a rundown neighborhood, the working poor are just starting to show up in greater numbers at Tabor Community Services, a Lancaster agency that counsels those deeply in debt, said Michael Weaver, president of Tabor.

The "fragile low income," as Mr. Weaver calls them, do not tend to own homes, but those who do buy them through subprime mortgage loans, in many cases with adjustable rates. Apart from housing, nearly every transaction for these consumers involves interest payments in one form or another. Lacking enough income, they rent television sets, furniture and appliances, signing agreements that can adjust upward as interest rates rise.

Like their higher income peers, Mr. Weaver`s clients often take loans to buy car, in their case, used cars. But they are loans of shorter duration and higher interest rates than the standard four- or five-year new car loan, now averaging 7.4 percent. They have credit cards, but at rates above 15 percent, which convert into much higher penalties when monthly payments are late.

"These are people who are maxed out on debt," Mr. Weaver said, "and their numbers are growing."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 28, 2004
Iraq Group Issues Threat to Behead a Missing Marine
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

AGHDAD, Iraq, June 27 — A militant Iraqi group threatened Sunday night to behead an American marine it said it had abducted from a military base unless the United States released all Iraqi prisoners, according to a video broadcast on the Qatar-based television network Al Jazeera.

The video shows a man identified as Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun sitting on the ground in desert-patterned camouflage fatigues, with a thick blindfold over his eyes and a long, curved sword held over his head.

Marine officials said Sunday night that Corporal Hassoun, who is of Lebanese descent, had been missing since June 21.

The kidnappers belong to a little-known group called the Islamic Reaction, which referred to itself as the security wing of the 20th Revolution Regiment. They did not give a deadline for taking action but said Corporal Hassoun would be killed if their demands were not met.
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A man identified as Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun of the Marines was shown with a captor brandishing a sword.
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The new beheading threat adds to the anxiety that has been steadily rising in Iraq with the approach of the transfer of sovereignty on Wednesday. Now five men — three Turks and a Pakistani as well as the American — face grisly execution if their countries do not bow to their captors` demands.

Also on Sunday, a passenger on a military flight was fatally shot when the plane was fired on during takeoff from Baghdad International Airport. In a separate incident, two children reportedly died after a mortar crashed into the waters of the Tigris River.

In Baghdad, extra police officers were called up to guard major intersections and search cars. American military officials warned that Monday could see the beginning of a wave of insurgent attacks that they are calling the "Baghdad offensive."

Earlier on Sunday, another Arab television network broadcast a video of masked men holding a Pakistani contractor hostage. The masked men, apparently not from the same group as the one holding Corporal Hassoun, said they would cut off their hostage`s head within 72 hours unless Pakistan closed its embassy in Baghdad and recalled all of its workers. The Pakistani government has not issued a response.

In the video, the Pakistani hostage looked ashen-faced and terrified as he sat at the feet of four gunmen. He held up a badge identifying himself as an employee of the American contractor Kellogg Brown & Root.

In the video of the man identified as Corporal Hassoun, no kidnappers are clearly shown, although someone standing off camera is holding a sword over the marine`s head. In a statement by the group, the kidnappers said they had sneaked into an American base, lured Corporal Hassoun out and then kidnapped him.

Marine officials said Corporal Hassoun is a member of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which has many troops based in the strife-ridden Falluja area, where several other Americans have been abducted. The officials said that while they could confirm that Corporal Hassoun was missing, they could not confirm he had been kidnapped. In the short, grainy video, the camera lingers on his Marine identification card that says, "Hassoun, Wassef Ali" and "Active Duty."

The group`s name, 20th Revolution Regiment, is thought to refer to the violent uprising in Iraq against the British after World War I.

Family members gathered Sunday night at the home of a close relative of Corporal Hassoun`s in West Jordan, Utah, southwest of Salt Lake City.

The blinds of the house were closed and the curtains pulled shut. Friends and relatives, some wearing head scarves, stopped by. A group of cameramen and reporters stood on the corner with their large trucks and lights on.

"In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate, we accept destiny with its good parts and its bad," said Tarek Nosseir, a family friend and spokesman, reading a statement to reporters. "We pray and we plead for his safe release, and we ask all people of the world to join us in our prayers. May God bless us all."

In the community, where children ride bikes down the street, neighbors say the family members keep to themselves. Usually, when they were seen outside, they were working on their lawn or their cars, said Rob L. Grimstad, a neighbor. He saw one of the family members on Sunday and said it was clear that he was suffering.

"You can tell he`s upset from his expression," Mr. Grimstad said. "He`s obviously in distress. That`s not the way he usually looks."

Meanwhile, three Turkish men remain in captivity, also facing a threat of beheading. Neither Turkey nor Pakistan has troops in Iraq though the two countries, both Muslim, supply many workers. Turkey said Sunday that it would not give in to the kidnappers` demands that it quit doing business with American forces in Iraq.

Already, two hostages seized in Iraq have been decapitated, on video, by insurgents connected to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian fugitive suspected of masterminding a bombing campaign that has killed hundreds of people. In recent weeks, he has emerged as the brutal new terror boss in Iraq, though it is not clear if he is linked to other groups like Al Qaeda or is operating on his own. Some intelligence officers have even said Mr. Zarqawi may be a rival, not an ally, of Osama bin Laden.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that occupation forces had recently captured two top Zarqawi aides. "We`ve picked up a couple of his key lieutenants, and that`s helpful," he said.

A defense official said one of the aides, who was captured last week, had told American interrogators that Mr. Zarqawi was less interested in the future of Iraq specifically than he was in establishing a base in Falluja from which to foment violence against the United States and American allies in the region.

Sunday in Baghdad started out grimly when several large mortar shells thudded into the Tigris River around 11 a.m. There was a second mortar attack in the evening, and news agencies later reported that between two and five people had been killed, including two boys playing on the riverbank.

Reuters reported that a rocket strike had killed an American soldier in Baghdad and that insurgents had killed six Iraqi soldiers near Baquba, a small city north of the capital and the scene of other recent violence.

The military released few details about the attack on the airplane, thought to be one of the first deadly incidents of its kind. A short news release said that a C-130 troop transport plane was hit by gunfire around 5 p.m. and that the pilot had returned to the ground to seek medical treatment for the passenger, who later died.

In Hilla, south of Baghdad, the death toll rose to 37 from a suicide car bomb that exploded on a busy street on Saturday night.

Sadiq Hashim was driving with his family to an ice cream parlor when the explosion ripped next to his car. His wife and two sons burned to death inside the car.

On Sunday, Mr. Hashim, a civil engineer, curled up in a hospital bed, his face and chest a mess of burn salve and gauze.

"The street was like a piece of fire," Mr. Hashim said. "It all happened before my eyes, and I was unable to help my kids, who were burning."

His 4-year-old daughter, Nergis, survived, but Mr. Hashim said the skin on her face now looked as though it had melted.

"I`ve been through a lot in my life, and I went through several wars," Mr. Hashim said. "But never have I seen something so horrible."

Car bombs have become one of the deadliest tools of terror in Iraq. But most are aimed at police stations or military targets. What was unusual about the Hilla bomb, which went off around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, was that it was directed against a strip of juice stands, clothing stores and ice cream shops, at the precise hour when families go out for a stroll or a drive after the desert sun sets and the air begins to cool.

Many people were outraged.

"I just want to ask one question to those who call themselves freedom fighters," said Ali Kadum al-Hamdani, the provincial human rights chief in Hilla. "What did Nergis do to them?"

Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Hilla, Iraq, for this article, Eric Schmitt from Istanbul and Melissa Sanford from West Jordan, Utah.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Gordon Adams, a senior defense budget official for the White House from 1993 to 1997, is a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. Nigel Holmes is a graphic designer.
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washingtonpost.com

Iraq Occupation Erodes Bush Doctrine

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 28, 2004; Page A01

The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush`s foreign policy, according to a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials.

When the war began 15 months ago, the president`s Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad`s transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change.

But these central planks of Bush doctrine have been tainted by spiraling violence, limited reconstruction, failure to find weapons of mass destruction or prove Iraq`s ties to al Qaeda, and mounting Arab disillusionment with U.S. leadership.

"Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a sliver," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center.

The president has "walked away from unilateralism. We`re not going to do another preemptive strike anytime soon, certainly not in Iran or North Korea. And it looks like terrorism is getting worse, not better, especially in critical countries like Saudi Arabia," Kemp said.

As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq, which is entering a new phase this week as the United States prepares to hand over power to the new Iraqi government.

Setbacks in Iraq have had a visible impact on policy, forcing shifts or reassessments. The United States has returned to the United Nations to solve its political problems in Iraq. It has appealed to NATO for help on security. It is also relying on diplomacy, with allies, to deal with every other hot spot.

"There`s already been a retreat from the radicalism in Bush administration foreign policy," said Walter Russell Mead, a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow. "You have a feeling that even Bush isn`t saying, `Hey, that was great. Let`s do it again.` "

Some analysts, including Republicans, suggest that another casualty of Iraq is the neoconservative approach that inspired a zealous agenda to tackle security threats in the Middle East and transform the region politically.

"Neoconservatism has been replaced by neorealism, even within the Bush White House," Kemp said. "The best evidence is the administration`s extraordinary recent reliance on [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan and [U.N. envoy] Lakhdar Brahimi. The neoconservatives are clearly much less credible than they were a year ago."

The administration would not make a senior official or spokesman available for quotation by name to support its policy. But top administration officials insist the Iraq experience has not invalidated Bush doctrine, and they contend its basic principles will endure beyond the Bush presidency.

Policy supporters argue that current realities will keep some form of all four ideas in future policy. "Despite all the problems of implementation and despite mistakes made by the Bush administration, I don`t see many other choices," said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle.

"No one thinks the Middle East pre-September 11 is acceptable, or that we should work with its dictators. No one says in a world of weapons of mass destruction we can rule out preemption or that they`re not worried about the linkage between terrorism and states producing weapons of mass destruction," he said. "So I don`t see much of an alternative to the Bush doctrine."

Challenges to its four central tenets, however, are likely to influence U.S. foreign policy for years, some analysts predict.
The Preemptive Strike

The most controversial tenet of Bush doctrine was also the primary justification for launching the Iraq war. In the president`s June 2002 address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Bush said deterrence and containment were no longer enough to defend America`s borders. The United States, he said, had the right to take preemptive action to prevent attacks against the United States.

"We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act," Bush told cadets.

In the policy`s early days, its supporters hinted that preemption could eventually justify forcible government change in Iran, Syria and North Korea as well as in Iraq. But that sentiment is evaporating, because Iraq showed the "pitfalls of the doctrine in graphic detail," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Preemption has been "damaged, if not totally discredited," and the outcome in Iraq may prove to be "an inoculation against rash action" by the United States in the future, Carpenter said.

The administration is working overtime to reduce the sense of alarm that Washington is posed "on a hair trigger" to launch a new offensive against governments it does not like, said James F. Hoge Jr., editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. White House officials are relying on diplomacy to defuse confrontations over nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, the two other countries with Iraq that Bush labeled the "axis of evil."

The administration now contends its decision was discretionary, not preemptive, because Saddam Hussein had a decade to meet several U.N. resolutions. U.S. officials also say that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they had to learn to deal with threats faster -- and proactively.

"The notion that preemption has been discredited is entirely mistaken," said Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has argued for a muscular approach to international affairs.

"It`s a fact of life in the international system, because of the reality of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," Kagan said. "The normal lead time that a nation has to protect itself is not what it used to be, so preemption will have to be part of the international arsenal."
Unilateralism

Bush has repeatedly made clear his intent to act alone or with a U.S.-led coalition when the international community balks at confronting perceived threats.

"I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world`s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world`s most destructive weapons," he said in his 2002 State of the Union address.

Later that year, he told the U.N. General Assembly that Washington would work with the world body to deal with the "common challenge in Iraq" but stressed that action would be "unavoidable" if Hussein did not comply. "The purposes of the United States should not be doubted," he warned.

Yet Washington has made a grudging retreat after its limited coalition could not cope with all the problems in Iraq, analysts say. The shift was evident when the administration turned to a U.N. envoy to form an interim Iraqi government after two failed U.S. attempts. It has also deferred to the United Nations to oversee elections and to help Iraq write a constitution.

"Going it alone doesn`t really work in the world as it exists today," said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan Brussels-based group that tracks global hot spots. "We need allies. We become more vulnerable and exposed when we don`t have them."

The administration counters that its coalition included more than 30 countries, including the majority of NATO members, and that the idea is far from new. "Every administration reserves the right with respect to protecting vital American interests to act alone, but every administration seeks to avoid it," said a senior administration official involved in Iraq policy.
The War on Terrorism

Bush turned his sights on Iraq within weeks of the war in Afghanistan. "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror," he said in the 2002 State of the Union address. He added later: "The price of indifference would be catastrophic."

Whatever the merits of deposing Hussein, foreign and domestic polls now consistently show that the failure to find concrete evidence of significant ties or joint actions between the Iraqi leader and al Qaeda has dissipated international support for the United States and generated skepticism at home about the benefits of the Iraq war.

The Iraq war may even have hurt U.S. efforts to combat terrorism, analysts say, noting the increase in car bombings, hostage abductions and beheadings in Iraq as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia. "We have assisted al Qaeda in recruiting fresh adherents by the war in Iraq and the antagonism it`s generated," Hoge said.

The administration is "drifting," Carpenter said. It "clings to the idea of state-sponsored terrorism as a motive for the Iraq war, but it was wildly off the mark," he said. "Afghanistan continues to be the real central front, to the extent there is a front at all."

U.S. officials say waging war in Iraq was vital to eliminate a refuge for extremists after Afghanistan.

Early supporters of administration policy also say the problem is not with the principles, but with their implementation. Any government has limited chances to enact policy, and early setbacks in execution can lead the public or policymakers to back away even if the ideas remain valid, Kristol said.
Promoting Democracy

The most ambitious aspect of Bush doctrine is pressing for political and economic reform in the Islamic world, the last bloc of countries to hold out against the democratic tide that has swept much of the rest of the world. Iraq was to be the catalyst of change.

"Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution," Bush said in a November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy.

Although the administration is still pushing its new democracy initiative for the wider Middle East, Muslim disillusionment with the United States over Iraq has deeply hurt this goal, analysts warn. Democratic and Republican foreign policy experts almost unanimously predict that progress will be much slower than expected even six months ago.

"The idea that the Middle East can be repaired by external intervention has been seriously damaged. And the ideas of reform are going to be a much harder sell after Iraq," said Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

After six decades as the main mediator in the region, the United States may also be losing its standing as an honest broker because of Iraq and the U.S. failure to fulfill promises to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Naim said.

The Iraq intervention also discredited the president`s approach to regional peace. "The administration argued that if you removed the security threat in Iraq, you`d improve the chances of solving the Arab-Israeli conflict -- that the road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad. If anything, we learned it`s just the other way around," Hoge said.

Supporters of the administration`s efforts argue that promoting democracy is the oldest goal in U.S. foreign policy worldwide, dating back more than 200 years. Whatever the current problems, they contend, it will remain a top goal -- particularly in the Islamic world as a key to countering extremism.

The overall impact of policy challenges in Iraq, analysts say, is that the Bush White House has been forced back to the policy center or scaled back the scope of its goals. They cite the president`s appeal for NATO assistance and cutbacks in the democracy initiative.

"It`s a lesson in hubris," Carpenter said. "The administration thought it had all the answers, but it found out through painful experience that it did not."

Yet administration supporters say Iraq has not produced backtracking or policy reassessment. "Enormously sharp distinctions are being made between different policy views, which are largely artificial," Kagan said. "There was an enormous consensus going into this war and there`s a consensus now about what needs to be done. So we are having a huge, vicious debate, and yet I`m not sure what the debate is about."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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The Undeclared Oil War

By Paul Roberts

Monday, June 28, 2004; Page A21

While some debate whether the war in Iraq was or was not "about oil," another war, this one involving little but oil, has broken out between two of the world`s most powerful nations.

For months China and Japan have been locked in a diplomatic battle over access to the big oil fields in Siberia. Japan, which depends entirely on imported oil, is desperately lobbying Moscow for a 2,300-mile pipeline from Siberia to coastal Japan. But fast-growing China, now the world`s second-largest oil user, after the United States, sees Russian oil as vital for its own "energy security" and is pushing for a 1,400-mile pipeline south to Daqing.

The petro-rivalry has become so intense that Japan has offered to finance the $5 billion pipeline, invest $7 billion in development of Siberian oil fields and throw in an additional $2 billion for Russian "social projects" -- this despite the certainty that if Japan does win Russia`s oil, relations between Tokyo and Beijing may sink to their lowest, potentially most dangerous, levels since World War II.

Asia`s undeclared oil war is but the latest reminder that in a global economy dependent largely on a single fuel -- oil -- "energy security" means far more than hardening refineries and pipelines against terrorist attack. At its most basic level, energy security is the ability to keep the global machine humming -- that is, to produce enough fuels and electricity at affordable prices that every nation can keep its economy running, its people fed and its borders defended. A failure of energy security means that the momentum of industrialization and modernity grinds to a halt. And by that measure, we are failing.

In the United States and Europe, new demand for electricity is outpacing the new supply of power and natural gas and raising the specter of more rolling blackouts. In the "emerging" economies, such as Brazil, India and especially China, energy demand is rising so fast it may double by 2020. And this only hints at the energy crisis facing the developing world, where nearly 2 billion people -- a third of the world`s population -- have almost no access to electricity or liquid fuels and are thus condemned to a medieval existence that breeds despair, resentment and, ultimately, conflict.

In other words, we are on the cusp of a new kind of war -- between those who have enough energy and those who do not but are increasingly willing to go out and get it. While nations have always competed for oil, it seems more and more likely that the race for a piece of the last big reserves of oil and natural gas will be the dominant geopolitical theme of the 21st century.

Already we can see the outlines. China and Japan are scrapping over Siberia. In the Caspian Sea region, European, Russian, Chinese and American governments and oil companies are battling for a stake in the big oil fields of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. In Africa, the United States is building a network of military bases and diplomatic missions whose main goal is to protect American access to oilfields in volatile places such as Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and tiny Sao Tome -- and, as important, to deny that access to China and other thirsty superpowers.

The diplomatic tussles only hint at what we`ll see in the Middle East, where most of the world`s remaining oil lies. For all the talk of big new oil discoveries in Russia and Africa -- and of how this gush of crude will "free" America and other big importers from the machinations of OPEC -- the geological facts speak otherwise. Even with the new Russian and African oil, worldwide oil production outside the Middle East is barely keeping pace with demand.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Russia and France clashed noisily with the United States over whose companies would have access to the oil in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Less well known is the way China has sought to build up its own oil alliances in the Middle East -- often over Washington`s objections. In 2000 Chinese oil officials visited Iran, a country U.S. companies are forbidden to deal with; China also has a major interest in Iraqi oil.

But China`s most controversial oil overture has been made to a country America once regarded as its most trusted oil ally: Saudi Arabia. In recent years, Beijing has been lobbying Riyadh for access to Saudi reserves, the largest in the world. In return, the Chinese have offered the Saudis a foothold in what will be the world`s biggest energy market -- and, as a bonus, have thrown in offers of sophisticated Chinese weaponry, including ballistic missiles and other hardware, that the United States and Europe have refused to sell to the Saudis.

Granted, the United States, with its vast economic and military power, would probably win any direct "hot" war for oil. The far more worrisome scenario is that an escalating rivalry among other big consumers will spark new conflicts -- conflicts that might require U.S. intervention and could easily destabilize the world economy upon which American power ultimately rests.

As demand for oil becomes sharper, as global oil production continues to lag (and as producers such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria grow more unstable) the struggle to maintain access to adequate energy supplies, always a critical mission for any nation, will become even more challenging and uncertain and take up even more resources and political attention.

This escalation will not only drive up the risk of conflict but will make it harder for governments to focus on long-term energy challenges, such as avoiding climate change, developing alternative fuels and alleviating Third World energy poverty -- challenges that are themselves critical to long-term energy security but which, ironically, will be seen as distracting from the current campaign to keep the oil flowing.

This, ultimately, is the real energy-security dilemma. The more obvious it becomes that an oil-dominated energy economy is inherently insecure, the harder it becomes to move on to something beyond oil.

Paul Roberts is the author of "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Fiery Hatchet Job

By William Raspberry

Monday, June 28, 2004; Page A21

Michael Moore`s "Fahrenheit 9/11" is everything you`ve heard. It is a searing indictment of the Bush administration`s war on terror. It is an eye-opening expose of a president whose inexperience and limited intelligence make him tragically unsuited for the job. It is a masterful job of connecting the dots between Saudi money and the business interests of the president and his friends. And it is an overwrought piece of propaganda -- a 110-minute hatchet job that doesn`t even bother to pretend to be fair.

That last may be a part of its appeal: There is no hidden agenda, no subliminal message. Moore thinks George W. Bush is dumb, devious and dangerous, and needs to be voted out of office. He doesn`t have that much good to say about the Democrats or John Kerry, their presumptive candidate. But it`s mostly about how bad Bush is.

It`s easy enough to see why Republicans hated the movie before they ever saw it, why they used their influence to try to stop its production and distribution, and why, having failed at that, they are calling on theater owners not to show it.

But why did the mostly liberal crowd at last week`s Washington premiere -- people who like to think of themselves as thoughtful and fair-minded -- applaud so unrestrainedly?

They applauded, I suspect, for much the same reason so many members of the black Christian middle-class applaud the harangues of Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan. Some of his facts may be wrong and some of his connections strained, but his attitude is right. What`s more, he`ll say in plain language what nice, educated people cannot bring themselves to say: The man is a devil.

I thought from the beginning that the Bush administration was wrong to launch its unprovoked war on Iraq. "Fahrenheit" makes it easier to believe that the war was not simply a horrible mistake based on over-extrapolation from slim evidence. I`ve long had my doubts about the president`s intellectual gifts. Moore tempts me to doubt his basic competency.

There is that Sept. 11 scene at a Florida elementary school where the president is reading to a group of children when an aide whispers in his ear that an airliner has crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He blanches at the horrible news but then returns to his reading: "My Pet Goat." What should he have done? Was he well-advised not to show panic? I don`t know, and Moore doesn`t tell us. He is content to give us the impression of a man who has no idea what to do unless there is someone there to give him instructions.

Or of a man who only pretends to care about terrorism. There is the vacationing President Bush making a grim-faced denunciation of some terrorist action, then turning back to his golf game with: "Now watch this drive."

You can tell how bad that looks -- but should he have bagged his clubs after delivering that TV message? To what purpose?

The movie is full of such slyness -- and if Moore is afraid it`s too subtle for you, he`ll spell it out in one of his numerous voice-overs.

But it`s not all slyness. The most powerful story in the film is that of Lila Lipscomb, from Moore`s hometown of Flint, Mich., who, when we meet her, is boasting of her family`s military service. A daughter served in the Gulf War and a son is serving in Iraq. Later, after the son is killed, she reads, on camera, his last letter home; in it he tells her how pointless and wrong and destructive the war seems to him.

And now this woman, who "used to hate those [Vietnam War] protesters," is a peculiarly effective war protester herself.

Will the film (along with the recent spate of books questioning the administration`s approach to fighting terrorism) produce a similar about-face on the part of the American public?

I wish Moore had been more scrupulously honest, more interested in examining other points of view, less inclined to make the facts line up to serve his purposes. But I can`t say he reached the wrong conclusion.

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NEWS ANALYSIS / THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Hand-Over Is Political Gamble for Bush
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

June 28, 2004

WASHINGTON — The hand-over of authority to an interim Iraqi government may offer President Bush his best opportunity before November to rebuild public confidence in his strategy for Iraq, but it also risks accelerating U.S. disillusionment with the mission there.

With a flurry of recent polls showing most Americans uneasy with events in Iraq, analysts across the political spectrum agree that the changeover could represent a pivotal moment in U.S. attitudes about the war.

Progress in establishing an Iraqi government capable of bearing more of the military burden could help Bush reverse the growing doubts about his management of the conflict — and fears that it has reduced rather than enhanced U.S. security.

Conversely, if the new government cannot establish legitimacy and order, pessimism about the mission`s prospects — and disillusionment over Bush`s initial decision to invade Iraq — is likely to solidify and even spread, experts say.

"There is risk and there is opportunity for Bush in the hand-over, and it is one of the most important events in an event-driven election," said Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

One key question is how Americans measure success in the weeks ahead. With U.S. officials indicating that they expect American forces to cede more security responsibilities to Iraqis, the number of U.S. casualties could decline. But as the terrorist attacks across Iraq last week show, a reduced U.S. role could mean more violence and Iraqi casualties.

"The administration is gambling on the notion that Americans will be thankful that there are fewer American casualties, even if the place is blowing up," said Ivo Daalder, a former national security aide to President Clinton and coauthor of a recent book on Bush`s foreign policy.

For now, the hand-over does not appear to be significantly affecting Sen. John F. Kerry`s strategy in the debate over Iraq. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has insisted since last fall that a key to success in Iraq is delegating more authority to the international community in return for more financial and military aid.

But the emergence of the transitional government could complicate Kerry`s arguments by reducing the visible role of American officials and encouraging other nations to become more involved in Iraq.

"It makes it trickier for him," said Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

The transition, though, holds greater risks for Bush, most agree.

The changeover comes as polls show widespread concern over Bush`s direction in Iraq. Although a mid-June Pew survey showed an increase in the percentage of Americans who thought events were going well in Iraq, most recent polls have portrayed public gloom over the struggle to stabilize the country.

In three national polls released last week and a Times survey concluded earlier this month, most Americans said they disapproved of the way Bush was handling the situation in Iraq; no more than 45% approved of his performance in any of the surveys.

In all of those polls, most Americans also said they did not think the decision to invade Iraq was worth the cost. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll released Thursday, 54% of those polled said it had been a mistake to send troops to Iraq, while 44% said it was not.

That was the first time since the invasion that a majority had branded the decision a mistake in Gallup surveys.

Experts agree the hand-over this week offers Bush a chance to quell such doubts. Bush supporters say over time it may encourage more Americans to conclude that, even with inevitable reversals, events in Iraq are moving in the right direction again.

White House strategists and independent analysts think the emergence of the interim Iraqi government can help Bush in several distinct ways.

After so many American expectations in Iraq have been disappointed, many agree Bush will benefit simply because the hand-over he has talked about for so long apparently will occur, on schedule.

"That`s a potential good news story, where they haven`t had many, and a chance to favorably surprise the American public, where they haven`t had many of those," said Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who writes extensively on public opinion about national security.

The hand-over will also somewhat change the face of the war for audiences in Iraq and the U.S. Rather than American officials and generals responding to each attack, increasingly it will be Iraqis in the spotlight, led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Those pictures could subtly reinforce Bush`s claim that Iraq is progressing toward his vision of democratic self-governance.

In the long run, though, most agree the key is not how the hand-over changes the image of the war, but the actual conduct and course of it.Many analysts sympathetic to the invasion hope that the replacement of the U.S. occupying authority will make it tougher for insurgents to win popular support for their attacks; in effect, they are hoping that terrorism in Iraq will be less sustainable if it is directed against Iraqis rather than Americans.

One senior Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking said the strikes last week against suspected terrorist safe houses in Fallouja, for example, were triggered by intelligence that was more easily available to the new Iraqi government than to American officials.

"This process is going to be one where all these factions in Iraq say, `We now have a seat at the table … and some punk with an AK-47 is going to try to take it away from us.` There is no doubt in my mind that`s why we got actionable intelligence on these safe houses," the senior Republican strategist said.

U.S. officials have made clear they aim to use the transition to significantly reduce the visibility — and vulnerability — of coalition troops in Iraq while relying more heavily on Iraqi forces to maintain order.

Although acknowledging that change will occur gradually, Army Gen. George W. Casey, Bush`s choice as the new commander of coalition forces, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that he expected U.S. troops increasingly to move into "a position of supporting the Iraqi security forces."

Such a shift could offer Bush a huge political boon: a long-term reduction in U.S. casualties. The danger to him is that it could also produce an increase in Iraqi deaths — especially if the new Iraqi forces prove ineffective or if the hope that the hand-over will discredit the insurgency is disappointed.

More turmoil in Iraq could undermine a central pillar of Bush`s case by deepening a sense that the invasion has increased, rather than reduced, the threat of terrorism.

It probably would also increase pessimism that the mission in Iraq could ever succeed, most experts agree. Both of those sentiments have helped power the recent erosion in support for the war.

Though many Americans clearly have hardened in their attitudes, the biggest lesson from the last year about U.S. opinion on Iraq is that it is constantly subject to revision. The months since the invasion were littered with putative turning points — led by the capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — whose effect faded with the headlines. Few doubt that events yet unforeseen will reconfigure whatever impressions Americans form about the hand-over this week.

"People are going to pay attention to it, but they are not going to make their judgments based on what happens in July; they are going to make their judgments about what happens all the way along the road," Kohut said.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Ich möchte auch noch mal aufr den Fisk-Artikel von Mitte des Monats hinweisen. Der sich ausführlich mit der Geschichte beschäftigt`Irak 1917`

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6337.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6337.htm

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 28. Juni 2004, 18:28
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,306238,00.html
Irak nach der Machtübergabe

Die geknebelte Demokratie

Von Yassin Musharbash

Die USA haben die Macht zwei Tage früher als vorgesehen an die irakische Übergangsregierung abgegeben. Doch ihr Plan für die Stabilisierung des Landes könnte ebenso scheitern wie der Großbritanniens nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, als der Irak im Chaos versank. Die neuen Herrscher bieten Radikalen zu viele Angriffsfläche.


Berlin - Als der neue Herrscher des Irak eingesetzt wurde, da ertönten ihm zu Ehren fremdländische Klänge: Die britischen Besatzer hatten dafür gesorgt, dass ihre eigene Hymne und nicht etwa die des neu entstandenen Staates zu hören war, als der haschemitische Emir Feisal am 23. August 1921 in Bagdad zum ersten König des Irak gekrönt wurde. Wenig subtil demonstrierten die Briten damit die wahren Verhältnisse: Die Iraker hatten zwar eine eigene Regierung bekommen; die Macht im Land würde aber weiter in den Händen der Besatzer liegen.

Auf solcherlei Brachial-Symbolik verzichtete der US-Zivilverwalter Paul Bremer heute, als er - zwei Tage früher als geplant - die Macht an die irakische Übergangsregierung übergab; stattdessen verließ er umgehend das Land. Doch genau wie 1921 beschlich auch heute viele Iraker das Gefühl, der Akt der Übertragung der Souveränität sei in Wahrheit doch nicht mehr als eine symbolische Geste.

Denn was ändert sich schon durch den Verwaltungsakt, den Bremer heute vollzog? Gut 150.000 US-Soldaten werden auch weiterhin auf unbestimmte Zeit im Land verbleiben. In den Augen der Mehrheit der Iraker garantieren sie weniger die Sicherheit der Zivilbevölkerung als vielmehr den US-amerikanischen Einfluss auf die weitere Entwicklung des Staates, der heute zum zweiten Mal gegründet wurde. Und die irakische Übergangsregierung, die nun formal die Macht in ihren Händen hält, wird auch künftig mehr damit zu tun haben, die Angriffe von Terroristen abzuwehren als Gesetze zu machen.

"Eine Menge Idioten..."

Von geregelten Verhältnissen ist der Irak heute genau so weit entfernt wie er es gestern war oder übermorgen sein wird. Die feierliche Rhetorik von Demokratie und Unabhängigkeit täuscht darüber hinweg, dass der Irak von heute in Wahrheit eher dem Gebilde von 1921 vergleichbar ist als dem Ideal-Irak, den sich die US-Regierung ausmalt.



"Es gibt in diesem Land in Wahrheit keinen Patriotismus. Er wird sich erst dann entwickeln, wenn das Volk erkannt hat, dass die arabische Regierung - mit uns im Rücken - keinen Schiffbruch erleiden wird. Bis dahin gibt es hier nur eine Menge Idioten, die sich einbilden, sie könnten den Laden selbst schmeißen, oder die ganze Sache wieder rückgängig machen. Beides können sie natürlich nicht...", schrieb die britische Beamtin Gertrude Bell 1921 nach der Inthronisation Feisals an ihren Vater in England.

Doch Bell irrte. Der Irak, den die Briten wollten, kam nie zu Stande. Er konnte es nicht, trotz aller britischen Einflussnahme und obwohl die Briten die Iraker vom Joch der Osmanen-Herrschaft befreit hatten. Weil die Iraker jenen Staat nicht wollten.

Schon in den Zwanzigern kam es zu derart heftigen Aufständen gegen den von Großbritannien vorgesehenen König, dass der britische Gouverneur Aylmer Haldane Giftgas orderte, um die Rebellen zu bekämpfen. Demokratische Wahlen, die die Briten verordnet hatten, fielen religiösen Rechtsgutachten schiitischer Geistlicher zum Opfer, die ihren Anhängern einen Boykott befahlen. Die Bevorzugung der Sunniten führte zu Aufständen der Schiiten. Und der britische Wunsch, von den Irakern die Erlaubnis für Militärbasen im Land zu erhalten, hatte bewaffnete Auseinandersetzungen zur Folge.

Fatale Parallelen zur Vergangenheit

Nach fast 40 Jahren, 58 Kabinetten und permanenten Rebellionen stürzten Putschoffiziere 1958 schließlich die Monarchie, die von den Briten eingesetzt worden war. Sie ersetzten sie erst durch ein Militärregime und später durch eine klassische orientalische Despotie, die in der brutalen Herrschaft Saddam Husseins mündete. Ein moderner irakischer Verfassungsstaat blieb eine Phantasie.



AP
Der irakische König Feisal II: Kein Patriotismus
Dem vagen politischen Fahrplan, den US-Zivilverwalter Bremer heute in Bagdad zurückließ, droht ein ähnliches Schicksal. Eine Verfassung und eine aus allgemeinen Wahlen hervorgegangene Regierung soll der Irak bekommen. Ob auch nur eines dieser Vorhaben verwirklicht werden kann, ist offen: Die Sicherheitslage spricht ebenso dagegen wie die weit verbreitete Ablehnung unter den Irakern gegen das als US-amerikanisch betrachtete Projekt.

Dazu kommen die innerirakischen Konflikte. Sunniten gegen Schiiten, militante Widerständler gegen die von den Besatzern bestallte Regierung, vormoderne Clan-Chefs gegen Demokraten, nach Westen orientierte Politiker gegen arabische Nationalisten, Kurden gegen den Rest des Irak, Minderheiten gegen die Zentralregierung - und die Ex-Besatzer zwischen allen Stühlen. Das Szenario der Gegenwart erinnert fatal an die Vergangenheit.

Für viele dieser Konflikte sind die USA freilich nicht verantwortlich, genauso wenig, wie es die Briten waren. Beiden Großmächten gemeinsam aber ist der Irrglaube, dass die Minderheit, auf die sie sich stützen, Garant genug ist für die Art von Entwicklung, die ihnen vorschwebt.

Ausreichend Motive für Gewalt

Denn genau wie seinerzeit die Briten auf König Feisal setzt das Weiße Haus heute alles auf die irakische Übergangsregierung. Feisal gestand damals den Briten das Recht auf Militärbasen und einen anglo-irakischen Knebelvertrag zu. Der Übergangspräsident Ghazi al-Jawir ist bereit, den USA zuliebe auf eine selbständige Politik und den Abzug ihrer Truppen zu verzichten und langfristig wohl auch den USA Militärbasen zuzugestehen.

Doch genau wie Feisal in den Zwanzigern steht heute Jawir nicht für die Mehrheit - und wird von ihr deshalb als Marionette der Besatzer wahrgenommen. "Miss Bell ließ irgendwo im Distrikt einen Furz und der hohe Beamte verlor die Orientierung", lautete ein Singvers, mit dem die Iraker damals auf die Macht der Britin anspielten, die - wenn auch nicht offiziell - eine Position innehatte, die Bremers vergleichbar war.

Nun ist Bremer zwar fort, die US-Soldaten aber sind noch da. Und solange sie da sind, wird es für Radikale aller Fraktionen ausreichend Motive geben, die Spirale der Gewalt im Irak weiterzudrehen.


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Charity hits at coalition over spending of Iraq oil revenues
By Gareth Smyth in Beirut and Thomas Catan in Washington
Published: June 28 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: June 28 2004 5:00

US-led occupation authorities have come under fresh criticism for the way in which they have spent Iraqi oil revenues during the past year of occupation.

In a report due for release today, Christian Aid, the UK-based international development charity, says the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has approved a flurry of spending commitments using Iraqi funds with few controls ahead of Wednesday`s handover of sovereignty.

"In the run-up to the handover, billions more dollars have been hastily allocated to projects that do not appear to have been properly planned," the report said. "This lack of accountability creates an environment ripe for corruption and theft at every level."

At a meeting on May 15, the CPA approved $2bn (?1.6m, £1.1m) of spending of Iraqi funds on security, infrastructure projects and future compensation funds. In June, it approved a further $500m for security ahead of the change of sovereignty.

Yesterday, a CPA spokesman said the spending commitments met the urgent needs of the Iraqi people and denied that its accounting methods were inadequate. He said the occupation authority had taken "extraordinary steps" to ensure Iraqi funds were properly accounted for.

"There was a consensus among Iraqi and CPA officials that the unfunded needs of the Iraqi people demanded that these funds . . . must be put to work for the country as soon as possible," a spokesman wrote in an e-mail.

After an initial report by Christian Aid last October, in which the charity said $4bn in Iraqi oil revenues were unaccounted for, the CPA began publishing some figures showing how much money flowed into the Development Fund for Iraq and how much was being spent.

In today`s report, however, Christian Aid said this disclosure remained "woefully inadequate" and claimed it was "almost impossible to work out what Iraq is earning from oil" using the figures.

The report follows stinging criticism of the CPA`s accounting methods by an international watchdog panel set up by the United Nations to oversee spending of Iraqi funds by occupation authorities.

Last week, the FT published an internal report by KPMG auditors working for the International Advisory and Monitoring Board in which they reported facing "resistance" from CPA officials and called its accounting methods "inadequate" and "prone to error".

The IAMB later announced that it would order a special audit into "sole-sourced" contracts handed out by the authority.

Such no-bid contracts have become a controversial political issue in the US because of the fact that some have been awarded to Halliburton, the company formerly run by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman who has been investigating these issues, told the FT: "The Bush administration has resisted oversight of its Iraq spending at every turn. It is wrong for the CPA to obstruct audits specifically mandated by the UN Security Council."

Yesterday, the authority said it was "surprised" at KPMG`s assertion that it had encountered resistance from CPA staff, and would respond to the complaints.

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War News for June 28, 2004

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Bring ‘em on: Insurgents capture US Marine near Fallujah, threaten beheading.

Bring ‘em on: One British soldier killed, two wounded by roadside bomb near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: US contractor killed as RAAF C-130 is hit by ground fire near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Six ICDC members killed in attack near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed in action in al-Anbar province.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi children killed in mortar attack near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed in rocket attack near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi policeman killed in mortar attack in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Five Kurdish peshmerga wounded by roadside bomb near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents threaten Pakistani contractor with beheading.

Bring ‘em on: British security contractor killed in Baghdad ambush.

"Sovereignty" given to interim Iraqi government, Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer cuts and runs.

KIA’s mother sounds off. “The mother of a soldier killed last week in Iraq planned to openly challenge the Pentagon on Sunday night by not only allowing the media to take pictures and video as her son`s coffin arrived at Sacramento International Airport, but by encouraging outlets to publish and distribute the images. ‘I don`t care what [President Bush] wants,’ Nadia McCaffrey said of the administration`s policy that bans on-base photographing of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. She planned to hold a short ceremony in front of reporters and photographers inside a Delta Airlines cargo terminal at the airport shortly before Flight 1583 was scheduled to arrive from Atlanta at midnight with the body of her son, National Guard Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, 34.”

Commentary

Editorial: “The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation`s unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm`s length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire. It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world`s most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans` memory banks. Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.” Read the whole thing.

Analysis: “When the war began 15 months ago, the president`s Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad`s transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change. But these central planks of Bush doctrine have been tainted by spiraling violence, limited reconstruction, failure to find weapons of mass destruction or prove Iraq`s ties to al Qaeda, and mounting Arab disillusionment with U.S. leadership. ‘Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a sliver,’ said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center.”

Analysis: “Young Army captains spend their evenings in mayors` offices, advising on everything from democracy theory to garbage collection. Slightly older lieutenant colonels organize sheiks` councils. ‘Every commander in this division has personally run an election,’ either in Bosnia or Kosovo, says a senior officer in the 1st Infantry Division, now based in Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit. By default, they have become America`s nation-builders overseas.” These are all tasks that should have been accomplished by the civilian reconstruction authority, not the uniformed services. The CPA has been a miserable failure.

Opinion: “Backbiters and back-stabbers are as entitled as anyone to ask questions, but they, like the rest of us, must remain realistic and credible. Today Iraq is poised for increased prosperity and a better political future. Many, if not most, of its people are imbued with hope. Thousands of brave Americans, with the support of most of us here, are slowly but surely turning that hope into reality.” So according to Bob Dole, any American who questions Lieutenant AWOL’s disastrous Iraq policy is a “back-stabber.” Bob, you’re starting to sound like one of those Nazis you fought 60 years ago.

Opinion: “The news from Iraq is worse than ever. Government ministers, local officials and Iraqi police officers are murdered in broad daylight. American troop convoys are ambushed at roadsides. Foreign civilians are taken hostage and beheaded on an almost weekly basis. Ahmed Chalabi, the Bushies` first choice to head the new democratic Iraq, is exposed as a double agent for Iran and a blatant liar about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction. Oil pipelines are regularly sabotaged. And control of Fallujah, in the mutinous Sunni triangle, is ceded without a fight to the jihadi militants.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: North Carolina Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Mississippi soldier wounded in Iraq.



Note to Readers

The US Marine captured by insurgents disappeared on June 21, according to US military sources. That was the same day four US Marines patrolling in Ramadi were killed. There were no survivors from that patrol. News reports indicated that the dead Marines were found without weapons or body armor, and that their rucksacks had been searched. I strongly suspect the US Marine was captured during that ambush.

Having had some experience in this field, I also suspect this patrol was actually a Marine intelligence operation that went very, very wrong. Soldiers with a native language ability are almost always seconded to intelligence or civil affairs duties. A five-man patrol in a hostile area like Ramadi makes little tactical sense – assuming the insurgents hold no other captives. The ambush happened to suddenly that the Marines apparently had no time to radio a call for help. Finally, the videotape released by the insurgents announcing the Marine’s capture said they had “lured” him outside the Marines perimeter.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:37 AM
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Ed Weathers: `November`s winner could appoint three Supreme Court justices`
Date: Monday, June 28 @ 10:37:13 EDT
Topic: Supreme Court

By Ed Weathers, Memphis Flyer

There has not been a new appointment to the United States Supreme Court in almost 10 years-the longest the court has ever gone without change. Change is coming. If you care about the future of this country, you will cast your presidential vote this November with the Supreme Court, above all other things, in mind.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist is 79 years old. He`s been on the court for 32 years. Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is 84 years old. He`s been on the court for 29 years. Associate Justice Sandra Day O`Connor is 74 years old. She`s been on the court for 23 years.

Supreme Court justices are, of course, appointed for life. It is not unusual for a justice to serve for 20 or 30 years or more-witness the examples above. As life expectancy increases, the tenure of justices will likely increase, as well. Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a justice at the age of just 43. Don`t be surprised if he remains on the court for 40 years or more.



There is a good chance that the next president of the United States will get to appoint at least three, and possibly four or five, Supreme Court justices. Rehnquist and Stevens are old; they are almost certain to be replaced in the next four years. O`Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 71) have had some health problems in recent years; either or both could leave the court soon. Justices Antonin Scalia (68), Anthony Kennedy (67), and David Souter (64) are each at an age when serious health problems are not unusual.

What this means is that the man we elect president in November is likely to determine the fabric of the law in this country until the year 2034 and beyond. This election is not about the next four years, it is about the next forty years.

Forget foreign policy-a president can change that on a whim. (See George W. Bush`s about-face regarding the United Nations in the last year.) Forget economic policy-the economy generates too much of its own momentum to be controlled by politicians. Forget legislative policy-elections in the House of Representatives can turn that upside-down every two years.

But the rulings of the Supreme Court affect all of us immediately and for generations. A Supreme Court decision today will control the law for decades. Witness last week`s decision that, according to most analysts, left federal sentencing guidelines in chaos.

In the past, presidents appointed justices who defied "liberal" and "conservative" labels. President Eisenhower, a Republican, appointed Earl Warren, who was later villified by conservatives as a superliberal. President Kennedy, a Democrat, appointed Byron White, who voted against abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. But things are different today. If George W. Bush is elected, his neocon handlers will demand that he appoint justices as predictably and consistently "conservative" as Scalia and Thomas, who almost always come down on the side of the police and the corporations. If John Kerry is elected, he is almost certain to appoint "liberal" justices like Ginsburg and Stevens, who believe in individual privacy rights and strict limits on police powers.

Over the next thirty years, the soul of our nation will be up for grabs. Two things make that inevitable:

1) There will be more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil-terrorists never go away-and when that happens, it is almost certain that the response of the Congress will be to pass laws that put more and more power into the hands of the FBI, the CIA, the police, and other elements of the so-called "security" establishment. Congress will also pass laws that cede more unilateral, unchecked power to the executive branch. That is what Congress has always done in the face of fear; it`s what the Alien and Sedition Acts did in 1798 and what the U.S. Patriot Act did in 2001. Today our nation is closer to an imperial presidency, with the executive branch having greater unchecked powers and more control over the dispensation of "justice," than at any time since the Sedition Act of 1918.

2) Technology will bring Big Brother closer to reality than ever before. Progress in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, computer technology, and surveillance systems will make it possible, even easy, for the government to find out everything about us and to use it in ways we can never discover. (A relevant digression: researchers are very close to increasing life expectancy to 120 years or more. The next set of Supreme Court justices may serve for sixty or seventy years or more. This is not science fiction.)

Together, these facts mean the next Supreme Court will decide where on the scale from fascism to democracy this nation will settle for at least two generations. These are some of the questions that that Supreme Court will have to answer in the next 40 years:

* Does the executive branch, in the name of national security, have the right to read our e-mails without a warrant?
* Does it have the right, without a warrant, to examine what we look at on the Internet?
* Does it have the right to put cameras in every public place to watch every citizen`s public movements?
* Does it have the right to use nanotechnolgy or heat-sensitive cameras to watch us through the walls of our bedrooms in the name of national security?
* Should every citizen be required to carry a national I..D. card with our genetic fingerprint on it?
* Should that national I.D. card contain a chip, like those in toll-booth E-Z passes, that can tell the government every store we`ve entered and every house we`ve visited? Should it also contain a global positioning chip that can tell the government where we are at any moment?
* Should the FBI be permitted to create a DNA profile (from loose hair samples, for instance) of any citizen it wants, in the name of national security?
* Should insurance companies or employers or police be given access to our DNA profiles, to find out if we might be prone to, say, heart attacks or alcoholism or criminal behavior?
* Does the government have the right to "tag" people it thinks might have terrorist potential by implanting computer chips under their skin, perhaps at birth?

All this, of course, goes beyond questions that the Supreme Court must answer much sooner, in the next two or three years:

* Is the so-called War on Terror really a war, when no war has been declared by Congress?
* Does the "War on Terror"-an expression with no meaning in the law-justify giving the President unending war powers?
* Can any President, ever, hold people in jail indefinitely, without giving them access to courts not controlled by the executive branch?
* Can the executive branch order the torture of prisoners for any reason?
* Can the FBI or the Transportation Security Administration maintain a list of people who are not allowed to fly on airplanes?

Let me finish with a current real-world example of the kind of issue the next Supreme Court will have to decide. Today, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security fund a program called "Matrix," which stands for "Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange." The Matrix program includes a computerized data-mining system that provides state and federal agencies with massive amounts of information about U.S. citizens. Recently, the company that came up with the Matrix data-mining program provided the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service with a list of 120,000 people in the United States who have "high terrorist factor scores." Because of their names, their ethnicity, their neighbors, their divorce records and who knows what else-their friends? their political columns?-120,000 people in the U.S. are now on a list. You may be there for reading this. I may be there for writing it. The government isn`t really saying how the list was determined or who is on it. They`re not saying if the list is being used to decide whose luggage gets searched at the airport or whose emails get read or who gets stopped in traffic. Very little has been revealed about Matrix.

The current administration doesn`t want you to know about Matrix, but it is real. (For more on the subject, go to http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=1… or http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=14257&c=130 .)

Sooner or later, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to decide if Matrix represents a constitutionally appropriate defense of national security or an unconstitutional threat to the privacy of American citizens. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, George Bush`s declared favorite justices, are on record as saying that the U.S. Constitution does not give American citizens the right to privacy. For the sake of your children and grandchildren, you might remember that when you vote in November.

Reprinted from The Memphis Flyer:
http://www.memphisflyer.com/content.asp?ID=2948&onthefly=1

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Bush`s American soldier body count in Iraq

Not 848,not 851, but 855 dead American soldiers.

Drip, drip, drip - the lives go down the drain - all for Bush`s illegal war.

Soon it will be 900, and then 1000.
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Published on Sunday, June 27, 2004 by the Free Lance-Star / Fredericksburg, Virginia
Bush is in Trouble; Will bin Laden Bail him Out?
by Rick Mercier


BEFORE PRESIDENT Bush’s Mesopotamian adventure, TomPaine.com produced an advertisement showing Osama bin Laden pointing at the reader, à la Uncle Sam, and exclaiming, “I want you to invade Iraq.”

As agitprop, it was brilliant; as commentary on the probable effects of an Iraq invasion, it wasn’t so bad, either.

With about four months to go until Election Day, I’m hoping that TomPaine or some other wise guys will put out an ad with the same image of bin Laden but with the request, “I want you to vote for Bush.”

It’s not hard to imagine bin Laden, tucked away in some remote tribal village along the Afghan–Pakistani border, chuckling to himself and mockingly chanting: “Four more years, four more years.” Bush has done a stunning job of playing into al–Qaida’s hands; the terrorist group could not have planned his response to Sept. 11 any better.

That’s essentially the argument made by a senior U.S. intelligence official, identified by the London Guardian as “centrally involved in the hunt for bin Laden,” in a soon-to-be-published book called “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.”

Written anonymously—because its author is still serving in an unnamed agency as a counterterrorism analyst—the book may represent what many career intelligence officials are thinking.
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Terrorism expert Peter Bergen, who has written two books on bin Laden and al–Qaida, told the Guardian that “Imperial Hubris” presents “an amped-up version of what is emerging as the consensus among intelligence counterterrorist professionals.”

According to the Guardian, “Imperial Hubris” characterizes 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 willful failure to recognize 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 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq.”

The author of “Imperial Hubris” believes bin Laden may well be planning a catastrophic attack on the United States before November—with the intention of getting Americans to rally around Bush and carry him to victory.

“I’m very sure they [al–Qaida] can’t have a better administration for them than the one they have now,” “Anonymous” told the Guardian.

A less “amped up,” but no less politically potent, critique of Bush emerged earlier this month from a bipartisan group of former diplomats and military commanders who have launched an unprecedented campaign to persuade Americans that “a whole new team is needed to repair the damage” caused by Bush and his neoconservative brain trust.

The White House has tried to dismiss the 27 former high-ranking officials as partisan hacks, but that’s yet another administration distortion. Many of those in Diplomats & Military Commanders for Change served Republican presidents, including Bush’s father. Some of the ex-officials even voted for Bush in 2000.

Says retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak, a member of the group who is advising John Kerry but was Oregon chairman for the Dole campaign in 1996 and a Veteran for Bush in 2000: “I don’t think that this accusation of politics on my part will wash. It’s just this administration has gone away from me, not vice versa.”

The Iraq debacle is “the worst reverse we’ve had on the international scene, and it simply has to be laid at the feet of the president,” says McPeak, who served as Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush and commander in chief of Pacific air forces under President Reagan.

Americans are starting to understand this line of critique. A CNN–USA Today–Gallup poll released Thursday found that, for the first time since the start of the war, most Americans believe it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq. Most Americans also feel that the war has not made the United States safer from terrorism, according to the poll.

A survey released by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press on June 17 found that Americans have become “considerably more negative” about how they view the war in Iraq in relation to the war on terrorism.

In that poll, 43 percent of Americans said the Iraq war has helped the war on terrorism, while 44 percent said it has hindered it. About a year ago, 65 percent felt the Iraq invasion had aided the war on terrorism, Pew noted.

Finally, a Washington Post–ABC poll released Monday found that only half the country approves of how Bush is conducting the war on terrorism. That’s down 13 points since April, the Post reported.

The poll also found that Bush has lost his once-commanding lead over Kerry as the candidate whom Americans trust to do a better job of protecting them from terrorism.

If the public-opinion trends indicated by these polls persist, Bush is in big trouble.

But the wild card is bin Laden. If the terrorist mastermind has a bloody October surprise up his sleeve, our blundering misleader may be rewarded with another four years to undermine our security.

Rick Mercier is a writer and editor for The Free Lance-Star. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Copyright 2004, The Free Lance-Star Publishing Co.

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June 29, 2004
Bush`s Rating Falls to Its Lowest Point, New Survey Finds
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER

President Bush`s job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

A majority of respondents in the poll, conducted before yesterday`s transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government, said that the war was not worth its cost in American lives and that the Bush administration did not have a clear plan to restore order to Iraq.

The survey, which showed Mr. Bush`s approval rating at 42 percent, also found that nearly 40 percent of Americans say they do not have an opinion about Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, despite what have been both parties` earliest and most expensive television advertising campaigns.

Among those who do have an opinion, Mr. Kerry is disliked more than he is liked. More than 50 percent of respondents said that Mr. Kerry says what he thinks voters want to hear, suggesting that Mr. Bush has had success in portraying his opponent as a flip-flopper.

Americans were more likely to believe that Mr. Bush would do a better job than Mr. Kerry would in steering the nation through a foreign crisis, and protecting it from future terrorist attacks. Support for Mr. Bush`s abilities in those areas has declined in recent months, but the findings suggest that Americans are more comfortable entrusting their security to a president they know than a challenger who remains relatively unknown.

Even so, the poll was scattered with warning flags for Mr. Bush, and there was compelling evidence that his decision to take the nation to war against Iraq has left him in a precarious political position.

As he heads into the fall election, Mr. Bush appears to have much riding on the transfer of power in Baghdad yesterday. The 42 percent of Americans who say they approve of the way Mr. Bush is handling his job is the lowest such figure in a Times/CBS News survey since the beginning of Mr. Bush`s presidency in January 2001; 51 percent say they disapprove.

Over the past 25 years, according to pollsters, presidents with job approval ratings below 50 percent in the spring of election years have generally gone on to lose. Mr. Bush`s father had a 34 percent job approval rating at this time in 1992.

Similarly, 45 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Bush himself, again the most negative measure the Times/CBS Poll has found since he took office. And 57 percent say the country is going in the wrong direction, another measure used by pollsters as a barometer of discontent with an incumbent.

Yet the survey found little evidence that Mr. Kerry has been able to take advantage of the president`s difficulties, even though Mr. Kerry has spent $60 million on television advertising over the past three months.

Nationwide, Mr. Kerry has the support of 45 percent of registered voters, with Mr. Bush supported by 44 percent. When Ralph Nader, who is running as an independent, is included, he draws 5 percent, leaving 42 percent for Mr. Kerry and 43 percent for Mr. Bush

In the 18 states viewed by both parties as the most competitive — and thus the subject of the most advertising expenditures and visits by the candidates — the race was equally tight. Forty-five percent of voters in those states said they would support Mr. Kerry, and 43 percent said they would back Mr. Bush. Indeed, on a host of measures, the poll found little difference in public opinion between the nation as a whole and that of voters in the competitive states.

The tight race indicated by the poll reflects how aides to both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have described the overall state of play for weeks. But other polls have, at times, shown Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush bumping ahead. A CBS News poll taken last month found Mr. Kerry with a lead of 49 percent to 41 percent over Mr. Bush.

The nationwide poll of 1,053 adults, including 875 registered voters, was taken by telephone June 23 to June 27. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

For all the signs of opposition to the war, Americans appear prepared to stay in Iraq until the situation becomes stable. The poll found that 54 percent of respondents said that the United States should remain in Iraq "as long as it takes," while 40 percent said the United States should withdraw "as soon as possible."

Overall, the poll`s findings left little doubt about the extent to which Mr. Bush`s decision to go to war is proving to be perhaps the most fateful of his presidency. About 60 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Mr. Bush`s Iraq policy, while just over 50 percent said they disapproved of his foreign policy. Those disapproval figures are the highest measured in his presidency on those subjects.

And 60 percent of respondents, including a majority of independents, said the war has not been worth the cost.

"We attacked a sovereign nation, and we went in there and we did things that the United States shouldn`t have done," Charles Drum, 36, a Republican from Alameda, Calif., said in an interview after the poll was taken. "I feel that we went after the wrong people, and it`s unacceptable, and it`s absolutely ridiculous that innocent people are dying over there in Iraq, and our own troops are dying for a cause that is not just."

Respondents said that Mr. Bush`s policies in Iraq were having the effect of creating terrorists and of increasing the chances of another terrorist attack at home. Concerns about the war appear to undercut what has long been one of Mr. Bush`s strong suits, his handling of the fight against terrorism. Fifty-two percent of Americans now say they approve of the way Mr. Bush is conducting that fight, down from 90 percent in December 2001.

"I watch the news quite a bit, and I`m kind of thinking it`s getting these terrorists motivated to do more," said Charlie Buck, 54, a Republican from Indiana, Pa. "Whether it`s their religious beliefs or it`s us trying to step into their country, I just get that feeling that they feel that we`re stepping into where we shouldn`t be, and it`s inciting them. It`s stimulating them to be more aggressive in getting us out."

In what could prove to be a particularly far-reaching development for Mr. Bush — especially because he and his campaign have sought to undercut Mr. Kerry`s credibility — nearly 60 percent said he was not being entirely truthful when talking about Iraq. Similarly, just 15 percent said the administration had told the entire truth when it came to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

There are some ways in which Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush are viewed similarly. They are seen as political leaders who keep their word, and both are viewed as optimistic, suggesting that Mr. Bush`s attempt to portray Mr. Kerry as pessimistic has not taken hold.

But there are signs that Americans are beginning to form very different personal perceptions of these two men. Mr. Kerry was described as more likely than Mr. Bush to admit a mistake, and to listen to divergent opinions. Mr. Bush is viewed as someone who takes a position and sticks with it, and while those interviewed were split on whether that was a positive trait, it is a contrast that Mr. Bush`s campaign has encouraged as a way of trying to undercut Mr. Kerry

"Kerry has flip-flopped too many times," said Joseph Martin, 52, an independent voter who lives outside Seattle. "The one thing that I think that a lot of people understand is a position of strength, and you cannot be waffling around. You`ve got to show a commitment, show a determination and keep a steady hand, and I just don`t think Kerry has got that."

For Mr. Bush, the poll contains a number of potentially worrisome findings. By 51 to 32 percent, Americans believe that he has divided the nation, rather than brought it together. The number of Americans who said that Mr. Bush did not care about the "needs and problems of people like you" edged up to 42 percent from 36 percent in March. More than 50 percent said that Mr. Bush did not have the same priorities for the country as they did.

On the issue of the economy, even though job-creation numbers have been rising over the past few months, 45 percent of Americans say that the Bush administration has been responsible for a decline in jobs, compared with 24 percent who say it has brought an increase. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they were very or somewhat concerned that they or someone in their house would be out of work over the next year.

Republicans, remembering what happened when Mr. Bush`s father lost in 1992, have long expressed concern that any improvement in the economy will happen too late to capture the notice of voters.

Both men are disliked by more people than they are liked. The number of people who view Mr. Kerry unfavorably has jumped to 35 percent from 29 percent in mid-March, when Mr. Bush began a huge television advertising campaign against his opponent.

In Mr. Kerry`s case, 36 percent said they had no opinion of him, despite the campaign`s record-setting expenditure on television advertisements. That figure is fairly typical for challengers at this point in the campaign; in June 1992, 44 percent of the public did not have an opinion of Bill Clinton.

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June 29, 2004
Militants Say U.S. Soldier Executed in Iraq
By REUTERS

Filed at 3:42 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Arabic television station broadcast a video tape showing what militants said was the execution of a U.S. soldier, hours after the United States and Britain formally handed power to an interim Iraqi government.

Kidnap groups have also threatened to kill a U.S. Marine, three Turks and a Pakistani seized in Iraq this month.

The captors of the Turks have said they will be killed on Tuesday unless Turkey orders companies to stop dealing with U.S. forces in Iraq. Ankara has rejected the demand.

The Pakistani`s kidnappers said on Sunday he would be beheaded within three days unless Iraqi prisoners are released.

Hostage-taking and violence are among the challenges facing the interim government sworn in on Monday after the U.S.-British occupation formally ended, two days earlier than planned.

Iraq`s independent Al Mada newspaper said only time would tell whether Iraqis were capable of managing their own affairs and how much freedom they would have to do so.

``It was a celebration with no marches, not one shot fired in joy, and in the streets everything remained as it was, with American patrols, Iraqi police checkpoints. Even the terrorist gangs that had warned Iraqis of hell carried out ordinary operations -- an explosion here and there and some shells at the Green Zone,`` it said in a front-page editorial.

The low-key ceremony, brought forward partly to foil any guerrilla plans to mark the handover with a spectacular attack, took many by surprise and the day passed in relative calm.

But there was anguish for the family of the man identified on the video footage shown on Al Jazeera television as Private Keith Maupin, 20, a U.S. soldier seized by guerrillas in April.

A gunman could be seen firing one shot at the soldier, wearing greenish overalls and seen only from the back. The body collapsed into a hole.

FAMILY VIGIL

U.S. defense officials said Maupin`s family had been told of the video, but that there was no confirmation that Maupin, from Batavia, Ohio, was the man killed. The family began a vigil on Monday and prayed for the soldier`s safe return.

Al Jazeera quoted a statement from a previously unheard of group as saying the soldier was killed because of U.S. policy in Iraq and in revenge for what it described as their martyrs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. The group was identified as the Implacable Power Against the Enemy of God and the Prophet.

Since April militants in Iraq have seized dozens of foreign workers and military personnel. At least four have been killed, including a South Korean and an American beheaded by a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The three Turks are held by Zarqawi`s Tawhid and Jihad group, while the Marine, Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, is held by a group calling itself the Islamic Response Movement.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi urged Iraqis to unite against foreign Islamist militants, blamed by U.S. and Iraqi officials for a campaign of suicide bomb attacks that have killed hundreds over the past year, as well as kidnappings.

Although Allawi`s government will have full sovereignty, according to a U.N. Security Council resolution earlier this month, there are important constraints on its powers.

It is barred from making long-term policy decisions and will not have control over more than 160,000 U.S.-led foreign troops who will stay in Iraq. The government has the right to ask them to leave, but has made clear it has no intention of doing so.

Iraq`s former U.S. administrator Paul Bremer extended immunity from Iraqi prosecution to foreign troops and contractors the day before handing over to Allawi`s government.

Officials with the now-dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority said Bremer signed revised Order 17 on Sunday after agreeing its contents with Allawi. The order remains valid until a transitional Iraqi government is elected in January.

Contractor immunity was highlighted by the abuse scandal at Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib prison in which employees from two U.S. defense contractors were named. The pair are not covered by U.S. military law and their legal fate is not yet known.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd.

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NEW GOVERNMENT
U.S. Has Leverage, but Wants to Show Iraqis Are in Charge
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Iraq was officially made sovereign yesterday, but how sovereign is still in dispute.

Iraq will have all the formal powers of a sovereign state: the ability to appoint and dismiss ministers; to allocate budgets; to conduct negotiations with foreign countries. But it is not clear what will happen if the Americans disagree with Iraqi decisions. Even though the United States has the leverage of troops and billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts, Iraqi complaints of American interference could embarrass an administration eager to prove to the world that Iraqis are now in charge.

A host of issues remain outstanding. Despite an agreement to consult on military matters, Iraq and the United States lack a formal accord governing the status of foreign forces and are relying on an American occupation directive covering several important matters.

American officials continue to hold Iraqi prisoners, among them Saddam Hussein, although the new Iraqi government has said it will take custody of him soon. How many other prisoners will be handed over is not clear.

And although Iraqi officials and legal scholars say that Iraq has the right to change the occupation-era rules, American military officials say that some of those governing military matters are binding. It is also not clear how Iraqi leaders would rescind other orders if they want to, since Iraq has no formal legislature.

Administration officials say the United States will have to exercise its influence tactfully and quietly.

Instead of holding news briefings, Ambassador John D. Negroponte plans to be nearly invisible.

"This is about Iraq," Mr. Negroponte said in an interview last week at the United Nations. "I hope that the rest of the world will get more and more of its information from Iraqis rather than from Americans. As for the information that you get on camera, I think we should look forward to higher visibility from Iraqis."

But Americans know that many Iraqis remain suspicious. "There is going to be skepticism among Iraqis," said Francis J. Ricciardone, who has led the planning at the State Department for a new American embassy in Iraq. "Some will surely see the new government as stooges. I hope they will see we are changing the way we deal with them. There will no longer be Americans telling them what the daily agenda is."

In his speech to the nation after taking power, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi mentioned the United States only twice, both times in passing and along with other countries. Dr. Allawi did not discuss the role the United States would play as the Iraqis actually begin to govern.

"That told me that the foreign power will continue to be here," said Salah Omar al-Ali, editor of a weekly Iraqi newspaper.

About 150 Americans remain in Iraqi ministries as advisers, and many Iraqi and American officials expect them to exert wide influence. It was unclear whether Americans would continue to occupy Mr. Hussein`s Republican Palace, but officials in Washington said a month ago that the administration plans to retain control of numerous buildings within the so-called Green Zone, a compound that includes the palace.

Other skeptics assert that, because of the American troops and the inexperience of the Baghdad government, the Americans will continue to hold sway.

"We`re turning over sovereignty to Iraq, but we`re not turning over the capacity for Iraq to govern itself," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "No one waking up to a sovereign Iraq on the first day will see that very much has changed."

A senior Bush administration policy maker who has dealt extensively with Dr. Allawi and his colleagues said that he was impressed with the Iraqi leader`s determination to exercise control.

"It isn`t just a legality," he said. "It is their state of mind. Allawi thinks he is a real prime minister. He does not doubt for a second that Iraq is sovereign."

But the Iraq that Dr. Allawi began governing yesterday is a nation with laws and directives handed down by L. Paul Bremer III, the former American administrator here, over the past several months and in some cases over the past several days. Among them was a decree granting immunity to American military and civilian personnel from prosecution for crimes in Iraqi courts.

Under international law, no laws issued by a military occupation are binding on an occupied country after the occupation ends, according to United Nations experts familiar with the Geneva Conventions. But American officials often argue that the occupation-era dictates of Mr. Bremer are still valid under resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.

Last Friday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserted at the Senate Armed Services Committee that Mr. Bremer`s immunity order could not be repealed by the interim government that took office yesterday.

Other administration officials contend that the Iraqi government can revise or repeal any rules it wants.

"There are hundreds of orders that the C.P.A. issued that are going to continue in force," said an administration official, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the official name of the occupation. "They may not be the law of the land, but they are part of the architecture of Iraq. But if the new government wants, they can change them."

Another sovereignty issue could arise over plans by Dr. Allawi to consider imposing martial law or some other form of emergency decree. Americans have begun to question whether a country that depends on the United States for its military forces can make such a decision on its own.

Several officials involved in Iraq policy said they expected that Iraq would sooner or later change such Bremer-era laws as those allowing extensive foreign investment and wide latitude for foreign companies to operate in Iraq.

The job of Mr. Negroponte and his colleagues, American officials said, will be to try to persuade Iraqis not to scare away foreign investors, or force American contractors to shut down if they should lose their protection from criminal prosecution.

While Mr. Bremer began each day with a telephone call to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, Mr. Negroponte will report to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, administration officials said.

After 15 months in which the Pentagon and the State Department often clashed over Iraqi policy, with Mr. Powell playing a secondary role to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the State Department is technically in charge. Some State Department officials who had drafted plans for the occupation before the war but were excluded from the occupation headquarters are now there to help Mr. Negroponte, who arrived in Baghdad yesterday.

Mr. Bremer had absolute powers; Mr. Negroponte will seek to persuade Iraqis rather than dictate to them, according to many officials. When Kurds in northern Iraq insisted on maintaining their autonomy, Mr. Bremer lectured them to drop their demands and ended up making them more determined, Kurdish officials say.

A decree by Mr. Bremer last year that he would not tolerate Islamic law similarly angered religious leaders.

"Negroponte will project, in a very dignified way, that he knows his place," said an administration official.

"Iraq`s politics are so complicated that we can`t fix them," said Mr. Ricciardone. "Only Iraqis can. We can calm them down, stand by them, let them vent, make suggestions and help. But trying to put everything together in our image, if that`s what we were trying to do, was a mistake."

Similarly, there will be a less visible role for the American military, including a more selective response to insurgent groups or individuals, coupled with a less visible role for Mr. Negroponte and his aides.

"It`ll be less search-and-destroy and more guard-the-borders, help the Iraqis, and a lesser rather than bigger footprint," said an administration official, speaking of the military. "In the beginning, the military had to have boots on the ground everywhere. We`re reversing that. I think that can help us."

At the same time, American officials say that the United States will mobilize all its state-of-the-art television equipment on projecting images of Dr. Allawi around the country, and do its best to publicize his actions and provide secure transportation.

Another part of the strategy is the speeding of the reconstruction financing, which many officials acknowledge has been frustratingly slow. Of the $18 billion authorized by Congress last year, which Mr. Powell had hoped would be spent by now, only about $5 billion has been awarded to contractors, and less than $400 million has been spent.

Since President Bush turned to the United Nations to help select an interim Iraqi government to replace the one appointed earlier by Mr. Bremer and later discredited, the administration has said that a key to Iraqi legitimacy is involvement of international organizations.

But many administration officials acknowledge that those efforts have been slow and disappointing. Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations has announced that he will select a special representative for Baghdad this week, but his aides say that the security situation is too dangerous to send a large delegation.

Ian Fisher contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Warren Hoge from the United Nations.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 29, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Fresh Starts: One for Iraq, One for Bush
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, June 28 — Seconds after President Bush received a handwritten note from Condoleezza Rice during a NATO meeting early Monday in Istanbul, telling him that their secret plan to turn over formal sovereignty to the Iraqis two days early had been consummated at 10:26 a.m., he smiled and scrawled a quick response.

"Let freedom reign!" he wrote on it.

Yet for all the quiet celebration of the moment, Mr. Bush`s mission is far from accomplished. The transfer represents yet another new start for Mr. Bush in Iraq. It is the president`s last, best hope of turning the page, of refocusing America and the world on the possibilities of remaking a broken nation, and of moving beyond the gruesome images of a star-crossed occupation. Several of his own advisers, in their more candid moments, admit they do not know whether that is still possible.

If Mr. Bush`s accomplishments in Iraq are judged on the events of the past 14 months, he has clearly succeeded in only one of his tasks: dismantling a tyrannical government. The so-far fruitless search for unconventional weapons — the primary justification for invading Iraq — undermined his credibility, making what Mr. Bush described as a war of necessity appear to have been one of choice. His argument that a change of rule in Iraq would quell terrorism is similarly questioned, undercut by a rewritten State Department assessment that now concedes an increase in terrorist incidents. The attacks on American troops in Iraq were not part of the count.

And it will be years, or even decades, Mr. Bush himself says, before anyone knows if the war in Iraq plants any seeds of democratic reform in the Middle East.

Yet Mr. Bush is gambling that the transition of formal sovereignty to the Iraqis will change the dynamic of the American intervention in Iraq, and with it the terms by which the Bush presidency is judged, not only on Election Day in November but also by history. His aim is to push doubts about the wisdom of the war and the bitter occupation into the past, and turn attention to the issue of where Iraq goes from here. That task was further complicated Monday by the Supreme Court`s repudiation of the administration`s insistence that the president alone could determine the fate of enemy combatants captured in the fight against terrorism.

But Iraq`s fortunes and Mr. Bush`s own are inextricably linked, the polls strongly suggest. And so Iraq strategy and campaign strategy have become linked as well.

One senior White House official said the other day that as soon as Mr. Bush`s team came to understand that the occupation was "detested" by Iraqis, Mr. Bush and his aides decided to turn over formal sovereignty as quickly as possible. The idea is to remove the American forces as a target and force the insurgents to face off against other Iraqis, in the hope that the Iraqi people themselves — to defend a nation they now control — will then rise to crush the enemy within.

"The struggle is, first and foremost, an Iraqi struggle," Mr. Bush said Monday. Referring to Iyad Allawi, the man who once took part in C.I.A. covert actions against Saddam Hussein and who now will lead the fragile government, Mr. Bush added: "The prime minister said of his people, `We`re prepared to fight, and if necessary, die for these objectives.` America, Great Britain, our coalition respect that spirit, and the Iraqi people will not stand alone."

The question is whether they can stand long enough to suppress an insurgency whose size, power, funds and appeal are still shrouded in mystery. The answer, notes James M. Lindsay, the co-author of "America Unbound," an account published last year of the revolution in Mr. Bush`s foreign policy after the Sept. 11 attacks, "may have different effects on the ground in Iraq and back here" during an election year.

Mr. Bush, he said Monday, is "hoping that if we get out of the way of the Iraqi people, they will have an incentive to make it work."

"The problem is that no one knows if the Allawi government has the capacity to handle the problem," he said. "And that is a threat that has to keep a lot of people in the White House up at night."

One senior official, asked Friday what could go wrong after the transfer, immediately answered: "Allawi could get killed. That would be disastrous." A less dramatic risk, he said, is that "his appeal may not stick" as his government has to answer for every delay in turning on the lights, pumping the oil and distributing aid in Iraq.

But for Mr. Bush, the bigger risk at home may be one that his own defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, has hinted at in recent days. Using an analogy that other members of the president`s national security team have avoided, Mr. Rumsfeld compared the insurgency to the Tet offensive, a battle in which the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, he said, ended up "winning psychologically." He suggested that the insurgents in Iraq had studied history and were hoping to use the 24-hour news cycle, in which every rocket-propelled grenade that hits an American armored personnel carrier and every American death obliterates the news of an Iraq that is struggling to its feet.

"Will it work?" Mr. Rumsfeld said Sunday. "I think not."

Whether it works or not, it poses a huge risk for Mr. Bush. For while the United States has stepped back from running Iraqi politics, it has not stepped back from the responsibility for keeping the streets calm enough for Iraqi politics to flourish.

"The loss of control makes the job even tougher," said Robert Orr, a Harvard scholar and a member of a team of outside experts on post-conflict reconstruction that Mr. Rumsfeld sent to Iraq last summer. "We have the same number of targets on the ground today as we did yesterday, but less control over the politics. The reality is that we are as engaged in Iraq as we have ever been."

Mr. Bush is already arguing the opposite position, that the transfer is the first step toward a gradual American pullback.

"Iraq`s prime minister and president have told me that their goal is to eventually take full responsibility for the security of their country," he said Monday in Istanbul. "And America wants Iraqi forces to take that role. Our military will stay as long as the stability of Iraq requires, and only as long as their presence is needed and requested by the Iraqi government."

That argument will undoubtedly be repeated on the campaign trail. But Mr. Bush begins a summer of hopscotching the country facing a nation of doubters: sixty percent of the respondents to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll say the war has not been worth the loss of life, up from 45 percent last August, as the insurgency began. Suddenly, Mr. Bush is confronted with the need to prove to Americans that there is an eventual way out, even at a moment when the Pentagon is considering contingency plans for bolstering the force.

That is certainly not the political situation Mr. Bush envisioned, his aides concede, when last July 2 he expressed confidence that the Americans could crush the then nascent insurgency. "There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there," he said at the time, adding: "My answer is, bring them on."

In retrospect, Mr. Bush`s challenge was uttered just as events were beginning to spin out of control. Historians will be arguing for years about whether more forces on the ground after the initial toppling of Saddam Hussein, or different choices by the just-departed head of the American occupation, L. Paul Bremer III, could have crushed the insurgency before it gained speed. But to Mr. Bush`s aides, the consequences are clear.

"There was no occupation until the insurgency created one," one of Mr. Bush`s senior advisers argued recently. "Before then, if we went into a town it was probably to rebuild a school. It was only in response to the insurgents that we had to act like an army of occupation."

The prison abuse scandal that began a few months later, many senior Republicans close to the White House believe, was born of the initial efforts to get the intelligence necessary to understand where the insurgents were coming from and how to choke them off. The publication of the now infamous photographs of prisoners being attacked by dogs and forced into sexually humiliating positions only spread public antipathy for the occupiers.

With the early transfer timed, the White House said, to give Mr. Allawi the chance to take office without the sound of car bombs going off, that formal occupation has ended. Now Mr. Bush is staking his presidency, and history`s judgment, on the American experiment in Iraq, on the bet that Iraqis will feel as if the occupation has really ended, and that together he and the new government can avoid their own Tet.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 29, 2004
Iraq Videotape Seems to Show Killing of a G.I.
By THOM SHANKER and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

WASHINGTON, June 28 — An Arab-language satellite channel broadcast a videotape on Monday that it said showed the execution of a captured American soldier, but United States military spokesmen in Iraq and at the Pentagon said they could not confirm that the soldier had been killed.

Al Jazeera, the television network that has been first to receive a number of videos showing the killing of Americans, said a group in Iraq announced that it had killed Specialist Keith Matthew Maupin, who disappeared in an ambush of his convoy near Baghdad on April 9.

A military spokesman in Baghdad said by telephone late Monday that there had been no confirmation that Specialist Maupin had been killed. "Our latest is that his status remains unknown," the spokesman said.

The Army officially informed Specialist Maupin`s family of the videotape and its images of a man, his back to the camera, being shot, Pentagon officials said. But the officials said the Army had told the family, in Glen Este, Ohio, that there was still no evidence to change the soldier`s status from an official classification of "captured."

Maj. Willie Harris, the public affairs officer for the Army`s 88th Regional Readiness Command, said Monday that there was "no indication so far that the video contains footage of Matt Maupin or any other Army soldier."

On a day that American and Iraqi officials had hoped would be dominated by images of the transfer of formal sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, military officials also confirmed that the marine whose captors have threatened him with beheading had been missing for more than a week.

The officials said they had been reluctant to publicize the disappearance of the marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, because the area in western Iraq where he was stationed is so anti-American. They also said they had suspected that he had deserted his Marine outpost.

Bush administration policy makers and military officials had warned in recent days that Saddam Hussein supporters and foreign terrorists in Iraq would try to stage major attacks to mar the transfer of sovereignty, which had been scheduled for Wednesday. They also said they feared that kidnappers would kill hostages when the transfer occurred.

"We knew we had a missing marine out there, but in a hostile area like this where you`re surrounded by the enemy, the last thing you want to do is raise a flag and broadcast this," said Maj. T. V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman.

Marine officials said they had little further information on the situation of Corporal Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Muslim who appeared blindfolded and with a sword hanging over his head in a video released Sunday night on Al Jazeera.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the occupation forces` deputy director of operations, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying Corporal Hassoun had gone "on an unauthorized absence."

"Based on his personal situation, there was reason to suspect that he was heading over to Lebanon," General Kimmitt said, without providing details. Many of Corporal Hassoun`s relatives live in Lebanon.

In an interview with The Associated Press in Tripoli, Lebanon, his father, Ali Hassoun, said, "I appeal to the kidnappers and to their conscience and faith to release my son."

His mother, who lives in in a suburb of Salt Lake City, was in seclusion Monday. Imam Shuaib Din of the Khadeeja Mosque, where the family sometimes prays, said she was already mourning.

Marine officials said Corporal Hassoun, 24, was last seen on June 19. He was a truck and Humvee driver at a Marine outpost in western Iraq.

Major Johnson said that when Corporal Hassoun did not report for duty on June 20, his commanders began an investigation, with troops scouring the area and questioning other marines about where he was last seen and who was with him.

On Sunday night, a little-known group called the Islamic Reaction said on a video that it had lured Corporal Hassoun from an American military base and abducted him. In the short, grainy video, the camera lingers on his Marine identification card, which reads, "Hassoun, Wassef Ali" and "Active Duty."

Marine officials, who were reluctant on Sunday to confirm that Corporal Hassoun had been kidnapped, said Monday that he was most likely the blindfolded man in the video.

"From all we know, watching that video, comparing it to pictures we have and other information, we have great reason to believe that, yes, the man in the video is Corporal Hassoun," Major Johnson said.

But the mystery remains: How did Iraqis capture a marine, apparently without firing a shot? Marines are almost never alone and rarely stray from their bases unless ordered.

The kidnappers threatened to kill the corporal unless the United States released all Iraqi prisoners. They did not set a deadline.

Major Johnson said there was no room for negotiation. "We don`t negotiate with terrorists," he said.

Four other men, three Turks and a Pakistani, are in similar circumstances, with kidnappers saying their hostages will be beheaded unless their demands are met.

In the case of Specialist Maupin, his fate after the April 9 convoy attack remained uncertain for a week, until his captors sent to Al Jazeera a video with images of him as a captive of militants.

A member of the Army Reserve`s 724th Transportation Company, from Illinois, Specialist Maupin was shown in that initial video sitting down, dressed in his military fatigues amid armed guerrillas.

The grainy video showed the light-haired soldier wearing a floppy Army hat, a few days growth of stubble on his chin. A voice in Arabic then said Specialist Maupin was being held to trade for Iraqi prisoners of American forces.

The soldier, nervous but unharmed in the earlier video, can be heard saying, "I am a soldier from the First Division," adding that he was married and had a 10-month-old son.

Thom Shanker reported from Washington for this article, and Jeffrey Gettleman from Baghdad. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from Salt Lake City, and Albert Salvado from Glen Este, Ohio.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Das ist die Spiegel-Story dieser Woche, die in der NYtimes in Englisch zu finden ist.

DER SPIEGEL 27/2004 - 28. Juni 2004
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,306031,00.html

Wiederaufbau

Die Goldgräber von Bagdad

Während im neuen Irak schießwütig um die politische Macht gerungen wird, sind irakische Clans und ausländische Pioniere dabei, das Land wirtschaftlich aufzurüsten. Ihnen fehlen Macht, Geld und Sicherheit, aber sie wollen irgendwann die Gewinner dieses Krieges sein. Von Mario Kaiser

In einer Seitenstraße in Bagdad, im Labyrinth des Geschäftsviertels Karrada, rollt eine dunkle Limousine über den Gehweg. Vor dem Haus Nummer 124 stoppt der Wagen, und ein kleiner, gedrungener Mann stemmt sich aus der Kühle des klimatisierten Innenraums. Er drückt ein silbernes Telefon an sein Ohr. Das Gelenk der Hand, die es hält, umschmiegt eine goldene Rolex-Uhr, ein Dutzend Diamanten umringt das Zifferblatt. Der Mann betritt das Gebäude und schreitet durch eine Empfangshalle aus Marmor, in der in goldenen Buchstaben sein Name an der Wand geschrieben steht.

Chalil Abd al-Wahhab al-Bunnia geht durch ein Spalier von Männern, die sich an Kalaschnikow-Gewehren festhalten. Er steigt hinauf in den zweiten Stock, wo auf einem langen Flur Menschen sitzen und seine Aufmerksamkeit begehren. Bunnia passiert die Wartenden wie ein Präsident, der eine Parade abschreitet.

So beginnt der Tag im Leben eines Kronprinzen, der sich auf den Moment vorbereitet, die Macht in einer der reichsten Familien des Irak zu übernehmen. Chalil Abd al-Wahhab al-Bunnia wird, wenn sein Vater den Zeitpunkt für gekommen hält, an die Spitze einer Wirtschaftsdynastie aufsteigen, deren Geschichte ein Jahrhundert zurückreicht. Was Mahmud Hadsch al-Bunnia im Jahr 1910 als Reishändler begann, wird sein Enkel als ein Konglomerat fortführen, das Brücken baut, Kaugummi herstellt, BMWs verkauft, Pepsi-Cola abfüllt, Rinder züchtet, Trinkwasser aufbereitet, Pestizide produziert. Es ist schwer, einen Tag im Irak zu verbringen, ohne den Reichtum der Bunnias zu mehren.

Als Chef der Al-Bunnia Trading Group wird Chalil, 49 Jahre alt, mehr als 40 Unternehmen und 4000 Mitarbeiter in einem halben Dutzend Ländern lenken. Er wird Anteile an einer Bank, einer Versicherung und dem Hotel Palestine in Bagdad kontrollieren. Der Kronprinz regiert nach einer einfachen Philosophie. "Es gibt nur drei Dinge, mit denen wir niemals Geschäfte machen", sagt Bunnia und zählt sie an den Fingern seiner goldbeschwerten Hand ab. "Waffen, Drogen und Alkohol."

Alles andere ist möglich in einem Land, das alles andere braucht. Ein Jahr nach dem Krieg ist jeder vierte Iraker arbeitslos. In der Hitze eines Sommers, in dem das Land 7000 Megawatt elektrischer Leistung pro Tag braucht, produziert es 4100 Megawatt. Das Bruttosozialprodukt ist auf unter 17 Milliarden Dollar im Jahr geschrumpft. Gleichzeitig braucht der Irak so viel Geld wie nie zuvor. Fast 36 Milliarden Dollar, schätzt die Weltbank, wird der Wiederaufbau in den nächsten vier Jahren kosten. Es wird nicht reichen. Allein die Ölindustrie zu modernisieren, eine Polizei und eine Armee aufzubauen wird 20 Milliarden Dollar im Jahr verschlingen.

Bunnia ist eine der mächtigsten Figuren einer irakischen Wirtschaftselite, die beim Wiederaufbau des Landes eine entscheidende Rolle spielen wird. Amerikanische Giganten wie das Energieunternehmen Halliburton und der Baukonzern Bechtel werden den größten Teil der Milliarden abschöpfen, die als Wirtschaftshilfe ins Land fließen. Doch sie werden, wenn sie Erfolg haben wollen, auf die Verbindungen der Bunnias und eines Dutzends anderer Dynastien angewiesen sein.

Die amerikanischen Unternehmer agieren pragmatischer als die amerikanischen Generäle.

Über Generationen geformte Freundschaften und Feindschaften verbinden die Clans zwischen Euphrat und Tigris, sie sind eine Macht, gegen deren Willen niemand den neuen Irak bauen kann. Die Unternehmer, die im Windschatten der Armeen in das Land eindrangen, agieren pragmatischer als die Generäle, die es überrannten. Sie haben sich mit den Bunnias arrangiert und die Bunnias sich mit ihnen. Sie vertrauen sich nicht. Aber sie paktieren miteinander. Sie wissen, dass die Gewinner dieses Krieges keine Waffen tragen.

An diesem Morgen kehrt Bunnia von einer Reise nach Amman, Dubai und Beirut zurück. Das Unternehmen hat dort Repräsentanzen, die während der Kommandowirtschaft Saddam Husseins zu wichtigen Brückenköpfen in die freien Märkte wurden. Jetzt sind sie die Einfallstore in den befreiten Irak. Bunnia legt seine beiden Mobiltelefone auf den Schreibtisch. Drei weiße und ein schwarzes Telefon stehen neben einem Monitor, auf dem er sehen kann, wer sein Vorzimmer betritt. Wenn die Telefone gleichzeitig klingeln, vermischt sich der amerikanische Klang der Bürotelefone mit den arabischen Melodien der Mobiltelefone, und Bunnia sitzt wie die personifizierte Schnittstelle zwischen dem Irak und dem Westen, Telefone an beiden Ohren, zwei Sprachen auf der Zunge.

Wenige navigieren durch das Labyrinth der irakischen Wirtschaft so geschickt wie Bunnia. Doch die Größe der Geschäfte befriedigt ihn nicht. "Das Problem sind die Banken", sagt Bunnia. "Das Blut einer jeden Wirtschaft ist Geld, doch im Irak fehlt ein starker finanzieller Sektor." Das schwächt den privaten Sektor, dem die Banken Geld injizieren müssten. Als Vizepräsident der Commercial Bank of Iraq weiß Bunnia, wie wenig Kapital die Banken zu verteilen haben. "Sie können ein paar hunderttausend Dollar geben", sagt er. "Aber wir brauchen Millionen. Und wir brauchen das Geld heute, nicht morgen."

Es reisen Männer mit Hunderttausenden Dollar am Körper durch das Land.

Auf Angst lässt sich kein Land bauen. Den irakischen Banken fehlt das Fundament und das Vertrauen einer argwöhnischen Klientel. Unternehmer wickeln ihre Geschäfte wie Geheimagenten ab. Es reisen in diesen Zeiten Männer mit Hunderttausenden Dollar am Körper durch das Land. Sie denken nicht an Innovation und Produktivität. Sie überlegen, wie sie überleben.

Bunnia hat den Krieg in Bagdad ausgesessen. Er hat auf den Moment gewartet, in dem die Zeit auf null gestellt wurde. Er träumte von neuen Märkten. Den Krieg nach dem Krieg hatte er nicht auf seiner Rechnung. "Wir dachten, sechs Monate nach dem Krieg würde alles stabil sein", sagt er. "Und hier sind wir nun ein Jahr später. Viele Leute sind arbeitslos, Gehälter werden nicht bezahlt. Also was tun sie? Sie entführen und erpressen einander. Sie töten, um zu stehlen."

Bunnia ist ungeduldig geworden, rastlos wie ein ganzes Volk, das auf die Früchte amerikanischer Versprechungen wartet. Die 18,6 Milliarden Dollar, die der US-Kongress für den Wiederaufbau des Irak bewilligte, werden helfen, daran zweifelt Bunnia nicht. Und er ist pragmatisch genug, zu verstehen, dass amerikanische Steuergelder zuerst an amerikanische Firmen verteilt werden. Doch es verletzt seinen Stolz, dass irakische Firmen auch bei der Vergabe der Unterverträge oft übergangen werden. "Es ist unser Land, wir sollten es aufbauen", sagt Bunnia. "Aber wir sollen wie Tiere vor ihren Toren warten."

Das Geld fließt nur langsam. Bürokratische Hindernisse verzögern die Vergabe von Verträgen, und der alltägliche Terror verhindert ihre Erfüllung. Unternehmen müssen mindestens ein Viertel ihrer Etats für Sicherheitsmaßnahmen ausgeben. Wenn der amerikanische Prokonsul Paul Bremer in dieser Woche seine Kampfstiefel auszieht und die Besatzungsbehörde auflöst, wird er von den 18,6 Milliarden Dollar, die er zu verteilen hatte, erst 3,2 Milliarden ausgegeben haben.

Bunnia war der erste irakische Subunternehmer, mit dem der US-Konzern Bechtel ein Projekt verwirklichte. Er baute für die Amerikaner eine Umgehungsstraße neben der zerstörten Mat-Brücke auf dem Highway 10. Amerikanische Kampfflugzeuge hatten die Brücke während des Krieges bombardiert und die Arterie zwischen dem Irak und Jordanien durchtrennt. Der Bypass, den Bunnia baute, verband die beiden Länder wieder. Tausende Lastwagen pendeln seitdem jeden Tag zwischen Bagdad und Amman. Es war ein Anfang. Aber Bunnia will keine Umgehungsstraßen bauen. Er will Brücken bauen.

"Hier kann Ihr Geschäftspartner tot sein, wenn Sie den nächsten Termin bei ihm haben."

Ein Manager des Technologiekonzerns Alcatel betritt jetzt Bunnias Büro, er ist unangemeldet gekommen. Er trägt ein Hemd aus Seide, ein goldenes Armband am Gelenk und einen goldenen Siegelring am kleinen Finger. Er küsst Bunnia auf beide Wangen und legt ihm ein Papier vor, das Bunnia unterschreibt, ohne es zu lesen. Der Manager entschuldigt sich nicht für seinen überraschenden Besuch. "Im Irak funktionieren die Geschäfte anders", sagt er, als er zur Tür hinausgeht, und senkt die Stimme, damit Bunnia ihn nicht hören kann. "Es klingt vielleicht zynisch, aber im Irak kann Ihr Geschäftspartner tot sein, wenn Sie den nächsten Termin bei ihm haben."

Die Gewalt der Gegenwart überschattet die Verbrechen der Vergangenheit. Doch in einem Land, das so verflochten war mit einem Apparat, der es durchleuchtete und verdunkelte, in einem Land, in dem Gerüchte die Wahrheit überwuchern, in diesem Land konnte es nicht lange dauern, bis ein Verdacht auf die Bunnias fiel. Dokumente tauchten auf.

Sie kamen aus dem Land, in dem die Konten keine Namen haben. Im Schweizer Handelsregister in Lugano war Chalils Onkel Sadun al-Bunnia als Gründungsgesellschafter der Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber (Miga) eingetragen. Das Unternehmen wird nach Angaben des amerikanischen Finanzministeriums von zwei Männern geführt, die Osama Bin Laden finanziell unterstützen. Das Ministerium setzte Miga auf seine Liste der "Specially Designated Global Terrorists". Kein amerikanisches Unternehmen darf mit Firmen, die auf der Liste stehen, Geschäfte machen.

Es blieb ein Verdacht. Er streifte die Bunnias. Ihr Name tauchte im Umfeld von Terroristen auf, doch sie selbst standen nicht auf der Liste des Ministeriums, und das allein zählte. In der Unaufgeräumtheit der Vergangenheit wird vieles verborgen bleiben.

Die Unschuldigen können den ersten Stein werfen, aber sie können das neue Land nicht bauen. Es ist der faustische Pakt nach jeder Diktatur: Niemand kennt die Statik des Systems so gut wie jene, die es stützten. Sie werden gebraucht, wenn aus den Trümmern eine neue Architektur entstehen soll. Ein Verdrängungswettbewerb hat begonnen, und er findet nicht nur auf dem Markt statt, sondern auch in der Erinnerung.

Die Bunnias hatten sich mit dem System Saddam arrangiert. Dass sie zum Schaden ihrer Geschäfte Widerstand geleistet hätten, ist nicht bekannt. Doch sie waren offenbar klug genug, sich nicht an Firmen zu beteiligen, die der Diktator kontrollierte. Die Vergangenheit konnte die Familie nicht einholen. Sie gehörte ihr schon. "Wir waren schon reich", sagt Bunnia, "als noch niemand wusste, wer Saddam Hussein ist."

Auf Bunnias Schreibtisch steht eine mechanische Rechenmaschine. Sie steht dort wie ein Symbol. Am Hof Bunnias ist alles dem Schein untergeordnet.

Telefone, Autos, Unternehmen, alles ist befrachtet mit einer Botschaft. Die Nummer seines Handys ließ er aus der höchsten aller Ziffern komponieren: 999999. Möge niemand sie vergessen. Unten auf dem Gehweg krümmt sich ein sehniger Mann über Bunnias BMW 745 Li und poliert die Flanken. Möge kein Staub seinen Glanz bedecken. In Bunnias Fuhrpark steht auch ein Rolls-Royce. Doch mit dem traut er sich im Moment nicht auf die Straße.

Die größte seiner Requisiten steht gegenüber dem Hauptbahnhof. Wo jeden Tag Tausende schiitische Pilger aus den Zügen strömen, bevor sie in die heiligen Städte Nadschaf und Kerbela ziehen, ragen die türkisfarbene Kuppel und das blaue Minarett der Bunnia-Moschee in den Himmel über Bagdad. Es ist die größte privat erbaute Moschee in der Stadt.

Ein einbeiniger Bettler kriecht über den Boden vor dem Portal. Er hebt die Hände und streckt sie nach Männern in dunklen Anzügen aus. Die Männer lassen Geldscheine in die zur Schale geformten Hände des Krüppels fallen. Dann gehen sie in die Totenhalle neben der Moschee. Sie sind gekommen, um einem Verstorbenen und seinen Hinterbliebenen ihre Aufwartung zu machen. Das Wehklagen der Frauen und der Singsang des Koranlesers schallen aus der Totenhalle.

Es ist das Hintergrundgeräusch, vor dem Bunnia Geschäfte anbahnt. Er war schon am Morgen hier, um seine Trauer zu bezeugen und die Trauernden zu umwerben. Die Totenhallen des Irak sind die Messehallen der Bunnias. So wurde die Moschee der Familie zu einem der wichtigsten Konferenzräume ihres Unternehmens. Jeder Tod verändert die Dynamik einer Familie, hinterlässt ein Vakuum, in dem die Hinterbliebenen eine neue Position besetzen. In der Intimität der Trauer verteilt Bunnia Visitenkarten, greift Arme, fasst Hände und bereitet den Boden für neue Geschäfte. Der Tod ist ein Verlust, den er in Gewinn zu verwandeln weiß.

Als der alte Irak kollabierte, operierte Bunnia nach derselben Methode. Er erschien als einer der Ersten, um das Übriggebliebene zu taxieren. Er mag klagen über die Arroganz der Amerikaner, die Ohnmacht der Banken, die Allgegenwart der Gewalt. Doch wenn man ihn fragt, ob der Nebel des Krieges auch Chancen eröffnet für jene, die das Territorium kennen, dann grinst Bunnia. "Alles, was privatisiert wird - die Petrochemie, Immobilien, Banken -, bekommt man für Peanuts." Seine Augen glänzen jetzt. Dann sagt er es. "Die goldene Zeit im Irak ist heute."

Die Bunnias sind die mächtigste und schillerndste der Wirtschaftsdynastien im Irak. Doch in ihrem Gefolge schürft ein Dutzend anderer Unternehmerfamilien den Reichtum des Landes. Die Chudairis, die eines der größten Bauunternehmen kontrollieren und die größte Arzneimittelfirma besitzen. Die Kubbas, die ihre eigene Cola produzieren und einen Teil ihres Vermögens über eine Stiftung verschenken. Die Suchtians, die mit Chemie und Pharmazie in den Kreis der Oligarchen aufstiegen. Über die Schanschals, die Dulaimis und die Charbits ist wenig außer ihrem Reichtum bekannt.

Die Profiteure des Krieges beugen sich über ein Land, das am Boden liegt. 120 Milliarden Dollar Schulden lasten auf dem Irak. Der Krieg und die Plünderungen, die ihm folgten, haben die Wirtschaft noch einmal um 22 Prozent schrumpfen lassen. Doch es gibt sie, die Optimisten, die unter den Trümmern einen Markt sehen, eine Zukunft, in der die Wirtschaft im nächsten Jahr um 45 Prozent wachsen soll. Wenn das Öl wieder fließt. Wenn das Blut aufhört zu fließen.

Während in Bagdad mordend um die Macht gerungen wird, haben jene, die auf die Zukunft spekulieren, das Land still unter sich aufgeteilt. Die neuen Herren sind alte Clans wie die Bunnias, mächtige Invasoren wie Halliburton und Bechtel. Und manchmal ist es ein Manager wie der Schotte Allan Richardson, einer, der mit einem Plan und einem Koffer voller Geld in Bagdad landet.

In einer Stadt, in der man die Macht der Manager an der Kraft ihrer Klimaanlagen messen kann, regiert Allan Richardson in einer der kühlsten Residenzen. In einer sandsteinfarbenen Villa in Mansur, Bagdads gediegenem Botschaftsviertel, führt der Weg zu Richardson vorbei an drei Männern mit Maschinengewehren, über weißen Marmor, zwischen weißen Säulen hindurch, vorbei an einer schönen Assistentin, deren Vater Saddam einst assistierte.

Richardson ist der Mann, der Bagdad einen neuen Klang gegeben hat. Die Melodien der Mobiltelefone, die zur Hintergrundmusik der Stadt wurden, sind seine Symphonie. Innerhalb weniger Monate baute der 49-Jährige das erste Netzwerk für Mobiltelefone im Zentralirak. Der Hunger nach Mitteilung ist groß in einem Volk, das die Wahrheit jahrzehntelang nur flüstern durfte.

Jetzt ruft das Volk alles in seine Handys. Die Wahrheit, die Lügen, die Gerüchte. Es ist die Freiheit, Geld für überflüssige Worte zu verschwenden. So wurden die Handys zu einem der begehrtesten Statussymbole in einer statushungrigen Gesellschaft. Die Frauen halten sie wie Amulette in den Händen. Die Männer tragen sie wie Waffen an den Gürteln.

Richardson kontrolliert das Netz, das sie verbindet. Dem Vorstandsvorsitzenden ist es gelungen, den Mobilfunkanbieter Iraqna zu einer der bekanntesten Marken im Irak zu machen. Und dabei unerkannt zu bleiben. Der Kopf des Unternehmens will ein Mann ohne Gesicht sein. Er verbietet Fotografen, das Objektiv auf ihn zu richten, weil er fürchtet, in das Visier von Männern zu geraten, die nach mehr als seinem Abbild trachten. "Ich habe es meiner Frau versprochen", sagt Richardson.

Als Richardson im Herbst vergangenen Jahres der Ruf nach Bagdad erreichte, saß er in der Elfenbeinküste fest und erlebte Gefechte, die das Land in einen neuen Bürgerkrieg zu stürzen drohten. Rebellen plünderten und mordeten, in den Straßen lagen Leichen. Es war vielleicht kein schlechter Ort, um über den Irak nachzudenken.

Richardson war Finanzvorstand bei Orascom Telecom, einem ägyptischen Mobilfunkunternehmen. Er kreuzte durch Afrika und Asien, wo Orascom mehr als sechs Millionen Kunden hat. Doch der Chef des Unternehmens glaubte an das Potenzial des Irak, und er wollte Richardson als seinen Mann in Bagdad.

Als er im Oktober in Bagdad landete, betrat Richardson ein Land, in dem die Bomben detonierten. Mehr als 100 Millionen Dollar sollte Richardson investieren, um den Zentralirak zu vernetzen. Es ging um den lukrativsten Markt im Land, und niemand sollte ihm zuvorkommen. Der Name des Unternehmens war Programm: Iraqna - unser Irak.

Richardson und vier Orascom-Manager mussten Mitarbeiter rekrutieren, Standorte für 36 Funktürme suchen, 36 Funktürme installieren, vernetzen, beschützen. Sie operierten in einem Land, dessen Infrastruktur zerstört war. Das seine Gesetze noch schreiben musste. In dem Ministerien um 14 Uhr die Pforten schlossen. Sie hatten Satellitentelefone, die selten funktionierten, und mussten ihre E-Mails aus Internet-Cafés verschicken. In der ersten Woche schliefen sie bei den Alcatel-Kollegen auf dem Boden. "Wir lebten wie in einer Endlosschleife", erzählt Richardson. "Wir standen früh auf, machten unsere Arbeit, tranken ein paar Bier und gingen spät ins Bett."

Doch sie schafften es. Zwei Monate später stand das Netzwerk, und am 22. Dezember unterzeichneten Richardson und der Kommunikationsminister den Lizenzvertrag. Der Himmel über dem Irak wurde in drei Zonen aufgeteilt. Im Norden, in der Mitte und im Süden hatte jeweils ein Mobilfunkanbieter ein Monopol. Richardson war nun der Herr der Frequenzen im Zentralirak.

Und das Land schien langsam zur Ruhe zu kommen. Der Diktator kroch aus seinem Erdloch, und die Bombenleger verloren ihre Symbolfigur. Der Irak schien nicht länger ein Schlachtfeld zu sein, sondern ein Markt, Millionen von Konsumenten, die er, Richardson, miteinander verbinden würde.

Jetzt sitzt Richardson in seinem Büro, das so kalt ist und still, dass er vergessen könnte, in Bagdad zu sein. Er hat einen runden Schädel und kurz geschorene Haare. Er verkörpert die drahtige Diszipliniertheit eines Ausbildungsoffiziers, an seinem Hals stehen Stränge von Sehnen und Venen hervor. Er sieht erschöpft aus an diesem Morgen. "The game has changed", sagt Richardson und reibt sich die Augen. "Als ich hier ankam, dachte ich, die Situation würde sich nach und nach verbessern. Doch das Land ist von Tag zu Tag unsicherer geworden. Ich hatte mal einen Plan für die nächsten zwölf Monate, aber in Wahrheit weiß ich nicht einmal, was in zwölf Tagen sein wird." Es gab eine Zeit, in der ging er abends in Restaurants essen. Im Mount Lebanon Hotel war er häufig zu Gast. "Das Essen war gut", sagt Richardson, und es klingt, als gebe der Chefkoch sich jetzt weniger Mühe. Am Abend des 17. März, drei Tage vor dem Jahrestag der Invasion, näherte sich ein Auto dem Hotel. Der Fahrer transportierte mehr als eine halbe Tonne Plastiksprengstoff. Die Wucht der Explosion riss die Fassade des Hotels ab, aus den oberen Etagen fielen Menschen auf die Straße. Sieben Menschen starben in dieser Nacht.

Am nächsten Morgen verließen die Kollegen von Motorola das Land. Richardson blieb, und seine Zahlen sind gut. Er blickt auf den Monitor seines Laptops und verliest sie wie auf einer Bilanzpressekonferenz. Mehr als 200 Funktürme stehen. Mehr als 200 000 Kunden telefonieren. Mehr als 400 Mitarbeiter betreuen sie. Mehr als 300 Filialen verkaufen Telefone und Karten. So war es geplant.

Aber die Zahlen erzählen die Geschichte nicht. Sie erzählen nicht, dass jeder Turm einen Generator braucht. Dass Diesel oft knapp ist. Dass die Türme Tag und Nacht bewacht werden müssen. Sie erzählen nicht, dass es keine Post gibt, mit der man Rechnungen verschicken kann. Und keine Bank, bei der man sie bezahlen kann. Sie erzählen nicht, dass Richardson das Unternehmen in fünf Villen untergebracht hat, weil sie niedrig und mit Raketen schwer zu treffen sind. Und dass sein Büro auf der Rückseite liegt, damit man ihn an seinem Schreibtisch nicht erschießen kann. "Es ist frustrierend", sagt Richardson. "Sicherheit ist das Erste, an das ich denke, wenn ich morgens aufstehe, und das Letzte, an das ich denke, wenn ich abends ins Bett gehe."

Jede Berührung mit dem Westen kann fatale Folgen haben. Ein deutscher Ingenieur muss sterben, weil er eine Wasserpumpe installieren will. Eine irakische Frau wird erschossen, weil sie amerikanischen Soldaten die Uniformen wäscht. Einem amerikanischen Geschäftsmann wird der Kopf abgeschnitten, weil amerikanische Soldaten irakische Häftlinge folterten.

In seiner Villa in Mansur sitzt Richardson und fragt sich, wie weit er noch gehen muss, um sich und seine Mitarbeiter zu schützen. Mansur hat sich in einen Hochsicherheitstrakt verwandelt, ein Labyrinth von Schranken und Barrieren, in dem Straßen plötzlich zu Sackgassen werden, an deren Enden sich Männer mit Maschinengewehren aufbauen. "Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass ich einmal sechs Meter hohe Mauern aufstellen müsste", sagt Richardson, "aber ich will keine Schuld auf mich laden."

Er hat sich Feinde gemacht, und er weiß es. Er brüstet sich damit, dass die meisten Mitarbeiter des Unternehmens Iraker sind. Und verschweigt, dass der einzige Iraker im Vorstand aus Amerika kommt. Das Netz ist oft überlastet, die Gebühren sind hoch. Das Unternehmen, das sich "unser Irak" nennt, bekam auf den Straßen Bagdads einen neuen Namen: Iraqhum - deren Irak.

Das Nervenzentrum des Unternehmens liegt in einer Villa nahe dem Hauptquartier. Hinter verdunkelten Fenstern, in einem von Neonlicht erhellten Saal im Erdgeschoss, sitzen 30 junge Frauen, die so schön sind und so schick, als würden sie in einer Modelagentur arbeiten.

Es ist das erste Callcenter des Landes, und es wirkt wie die Vollversammlung eines modernen Irak, die in Erfüllung gegangene Vision amerikanischer Propaganda. Um den Hals tragen die Mitarbeiter ihren Dienstausweis am roten Band. Er öffnet elektronisch verriegelte Türen. Doch die Ausweise sind mehr als eine Sicherheitsmaßnahme. Sie tragen eine Botschaft. In diesem Saal sind sie keine Sunniten, keine Schiiten, keine Kurden. Sie gehören jetzt zu einem neuen Stamm, dem Stamm der Iraker, die Karriere machen wollen.

Es zählt nicht mehr, wo sie herkommen, sondern wo sie hinwollen.

Allan Richardson weiß, wo er hinwill. Er will weg aus diesem Land. Doch er hat einen Auftrag, ein Ziel, das er erreichen will, bevor er geht. Mehr als eine Million Kunden will er gewinnen. Das Potenzial sieht er. "Ich will, dass dieses Unternehmen ein Teil des Gewebes des neuen Irak wird", sagt Richardson. "Ich will Kinder auf den Straßen sehen, die sich gegenseitig SMS-Nachrichten schicken."

Dann schließt er seinen Aktenkoffer und hängt einen Passierschein für die Green Zone von Bagdad um seinen Hals. Er hat einen Termin bei den Amerikanern, er fährt die Strecke nicht gern. Dann öffnet sich das Tor der Villa, und eine schwarze Limousine rast aus der Einfahrt. Hinter den verdunkelten Scheiben verbirgt sich Allan Richardson, und es ist schwer zu erkennen, ob er auf der Flucht ist oder auf dem Weg zu etwas.

© DER SPIEGEL 27/2004

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June 29, 2004
PATIENTS
At a Baghdad Hospital, Fear and Resignation Remain on an Unexpectedly Ordinary Day
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 28 — On the day the Americans ceded formal sovereignty to the Iraqis, the scene inside Yarmouk Hospital was a portrait of weariness.

A washerwoman who once worked for the American military lay motionless at the far end of the women`s ward, paralyzed by a spray of gunfire. A government guard was wheeled in by his comrades, screaming from the pain of a bullet that had just lodged in his right ankle. A 7-year-old boy with a bullet in his back was weeping quietly in the emergency room: He had been standing at the threshold of his house at twilight, when a stray bullet chose him.

There was no enthusiasm here at one of the city`s main public hospitals. There was no anger either, only resignation and fear. Much more violence had been expected on the day of the transfer, and it had not come to pass.

All in all, it was a quiet day at the hospital, and that itself was unsettling.

"It`s very unusual," said Dr. Ahmed K. al-Temimi, one of the doctors on duty. "We`re always in the storm. It`s never quiet."

Neither among doctors nor patients were there great expectations for the new government. So much had been endured. So much more would have to be endured.

On Sunday, for instance, Dr. Temimi said, there were three victims of a rocket-propelled grenade attack. Two of them were police officers. The third was a restaurant owner serving breakfast to the two officers. The restaurant owner was killed.

Yes, he said, he had heard Prime Minister Iyad Allawi`s promises to crack down on the insurgents wreaking havoc on this country. But he did not envision imminent changes.

"I don`t know if he will succeed or not," Dr. Temimi said. "I`m afraid he will not."

In the surgery ward on Monday afternoon, Wafiya Khadim sat at the edge of her 12-year-old son`s bed. The boy, Haider Hamadi, had been standing outside his house at midmorning on Sunday, Mrs. Khadim said, when a rocket suddenly fell. The shrapnel punctured his spleen and small intestines.

It was not her first brush with terror. Her eldest son took a bullet in the head several months ago. Now he is paralyzed and can no longer speak.

She shook her head. She spoke flatly, matter of factly. There were no tears in her eyes. "I don`t expect anything to change," she said.

Down the hall, in the women`s ward, too much had already changed for the washerwoman, Azhan Saeed Damarchi. Once, as the eldest of seven children, Ms. Damarchi, 29, was the principal breadwinner for her family. Then, one early morning in May, as she was on her way to work at the American military base called Scania, she was met with a spray of gunfire.

On Monday, Ms. Damarchi`s one good kidney was failing her, a bullet wound to the spine had rendered her motionless, and she was suffering from bedsores. But her mother said that what really was killing her was the deep and sudden plunge her life had taken.

"She is always complaining about how she used to be and how she is now," said her mother, Leila Edward Louise. "She used to stand on her legs."

Ms. Damarchi began weeping uncontrollably as her mother spoke. Her mother started crying too. Her grandmother bent over in her chair and wept. Her younger sister Sara wiped her brow.

The family has had no luck getting her into the American military hospital.

The emergency room at Yarmouk, on high alert for the last two weeks, was unusually quiet. For a while on Monday morning, all 13 beds were empty.

A woman with a giant blue bump on her head came in with her father. Her husband had struck her with a pipe.

A man came in with a bullet in his thigh. His friends said he had been caught in the cross-fire between two warring street gangs.

An Education Ministry bodyguard, Mohammed Rabiah Ahmed, 39, was brought in, groaning in pain. He had just escorted the minister to his office this afternoon, when a car full of gunmen fired. Gunfire fractured both bones in his right leg.

At sundown, Hussein Thaer, 7, came in with a bullet behind his shoulder. He had been standing in the doorway of his house when, with no warning, a bullet lodged in his back.

The boy sat on a hospital bed, quietly for long stretches and then suddenly began weeping. His mother took his hands in hers and kissed them. His father clutched his own stomach with his hands, as if he had taken the bullet himself.

No one could summon an explanation as to why a boy, standing in the doorway of his house on a Monday evening, could be shot in the back. "This happens," is all Dr. Firas Ghanim, a resident surgeon, could say.

In the maternity ward, a baby girl was born to Sahar Fadhel. She named her Hanin.

Will life be different for Hanin in the new Iraq?

"Only God knows," Mrs. Fadhel said, her words wrapped in as much disgust as resignation.

Mrs. Fadhel had been on her way to the hospital at 3 a.m., when Iraqi policemen and American soldiers ordered her to turn around. They told her that they suspected there was a car bomb up the road, they told her. She was in labor, but she turned around and sat it out at home until day broke and the road was opened up again.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 29, 2004
Reaffirming the Rule of Law

Part of the "new normal" that the Bush administration ushered in after Sept. 11 was a radically broader view of the government`s power to detain people. The administration claimed the right to hold foreign terrorism suspects in an indefinite legal limbo in Guantánamo, and to designate American citizens as "enemy combatants" and hold them for years without access to lawyers. Yesterday, the Supreme Court delivered a stinging rebuke to these policies. In a pair of landmark decisions, the court made it clear that even during the war on terror, the government must adhere to the rule of law.

The Guantánamo case was brought by 14 of the more than 600 detainees being held at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The detainees insist that they did not engage in combat or terrorism against the United States, but were wrongly picked up in the fog of war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration responded that, guilty or innocent, they have no right to be heard. In its view, non-citizens held outside the United States cannot turn to American courts to challenge their confinement. A federal district court and an appeals court both agreed, and dismissed the lawsuit.

The Supreme Court reversed that decision on a 6-to-3 vote. The court rightly looked beyond the legal fiction that the government relied on, that the base in Guantánamo is not part of the United States. For more than 100 years, the court observed, Guantánamo has been under America`s "complete jurisdiction and control," and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. As a legal matter, there is no difference between being held in Guantánamo and being held in the United States. The court also noted that habeas corpus, a venerable doctrine that allows prisoners to challenge their confinement, applies not to the prisoner, but to the one doing the imprisoning — in this case, the Defense Department. By this logic, the location where the prisoner is being held should not matter.

The court did not rule on the detainees` actual claims of being wrongly confined. But it held that they have a right to have the claims heard in federal court, and it sent the case back down to the district court with instructions to start considering them. The ruling reaffirms a core principle of American law: anyone behind bars has a right to challenge that imprisonment in court.

In a second case, the court ruled for Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen who has been designated an enemy combatant. The government says Mr. Hamdi was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001, and he has been held for more than two years in naval brigs in Virginia and South Carolina. The government contended that Mr. Hamdi could be held indefinitely without access to a lawyer, although it eventually relented and allowed him to consult with counsel.

The Supreme Court`s decision is fractured, but Justice Sandra Day O`Connor spoke for a majority when she wrote that the conditions of Mr. Hamdi`s confinement were unacceptable. At the least, the court held, a citizen designated as an enemy combatant must be given access to a lawyer, told the basis on which he received the designation and accorded a fair opportunity to challenge it before a neutral decision maker.

Yesterday`s cases leave important questions unanswered. In the Guantánamo case, the court is unclear about whether its ruling applies only to detainees held in Guantánamo because it is effectively American territory, or whether it extends to any non-citizen held outside the United States. Given the court`s analysis of the purpose and history of habeas corpus law, however, the decision should apply to detainees both in Guantánamo and elsewhere.

In the enemy combatant case, the court is not specific about what kind of hearing Mr. Hamdi should get. Justice O`Connor`s opinion could be read as allowing him to be brought before a military tribunal. But even the Bush administration, when it announced that it would be using military tribunals, made it clear that American citizens would not be tried before them. Putting American citizens before military tribunals would be bad politics, as the administration realized. It would also substantially diminish the level of due process Americans can expect when they are accused of wrongdoing. It is important that when Mr. Hamdi presents his case, he be allowed to do so in a federal district court.

During World War II, the Supreme Court handed down one of its most infamous decisions, affirming the government`s power to put Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Fortunately, this court appears to be mindful of the mistakes of the past. "It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation`s commitment to due process is most severely tested," Justice O`Connor observed yesterday, "and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 29, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Court v. Bush
By ANTHONY LEWIS

WASHINGTON — A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation`s citizens." With those words, Justice Sandra Day O`Connor confronted the claim of President Bush that the "war on terror" entitles him to act without any meaningful check by the courts. She and seven of her colleagues on the Supreme Court firmly rejected his presumption of omnipotence.

It was as profound a day in the court as any in a long time. The justices did what they have often shied away from doing: said no to the argument that the title commander-in-chief means that the president can do whatever he says is necessary to win a war. In 1944, for example, the court upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt`s order to remove Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast and confine them in desert camps — on the thin argument, as it turned out false, that they might be disloyal.

At issue yesterday was Mr. Bush`s claim that he can label any American an "enemy combatant" and hold him or her in prison indefinitely without trial or access to counsel. The case involved Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen who was taken prisoner in Afghanistan and has been held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina.

Justice O`Connor, for herself and three other justices, upheld the government`s power to detain Mr. Hamdi under what she called the "narrow" circumstance of his capture in Afghanistan. But the opinion, methodically rejecting the administration`s arguments, said he must be able to go to court with a real chance to challenge his "enemy combatant" designation.

The government argued that it need produce only "some evidence" that Mr. Hamdi fought with the Taliban, which he denied. What it produced was a statement by a Pentagon official that contained no firsthand evidence and was never subject to cross-examination. Justice O`Connor said a process in which government claims "are simply presumed correct without any opportunity for the alleged combatant to demonstrate otherwise falls constitutionally short."

Justice O`Connor also fired a warning shot at what she said was the "substantial" possibility that the administration would hold Mr. Hamdi for the rest of his life. At times, in fact, her opinion seemed to be addressing the president and his lawyers directly about constitutional values. In challenging times, she said, "we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."

Two other opinions in the Hamdi case underlined the extent of the Bush administration`s deceit. Justice David H. Souter, for himself and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the president had no power to detain Mr. Hamdi at all. Justice Antonin Scalia, for himself and Justice John Paul Stevens, said that Mr. Hamdi had a right to trial by jury. "The very core of liberty," Justice Scalia said, "has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive." Only Justice Clarence Thomas endorsed the president`s approach.

The administration also lost another critical case in which it claimed to be exempt from the judicial process. It argued that federal courts had no jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus cases brought by prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. A 6-to-3 majority rejected that proposition.

The extreme reach of the administration`s view that a war president is not subject to check by the other branches of government was apparent in the recently disclosed memorandums on torturing prisoners. A Defense Department memo from March 2003 said that "any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution`s sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president." The administration later disavowed that argument. It would plainly fail the Supreme Court`s test.

One of the few times the Court said no to a wartime president was in 1952. Harry Truman had seized the country`s steel mills to forestall a strike during the Korean War. The court held his action unconstitutional. Justice O`Connor, tellingly, cited the steel decision with her statement that war does not give presidents a blank check.

Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.

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OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who Lost Iraq?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it`s already worth asking why things went so wrong.

The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we`ll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country.

Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution`s invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will.

What the figures don`t describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance.

The insurgency took root during the occupation`s first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, "Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold."

Plans for privatization were eventually put on hold. But as he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time — but we`ve given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics.

If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections — people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that "the level of casualties is secondary" because "we are a warlike people" and "we love war."

Still, given Mr. Bremer`s economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he`s Ari Fleischer`s brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: "The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

Checks and review? Yesterday a leading British charity, Christian Aid, released a scathing report, "Fueling Suspicion," on the use of Iraqi oil revenue. It points out that the May 2003 U.N. resolution giving the C.P.A. the right to spend that revenue required the creation of an international oversight board, which would appoint an auditor to ensure that the funds were spent to benefit the Iraqi people.

Instead, the U.S. stalled, and the auditor didn`t begin work until April 2004. Even then, according to an interim report, it faced "resistance from C.P.A. staff." And now, with the audit still unpublished, the C.P.A. has been dissolved.

Defenders of the administration will no doubt say that Christian Aid and other critics have no proof that the unaccounted-for billions were ill spent. But think of it this way: given the Arab world`s suspicion that we came to steal Iraq`s oil, the occupation authorities had every incentive to expedite an independent audit that would clear Halliburton and other U.S. corporations of charges that they were profiteering at Iraq`s expense. Unless, that is, the charges are true.

Let`s say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Executive Branch Reined In

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A01

The Supreme Court`s complicated holdings in three cases involving detainees from the battle against terrorism may not result in any prisoners going free -- the justices yesterday left that for lower courts or tribunals to decide.

But the opinions, concurrences and dissents were decisive on this: They represent a nearly unanimous repudiation of the Bush administration`s sweeping claims to power over those captives.

Liberal or conservative mattered little in the ultimate outcome. The court roundly rejected the president`s assertion that, in time of war, he can order the "potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing," to quote the court`s opinion in the case of foreign prisoners held at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In fact, the administration`s claim to such power over U.S. citizens produced an opinion signed by perhaps the court`s most conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, and possibly its most liberal, John Paul Stevens.

"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive," Scalia wrote, with Stevens`s support.

In this way, the court`s rejection of the executive-power arguments in the cases might be seen as part of a reemergence of the other branches of government from the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As the justices suggested several times in their opinions, emergency measures that might have been within the president`s power in the days and weeks just after 9/11 now must be reconciled withAmerican norms of due process. In that sense, the cases struck a chord with congressional hearings into the rules for prisoner interrogations at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given that the administration has said its war on terrorism might stretch over generations, Justice Sandra Day O`Connor wrote, the "indefinite detention" of a prisoner "could last for the rest of his life." And that, the court said, is too long to do without the basics of due process.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas embraced the administration`s positions without reservation, referring in a dissenting opinion to "the breadth of the President`s authority to detain enemy combatants, an authority that includes making virtually conclusive factual findings" that the Supreme Court is powerless to "second-guess."

Each case before the court presented slightly different facts -- there was a case asking whether foreign prisoners captured in the terrorism war had a right in U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment, a case asking whether a U.S. citizen could be held as an "enemy combatant" without a hearing of some kind, and a case challenging the short-circuiting of a criminal case against accused terrorist Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, by placing him in military custody as an enemy combatant.

But the justices used the cases to wrestle with one of the core dilemmas of a free society: How can strength be balanced with liberty? Or, put another way, what are the limits on a leader`s power in a crisis?

"The defining characteristic of American constitutional government is its constant tension between security and liberty," Justice David H. Souter wrote.

And so the opinions drew heavily on some of the oldest and weightiest precedents in the book. Starting with King John`s promise in the Magna Carta, signed in 1215, that "no free man should be imprisoned . . . save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land," the justices traced the limits on executive power through English common law, on through the Federalist Papers and down a long a line of precedents forged in some of the darkest hours of the nation, including the Civil War and World War II.

"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation`s citizens," O`Connor wrote in a painstakingly nuanced opinion ordering a hearing for U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was taken captive in Afghanistan.

The justices left unresolved exactly how tightly they intend to try to rein in the president. All of them paid deference to the heavy responsibility of the commander in chief and his duty to keep the country secure. Even as they reaffirmed the bedrock principle of checks and balances, they left Bush and his successors substantial room to operate.

They admonished lower courts to tread carefully on national security matters. They resolved the Padilla case -- which could have been the most provocative -- on narrow jurisdictional grounds. And they stopped far short of ruling that citizens who are designated enemy combatants must be charged as criminals and given the full access to the courts that would entail.

This moderation ultimately left the court`s liberal wing unsatisfied. Stevens, joined by Justices Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, argued passionately that the Padilla case should have been dealt with head on. "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. . . . Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber," he wrote.

Yet if, in the end, the justices could not agree on exactly how far the president can go, they were clear that he had already gone too far.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Al-Jazeera: Turkish Hostages to Be Freed


The Associated Press
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; 5:24 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The extremist group responsible for beheading two foreign hostages has announced it is releasing three Turkish captives "for the sake of their Muslim brothers," Al-Jazeera television said Tuesday.

The Arab satellite station broadcast a videotape showing the three hostages kneeling in front of three members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi`s Tawhid and Jihad movement, as one of the militants read a statement.

"For the sake of you, our brothers, and Muslims of the people of Turkey ... we will release these hostages and send them safely home," the statement said.

Supporters of al-Zarqawi, a suspected al-Qaida terrorist, said Saturday that they would behead the Turkish hostages within 72 hours unless Turkish companies stopped doing business with American forces in Iraq.

They also called for large demonstrations in Turkey against the war and President Bush, who is attending a NATO summit in Turkey. The following day, Turkey`s defense minister, Vecdi Gonul, reportedly said Turkey would not give in to terrorists` threats.

© 2004 The Associated Press

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A Grand Mission Ends Quietly

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, June 28 -- L. Paul Bremer arrived here almost 14 months ago with a seemingly limitless reserve of energy and a mission unparalleled in U.S. diplomatic history: to remake a nation by using near dictatorial powers.

When he left Iraq on Monday after surrendering authority to an interim government, it was with a somber air of exhaustion. There was no farewell address to the Iraqi people, no celebratory airport sendoff. Instead of a festive handover ceremony on Wednesday, the date set for the transfer, an improvised event occupied five minutes on a Monday morning.

The secrecy and brevity of the ceremony were in keeping with the precarious future of the Iraq that Bremer built. Setting out with a vision to transform Iraq into a model of Western democracy and capitalism for the rest of the Arab world, he has left behind a country freed from a tyrannical past but also with grave security threats, a sputtering economy and an appointed government with little popular support.

The stealth of Bremer`s final act was occasioned by security concerns that have bedeviled the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq. With insurgent activity far from contained by 138,000 U.S. troops, diplomats and reconstruction specialists have curtailed travel outside Baghdad`s highly fortified Green Zone. U.S.-funded projects, from repairing power plants to seminars on democracy, have been put on hold. Even Bremer, in his last months in the country, gave up the vigorous barnstorming he loved as occupier in chief.

Any public celebration of U.S. achievements here would have been a target not only for insurgents, but for questioning of Bremer and the CPA`s unfinished business, from promises to double electrical power generation to training thousands more police officers.

Bremer, a 62-year-old former ambassador and counterterrorism expert, but a Middle East neophyte, was dispatched to Iraq by President Bush with broad powers and an equally broad mandate. He was to install a democratic government and a free-market economy on the ruins of three decades of dictatorship and socialism. His resources were limited -- both in reconstruction funds and soldiers to keep the peace -- but his ambition was not.

Bremer made an immediate impression with his style and energy. A veteran of 20 marathons, he woke at 5 a.m. most days and kept working until midnight, meeting with rival factions, shuttling across the country in a helicopter and issuing edicts. In contrast to his predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, whose casual, aloof style irritated Iraqis, Bremer always wore a coat and tie "as a sign of respect," he said. (These were accessorized with combat boots, a look copied by other U.S. officials.) He studied Arabic, keeping a stack of flash cards in his suit pocket. He sought to travel as much as he could.

In the end, it was not always easy to determine which failings or successes of the occupation belonged to Bremer and which were beyond his control. The failure to deploy more troops in Iraq, a decision in which he was not involved, was one significant factor in the rise of the insurgency. Other U.S. officials said the growth of the resistance was also accelerated by Bremer`s decision to disband the Iraqi army and his inability to muster enough resources to put unemployed Iraqis to work on reconstruction projects.

With security deteriorating, the only Iraqis with whom Bremer could practice his Arabic were members of the Governing Council he had appointed and who were holed up with him inside the Green Zone. Trips around Baghdad became less frequent.

Although even his toughest critics praised him for his punishing work schedule, they questioned why Bremer did not recruit more seasoned diplomats with experience in the Arab world. They criticized him for relying instead on young, inexperienced staffers with Republican Party connections. The critics, including many within the CPA, also faulted him for not pushing to get the $18.6 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds spent more quickly.

To many Iraqis, including members of the interim government, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure. Many of its promises to the Iraqi people, including pledges to mount a massive reconstruction effort and create a competent security force, have gone unfulfilled. In a recent opinion poll of Iraqis sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of those responding said they lacked confidence in the CPA.

In his last week in Iraq, Bremer crisscrossed the country in much the same way he did when he arrived. But instead of driving through cities and plunging into crowds, he stayed largely on military bases. Iraqis he wanted to see had to come to him.

A top aide to Bremer warned reporters a week ago that the transfer of political authority in Iraq would not resemble the British handover in Hong Kong in 1997, a multi-day affair replete with marching bands, honor guards and fireworks.

Even so, some Americans and Iraqis here were taken by surprise by Monday`s lack of historical moment. To some Iraqis, it seemed as if Bremer had slighted them one final time by not making the handover into a grander gesture. To some Americans working for the CPA, it recalled the departure of U.S. diplomats from Saigon in 1975.

"I knew there were big security concerns, but I figured that at the very least we`d have a ceremony with a few hundred Iraqis -- something that would be televised for the country to see," one American working for the CPA said. "This was embarrassing."

Another CPA staff member described Bremer`s departure as a "tail-between-your-legs exit."

"We should have held up our heads high," the staff member said. "Everything may not have worked out as we had planned, but we did do a lot of good. Don`t forget: We got rid of Saddam."

A senior aide to Bremer said the CPA had intended to hold the ceremony before the announced date, likely on Tuesday, because intelligence analysts had predicted a rash of insurgent attacks on Wednesday, the planned handover date. The aide said it was moved to Monday at the request of the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who met with Bremer to discuss it Sunday.

Bremer concurred with Allawi, but kept the information limited to a handful of his top advisers, a senior U.S. official said. The official said Bremer also informed the White House and the Pentagon of the schedule change.

The small cadre of CPA officials who knew about the change stayed up all night preparing for the event, which was held in the prime minister`s office in the Green Zone. There were no banners or bands, just a few chairs upholstered in gold fabric arranged around a coffee table with a flower arrangement with a small Iraqi flag.

When Bremer informed his senior staff at 8 a.m. Monday that he would be leaving by noon, there was an emotional reaction but also a sense of the inevitable, participants said. "It was amazing to see how many people were standing out with nothing to do," one of them said. "We were waiting for this arbitrary day, so when Bremer announced it, I don`t think there was a surprised face."

Two hours after the ceremony, he was at Baghdad International Airport, where a television camera filmed him walking across the tarmac with Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. Both men were surrounded by plainclothes security guards. Without making any public comments, Bremer walked up the steps of an Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane.

As he reached the top step, he turned, waved and ducked into the military aircraft that would take him back to America.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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America`s Missed Photo Opportunity
Surprise Transfer of Sovereignty Lacks Memorable Positive Picture

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page C01

DUBAI, June 28 -- On Sunday, three days before the officially scheduled transfer of sovereignty in Iraq, Salah Nagm, the head of news at the Middle East Broadcasting Centre that runs the Arabic satellite channel al-Arabiya, said it was possible that the ceremony would join other historic images -- momentous handshakes on the South Lawn of the White House or Anwar Sadat`s visit to Israel -- that are graven on the memory of this region. He couldn`t know, of course, what the event would look like. But as a man who deals in images, he knew it might have enormous impact.

"The ceremony, if there is a ceremony, should be designed very carefully," said Nagm, in his fourth-floor newsroom office in Dubai`s gleaming Media City. "Anything that goes into it will affect the view of it. It is a picture that will remain in history, and it needs to be seen by Iraqis."

Nagm is a cautious man, and his "if there is a ceremony" spoke volumes. By Sunday, the escalation of violence and the persistence of rumors that the handover might be moved up had journalists here and in Baghdad ready for fast-breaking news. But the timing of the handover -- which took place Monday, two days ahead of schedule and without warning or advance notice -- not only took al-Arabiya by surprise, it left the network scrambling for "visuals." No one, it seems, had bothered to call the Arabic-language channel that says it has the largest viewership in Iraq. Their cameras were not even in the room when Iraq was reborn as a sovereign nation (or "so-called sovereign" in the local parlance).

"I don`t know what they were thinking -- they didn`t tell anybody," said Abdul Kader Kharobi, an assignment editor at al-Arabiya, a few hours after the transfer at 10:26 a.m. local time. There was no frustration in his voice, just disgust and a lot of weary irony. The Americans have been all but incompetent in manufacturing images, he said, and yet what does it matter? After Abu Ghraib, and after what he believes was a sham investigation into the March 18 killing of two al-Arabiya journalists in Baghdad by U.S. soldiers, who believes the Americans anyway?

Kharobi first learned that the transfer might happen early from statements by the Iraqi interior minister, who was in Turkey for the NATO summit. But, he said, despite the best efforts of one of his reporters to get more information out of members of the Iraqi delegation, no one offered anything specific. It seemed like a rumor, or confusion.

Ten minutes later, he learned that the transfer was already a done deal. And so the event that might have produced the most public, ceremonial moment in the birth of a new country was a private, invitation-only event. A war of images, of toppled statues and looted museums, of captured Americans and mangled children, a war whose ending was marked with a premature victory celebration on an aircraft carrier more than a year ago, was given another ambiguous marker. Iraqis were once again nominally in charge of their country, but al-Arabiya, for the moment, had no way of proving it to its viewers.

The day continued like that. There had, in fact, been a camera in the room in Baghdad, and the video that emerged showed a weary-looking L. Paul Bremer on a yellow sofa. The actual transfer of power came with the exchange of a large blue portfolio, but who was running the camera at this critical moment? And why was someone standing in the way?

"The camera was positioned very badly," said Kharobi, who, despite deep skepticism of American intentions, is hopeful that peace, at least, will follow soon. But his optimism, and most of the optimism one heard here Monday, came with an "Inshallah" ("God willing").

"It doesn`t look promising," he said. "Like some people in a bunker doing something illegal."

Later, it was announced that Bremer had left, but it took time to get images of the man (whose "reign" was widely criticized by Arab media as a failure) touching terra firma in Iraq for the last time in his trademark boots and suit. Richard Nixon, skulking out of Washington after his resignation, looked more exultant.

The paucity of images on Arab television, and lag time during the first hours after the handover, contributed to a sense that the American part of this moment was a bit furtive and sad. Al-Arabiya, which spent the day interviewing notable political and cultural leaders, often split its screen, returning again and again to a tape loop of Bremer, at the handover, looking exhausted and almost dazed. For much of the afternoon, Arab leaders talked over him, plunging into all the problems the new nation faces, the violence, the debts inherited by the new government, the question of the interim government`s legitimacy. They talked, and Bremer listened, or so the juxtaposition of images seemed to say. A neat reversal of who dictates to whom, and perhaps a last dig at a man sometimes referred to on Arab television as a "dictator."

It`s hard to put one`s finger on the right word when it comes to little things like this. It`s too serious to be humor, and the word "sly" suggests deceit. But there is disconcerting imagery in the Middle East, especially when the subject is so profound.

On Saturday, an edition of the Daily Star, a respected Lebanese newspaper that comes to Dubai sandwiched in the International Herald Tribune, ran a headline "US launches air strike on Fallujah." Although it appeared right above an article that referred to the U.S. "so-called `war on terror,` " there was nothing in this particular story that couldn`t have been part of any mainstream U.S. newspaper.

Except for the picture that illustrated it. Photographed from above, it showed young Iraqi boys sitting in a perfect circle, in Fallujah, "being taught the Koran by a sheik." The white-robed sheik sat in the center of the circle, as if he were the bull`s-eye of a target. Americans strike Fallujah. Religion is the target. Children are the collateral damage.

Television is necessarily more blunt than that. The most striking aspect of Monday`s coverage -- besides the fact that channels al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera were left on the outside of an event that one might have expected the Americans to spoon-feed them -- is how quickly everyone moved on. Although an al-Arabiya journalist, doing man-in-the-street questions, asked a group of Iraqis, "Is this a government of stooges to the United States?" there wasn`t a lot of obsessing about the meaning of the actual transfer. Rather, the handover itself was nudged to the side, and the conversation turned to the future: money, police, safety, foreign affairs, the future of Saddam Hussein (taking possession of, and prosecuting him, may be the first items of business attempted by the new government).

In any "handover" there must be a giving and a taking. The giving was the American part of the story, and the Americans gave with such absence of fanfare that it was easy to brush the giving aside and focus on the taking. So the Arab media shifted the view, focusing on the active assumption of Arab control over the conversation that will determine Iraq`s future. Americans, weary of war, and the Bush administration, hopeful for a newly stable Iraq, will be happy to "leave" the responsibility and risk to the Iraqis. But they may not notice how deftly the moment that might have been constructed to prove American good intentions has been airbrushed out of the picture. Or, as a Saudi commentator interviewed on al-Arabiya put it, how much this story is not "about American generosity."

Sovereignty has always been a brand of fiction. There are no keys to a country, only power and, if the country is governed by consent, agreements on how to share it, wield it and pass it on. The old formula for royal succession -- the king is dead, long live the king -- was a paradox that (if people believed in it) solved the problem of death and continuity. There was something paradoxical, but perhaps wise as well, about how the Arab media presented this perhaps historic transfer of power. Mistrust and optimism were commingled. They seemed to be saying, of course, the whole thing is fraud; now get out of the way.

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Talk to the Insurgents

By Fareed Zakaria

Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A23

There is some good news coming out of Iraq. The interim government has the support of most Iraqis. The international community is getting more involved. Money for the reconstruction effort is moving faster. But all this will mean nothing if Iraq`s central problem -- a pervasive lack of security -- remains unsolved. Unless this changes soon, positive trends will turn negative. The new government will be seen as ineffectual, reconstruction will remain halting, radical militias will gain ground and there will be no elections in January. This will end in either a low-level civil war or military rule, possibly both.

Ayad Allawi, Iraq`s new interim prime minister, and Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan have hinted at the possibility of imposing martial law. This is understandable, as long as it`s temporary. (Syria has been in a state of emergency for 40 years.) But along with tough measures, Allawi will have to do something the United States could never bring itself to do: talk to the insurgents.

The Bush administration has never really understood the security problem in Iraq. To do so would require that it face up to its own mistakes. The original sin of U.S. postwar policy remains the decision to go into Iraq with too few troops. A larger presence would have intimidated and thus deterred some of the opposition and, in places such as Najaf and Karbala, forestalled the rise of local militias.

But the second important mistake has been to discount the size of the insurgency and its local support. For many in the administration it was an article of faith that Iraqis would welcome the American occupation. So it was impossible for them to accept the idea that ordinary Iraqis could be helping the guerrillas. That`s why Donald Rumsfeld always dismissively referred to Iraqi militants as a bunch of "dead-enders." Administration officials objected to the use of terms such as "insurgents," and claimed that most of the troublemakers were foreign terrorists.

As has happened so many times regarding Iraq, ideology clouded analysis. The best-equipped, best-trained army in the world has not been able to crush or even find the "dead-enders," whose operations have grown in size, skill and organization. Fourteen months after the fall of Baghdad, Iraq`s main airport remains closed, the road from the airport to Baghdad is a free-fire zone, several other key routes linking the country are extremely dangerous, and attacks on infrastructure, civilians and troops are a daily occurrence.

"There is no doubt that the insurgents have local support," says Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who spent several months in Iraq last winter studying the insurgency while attached to the U.S. Army. "They melt into neighborhoods. People do not inform on them. These are all telltale signs of local support." Hashim says that the insurgency is made up of Baathists, Islamists, hard-core Iraqi nationalists and a significant number of foreign terrorists. "Even the foreigners have some tacit support from people," Hashim says. The glue holding them together, he argues, is nationalism and anti-Americanism.

The Iraqi mood may be changing, and this political shift provides the best opportunity the coalition has to win this guerrilla war. The interim government has public support. The recent attacks appear to be unpopular. Sunni clerics and tribal leaders have denounced the violence, as have almost all political parties. Allawi should capitalize on this support by moving aggressively now.

The only successful strategy in dealing with insurgencies has been to separate them from their local support. That means offering political, social and economic bounties to those in the Sunni community who are tacitly backing -- or at least not opposing -- these attacks. This means co-opting clerics, tribal chiefs and former Army officers.

This strategy would isolate the most die-hard Iraqis and foreign terrorists. And they would then have to operate within less cooperative communities. Crushing this smaller group will remain tough, but counterinsurgency warfare will more likely succeed once the guerrillas have been isolated.

Some conservatives were apoplectic when U.S. forces made a deal with the insurgents in Fallujah. This strategy, they would argue, is Fallujah writ large. Actually, it`s closer to the manner in which the Army handled the challenge from Moqtada Sadr in the south, using a mix of military strikes and bribes to wean away his support. Anyway, what is the alternative? The occupation, in the latest Coalition Provisional Authority poll, has 2 percent support among Iraqis. The CPA itself has inched up to 8 percent support. With those kinds of numbers, any harsh offensive operation by American troops is going to produce more insurgents than it kills. And for the immediate future, most counterinsurgency operations will remain largely American affairs.

The United States has made some strides in Iraq over the past month because it has reversed many of its most damaging policies. Prodded by the Iraqi government, it must now make this final reversal.

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Wal-Mart bläst der Wind ins Gesicht
von Lee Sustar
Socialist Worker / ZNet 25.06.2004
Endlich schlägt auch den Wal-Mart-Bossen ein gewisser Wind entgegen - für die berüchtigte arbeiterfeindliche Politik des Unternehmens. Am 22. Juni ließ ein Bundesrichter die Klage weiblicher Mitarbeiter des Einzelhandelsriesen zu; dabei geht es um einen Class-Action-Prozess bezüglich Wal-Marts Lohn- und Beförderungs-Politik. Der Prozess betrifft alle Frauen, die von Wal-Mart seit 1998 eingestellt wurden – schätzungsweise 1,6 Millionen – und dürfte somit der größte Prozess dieser Kategorie in der Geschichte der USA werden. Distriktrichter Martin Jenkins vergleicht den Fall mit ‚Brown versus Board of Education‘ im Jahr 1954, mit dem die Rassentrennung an Schulen für ungesetzlich erklärt wurde. „Dieses Jubiläumsdatum erinnert uns daran, wie wichtig Gerichte sind, wenn es darum geht, gegen die Verweigerung gleicher Behandlung gesetzlich vorzugehen, wo immer und durch wen immer sie erfolgt“, schreibt Jenkins.

Experten, die das Verfahren unterstützt haben, fanden heraus, dass weibliche Wal-Mart-Mitarbeiter 6,2% weniger verdienen als männliche mit vergleichbarer Tätigkeit. Weibliche Ladenmanagerinnen – insgesamt nur 15% - verdienten $16 400 im Jahr weniger als ihre männliche Kollegen. Eine der klagenden Frauen, eine 18jährige Beschäftigte, sagte gegenüber ‚National Public Radio‘, sie sei bei Beförderungen wiederholt übergangen worden – um befördert zu werden, hätte sie sich „wie eine Puppe aufmotzen“ müssen. „Je mehr ich mich beschwerte, desto mehr dachten die bei mir an das große, böse B-Wort (vermutlich ‚bitch‘ – Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin)“, sagt sie.

Dieser Prozess kommt, nachdem Anfang des Jahres 300 Arbeiter ohne gültige Papiere verhaftet wurden. Sie arbeiteten für Hausmeisterfirmen, die für Wal-Mart tätig waren. Diese Arbeiter hatten von routinemäßiger Misshandlung berichtet – etwa „Einsperren“, um verletzte Arbeiter von medizinischer Behandlung abzuhalten. Hinzu kommt, dass Wal-Mart nicht bereit ist, Löhne zu zahlen, von denen man leben kann. Laut einer Studie des Forbes-Magazins kommen Wal-Mart-Mitarbeiter im Schnitt auf einen Stundenlohn von $7,50, etwa $15 000 im Jahr – was fast exakt der federalen Armutsgrenze für eine dreiköpfige Familie entspricht, nämlich $15 060. Bereits im Februar hatte eine Bundes-Jury in Oregon festgestellt, das Unternehmen habe zwischen 1994 und 1999 83 Mitarbeiter unbezahlt Überstunden schieben lassen. Mindestens drei dutzend weitere Prozesse dieser Art sind anhängig. Löhne und Überstunden(-Bezahlung) bei Wal-Mart sind lausig - noch übler allerdings ist die Krankenversicherung. Vielen Mitarbeitern ist es unmöglich, ihren Teil der Krankenversicherung abzudecken – 30% des Gesamtbetrags. Wal-Marts Gesundheitsleistungen reflektieren die konservative Gesinnung des Walton-Managements. So verweigert Wal-Mart beispielsweise die Erstattung von Verhütungsmitteln. Aber auch Impfungen für Kinder sowie viele Routineleistungen wollen die Wal-Mart-Bosse nicht bezahlen. Um der Kritik an diesem lausigen Gesundheitsplan den Wind aus den Segeln zu nehmen, stilisieren die Wal-Mart-Manager ein Programm hoch – Wal-Mart springt in die Bresche, zahlt für sehr teure Behandlungen, etwa Organtransplantationen. Ein Journalist der Los Angeles Times, Michael Hilttzik, verweist allerdings auf die Tatsache, dass nur 0,01% der rund 500 000 versicherten Unternehmensmitarbeiter eine Transplantation nötig hatten. „Indem es Leistungen so steuert, dass große Eingriffe Priorität vor Routineleistungen haben - die von einem großen Prozentsatz der Angestellten genutzt würden -, hat Wal-Mart die Krankenversicherungsorthodoxie mehrerer Jahrzehnte auf den Kopf gestellt“, schreibt Hilttzik.

Aber nicht nur Angestellte werden von der Wal-Mart-Maschinerie ausgebeutet. Laut einer Studie der Forschungsgruppe ‚Good Jobs First‘ gelang es Wal-Mart, Regierungssubventionen in Höhe von mindestens $624 Millionen für seine großen Verteilungszentren einzuheimsen – in Form von Infrastrukturverbesserungshilfen, Steuerkrediten, Finanzierung, Job-Training, usw.. Gerechtfertigt wird diese Subventionierung mit der Schaffung neuer Arbeitsplätze. Dabei zerstört Wal-Mart in der Regel Jobs, indem es kleinere Konkurrenten aus dem Feld wirft. „Wenn die irgendwo reingehen, sorgen sie ganz einfach für eine Umverteilung der Einnahmen des Einzelhandels“, so Phillip Mattera, einer der Autoren der Studie zu ‚Socialist Worker‘. Nun, da Wal-Mart der Wind ins Gesicht bläst, startet das Unternehmen einen Public-Relations-Blitzfeldzug, der sein Image aufpolieren soll. In Chicago hatten Gewerkschaften und Interessensgruppen der Bürger es fertiggebracht, die Zustimmung des Gemeinderats für einen von zwei geplanten Wal-Mart-Läden zu Fall zu bringen. Jetzt sponsert Wal-Mart das lokale ‚National Public Radio‘ – mit dem Slogan: „Job-Chancen schaffen für Menschen in allen Lebensbereichen“. Und beim Jahrestreffen seiner Anleger kündigte Wal-Mart an, es werde künftig höhere Löhne zahlen – ein Schritt, den das Unternehmen allerdings so oder so einleiten muss, wenn es in Städte geht, in denen die Löhne im Einzelhandel höher sind. Lassen Sie sich nicht reinlegen, sagt Mattera von ‚Good Jobs First‘: „Wal-Mart hat erkannt, es muss mehr Geld in PR investieren und mehr politische Ressourcen kaufen“, sagt er. „Ihre Präsenz in Washington ist inzwischen weit massiver und sie geben mehr Geld für Lobby-Arbeit auf bundesstaatlicher Ebene aus. Man erlebt einen anderen Wal-Mart. Aber das Letzte, was sie tun werden, ist, die Löhne und Bedingungen zu verbessern“.

Kann man Wal-Mart gewerkschaftlich organisieren?

Wal-Mart – die führende Kraft Niedriglohn-Amerikas - will so bleiben, wie es ist. Vor einiger Zeit hatte das ‚National Labor Relations Board‘ verfügt, das Unternehmen müsse mit den Fleischzerteilern von Jacksonville, Texas, verhandeln, die der Gewerkschaft ‚United Food and Commercial Workers‘ (UFCW) beitreten wollten. Die Entscheidung war eine seltene Niederlage für das Unternehmen. Allerdings erging sie fast drei Jahre, nachdem Wal-Mart seine Fleisch-Abteilung dichtmachte – nur, um zu verhindern, dass die Gewerkschaft irgendwo einen Fuß in die Tür kriegt. Inzwischen plant Wal-Mart, die Entscheidung auf Ebene der Bundesgerichtsbarkeit anzufechten – was bedeutet, die Arbeiter müssen noch weitere Jahre warten, bis über ihr Schicksal endgültig entschieden ist. Mit dieser Feindseligkeit konfrontiert, reagierte die UFCW in Form einer „Konzern-Kampagne“ gegen Wal-Mart – man versucht, die arbeiterfeindlichen Praktiken des Unternehmens bloßzustellen. Allerdings steckt dahinter in den meisten Fällen nicht der ernsthafte Versuch, Wal-Mart (gewerkschaftlich) zu organisieren. Stattdessen konzentriert man sich überwiegend auf den Ladenboykott. Eine vollkommen fehlgeleitete Strategie. Denn damit trifft man unweigerlich vor allem die 34 Millionen Arbeiter in den USA, die weniger als $8,70 die Stunde verdienen. Diese Arbeiter haben kaum eine andere Wahl, als bei Wal-Mart einzukaufen und von Tiefstpreisen zu profitieren. In Chicago beispielsweise wundern sich viele Bewohner der verarmten West Side – meist Afroamerikaner und Verarmte – weshalb die organisierte Arbeiterschaft etwas gegen den Bau von Läden in einem Viertel hat, in dem ein drastischer Mangel an Einkaufsmöglichkeiten herrscht - und an Jobs. Hinzu kommt, dass die UFCW-Offiziellen keine Strategie haben, um dem Druck Wal-Marts auf die Lebensmittelindustrie in puncto Senkung der Lohnkosten etwas entgegenzusetzen. Wal-Mart ist für diesen Bereich inzwischen der größte Einzelhändler.

Letztes Jahr streikten in Süd-Kalifornien zehntausende Arbeiter der Lebensmittelindustrie. Sie gehörten der UFCW an. Die Gewerkschaftsführer setzten ein Abkommen durch - inklusive massiver Erhöhung der Gesundheitsleistungen, wie schon längst gefordert. Die einzige Chance, höhere Löhne und bessere Arbeitsbedingungen bei Wal-Mart zu erreichen, liegt somit in der gewerkschaftlichen Organisierung – nicht nur durch UFCW, vielmehr bedarf es der konzentrierten Anstrengung und der Ressourcen der Arbeiterbewegung. Das erreicht man nicht durch Rein-Raus-Demos und Anzeigenschaltung, das muss Stadt für Stadt, Laden für Laden, Arbeiter für Arbeiter erfolgen. Ein Scheitern der gewerkschaftlichen Organisierung beim größten privaten Arbeitgeber der USA wäre nur ein weiterer Sargnagel für die Arbeiterbewegung. Es gibt keine Alternative, der Wal-Mart-Moloch muss gestoppt werden. In diesem Moment, da das Unternehmen in der Defensive ist, wäre der richtige Zeitpunkt für Labor und deren Verbündete, den Kampf zu forcieren.

Eine Wal-Mart-Mitarbeiterin redet Klartext

„Mein Name ist Rosetta Brown, ich bin seit sechs Jahren Angestellte des Unternehmens Wal-Mart. Als Angestellte habe ich persönlich gesehen, dass Wal-Mart-Mitarbeiter häufig schädlichen Arbeitsbedingungen ausgesetzt sind – alles, von Rassendiskriminierung über Einschüchterung durch das Management bis zu Desinformation und Verstößen gegen das Arbeitsrecht und das Gesetz. Ich habe mich am Arbeitsplatz verletzt, als ich am 6. Oktober1999 über Nacht für die Inventur in den Laden eingeschlossen wurde. Heute lebe ich mit den Schmerzen und dem Leid durch einen Nackenwirbelvorfall - das ist in jener Nacht passiert. Die Handlungsweise Wal-Marts und Sam’s Clubs hat meine Entschädigung als Beschäftigte verzögert. Als Folge haben sich bei mir medizinische Rechnungen in Höhe von zehntausenden Dollars angesammelt, ich habe meine Wohnung verloren und war auf Sozialhilfe angewiesen. Mein Kredit ist futsch, und ich muss jeden Tag mit Schmerzen leben. Mein Arzt empfiehlt mir irgendwann zu einer Operation, um mein Leiden zu lindern, aber weil Wal-Mart kontinuierlich meine Ansprüche zurückweist, kann ich sie mir finanziell nicht leisten. Am meisten schmerzt mich, dass das alles von Anfang an zu verhindern gewesen wäre, hätten sie nur getan, was recht ist“.

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June 29, 2004



HOME RULE
by NIR ROSEN
A dangerous excursion into the heart of the Sunni opposition.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040705fa_fact

Issue of 2004-07-05
Posted 2004-06-28

On May 11th, the day after the United States marines withdrew from the streets of Falluja, about five hundred clerics, tribal leaders, businessmen, and military and police officers gathered in the dusty courtyard in front of the wide stone stairs that lead to the entrance of Rahma Hospital. The hospital is under construction, and during the Americans’ siege of the city, which lasted for most of April, it served as a storehouse for weapons, medical and food supplies, and sandbags. A rough lectern had been placed halfway up the stairs, and was flanked by flags and banners inscribed with phrases extolling the martyrs of the siege. The dignitaries sat in white plastic chairs under a big tent that shaded them from the midday sun, clapping politely and drinking from cans of soda and bottles of water, while poets read work they had prepared for the occasion. Several of the poets were from other cities in Iraq, including Najaf, and a recurrent theme that afternoon was the bond between Sunnis and Shiites. Falluja is one of the most religiously conservative towns in the “Sunni triangle,” but the recent confluence of the Shiite uprising led by Moqtada al-Sadr and the siege of Falluja by the marines had created a curious alliance that transcended religious differences. A local poet recited a poem called “The Falluja Tragedy.” His accent made his words barely intelligible, at least to me, but I could make out these phrases: “Falluja is a tall date palm. She never accepts anybody touching her dates. She will shoot arrows into the eyes of those who try to taste her. This is Falluja, your bride, O Euphrates! She will never fall in love with anyone but you. . . . Americans dug in the ground and pulled out the roots of the date palm.”

A young boy from Najaf wearing a pressed white shirt tucked neatly into bluejeans walked up to the lectern, and the microphone was lowered to accommodate him. The boy raised his right arm, pointing his index finger at the sky. “I came to praise the heroes of Falluja!” he shouted. His poem ended with calls to God—“Ya Allah! Ya allah!”—that he screamed out. Then he began to sob, and he was led away, wiping his tears. The men in the front row of plastic chairs embraced and kissed him, and he returned to the lectern and recited another poem. This time, he brandished a Kalashnikov that was as long as he was tall.

The most distinguished guest in the tent was Sheikh Dhafer al-Obeidi, a man in his late thirties with narrow eyes and a thick black beard. He sat regally in the front row, wearing a white scarf and a translucent gold-rimmed cape that he had draped over his shoulders. Falluja’s most powerful cleric, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi, had recently given Sheikh Dhafer day-to-day authority over the city. Sheikh Dhafer was the last speaker. He described the event as “the wedding day for Falluja.” Muslims had not felt such joy, he said, since Saladin liberated Jerusalem in the twelfth century.

The Marines’ farewell visit to Falluja the previous day had been billed as a joint patrol with a new Iraqi security force, the Falluja Brigade. It was a hasty affair, lasting only about half an hour, and something of an anticlimax to Operation Vigilant Resolve, the attack on the city launched on April 5th by the First Marine Expeditionary Force after the killing and mutilation of four Blackwater security guards. Hospital officials in Falluja say that at least six hundred Iraqis died during the subsequent siege.

The American withdrawal was a controversial experiment in Iraqi autonomy. Falluja was the only city in Iraq that was surrendered to a local military force with strong connections to the previous regime. This was, essentially, a reversal of the policy that had been in effect since the previous April, when U.S. Army troops arrived in Falluja, two weeks after they took Baghdad, thirty-five miles to the east. But Falluja was a far different place now than it had been a year ago. In the first few months after Saddam’s government fell, the city had been fairly stable internally. Religious and tribal leaders had appointed their own civil management council before the Americans arrived. Falluja did not suffer from looting, and government buildings were protected. Tight tribal bonds helped maintain order. Early in the occupation, however, a demonstration protesting the Americans’ takeover of a school building had turned bloody, and a cycle of attacks and retaliation began, with the resistance increasing in sophistication. Local fighters were joined by rogue mujahideen and jihadis from other Arab countries, and, as in the rest of Iraq, the violence and disorder spiralled out of control.

The accord between the Americans and the resistance was brokered by the Marines, members of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and several groups of Iraqis, not all of them with the same agenda, although there were basic areas of agreement. “Many people came in asking to be intermediaries,” a member of the C.P.A., who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “We wanted the individuals who had killed the contractors, and we wanted heavy weapons turned in, and we needed to be able to move inside and outside the city. They wanted the hospital opened and the old bridge cleared and the curfew changed so they could make it to evening prayers in the mosque. And we discussed what to do about foreign fighters, or ‘Arab guests,’ as they called them.”

The men who killed the contractors were not turned in, and very few weapons were surrendered, but the Americans agreed to a deal nonetheless. The fact that the Falluja Brigade included several former Baathists and radical Sunni fighters whom the Marines had recently been battling was considered a small price to pay for peace. Power had been turned over to local authorities who had legitimacy. And the marines claimed that they were still in control. A Coalition press release noted that “Fallujans reportedly waved to them”—the marines—“as they made their way in and out of the city” on May 10th. This was apparently a reference to the thousands of residents who came into the streets to celebrate. Fighters in the backs of pickup trucks shot weapons into the air, songs were sung, and a sheep was slaughtered. An Iraqi officer wearing the uniform of the old Republican Guard handed out forms to men who had lined up to join the Falluja Brigade.

The four Blackwater security guards were killed at a large intersection on Falluja’s main street. It was once called Habbaniya Street, but the name was changed to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin Street in March, after the Israelis assassinated Yassin, the co-founder of Hamas. When I was there in May, laborers with scarves protecting their faces from dust stood around, waiting to be picked up for day jobs. Anti-American graffiti was scrawled in English on the walls of nearby buildings. Young boys who sold bananas and Kleenex were acting as an early-warning system for the city. I knew several people who had been spotted by them. The laborers, who were armed with shovels, pipes, and pickaxes, were on hand to enforce street justice.

The boys gathered around me and the laborers removed their kaffiyehs from their faces to talk. Several of them said that they had witnessed the attack, and they described how two S.U.V.s had stopped at a red light and mujahideen had opened fire on them from other vehicles. A mujahid had shouted, “I avenged my brother who was killed by the Americans!” and the assailants left. The gruesome scene of the mob mutilating the bodies, burning them and beating them until they were partially dismembered, was captured on film by local cameramen. (There is a term for this kind of thing. In Iraqi dialect, the Arabic word sahl, which literally means dragging a body down the street, has grown to mean any sort of public massacre.) The images were broadcast over and over again on Arab and Western television.

In the Jolan neighborhood, on the northwest edge of town, near the bridge where the charred bodies of two of the Blackwater security guards were strung up, people were sorting through the rubble of their homes. One man stood in the center of an immense crater while his children played on a pile of bricks that had once made up their house. Several men asked me to photograph the damage, and as I was doing so a white sedan pulled up and two men whose faces were covered with checkered scarves demanded to know who I was. They were worried about spies, they said. Mujahideen paranoia was making it impossible for Western journalists to work in Falluja. I was able to avoid being taken hostage or killed because I speak Arabic and have olive skin and black hair and, when asked, I said that I was Bosnian. I didn’t carry my American passport into Falluja. More important, I was travelling with a Palestinian who had helped the resistance leaders during the fighting. This reassured the men in the white sedan.

Several people in Jolan said that the foreign fighters—Saudis, Tunisians, Moroccans, Yemenis, and Lebanese, directed by Syrian militants—had been crucial to the defense of the neighborhood. The groups of mujahideen who hung around mosques included men who looked to me like Arabs from the Gulf. Most of them were dark, with angular features, and they had long, well-groomed beards. Their dishdashas were short, in the Wahhabi style, ending a little below their knees. Friends of mine who had been held by mujahideen told me they had heard men speaking with accents from the Gulf, Syria, and North Africa.

The foreign mujahideen still in Jolan imposed strict Islamic codes of behavior on the neighborhood. They harassed Iraqis who smoked cigarettes or drank water using their left hand, which is considered impure. They banned alcohol, Western films, makeup, hairdressers, “behaving like women”—i.e., homosexuality—and even dominoes in the coffeehouses. Men found publicly drunk had been flogged, and I was told of a dozen men who had been beaten and imprisoned for selling drugs.

The Nazal neighborhood, in the southern part of the city, had also been a battleground during the siege, and I met a former brigadier general in the Iraqi Army, Abu Muhammad, there. We sat in the guest hall of his grand house, watching the news on television while his three young sons wrestled on the sofa. Abu Muhammad had lost his job when Paul Bremer dissolved the army. When the war ended, he said, “we expected things to improve, but everything became worse: electricity, water, sewage.” Speakers in the mosques began to talk openly about jihad. “This attracted foreign Arabs who felt constrained by their own regimes,” Abu Muhammad said, “and of course there were neighboring countries that supported them. Nobody in Falluja opposed the resistance, and many different resistance groups came in. Weapons were very available. The Baath Party had distributed weapons, and after the fall of Saddam’s government soldiers and security personnel took their weapons home. People here grow up with weapons. They are part of our personality.”

When the siege of Falluja started, in early April, Abu Muhammad said, “people here were monitoring American movements and had the upper hand. They had military experience, and they prepared themselves for the fight.” Highway 10, the road that connects Baghdad to Jordan and the western part of the country, runs through Falluja, and it was virtually shut down. Fighters set up roadblocks and searched cars for foreigners, military convoys were attacked, and trucks were hijacked and robbed. Abu Muhammad said that Al Jazeera’s coverage of the siege incited sympathy for the resistance. He compared the Al Jazeera correspondent to a sports commentator: “He encouraged people to support one team against the other. And he raised the spirits of fighters.” Abu Muhammad was not optimistic about the future of Falluja. “It’s like Afghanistan, where gangs rule, and Mafias and Taliban,” he said. “If they decide somebody is a spy, they will kill him. There is no legal procedure. Imams who left during the fighting were prevented from returning to their mosques.” He feared that differences between mujahideen groups would lead to further violence.

Several councils, committees, political parties, and religious organizations were competing for influence in Falluja, among them the local branch of the Association of Muslim Scholars, one of the most powerful Sunni organizations in the country. It is led by Harith al-Dhari, who is both a religious and a tribal leader and has been vociferous in his opposition to the American occupation. The Association of Muslim Scholars, which is based in the Abdel-Aziz Al Samarrai mosque, had its own mujahideen units during the fighting. The mosque’s green dome was dotted with bullet holes and there was a big hole in the tower.

The Association of Muslim Scholars’ main competition is the Iraqi Islamic Party, which has offices in an old theatre across from the central market in Falluja. The Party dominates the town council, but its members were not active during the fighting, and some even left the city, earning the contempt of many Fallujans. Another organization, the forty-five-member Falluja Provisional Authority Council, was concerned mostly with negotiating with the Americans about the reconstruction of the city. Its headquarters, on Falluja’s main street, was surrounded by huge concrete security barriers covered with resistance posters.

By far the most important seat of authority in town is the Al Hadhra Al Muhammadiya mosque, led by Sheikh Dhafer. Falluja is known as medinat al-masajid, the city of mosques, of which it has at least eighty, and the Hadhra is small and faded compared to others. It is, nonetheless, the city’s de-facto command-and-control center. An informal committee of religious, tribal, and political leaders based in the mosque confers on strategy and advises the mayor and the town council. During the fighting in April, the loudspeaker in the mosque’s tower broadcast bulletins encouraging resistance, disseminating news, and giving directions to fighters about which front they should report to. I bought several DVDs in Falluja that showed fighters armed with Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades congregating inside the mosque and loading supplies into pickup trucks parked in front of it. DVDs of this sort are used for recruitment purposes by the mujahideen, and they have soundtracks that, typically, begin with turgid chants mourning the victims of the occupation forces, accompanied by pictures of bleeding and dead Iraqi children. Then the music becomes more reggae-like, and there are images of mujahideen firing mortars or exploding roadside bombs beneath American vehicles. One DVD showed heavy machine guns, pistols, grenades, satellite phones, walkie-talkies, video-rental cards, an airline itinerary printed from a Hotmail account, and plane tickets—all spread out on the carpet of someone’s diwan, or guest room. The booty was identified as having been taken from the vehicles of the four slain Blackwater guards.

Sheikh Dhafer’s many powers include the giving or withholding of clearances for journalists to work in the city, and I had to get a piece of paper from him that allowed me to move about. Journalists who had not done so ended up being held by armed gangs. The rusted gate in front of the Hadhra mosque was covered with announcements, including one from the qaimmaqamiya (an old Ottoman word for town hall) that gave instructions about what documents were necessary to apply for compensation for martyrs, wounded people, and damaged vehicles. A tall palm tree provided a bit of shade on a path to the mosque office, where I removed my shoes and left them by the door. The office was sparsely furnished, and I sat on an old sofa and drank a glass of water and ate some candies that an attendant thrust at me. There were several representatives of Sheikh Dhafer in the office, and visitors streamed in. Each man who entered the room said, “assalamu aleikum,” or “peace be upon you,” and everyone stood up and answered, “wa aleikum salam,” or “and upon you peace.” We would then shake hands and greet each other in the western-Iraqi way: a kiss on the cheek followed by three kisses on the shoulder. A twelve-year-old boy named Saad was introduced as an intrepid sniper. He was hugged and kissed and congratulated for being a batal, a hero. Saad smiled proudly. He had a hoarse, adult voice and was insolent to the older, bigger boys in the room.

Major General Jassim Muhammad Saleh, the former Iraqi Army officer who was appointed to head the Falluja Brigade when the accord with the Americans was reached, came by, looking elegant in a white dishdasha and a white scarf. He exchanged greetings with the guests in the increasingly crowded office, and briefed them on the latest political events, barking gruffly in clipped military style, his jowls shaking, as he fingered yellow prayer beads. General Saleh is a well-connected member of an important family in Falluja, and he had made a dramatic show of taking over the city at the end of April, but he turned out to have been an unfortunate choice from the American point of view. Rumors soon spread that he was a member of Saddam’s Republican Guard and had been involved in crushing the Kurdish and Shiite uprising that erupted early in 1991, after the first Gulf War. He was soon replaced by Muhammad Latif, a former Army officer who had been jailed by Saddam. Latif wasn’t from Falluja, and he continued to live in Baghdad, but his shortcomings in terms of local credibility were offset by the fact that he didn’t look like a reconstituted Baathist. My Palestinian guide, among others, said that Latif was just a figurehead, although American military officials and reporters, to whom he liked to give interviews in his garden in Baghdad, portrayed him as a forceful leader. Saleh, meanwhile, conferred often with Sheikh Dhafer and the other authorities in the Hadhra mosque.

Sheikh Dhafer, in addition to being the imam of the mosque, was now also the director of Falluja’s amana al-ulia lilifta, the high council for fatwas, which was formed after Saddam’s government fell. The fatwa council is based in Baghdad and is led by a radical Sufi cleric. When I asked Dhafer if he was the real leader of the city, he smiled disingenuously. “I am just a simple man who lived through the suffering of Falluja,” he said. I told him I had heard that he was the architect of the victory over the Americans, and he grinned proudly but whispered, “Don’t mention that, for my security.”

At Friday prayers that week, the mosque was overflowing, and I took one of the prayer mats that had been spread outside. Sheikh Dhafer’s raspy, high-pitched voice came over loudspeakers. Following convention, his sermon began with a general discussion of religion, but it soon became political. “Everybody hates America now because of the policies of President Bush, and his own people condemn him, so what can we not do?” he asked. “What can we not say? What are the limits of our response?” Dhafer then turned to the subject of unruly mujahideen. “It’s a shame that people who claim they are mujahideen set up checkpoints and steal cars and kidnap people,” he said. “They do what the Americans do, forcing people to lie on the ground, spreading their legs. What religion is this?” Dhafer urged the mujahideen to be more pious.

After the noon prayer and sermon ended, I was inundated by invitations to lunch, and joined a businessman with connections to the mujahideen. The men of his family lined up at the entrance of their diwan to shake hands and welcome visitors. A plastic mat was spread on the floor and bowls of rice and meat were set out, surrounded by smaller bowls of sliced vegetables and chicken. Round bread was piled on the mat’s edge. We all sat cross-legged on the floor, and a spoon and a plate were ordered for the Western guest, out of respect for his presumed inability to eat with his hands directly from the bowls, like a civilized person. When I finally plunged my fist into the greasy rice, tearing shreds of meat and stuffing it into my mouth, the men exclaimed with pleasure. Thin glasses were brought out, nearly half-filled with sugar and dark tea. The room echoed with the sharp tinkling of spoons mixing the sugar, and we watched the American attacks on Najaf and Karbala on Al Jazeera.

My hosts showed me a leaflet that was circulating throughout the region. A blurry photocollage depicted a giant, spiderlike creature next to a pair of legs that belonged to a man in an American military uniform. The leaflet explained that the creature circles around Falluja, attacking Americans. It could run up to forty kilometres, screaming and biting. I had heard numerous fantastic stories like that. One told of a Kalashnikov that worked for four hours straight without reloading. An armory used by the mujahideen turned into a weapons cornucopia. Dead mujahideen were said to smell pleasantly of musk. “Unnatural things happened,” I was told over and over.

On May 27th, my Palestinian guide told me that three NBC journalists had been taken hostage in Falluja, and we drove over from Baghdad the next morning. By then, the NBC crew had been released, and marines were eying the city warily from behind two barricades and vehicles covered with camouflage netting. Several dozen members of the Falluja Brigade, police, and civilians crowded around the entrance to the Hadhra mosque. I asked a guard I recognized to tell me what was going on, and he said that two “spies” had been arrested: “They’re British or maybe German.”

Taghlub al-Alusi, a gentle old man, tall and dignified, with sharp lines on his face, who was the administrator of the mosque, was in sheikh Dhafer’s office with several other men. He was looking more worried than usual. A woman was sitting in a corner of the room, in front of a table covered with Styrofoam containers of food. She was very white, and young. Her face was swollen and her shirt had speckles of blood on it. A pale, tall, middle-aged man emerged from the bathroom and sat next to her. His face was spotted with red bruises, and he winced when he moved. His hands were trembling. Taghlub and another man were examining two German passports, turning them around and squinting at every page. The chief of police was seated across the table from the Germans, a chicken leg in his hand. His sixteen-year-old son, who wore a pistol on one side of his waist and a walkie-talkie on the other, was next to him, opposite a short, round man with layers of tape covering his nose. A baby-faced man in a tailored suit sat next to the man with the bandage. He was the mayor, and he was rehearsing a statement.

The German man was Uwe Sauermann, a fifty-five-year-old freelance journalist. The woman was his twenty-four-year-old assistant, Manya Schöche. They had driven to Falluja that morning after being warned not to go to Najaf because it was too dangerous. Sauermann had taken his hotel manager’s advice and put on a dishdasha as they entered town, but someone saw his face when their car was stopped at the intersection where the four contractors had been killed, and they were seized by six armed men, one of whom wore a policeman’s uniform, and accused of being an American general and a female soldier. A mob beat them with shovels, sticks, and rocks. Their translator, a Christian from Baghdad, who wore a cross, was hit in the back of the neck with a machete and his nose was broken. He was the short man with the tape on his nose.

Just as the Germans and their translator were about to be doused with gasoline, someone had pulled Sauermann into a car and put a plastic bag over his head, and—after more violence, during which a police car was destroyed—he and the other two hostages were brought to the Hadhra mosque, which was soon surrounded by men carrying RPGs and Kalashnikovs. Sheikh Dhafer, General Saleh, and Muhammad Latif, the putative head of the Falluja Brigade, were inside, but they thought the situation was becoming too volatile, and they left. The mosque’s “committee for the investigation of espionage” established that Sauermann and Schöche were indeed German journalists, and Abu Abdullah, a foreign mujahideen leader who marched in demanding the return of what he referred to as American spies, was rebuffed.

The translator, who came over and sat next to me, kept dabbing at hisnose, wiping blood away, and when the mayor told him to eat he said, in a nasal voice, “I can’t—I’ll throw up.” Sauermann and Schöche were taken into an office where local stringers for Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were preparing to film the mayor’s statement. They were seated on a sofa on either side of the mayor, who faced a camera and explained that it had all been a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if the Germans had checked in with his office in the first place. Sauermann was told that he could make a statement. “When I saw the pictures of American attacks on Falluja, I decided to come here,” he said in English, with a thick German accent. “Somebody shouted ‘Americaner! Americaner!’ and then people came and you know what happened next. Men with guns put a bag on my head like the Americans do.” He said that he was a friend of the Iraqi people. The mayor shook Sauermann’s hand and told him to recant his statement comparing the behavior of the mob to that of the Americans. “When I said they used a plastic bag, it didn’t mean that we have to compare the people of Falluja to the Americans,” Sauermann said. “I only meant that the plastic bag itself reminded me of the Americans.”

Saad, the young sniper, who was serving refreshments, asked me if Schöche was Sauermann’s daughter. He didn’t understand how a woman could be travelling with a man not related to her. “Just give me five minutes alone with her,” he said, with a wistful smile.

Sauermann and Schöche were loaded into the mayor’s car, and about twenty members of the Falluja Brigade, in pickup trucks, accompanied them to the edge of town. The mayor, the police chief, and several aides and guards continued on to Baghdad, to the German embassy, a fortresslike place in the posh Mansour neighborhood. The mayor and the police chief went inside with the former captives, and I waited outside, chatting with two of the mayor’s assistants. They were worried about the political situation in Falluja. The foreign fighters and rogue mujahideen didn’t respect the authority of Sheikh Dhafer and the counsellors attached to the Hadhra mosque. They didn’t answer to Falluja’s tribal and religious establishment, and they had the muscle to do as they liked. The mayor’s assistants feared that Sheikh Dhafer and his colleagues could lose control of the town.

Iwent back to Falluja once more before I sensed that I was pressing my luck. On May 28th, the day the Germans were released, Sheikh Janabi, who in addition to being the senior cleric was the head of the Mujahideen Advisory Council, an ad-hoc group established to control the fighters in the city, had warned in his Friday sermon that any member of the foreign press who entered Falluja would be killed. Two weeks later, the bodies of six Shiite truck drivers who had been carrying supplies to the Falluja Brigade were discovered in the neighboring town of Ramadi. The truck drivers’ families claimed that they had been brutally murdered at the behest of Sheikh Janabi, although he denied having anything to do with it. Then the Pentagon announced that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was using Falluja as his headquarters, directing the assassins and suicide bombers who were turning the handover of Iraqi sovereignty into a bloodbath, and American aircraft bombed a house in Falluja that was alleged to be a Zarqawi safe house. At least twenty people were killed. On June 22nd, Kim Sun Il, a Korean translator who had been captured near Falluja, was beheaded, and a car and a garage in the Jubail neighborhood were hit by American rockets. Fighting broke out between the marines and resistance forces, and there was more bombing.

Speakers at a street demonstration in Falluja denied that Zarqawi was in the city. One of them, a young cleric, said that they did not need Zarqawi’s help. “The people of Falluja have men that love death the way the infidels love life!” he shouted. Sheikh Janabi said that the United States was using Zarqawi as a pretext to attack Iraqis, just as it had once used weapons of mass destruction. In any case, the airstrikes indicated that the Americans had pretty much abandoned the idea that the Falluja Brigade could do serious policework among resistance fighters, and certainly not among suspected terrorists. There were even reports that brigade members had joined the resistance when the new fighting broke out. As the handover to sovereignty began, the experiment with self-rule in Falluja looked more and more like a desperate measure that had been taken too late.

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Military Stands Its Ground
U.S. forces will remain autonomous but will consult and coordinate more with Iraqis.
By Mark Mazzetti and Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writers

June 29, 2004

BAGHDAD — With the stroke of a pen and an exchange of documents Monday, the 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq were transformed from occupiers into guests of a U.S.-backed government.

For all the political significance of the moment, the role of the U.S. military here will change very little immediately. Troops still will take orders from a U.S. general and still will have their hands full with an insurgent campaign of bombings, ambushes and assassinations. Not one fewer American soldier or Marine is on Iraqi soil today.

U.S. commanders on the ground say they plan to continue conducting patrols, raids and other operations unless the brass tells them otherwise. It is unlikely that the Americans will even consult the Iraqis if they have a chance to capture or kill major figures in the insurgency.

"Moving from an occupation force to a sovereign nation — we haven`t done that very often," said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, operational chief of the U.S.-led foreign force in Iraq. "[There`s] a whole lot of art involved with it.

"Each commander really likes his battle space to be his," Metz said. "And this is going to be really challenging because we`re going to run a parallel effort [with Iraqis], and we`ve got to coordinate between the two."

Even if U.S. military officers are doing the same things now that Iraqi sovereignty has been restored, they might find it more complicated. Commanders who ran operations at will throughout the country now must navigate Iraqi political sensitivities, without the benefit of an agreement spelling out their rights and responsibilities.

In the longer term, Monday`s events also underscore the importance of another U.S. effort, which has been lagging: properly training and equipping Iraqi security forces to take the place of Americans and other foreign troops. The success of that mission will help determine whether the interim government can organize elections early next year and pass power to a representative government.

Col. Robert B. Abrams, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the Army`s 1st Cavalry Division, said he would continue coordinating with Iraqi forces as he battled Shiite Muslim fighters in Baghdad`s Sadr City neighborhood. But he did not plan to ask Iraqis for permission. "It`s not going to cramp my style," he said.

The deputy chief of the U.S. Central Command, Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, said that if the Americans got an opportunity to hit insurgents such as Abu Musab Zarqawi, whom officials accuse of orchestrating a campaign of bombings and other attacks, they`d take it.

"In those instances where we want to go after Zarqawi or someone like that, then I think we`re going to have to hold pretty firm," Smith said. "That`s going to be the potential area where we might have some difficulty."

Unlike multitudes of U.S. troops in bases around the globe, those in Iraq will not operate under an accord with the host nation that defines their rights and responsibilities. Washington is relying on the current good relations between the U.S. and Iraq`s interim government to continue. Washington also depends on the authority granted to the multinational forces by a June 8 United Nations resolution, which stated that foreign forces may "take all necessary measures" to keep the peace in Iraq.

U.S. officials say it is possible the Iraqis will ask American troops to carry out a mission the Pentagon deems risky or unjustified — such as enforcing martial law. Such a request would have to be negotiated between Iraqi and U.S. officials, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said last week.

"If Prime Minister [Iyad] Allawi decides that it is appropriate to have martial law in some area, and we think not, it`s going to be up to him with his own forces to be able to enforce that," Wolfowitz said.

U.S. forces no longer have formal operational control of the Iraqi military units that have been trained. From now on, commanders must request their participation — even though the Iraqi command structure is still fluid. Edgy U.S. officers and troops are anxiously waiting to see how well Iraqi police and security forces perform.

"Are they going to be able to step up and provide security for Iraqi cities and towns?" asked Col. G.L. Cooper, a 1st Marine Division officer who works with Iraqi police west of Baghdad. "It`s going to take several months before we have measures of success, good or bad."

The U.S. military plans to increase joint patrols with Iraqi forces, but commanders hope to be able to send Iraqis out on their own in six months, using foreign troops only as a backup and quick-reaction force.

Building trust among Iraqis and Americans is crucial, said Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, which led the assault on the tense western town of Fallouja in April. "We want them to be able to ask us: `Hey, we`re going to go in and take down this building where there are bandits. Can you back us up?` "

In part, this is a reflection of greater pragmatism among U.S. generals. After hundreds of combat deaths, speeding up the "Iraqification" process is likely to be the only way to curtail the violence that still pervades the most turbulent areas. U.S. officials have recognized that it is better to be in the background. With many Iraqis angry at the United States, a visible U.S. presence tends to undermine the government that was organized by Washington and the U.N.

Iraqi troops "will never be as assertive as Marines would like," said Lt. Col. Phil Skuta of the 7th Marines, Regimental Combat Team, whose battalion was on patrol west of Baghdad last week. But he said that with U.S. backing and the availability of U.S. military might, they should be able to take control.

"The most important thing at the end of the day is that it has an Iraqi face on it," Skuta said.

This strategy has its critics in Washington. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), who met recently with generals in Iraq about plans after the hand-over, told reporters he feared that putting poorly equipped and trained Iraqis on the front lines of the counterinsurgency effort would "create a vacuum."

"I think that`s a mistake," Biden said of the pullback strategy. "Security is actually worse than a year ago."

April uprisings by both Sunni Muslim insurgents north and west of Baghdad and Shiites in southern Iraq dramatized the ineffectiveness of Iraq`s security services. But commanders said it was better to find that out earlier rather than after they had returned sovereignty to the Iraqis.

In the spring, U.S. officials predicted that violence would escalate until the hand-over at the end of June, then taper off. Now they say the violence is likely to last well into summer.

They hope that by the fall, Iraqis will be in control of much of the country. By then, registration should be well underway for watershed national elections planned for January. Officials want to avoid having to surround the 9,000-plus polling stations with blast walls, sandbags and U.S. troops.

Whether the baton can be successfully passed to an Iraqi security force that ultimately will grow to 250,000 members depends largely on a more coherent U.S. plan for training the nascent army.

"The training has not been as rapid as we had planned by now," Smith, the deputy Central Command chief, acknowledged. Yet the Pentagon hopes that by tapping Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the war last spring, to head the training, it can produce better results more quickly.

NATO has agreed in principle to help train Iraqi forces, but tensions remain over where and how to do it. France and Germany have said they will take part in such training only outside Iraq.

Deliveries of weapons, body armor, radios and other supplies have been slow as well. Setbacks in the arrival of equipment and reconstruction funds have been a major irritant for commanders on the ground.

"It`s really very frustrating because you know that Iraqi and U.S. and coalition soldiers have been killed because we have a very slow process and bureaucracy," Metz said, adding that every man brought into the Iraqi forces is potentially one fewer insurgent.

"For every guy that I can employ … during the day, he`s not going to pick up his AK-47 and fight me at night," Metz said.

The general is open to the idea, floated by the Iraqi leadership, of an amnesty or pardon for the Sunni fighters believed to be at the heart of the guerrilla war.

"I am very confident … that the new Iraqi government is going to make those overtures," Metz said. "And I think they can be very successful."

Such a plan would have to take into account the sensitivities of Iraq`s Shiite majority and ethnic Kurdish minority, groups that suffered under Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated government.

Metz said officials were not likely to cut more deals like the one in Fallouja, where U.S. forces agreed to pull out in April after days of bloody battles. They then turned the pro-Hussein town over to former Baath Party military officers with ties to insurgents. Fallouja has been mostly peaceful since, but commanders concede that the city has become a sanctuary for insurgents, and possibly Zarqawi himself.

No senior commanders expect the new security arrangement to be free of conflict, and some even embrace a degree of tension between the Iraqi and U.S. chains of command.

"We should expect and we should want friction," said Metz, who will manage day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq. "Because without that friction, the international community, and especially the insurgents and the terrorists, are going to say, `Well, they`re just the lackeys of the coalition.` We don`t want that."

As the Pentagon braces for a surge of violence after the restoration of sovereignty, top officers say it will be crucial how the new government handles the attacks. More than anything, this will determine whether the insurgency loses steam as the U.S. tries to diminish its military role.

In the wake of the political transition, Smith said, the insurgents will learn two things: "Is the government going to respond? And are the people of Iraq going to support the government`s response?"

Mazzetti reported from Washington and McDonnell from Baghdad. Times staff writers John Balzar in western Iraq and Mary Curtius in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Von den üblichen Verdächtigen wird diskutiert, wen die Terroristen umbringen müßten, damit Bush wiedergewählt wird oder nicht.
Warum nicht nach dem Motto `wir zerstörten das Land, um es zu retten` dann die Möglichkeit "Sie erschießen Bush, damit er wiedergewählt wird."
Für einen NeoCon müßte das logisch sein!

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SUPREME COURT / DETAINEES` RIGHTS
Wartime President Is Again Outflanked
By Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writer

June 29, 2004

WASHINGTON — Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists seized four jetliners and caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, President Bush has declared that the United States is at war — and in wartime, presidents assume emergency powers they would not claim in times of peace.

Bush and his aides said they had a right to imprison suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, without court hearings. They asserted a prerogative to keep more secrets than before from Congress, the media and the public. And at one point, the Justice Department claimed the president could ignore laws prohibiting torture, under his "inherent authority" as commander in chief.

But in an unusual series of reversals in recent weeks, the Supreme Court, Congress and public opinion all have intervened to draw new limits on the president`s wartime authority.

On Monday, the court ruled that the federal government could not hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without allowing them to challenge their detention in legal hearings, a significant setback for the administration.

Earlier this month, the administration was embarrassed by a 2003 memo that claimed a presidential right to override laws regulating torture or, for that matter, any other military conduct. The White House, facing a public-opinion storm, promptly disavowed the policy.

Before that, the administration sought to withhold documents and witnesses from a congressionally created commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, claiming they were sheltered by the right of executive privilege. But after protests from members of both parties in Congress, the administration backed down.

"For a year after 9/11, the executive branch got the benefit of the doubt," said Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at the predominantly conservative American Enterprise Institute. "That was the case, for example, when Congress voted to authorize the war in Iraq. But it`s not the case anymore."

"Part of it is time passing" since the terrorist attacks, he added. "I couldn`t say the court`s decisions would have been different if it were, say, three months after 9/11, but they very well might have been."

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is now at Pepperdine Law School, agreed.

"It would have been interesting to know how different the outcome would have been if we had more recently suffered an attack on the homeland," he said. "I do think the 9/11 commission and the furor over the administration`s decision-making on interrogation policy affected the court`s judgment."

Kmiec said the decisions were "an appropriate reminder of the importance of civil liberties, even in wartime."

Earlier presidents also claimed emergency powers in wartime.

The Supreme Court has rarely intervened — and then, "only after the combat was over," Kmiec noted.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln ordered more than 13,000 suspected rebels detained without access to the courts. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Japanese Americans to detention camps, and the Supreme Court approved.

"But the war on terrorism is potentially endless, and that posed a problem for the court," Kmiec said. "We are certainly in a zone of twilight between outright combat and normalcy, and we want to reacquire as much normalcy as possible."

"These are decisions that were made while the war is still on in Iraq and the threat of terrorism remains real," agreed Walter E. Dellinger III, a former Clinton administration official who now teaches law at Duke University. "These are not cases where the court is writing from the comfort of an armistice having been signed."

Dellinger and other liberals described Monday`s decisions as bold, sweeping and stinging in their effect on the Bush administration.

"The opinions cut the heart out of the position that was argued in the [Justice Department] memorandum on the president`s authority to order torture," he said. "They are sweeping in their affirmation of the right of judicial process."

"It`s a major loss for the position of the executive branch," agreed Lawrence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School. "A strong majority of the court has said … `We won`t interfere with the executive`s conduct of the war — but the executive can`t interfere with the courts` task of making sure the Constitution`s core principles are obeyed.`

"So the system has pushed back. And it`s a push-back on several fronts — the courts, the 9/11 commission and public opinion."

But conservatives such as Kmiec argued that the decisions, while they limited the president`s powers, should not be seen as a major rebuff to Bush.

"This is no Michael Moore opinion," he said, referring to the ferociously anti-Bush director of the film "Fahrenheit 9/11." "The tone of these opinions is not chastisement — which was certainly the tone of the Supreme Court when it told [then-President] Harry Truman that he couldn`t seize the steel mills." Truman claimed the power to take over the steel industry during the Korean War in 1952, but lost.

"The executive branch asked for more latitude than they got, but they got substantially what they wanted," Kmiec argued. He noted that while the court said detainees must be given a hearing, it left open the possibility that the hearing could be conducted by a military tribunal, with rules that grant the government the presumption of a valid case. "We`re not at a peacetime setting," he said.

In another recent case that focused on executive power, he noted, the administration won its point: a lawsuit demanding that Vice President Dick Cheney release records of his energy policy task force. Last week, the court overruled a judge`s order that would have required Cheney to release the records, saying the president and the vice president were entitled to shield their internal discussions from outside eyes.

Ornstein noted that in Congress, the administration is facing more criticism and scrutiny of its actions than at any time since Sept. 11 — most notably, the scandal over abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but other issues as well.

"For a long time, Congress` relationship with Bush has been like battered-wife syndrome," he said. "The administration didn`t just take Congress for granted; it abused people. But now, as we are getting closer to the election, they are getting more push-back.

"The political context has changed, and of all the things that have happened, Abu Ghraib has made the biggest difference politically.

"There`s an old saying: The Supreme Court follows the election returns. In this case, who knows? They may actually be anticipating the election returns."



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL
It`s Called Democracy

June 29, 2004

What gives the government the right to arrest you and imprison you indefinitely without offering a reason or opportunity to appeal? The answer, in the United States, is: Nothing gives the government that right. It is hard to see what is left of American freedom if the government has the authority to make anyone on its soil — citizen or noncitizen — disappear and then rule that no one can do anything about it.

Or so we once thought. But the Bush administration — whose convoluted memos on defining torture now rank with Bill Clinton`s definition of sex — says Congress gave it exactly this power. And when was that? Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, Congress passed a two-line resolution authorizing the use of military force against "nations, organizations or persons" engaged in terrorism. We would like to hear from any member who intended by this vote to repeal the Bill of Rights.

Shockingly, though, in rulings issued Monday about the rights of terror suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in a military brig, four justices of the U.S. Supreme Court bought the administration`s argument. In better news, a 6-3 majority flatly rejected the administration`s arguments that the prisoners were not even entitled to a court hearing. One of the plaintiffs — an American citizen named Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan — has been held in a military brig with no charges brought against him for nearly three years.

The court said that even the Guantanamo detainees who were not citizens were still "persons" under the Constitution. That gives them the right to challenge their detention, with a lawyer to help them. Even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist couldn`t swallow the administration`s notion that these prisoners had no rights at all.

President Bush and his administration say: Look, there`s a war on. And anyway, the United States is not some Latin American dictatorship of the 1970s; we can trust our government not to abuse the extraordinary power it claims. But this administration`s record of incompetence and callousness does not inspire us to lightly kiss away our constitutional protections.

Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, was arrested by the FBI in connection with the Madrid train bombings in March. His fingerprints were supposedly on a bag of detonators found in Spain. Having been tarred as a murderer and terrorist by his own government, he was released with little more than an "oops." More than two dozen Guantanamo prisoners were released earlier this year after Pentagon lawyers decided they were not terrorists after all. Meanwhile, they had been imprisoned for two years.

The whole point of the substantive freedoms and due process guarantees in the Bill of Rights is that freedom should not rest on any government`s claims of benevolence. Now that the Guantanamo detainees have been given the right to a hearing, Americans will learn a bit more about what has happened there. As with the abuses at Baghdad`s Abu Ghraib prison, it`s likely that the more they learn, the less they`ll like it.



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Kenneth Pollack justified the agency`s (CIA) earlier use of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi "send a thief to catch a thief." But the question now is: Do you send a thief to build a democracy?
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COMMENTARY
Born Under a Cloud of Irony
The new, free Iraq may officially be in the hands of a former terrorist.
Robert Scheer

June 29, 2004

The ironies are flowing thicker than crude oil in Iraq these days.

First, the United States surreptitiously turns over nominal control of the country to a government appointed by outsiders while leaving real power in the hands of U.S. military commanders and calls it an exercise in democracy.

And although the interim prime minister is a former member of Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party who later conducted anti-Hussein terrorist operations on behalf of the CIA — operations in which innocent Iraqi civilians may have been killed — his anointment as leader of a "free Iraq" is being hailed by President Bush as a great victory in the war on terror.

According to several former intelligence officials interviewed by the New York Times this month, the political group run by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the 1990s, but financed by the CIA, "used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Iraq" in an attempt to sabotage and destabilize Hussein`s regime.

With such a record, it is perhaps not strange then that Allawi, who built his exile organization with defecting Iraqi military officers, is already proclaiming the need to delay elections scheduled for January and impose martial law. On Monday Bush said coalition forces would support such a call for martial law, presumably enforced by U.S. troops.

Allawi is also demanding that Hussein be put under his government`s control and tried quickly by an Iraqi court — probably a strategic move to seize Hussein`s strongman crown directly.

When Allawi was first picked for the prime minister post through an opaque selection process ostensibly run by a U.N. representative, former CIA Iran-Iraq analyst Kenneth Pollack justified the agency`s earlier use of Allawi as a terrorist with the comment "send a thief to catch a thief." But the question now is: Do you send a thief to build a democracy?

There has been little media follow-up to reports in early June that Allawi`s work for the CIA amounted to much more than trying to win hearts and minds. Yet what we do know is damning enough. In 1996, one of Allawi`s top officers and his group`s self-proclaimed chief bomb maker detailed the mechanics behind Allawi`s murderous actions in a videotape subsequently obtained by a British newspaper, the Independent. On the tape he even expresses annoyance that the CIA had shortchanged him on one job, a car bombing, allegedly paying only half the agreed-upon amount.

According to one of the New York Times` sources, Allawi`s group, the Iraqi National Accord, was the only exile group the CIA trusted to unleash violence inside Iraq under the agency`s direction. In those days, car bombings in Baghdad were thought to be a good thing, according to one U.S. intelligence officer who worked with Allawi. "No one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," he said, adding, "I don`t think anyone could have known how things could turn out today." Now, Allawi has made control over his old rival Hussein a loud demand of his appointed government, which sits in uneasy reliance on 135,000 U.S. troops and must answer to the world`s largest American embassy in all important matters.

Such a plan must be tempting for the United States. A show trial under Allawi would be designed to get Hussein out of the way as quickly and quietly as possible, which might save the U.S. some embarrassment. After all, in an open, unbiased trial the old dictator, if he still has his wits about him, could talk about his cooperation with the Reagan and Bush administrations during the 1980s, when he committed many of the alleged crimes — including the use of poison gas — for which he will be brought to trial. He might even discuss his two visits back then with Donald H. Rumsfeld. But even though a fair public trial might prove uncomfortable for our government, Hussein is a prisoner of war captured by the United States, and Washington is responsible for his treatment under international standards. We have no right to turn him over to the tender mercies of a former CIA-financed archrival. That is simply an abdication of responsibility that violates international law.

There is no good argument for not trying Hussein under international law, as has been done with former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. A fair public trial would reveal the crimes of Hussein as well as the machinations of those U.S. officials and agencies that aided him.

*

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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Ich weiß nicht, ob es den Dreien hilft, die ersten Opfer in dem neuen `souveränen` Irak zu sein.

Roadside bomb kills three U.S. troops in first major attack since sovereignty transfer
- ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004

(06-29) 04:23 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --

A roadside bomb rocked a military convoy in southeast Baghdad on Tuesday, killing three U.S. Marines and wounding two others in the first fatal attack on American forces since they transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government.

Footage from Associated Press Television News showed blood inside a slightly damaged Humvee and a flak vest laying in the road in the residential neighborhood.

Iraqi national guardsman Sgt. Ali Muhsin said that three U.S. service members were killed and at least on wounded by the roadside bomb. The U.S. military in Iraq later released a statement confirming that three U.S. Marines were killed and two were wounded.

A U.S. soldier at the scene said the bomb hit the lead vehicle in the convoy and wounded or killed several American soldiers.

Meanwhile, Iraqi militants shot dead an American soldier they had held hostage for three months, saying the killing was because of U.S. policy in the Mideast nation, Al-Jazeera television said Tuesday.

The Arab-language station reported that the slain soldier was Spc. Keith M. Maupin, but the U.S. military said it could not confirm whether a man shown being shot in a murky videotape was indeed Maupin, who was taken hostage after an April 9 attack outside Baghdad. The report did not say when Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, was killed.

In a separate hostage drama, an Iraqi extremist group freed three Turkish captives on Tuesday, Turkey`s foreign minister said. Al-Jazeera television reported that the group was releasing the hostages "for the sake of their Muslim brothers."

"Our citizens have been released," Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told state television. "We`ve struggled a lot for their release."

The Arab satellite station broadcast a videotape showing the three Turkish hostages, believed to have been contractors, kneeling in front of three members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi`s Tawhid and Jihad movement, as one of the militants read a statement.

"For the sake of you, our brothers, and Muslims of the people of Turkey ... we will release these hostages and send them safely home," the statement said.

Monday`s surprise transfer of sovereignty came two days earlier in an apparent attempt to foil the timing of expected attacks by anti-American insurgents intent at undermining the transfer.

There were no major attacks on Monday. After nightfall four heavy explosions rang out in central Baghdad, near the U.S.-held Green Zone -- a near daily occurrence in the capital. But the military said there were no injuries in the blasts, which were caused by mortar fire.

Early Tuesday, gunmen attacked a police station in Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing one officer and one civilian, said policeman Satar al-Ghareri. Some eyewitnesses said the gunmen recited Quranic verses before peppering the police station with bullets and rocket-propelled grenade-fire.

Also Tuesday, a roadside bomb exploded as a senior Kurdish police official was heading to work, killing one of this guards and wounding him, police said.

Maj. Ahmed al-Hamawandi, the head of police in the Kurdish district of Azadi in Kirkuk, suffered minor injuries in the attack that occurred at around 8:50 a.m., said police Col. Sarhat Qader.

Sectarian tension has been on the rise in Kirkuk, a city that sits atop vast oil reserves, and Kurdish officials and police have been the frequent target of attacks by gunmen.

In Baghdad, assailants attacked a U.S. patrol in the Azimiya neighborhood. One civilian was killed, according to official in the Interior Ministry who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. civilian authority, which rode in on a swift military victory that swept away Saddam`s generation-long regime, withdrew quietly on Monday. Its leader, L. Paul Bremer, left Iraq aboard a military plane two hours after the transfer and was swiftly succeeded by U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte.

Hours later, NATO leaders agreed to help train Iraq`s armed forces -- a decision that fell short of U.S. hopes that the security alliance would take a larger role in Iraq.

Iraq`s tentative step toward democratic rule will operate under major restrictions -- some imposed at the behest of the country`s influential Shiite Muslim clergy, which wanted to limit the powers of an unelected administration.

The interim government will hold power for seven months until, by U.N. Security Council resolution, elections are held "in no case later than" Jan. 31. The Americans retain responsibility for security.

President Bush raised no objection to Iyad Allawi taking hard-line measures to deal with militants such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in the country.

"He may take tough security measures to deal with Zarqawi, but he may have to," Bush said. "Zarqawi is the guy who beheads people on TV. He`s the person that orders suiciders to kill women and children."

Al-Jazeera aired a video showing a blindfolded man identified as Maupin sitting on the ground. Al-Jazeera said that in the next scene, gunmen shoot the man in the back of the head, in front of a hole dug in the ground. The station did not broadcast the killing.

Maj. Willie Harris, spokesman for the Army`s 88th Regional Readiness Command, said the man in the footage could not be clearly identified but that the videotape is being analyzed by the Department of Defense.

"There is no confirmation at this time, that the tape contains footage of Matt Maupin or any other Army soldier," he said.

Al-Jazeera said a statement was issued with the video in the name of a group calling itself "The Sharp Sword against the Enemies of God and His Prophet."

In the statement, the militants said they killed the soldier because the United States did not change its policies in Iraq and to avenge "martyrs" in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Algeria.

Maupin was among nine Americans, seven of them contractors, who disappeared after an ambush on a convoy west of Baghdad on April 9.

The bodies of four civilian employees of Kellogg Brown & Root -- a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney`s former company Halliburton -- were later found in a shallow grave near the site of the attack. The body of Sgt. Elmer Krause, of Greensboro, North Carolina, was later found.

One civilian driver, Thomas Hamill of Macon, Miss., was kidnapped but escaped from his captors nearly a month later. The others are missing.

In a separate hostage-taking, the father of a U.S. Marine who was reported kidnapped by militants on Monday issued a plea for his release. The captors of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun have threatened to behead him.

Hassoun, an American Marine of Lebanese descent, was shown blindfolded, with a sword brandished over his head in a videotape aired on Al-Jazeera on Sunday. The militants threatened to behead him unless all Iraqis "in occupation jails" are freed. They did not set a timeframe.

"I appeal to the kidnappers and to their conscience and faith to release my son," his father, Ali Hassoun, said in an interview with The Associated Press at his house in the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli.

"He is not a fighter. I hope that they will respond favorably to my appeal. May God reward them," he said.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/a/2004/06/2…
©2004 Associated Press

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Der Furor
Bush plays the Nazi card.
By William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg
Posted Monday, June 28, 2004, at 4:13 PM PT

"Kerry`s Coalition of the Wild-eyed" was produced for the Bush campaign by Maverick Media. To watch the video on the Bush campaign Web site, click here.

http://www.georgewbush.com/VideoAndAudio/Default.aspx

For a script, click here

http://www.georgewbush.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=2831

.

From: William Saletan
To: Jacob Weisberg

Where to begin with this despicable video?

Six months ago, MoveOn.org held a contest to find the best amateur ad against President Bush. The group invited people to make ads and submit them to its Web site. Some idiot spliced images of Bush together with images of Adolf Hitler, evidently trying to make Bush look like a warmonger. His submissions, which arrived with 1,500 others—too many to be screened quickly—were posted on the contest Web site. As soon as MoveOn.org leaders realized what was in the ad, they removed and denounced it.

The Bush campaign, outraged by the mixture of Nazi images with images of an American politician, has decided that the best response to this offense is to repeat it.

The Bush video`s opening white-on-black graphic says, "The Faces of John Kerry`s Democratic Party. The Coalition of the Wild-eyed." Next comes a parade of angry speakers: Al Gore, Hitler, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Dick Gephardt, Hitler, Gore, and Kerry.

Is Bush suggesting that Hitler fits in with this group? Don`t be silly, Jake. Bush`s aides insist they`re just showing the Hitler footage so you can see the filth Democrats are putting out. But we already know how Bush`s GOP presents images from Democratic ads when it wants to discredit them. In 2000, Republican National Committee ads repeatedly depicted Al Gore`s commercials running on a small television screen in a kitchen. The RNC ads didn`t show the Gore ads at full size on your screen because the RNC didn`t want the images in the Gore ads to be taken at face value.

This time, the Bush campaign shows the Hitler images at full size, in an unexplained sequence with Gore, Dean, Gephardt, and Kerry. Draw your own conclusions.

How does the Bush camp identify the Hitler footage? "Sponsored by Moveon.Org" says a label on the first Hitler clip, evidently put there by the miscreants who submitted the ad. "Images from Moveon.Org ad" says the Bush campaign`s label on the second Hitler clip. The only organization that doesn`t identify the clips as a "Moveon.org ad" is MoveOn.org, which denounced the ad and never "sponsored" it. But never mind. Instead of apologizing for this implicit misrepresentation of sponsorship, the Bush campaign has made the misrepresentation explicit. "The following video contains remarks made by and images from ads sponsored by Kerry Supporters," says a graphic appended to the beginning of the video.

The Bush campaign`s claim that the amateur Hitler ads represent "John Kerry`s Democratic Party" is laughable. Kerry didn`t control MoveOn.org, and MoveOn.org didn`t make the ads. When the ads were submitted, the membership of MoveOn.org largely supported Dean, the candidate who had nearly wiped Kerry off the map. Kerry had just mortgaged his house to get the cash Democrats were refusing to give him. The suggestion that he controlled the party is preposterous—but only slightly more preposterous than the suggestion that Kerry is responsible what Dean and Gephardt said while running against him, or what Gore and Moore said while supporting candidates who were running against him. Not to mention that the question Gore poses in the ad—"How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein`s torture prison?"—is well warranted.

The only clip that can fairly be attributed to Kerry appears at the end, when the senator is shown telling an audience, "George Bush will lay off your camel, tax your shovel, kick your (bleep) and tell you there is no Promised Land." This is the punch line of a joke Kerry used to tell on the trail. The joke, now thankfully defunct, is too long and unfunny to bear repeating. What`s worth noting is that Bush-Cheney `04 thinks this clip shows a man too angry and foul-mouthed to sit in the White House. This from a president who delivered the seven-letter version of Kerry`s A-word in his last campaign, and a vice president who boasted Friday that he "felt better" after delivering the F-word to a Democrat on the Senate floor. Politician, go heal thyself.

To: William Saletan
From: Jacob Weisberg

On the pretext of protesting a comparison of George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler, the president`s re-election campaign has made an ad that implicitly compares John Kerry to Hitler. To be sure, it`s disgusting, for all the reasons you say.

But the vileness of "Kerry`s Coalition of the Wild-eyed" must not be allowed to obscure its essential hilarity. What moron came up with this idea? What are they smoking in Karl Rove`s office? C`mon, Will. This ad is the campaign equivalent of The Producers—an idea so egregiously tasteless and stupid that it might just succeed as camp.

Footage of Hitler shouting in German is juxtaposed with footage of Al Gore, Howard Dean, and Dick Gephardt getting worked up while criticizing Bush, Michael Moore getting booed for criticizing the Iraq War at the Academy Awards, and John Kerry using the phrase "kick your ass" (which is bleeped out, possibly in an effort to imply he said something worse). I know I should be disgusted by the attempted association of Democrats and Nazis, but it`s too funny to get upset about. Cue the goose-stepping mädchen of the Brookings Institution!

What exactly does the Bush-Cheney campaign think that these Democrats have in common with Hitler? Basically, it`s that they`re too darned excited about politics. They yell. They criticize harshly. They use bad language. The message here, to the extent there is one, is: "Don`t be like Hitler—chill out!"

Developing its argument that Nazism was basically a failure to relax, the ad attempts to tie its grotesque libel to the Bush campaign`s theme of the month, which is that the incumbent`s "optimism" is better than Kerry`s "pessimism." "This is not a time for pessimism and rage," the screen text says, over an image of a not at all enraged John Kerry telling his camel joke. The noise and chaos and grainy footage of the Democrats jarringly dissolves into sunny music, accompanied by a clear, color photograph of a confident President Bush strutting around the White House. "It`s a time for optimism, steady leadership and progress," the text continues.

This language pushes the facile notion that "optimism" is the most important of presidential qualities deep into the realm of the absurd. The implicit argument is a parody of syllogistic illogic: According to the premise of the ad, Hitler = rage and pessimism; Democrats = rage and pessimism; ergo, Kerry = Hitler. Is there any danger of any person in the United States taking this stuff seriously?

Then again, if such a grotesque video is not an occasion for pessimism and rage, I`m not sure what is. In the president`s view, is there ever "a time" for such sentiments? Would Bush have counseled optimism if he`d been a Jew facing the real Hitler in Germany in the 1930s, or a Kurd in Saddam`s Iraq? Should the kidnapped U.S. Marine threatened with beheading by his captors be optimistic because optimism is the American way?

A state of perpetual optimism is either a dangerous delusion or a calculated pose. In the case of the Bush campaign, it`s evidently the latter. Comparing one`s opponent to Hitler is not, in fact, the sign of a confident or optimistic candidate. To the contrary, it`s the act of a fearful and cynical candidate who is willing to use any tactic to avoid defeat.

But in reaching so far down so early in, Bush has not improved his prospects. Aimed as it is at the surviving members of various John Birch splinter organizations, this ad will win over no one, while alienating and offending many potential Bush supporters. Republicans will spend much time on the defensive trying to explain why their ad is not as revolting and preposterous as it obviously is. This sets Bush back.

He`s going to need better gutter tactics than this to stop Hitler in Ohio.
William Saletan is Slate`s chief political correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2103033/

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Tuesday, June 29, 2004

US Soldier Kept Hostage by Guerrillas is Killed (Ich empfehle rot und dick für die wichtigen Postings)

The killing of Spc. Keith Matthew Maupin by guerrillas in Iraq marks the potential beginning of a new tactic in the Iraq war. For the most part, it is hard for the guerrillas to wreak much real damage on US troops in the country, who are well armed and well protected. Ocassionally they manage to kill a US soldier with a roadside bomb or mortar or rpg fire. But these actions do not really wreak significant harm on the US war effort, though the accumulation of such deaths is beginning to alarm the US public.

Taking a soldier hostage, on the other hand, is much easier than killing large numbers of US troops. Since an individual hostage has a name and a face and family members, his story is much more affecting than is the report of a casualty statistic, even when a name is given. With the killing of Spc. Maupin, the guerrillas have initiated a new media campaign aimed at weakening the will of the US public to remain in Iraq. I fear guerrillas may increasingly deploy this tactic.

One thing I admire about John Kerry`s approach to Iraq is that he never fails to keep in view the sacrifice of the American soldiers and the positive contributions they have made. The Bush administration has grossly mismanaged post-war Iraq, but that is not the fault of US troops, who are mostly dedicated young people thrust into an unfamiliar situation in which their lives are in danger. They did rid Iraq of a genocidal regime, and they have done a lot of behind the scenes community service work in Iraq. I hope Americans, as they increasingly turn against the Iraq war (with every reason in the world) will not repeat the error of some in the 1970s, who despised Vietnam vets along with the Vietnam war. One officer confessed to me last fall when things were obviously turning bad, "Dr. Cole, I`m in a business where if I`m ordered to shoot over there, I shoot over there." He clearly was unhappy with the policies pursued. But what could he do. The American public owes it to these troops to give them a civilian leadership who will do right by them.

Also captured, with his fate as yet unknown, is Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, a Lebanese-American Marine, His case underlines the service given to the United States by Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. In the wake of September 11, it is especially important that the US public constantly be reminded that Arab Americans are not aliens but a longstanding and essential thread in the great American tapestry. Lebanese began coming to the US in some numbers in the 1880s. That wave of immigration, which was greatly reduced from 1924, also brought the Italians and Eastern European Jews to this country. Although most Lebanese immigrants were Christian, it is estimated that about 10% were Muslim.

Many Arabs took up the peddling trade in the Midwest, trekking long hours to farm houses to supply basic supplies at a time before the Model T and the Sears and Roebuck catalogue made it easy to get them. When the automobile helped kill the peddling business, many Arab Americans flocked to Dearborn to work for Ford, so that ironically the very industry that ended their previous jobs provided them new ones. The "Syrians" were a key element all along in the Detroit automobile industry, and southeast Michigan came to have the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Arab world itself.

The red scare after WW I and the spread of anti-immigrant racism closed off most such immigration from 1924 until 1965, when the Civil Rights Movement impelled Congress to end the quota system installed in 1924 (which had set tiny quotas for Syria and Lebanon and large ones for Germany and Norway). A second wave of large-scale Arab immigration began from 1965 and continues until the present.

Comedian Danny Thomas and his daughter Marlo Thomas (who married Phil Donohue) are among the best-known Arab Americans. But they are legion. They include Dr. DeBakey, who did pioneering work on the artificial heart, Paula Abdul, and Ralph Nader (Arab newspapers most often refer to him as the Arab presidential candidate), among many others.

Cpl. Hassoun has risked his for the United States of America. He is not only a Marine, but an Arab-American Muslim. All Americans owe him and his family a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid. The next time any American looks askance at someone for having an Arabic accent or appearing Arab, they should remember Cpl. Hassoun. I only hope he can escape his captors so that we can remember his further exploits.

posted by Juan @ 6/29/2004 09:43:27 AM
Monday, June 28, 2004

Bremer Flees Iraq Two Days Early

Paul Bremer suddenly left Iraq on Monday, having "transferred sovereignty" to the caretaker Iraqi government two days early.

It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty. Since the US military is so weak in Iraq and appears to have poor intelligence on the guerrilla insurgency, the Bush administration could not take the chance that a major bombing or other attack would mar the ceremony.

The surprise move will throw off all the major news organizations, which were planning intensive coverage of the ceremonies originally planned for Wednesday.

This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to that effect). Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush show. That`s what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations and manipulation of journalists. Let`s see if they fall for it.

Allawi is not popular and was not elected by anyone in Iraq. The Kurds were sullen today. There were no public celebrations in Baghdad. When people in the Arab world are really happy, there is celebratory fire. They are willing to give Allawi a chance, but that is different from wholehearted support.

What has changed? The big change is that Allawi now controls the Iraqi government`s $20 billion a year in income. About $10 bn. of that is oil revenues, and those may be hurt this year by extensive sabotage. To tell you the truth, I can`t imagine where the other $10 bn. comes from. The government can`t collect much in taxes. Some of it may be foreign aid, but not much of that has come in. The problem is that the Iraqi government probably needs $30 billion to run the government properly, and with only 2/3s of that or less, the government will be weak and somewhat ineffective.

Since Bremer was a congenital screw-up, just getting him and his CPA out of the country and out of control may be a good step forward. Allawi won`t care about Polish style shock therapy for the economy. Allawi does not have any investment in keeping Iraq weak or preventing it from having a proper army. But how the Iraqi military, if brought back, can operate in a security environment where there are 160,000 foreign troops under US command is unclear.

So that some group of Iraqis now control the budget and can set key policy in some regards may be significant. But the caretaker government is hedged around by American power. Negroponte (the US ambassador to Baghdad who has just arrived in the country) will control $18 bn. in US AID to Iraq. Rumsfeld will go on controlling the US and coalition military. There isn`t much space left for real Iraqi sovereignty in all that.

Another danger is that Allawi will overshoot and provide too much security. He is infatuated with reviving the Baath secret police or mukhabarat, and bringing back Saddam`s domestic spies. Unlike the regular army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the secret police are dirty, and if they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter.

The guerrilla insurgency will continue, perhaps become more active. My wife Shahin, always a keen and canny observer, thinks the guerrillas will make their priority number one the assassination of Allawi.

See also the article by Michael Hill of the Baltimore Sun, where I and others are quoted.

posted by Juan @ 6/28/2004 02:02:46 PM

Fallujah

Nir Rosen`s brave and essential reporting from Fallujah in the New Yorker is a must read. A taste:


` A young boy from Najaf wearing a pressed white shirt tucked neatly into bluejeans walked up to the lectern, and the microphone was lowered to accommodate him. The boy raised his right arm, pointing his index finger at the sky. “I came to praise the heroes of Falluja!” he shouted. His poem ended with calls to God—“Ya Allah! Ya allah!”—that he screamed out. Then he began to sob, and he was led away, wiping his tears. The men in the front row of plastic chairs embraced and kissed him, and he returned to the lectern and recited another poem. This time, he brandished a Kalashnikov that was as long as he was tall. `




posted by Juan @ 6/28/2004 11:25:02 AM

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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
War News for June 28, 2004 draft

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: US prisoner of war executed.

Bring ‘em on: Three US Marines killed by roadside bomb near Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US patrol ambushed in Baghdad; one Iraqi killed.

Bring ‘em on: Senior police official wounded in assassination attempt near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi policeman killed in attack on police station in Mahmudiyah.

Bring ‘em on: Fighting reported in Ramadi.

Bring ‘em on: Explosions reported near Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi civilians killed in roadside bomb attack against US convoy in Baquba.

More troops. “The U.S. Army is planning an involuntary mobilization of thousands of reserve troops to maintain adequate force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense officials said on Monday. The move -- involving the seldom-tapped Individual Ready Reserve -- represents the latest evidence of the strain being placed on the U.S. military, particularly the Army, by operations in those two countries.”

Crooks. “According to documents posted on its own web site, the CPA’s little-known Program Review Board (PRB) has quietly committed billions of dollars in Iraq’s oil revenues to new contracts that critics say will enrich US and British corporations while limiting the amount of revenue Iraq’s new interim government will have at its disposal when it assumes authority from the CPA on June 30.”

Stranded. “According to the Foreign Ministry, 33-year-old Gana Trading employed Choi Wook has wanted to come home to Korea since receiving word of Kim Sun-il`s murder, but because overland travel is almost impossible due to the threat of attack from armed groups and Mosul Airport is closed, he has remained in Mosul.”

Commentary

Analysis: “U.S. commanders concede that they are far from quelling a stubborn and increasingly sophisticated insurgency. It has extended well beyond supporters of Saddam Hussein and foreign fighters, spreading to ordinary Iraqis seething at the occupation and its failures. They act at the grass-roots level, often with little training or direction, but with a zealousness born of anticolonial ambitions. U.S. commanders acknowledge that military might alone cannot defeat the insurgency; in fact, the frequent use of force often spurs resistance by deepening ill will. ‘This war cannot be won militarily," said Major General John Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, which oversees a swath of the northern Sunni triangle, as the area is called. ‘It really does need a political and economic solution.’”

Analysis: “As has happened so many times regarding Iraq, ideology clouded analysis. The best-equipped, best-trained army in the world has not been able to crush or even find the ‘dead-enders,’ whose operations have grown in size, skill and organization. Fourteen months after the fall of Baghdad, Iraq`s main airport remains closed, the road from the airport to Baghdad is a free-fire zone, several other key routes linking the country are extremely dangerous, and attacks on infrastructure, civilians and troops are a daily occurrence.”

Opinion: “Let`s say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.”

Opinion: “The American torture of Iraqi prisoners was not especially helpful to Army Spc. Keith M. Maupin, who was shot dead by "the Sharp Sword against the Enemies of God and his Prophet." Torture is a two-way street. Nor does it seem so helpful today to U.S. Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. He has been missing since June 21 and now he is being shown on Arab television with a sword over his head. Voices say they will cut off his head. This is simultaneously impossible to contemplate and yet so familiar that you flinch at the mention. I wonder what these dangerous fools in Washington, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, think about the Marine.”

Opinion: “When Allawi was first picked for the prime minister post through an opaque selection process ostensibly run by a U.N. representative, former CIA Iran-Iraq analyst Kenneth Pollack justified the agency`s earlier use of Allawi as a terrorist with the comment "send a thief to catch a thief." But the question now is: Do you send a thief to build a democracy?”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Illinois soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: California Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: New Hampshire Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Three Oregon Guardsmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier wounded in Iraq.

Awards and Decorations

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier decorated for valor in Iraq.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:19 AM
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June 29, 2004
Alice in an Iraqi Wonderland
The Pitiful Restoration of "Sovereignty"

By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

So in the end, America`s enemies set the date. The handover of "full sovereignty" was secretly brought forward so that the ex-CIA intelligence officer who is now "Prime Minister" of Iraq could avoid another bloody offensive by America`s enemies. What is supposed to be the most important date in Iraq`s modern history was changed--like a birthday party--because it might rain on Wednesday.

Pitiful is the word that comes to mind. Here we were, handing "full sovereignty" to the people of Iraq ? "full", of course, providing we forget the 160,000 foreign soldiers whom the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, has apparently asked to stay in Iraq, "full" providing we forget the 3,000 US diplomats in Baghdad who will constitute the largest US embassy in the world--without even telling the Iraqi people that we had changed the date.

Few, save of course for the Iraqis, understood the cruellest paradox of the event. For it was the new "Iraqi Foreign Minister" who chose to leak the "bringing forward" of sovereignty in Iraq at the Nato summit in Turkey. Thus was this new and unprecedented date in modern Iraqi history announced not in Baghdad but in the capital of the former Ottoman empire which once ruled Iraq. Alice in Wonderland could not have improved on this. The looking-glass reflects all the way from Baghdad to Washington. In its savage irony Ibsen might have done justice to the occasion. After all, what could have been more familiar than Allawi`s appeal to Iraqis to fight "the enemies of the people".

Power was ritually handed over in legal documents. The new government was sworn in on the Koran. The US proconsul, Paul Bremer, formally shook hands with Mr Allawi and boarded his C130 to fly home, guarded by special forces men in shades.

It was difficult to remember that Mr Bremer was touted for his job more than a year ago because he was a "counter-terrorism" expert and that what he referred to as "dead-enders" [Baathist diehards] managed to turn almost an entire Iraqi population against the United States and Britain in just a few months.

According to Mr Allawi yesterday, the "dead-enders" and the "remnants" belonged to Saddam Hussein. Those of them who had not committed crimes could even join the new authorities, he announced. But it had already been made clear that Mr Allawi was pondering martial law, the sine qua non of every Arab dictatorship--this time to be imposed on an Arab state, heaven spare us, by a Western army led by an avowedly Christian government. Who was the last man to impose martial law on Iraqis? Wasn`t it Saddam Hussein?

No, Mr Allawi and his chums--along with the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, now dug up from his political grave--are not little Saddams. Indeed, it is Mr Allawi`s claim to fame that he was a Saddam loyalist until he upped sticks and fled to London. He almost got assassinated by Saddam before--this by his own admission--he took the King`s shilling (MI6) and the CIA`s dollar and (again by his own admission) that of 12 other intelligence agencies.

Yesterday, Mr Allawi was talking of a "historical day". As far as the new Prime Minister is concerned, Iraqis were about to enjoy "full sovereignty". Those of us who put quotation marks around "liberation" in 2003 should now put quotation marks around "sovereignty". Doing this has become part of the reporting of the Middle East.

Perhaps most remarkable of all was Mr Allawi`s demand that "mercenaries who come to Iraq from foreign countries" should leave Iraq. There are, of course, 80,000 Western "mercenaries" in Iraq, most of them wearing Western clothes. But of course, Mr Allawi was not speaking of these men. And herein lies a problem. There must come a time when we have to give up cliches, when we have to give up on the American nightmares. Al-Qa`ida does not have an original branch in Iraq. And the Iraqis didn`t plan September 11, 2001.

But not to worry. The new Iraqi Prime Minister will soon introduce martial law --journalists who think they can escape criticism should reflect again--and thus we can all wait for a request for more American troops "at the formal request of the provincial government". Wait, then, for the first expulsion of journalists. Democratic elections will be held in Iraq, "it is hoped", within five months. Well, we shall see.

True, Mr Allawi promises a future Iraq with "a society of all Iraqis, irrespective of ethnicity, colour or religion." But the Iraqis who Mr Allawi promises to protect do not apparently include the 5,000 prisoners held in America`s dubious camps across Iraq. At least 3,000 will remain captive, largely of the Americans.

There were many promises yesterday of a trial for Saddam Hussein and his colleagues although, not surprisingly, Iraqi lawyers felt there were other, more pressing issues to pursue. Paul Bremer abolished the death penalty in Iraq but Mr Allawi seems to want to bring it back. Asked whether Saddam might be executed, he remarked that "this is again something which is being debated in the judicial system in Iraq". He said, however, that he was in favour of capital punishment.

According to American sources, the United States has been putting pressure on Mr Allawi for at least two weeks in the hope that his ministries could--in theory, at least--function without US support. American advisers had already been withdrawn from many Iraqi institutions. Yet when he appeared yesterday, the Prime Minister spoke with words that might have come from George Bush. He warned "the forces of terror" that "we will not forget who stood with us and against us in this crisis". As the new "Cabinet" stepped forward to place their hands on the Koran, a large number of Iraqi flags lined the podium behind them--though not the strange blue and white banner which the former Interim Council had concocted two months ago.

The real problem for Mr Allawi is that he has to be an independent leader while relying upon an alien, Western and Christian force to support his rule. He cannot produce security without the assistance of an alien force. But he has no control over that force. He cannot order the Americans to leave. But here is the real question.

If Mr Allawi really intends to lead Iraq, the most powerful demonstration he could show would be to demand the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces. Within hours, he would be a hero in Iraq. The Americans would be finished. But does Mr Allawi have the wit to realise that this ultimate step might save him? Who can tell, at this critical and bloody hour? America`s satraps have been known to turn traitor before. Yet the whole painful equation in Baghdad now is that Mr Allawi is relying on the one army whose evacuation he needs to prove his own credibility.

The Western occupying powers have left behind a raft of dubious legislation. Much of it allows Western companies to suck up the profits of reconstruction --an issue over which the Iraqis had no choice--and many people in the country have no interest in continuing Mr Bremer`s occupation laws. No one, for example, is likely to spend a month in jail for driving without a licence. But why should US and other Western businesses have legal immunity from Iraqi law? When a British or American mercenary shoots dead an Iraqi, he cannot be taken to an Iraqi court.

But Mr Allawi relies upon these same mercenaries. Which is why, sadly and inevitably, he and his government will fail. The insurgency now has a life of its own--and a plan. If it can continue to maintain an independence struggle for nationalists within the Sunni Muslim areas north and west of Baghdad, then the Sunnis may also claim that they have the right to form Iraq`s first independent, post-American government.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch`s hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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Published on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 by the Guardian/UK
80% of Iraqis Want US to Stop Patrolling Cities
by Jonathan Steele in Baghdad


Over 80% of Iraqis want US and other foreign forces to stop patrolling their cities and make their presence less visible by withdrawing to bases, according to the latest survey by Iraq`s best-known polling organization.

Forty-one per cent would feel safer if the forces left Iraq altogether, and only 32% would feel less safe.

In interviews in Baghdad and six other cities, which were completed last Tuesday, the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies also found that pressure is likely to mount on the US and Britain to pull out of Iraq as soon as the country has an elected government in January.

This would be almost a year earlier than the end of the mandate which Washington and London got from the United Nations security council recently. That named December 2005 as the mandate`s limit.

The survey looked ahead to the election campaign which will start this autumn and found that parties that promised to demand the immediate departure of foreign forces would have a huge head start.

Forty-three per cent of those polled said they would be most likely to vote for a party which called for foreign forces to leave.

Asked if they would support a party which wanted foreign forces to stay until Iraq`s army and police were adequately trained and equipped to face threats of violence, only 16% said yes.

Although the collapse of security is the population`s top concern, most of those surveyed felt that the problem would be best handled by Iraqi forces and that the presence of foreign armies attracted more violence.

Almost 70% said that if foreign armies remained in Iraq after an elected government took office in January attacks against Iraqi police and government officials would increase.

The Iraq Center for Research conducts monthly polls and is approved by the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority. Its latest results were handed to CPA officials on Sunday, the eve of their departure.

The finding that 41% would feel safer without any foreign forces in Iraq is similar to the results for April, but lower than the 55% who felt that way last month. The change may be due to the shock of recent car bombings and assassinations.

Dr Sadoun al Duleimi, who has a PhD in social psychology from Keele University and directs the polling Center, said yesterday: "It`s probably because of the large number of recent explosions and attacks on the police.

"Another reason may be that at first Iraqis felt the new government was really going to be an Iraqi government of technocrats and experts who would handle the country`s problems with an iron hand.

"When they see it`s an extension of the previous governing council, some people go back to accepting coalition forces on the basis that the devil you know is better than the devil you don`t."

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Escape from Baghdad
The country that U.S. authorities are hastily handing over to the Iraqis is more of a bloody mess than ever.

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By Eric Boehlert

June 29, 2004 | This time there was no "Mission Accomplished" banner flying high.

Forsaking public, self-congratulatory speeches, the much-anticipated transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people did not take place among pomp and circumstance, nor was it captured for history by a throng of journalists. Instead, the transfer occurred nearly in secret inside a well-secured building behind the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, witnessed by a handful of participants in the five-minute service. Coming off a weekend of unending violence, during which more than 100 Iraqis were killed by terrorists protesting the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the pageantry of a ceremony on June 30 suddenly seemed less inviting to both the United States and its Iraqi partners in the interim government, and the transfer of power was quickly moved up to Monday.

It was just the latest U.S. plan for the Iraqi occupation to go awry. That sovereignty is being passed to Iraq against a backdrop of violence so extreme that martial law is being seriously discussed by the new Iraqi government highlights how poor the postwar conditions are and how big of a challenge the new government faces. Indeed, the handover occurs as a wide range of foreign policy experts have concluded that the plan to invade Iraq as well as the postwar-construction phase have failed on nearly every front.
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U.S. ambassador Paul Bremer prepares to leave Baghdad on Monday, after signing the document that gave authority to Iraq`s interim government.
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"The violence is going to be the biggest problem. That, and the country breaking into civil war," says James Bamford, author of the new book "A Pretext to War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America`s Intelligence Agencies."

"The dissolution of the [Coalition Provisional Authority] and the transfer of power to Iraq are long overdue and a good thing," says Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report. "But I`m not sure Iraq is any further along the road toward general recovery."

Symbolically, Monday`s handover clearly had more meaning in Washington, where President Bush, facing reelection, is anxious to distance himself from the woes -- and responsibilities -- of Iraq, than it had in Baghdad, where Iraqis continue to struggle with an ever deteriorating security situation, regardless of which government is deemed to be in charge.

"The Iraqi people have their country back," President Bush declared in Istanbul, Turkey, where he is attending a NATO summit. "We have kept our word." Ordinary Iraqi citizens and others critical of the U.S. occupation, however, suggest that the violence-riddled country Bush has handed back to Iraqis is in far worse condition than it was before the war. As one Baghdad literature student told a reporter over the weekend, "The security situation seems to be getting worse day by day. Our lives are much worse than in the time of Saddam."

"I think many Iraqis, outside those of Kurdistan, would say they`re getting a worse country back than they had before the invasion," adds Toensing. "It`s utter chaos."

"We have heard over and over again that Iraq is turning the corner," Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted Monday during an online discussion hosted by the Washington Post. "First, when the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Firdous Square, we were told that there would be a relatively smooth occupation. After the insurgency began, the administration believed that once Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed, stability would return. When that didn`t happen, Americans were led to believe that once Saddam was apprehended, the situation in Iraq would improve. Now, it is the handover of sovereignty. I certainly hope things will improve, but a variety of factors -- notably, the continued insurgency -- are a great cause for concern."

Here`s a small portion of an AP weekend dispatch that describes the unrestrained, yet commonplace violence that continues to haunt Iraq:

"A taxi apparently filled with weapons and ammunition blew up a street about 250 yards from one of the political party offices that was attacked earlier, witnesses reported. Elsewhere, insurgents killed two Iraqi National Guardsmen in an ambush in Mahmoudiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. A police officer was also killed in a separate attack Saturday, said the director of the Mahmoudiyah general hospital, Dawoud al-Taei. A car bomb exploded Saturday in the Kurdish stronghold of Irbil, injuring the culture minister of the pro-American Kurdistan Democratic Party and killing his bodyguard and injuring 18 people -- four of them children."

The notion that the newborn Iraq government will be able to root out powerful insurgents, even though 138,000 U.S. troops have failed at that task over many months, strikes many observers as fantasy. "I think their chances are 20-to-80 for success," says Toensing.

Administration officials deny that fear about a possible terrorist attack on Wednesday prompted the ceremony to be moved up two days. An anonymous senior State Department official, during a Monday background briefing, said, "All the critics, months ago, were saying, you`re never going to make the June 30th deadline, you`re going to have to push it back, you should push it back, just push it back. And, in fact, what they`re demonstrating to the Iraqi people and to the world is, no, we`re ready, and we`re ready ahead of schedule.`"

Whether or not there was a connection to fears of terrorism, another reason to move up the transfer of power, says Amy Hawthorne, a Middle Eastern expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, may have been so that it would occur while the NATO summit was taking place -- at which Bush pressed allies to play a bigger role in the reconstruction of Iraq, specifically in providing training for Iraqi security forces.

Bush can use all the allies he can get. Monday`s transfer of power comes at a time when a majority of Americans say the war in Iraq was a mistake and that it has made the United States less safe, not more secure. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll released Monday shows that by a margin of 2-to-1, Americans do not think that the turnover of political control to Iraqis is a sign of success for the Bush administration because Iraq`s long-term stability remains in serious question. Sixty percent of those polled doubt that security will be established in Iraq in the next year.

The view from within Iraq is even more pessimistic. While a USA Today-CNN-Gallup poll in April indicated that 71 percent of Iraqis saw the U.S.-led coalition as "occupiers," a poll conducted in May for the CPA shows grimmer numbers: 92 percent of Iraqis consider the U.S.-led forces to be "occupiers." And 55 percent of Iraqis told pollsters they would feel safer if U.S. troops left immediately.

Bamford says that`s exactly what the United States has to do -- pull the troops out -- if the new Iraqi government is going to stand a chance of succeeding. "As long as Americans are there, there will not be a reduction, but an expansion, of the violence. It`s Americans` presence in Iraq that`s causing the violence. The United States needs to define an exit strategy: [Now] that we`ve successfully transferred power, we`re going to pull out 20,000 troops per month while bringing in other allied forces to replace them. What`s the alternative? Stay forever? Right now it`s a quagmire, with no end in sight. Vietnam was the same way."

Charles Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation and former editor of Foreign Policy magazine, pinpoints the dilemma: "The new government depends on the United States for its military power, yet it lacks legitimacy so long as this is true. The longer the U.S. remains in Iraq, the more difficult the position of the new government is likely to be. The reason is that the U.S. military, to defend itself, will have to continue killing Iraqis, a perfectly legitimate act of self-defense for which the local authorities will be blamed."

A sovereign government without complete sovereignty, let alone its own army, battling insurrection and possible civil war. Says Hawthorne at Carnegie, "There are all kinds of land [mines] ... ahead for this government."

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About the writer
Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.

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Doctrines And Visions: Who Is To Run The World, And How?
Jun 26, 2004
By Noam Chomsky

We have just passed the first anniversary of the President`s declaration of victory in Iraq. I won`t speak about what is happening on the ground. There is more than enough information about that, and we can draw our own conclusions. I will just mention one aspect of it: What has happened to Iraqis? About that, we know little, because it is not investigated. Some surprise has recently been voiced in the British press about this gap in our knowledge. That`s a misunderstanding. It is quite general practice. Thus we do not know within millions how many people died in the course of the US wars in Indochina. Information and concern are so slight that in the only careful study I have found, the mean estimate of Vietnamese who died is 100,000, about 5% of the official figure and probably 2-3% of the actual figure. Virtually no one knows that victims of the US chemical warfare that began in 1962 are estimated at about 600,000, still dying, or that it was recently discovered that the use of devastating carcinogens was at twice the announced rate, and at levels incomparably beyond anything tolerated within the industrial societies -- all in South Vietnam; the North was spared this particular atrocity.

As a thought experiment, we might ask how we would react if Germans estimated deaths in the Holocaust at 2-300,000 and had little knowledge or interest about the modalities of the slaughter.

There is one exception to lack of information about casualties in Indochina. There have been very intensive efforts from the start to reveal, or very often simply to invent, atrocities that could be attributed to the Khmer Rouge. Post-KR literature on the topic is substantial, ranging from astonishingly low estimates of KR crimes in the curious 1980 CIA demographic study, when evidence had become available about the peaking of atrocities at the end, to far higher and more credible estimates by serious and extensive scholarship. One can hardly fail to observe that the single exception to the rule involves crimes that are doctrinally useful.

Turning to Iraq, information is as usual slight, but not entirely lacking. A study by the London-based health organization MEDACT last November, scarcely mentioned in the US, gave a rough estimate of between 22,000-55,000 Iraqi dead, and also reported rising maternal mortality rates, near doubling of acute malnutrition, and an increase in water-borne diseases and vaccine-preventable diseases. "The most important thing that comes out of [the study] is that the data are not available," Dr. Victor Sidel commented. He is a noted US health authority, past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and an adviser to the study. Two months ago, a fact-finding mission by the Belgian NGO Medical Aid for the Third World found that even the devastating effects of the US-UK sanctions have not been overcome, including their veto of medicines, and that infant mortality is apparently increasing and general health declining because of deteriorating living conditions: lack of access to food, potable water, or medical aid and hospitals, and a sharp decline in purchasing power - largely the result of the remarkable failures of what should have been one of the easiest military occupations ever. "It has been one of the most extraordinary failures in history," the veteran British correspondent Patrick Cockburn observed, quite plausibly.

The best explanation I have heard was from a high-ranking official of one of the world`s leading humanitarian and relief organizations, who has had extensive experience in some of the most awful places in the world. After several frustrating months in Baghdad, he said he had never seen such a combination of "arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence" -- referring not to the military, but to the civilians who run the Pentagon. In Iraq they have succeeded in achieving pretty much what they did in the international arena: quickly turning the US into the most feared and often hated country in the world. The latest in-depth polls in Iraq - before the recent revelations about torture -- found that among Iraqi Arabs, the US is regarded as an "occupying force" rather than a "liberating force" by 12 to 1, and increasing. If we count also Kurds, who have their own distinct aspirations and hopes, the figures are still overwhelming: 88% of all Iraqis according to one recent poll, also pre-Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and associates have even succeeded in turning the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, previously a marginal figure, into the second most popular leader in Iraq, right below Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, with 1/3 of the population "strongly supporting" him and another third "somewhat supporting" him. Other Western polls find support for the occupying forces in single digits, and the same for the Governing Council they appointed.

But I will put Iraq aside, and turn to the "new imperial grand strategy" that was to be set in motion with the conquest of Iraq, and the doctrines and visions that underlie it.

The phrase "new imperial grand strategy" is not mine. It has a much more interesting source: the leading establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The invasion of Iraq was virtually announced in Sept 2002, along with the Bush Administration`s National Security Strategy, which declared the intention to dominate the world for the indefinite future and to destroy any potential challenge to US domination. The UN was informed that it could be "relevant" if it authorized what Washington would do anyway, or else it could become a debating society, as Administration moderate Colin Powell instructed them. The invasion of Iraq was to be the first test of the new doctrine announced in the NSS, "the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy grew," the New York Times reported as the experiment was declared a grand success a year ago.

The doctrine and its implementation in Iraq elicited unprecedented protest around the world, including the foreign policy elite at home. In Foreign Affairs, the "new imperial grand strategy" was immediately criticized as a threat to the world and to the US. Elite criticism was remarkably broad, but on narrow grounds: the principle is not wrong, but the style and implementation are dangerous, a threat to US interests. The basic thrust of the criticism was captured by Madeleine Albright, also in Foreign Affairs. She pointed out that every President has a similar doctrine, but keeps it in his back pocket, to be used when necessary. It is a serious error to smash people in face with it, and to implement it in brazen defiance even of allies, let alone rest of world. That is simply foolish, another illustration of the dangerous combination of "arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence."

Albright of course knew that Clinton had a similar doctrine. As UN Ambassador, she had reiterated to the Security Council President Clinton`s message to them that the US will act "multilaterally when possible but unilaterally when necessary." And later as Clinton`s Secretary of State, she surely knew that the White House had spelled out the meaning in messages to Congress declaring the right to "unilateral use of military power" to defend vital interests, which include "ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources," without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair devised. Taken literally, the Clinton doctrine is more expansive than Bush`s NSS, but it was issued quietly, not in a manner designed to arouse hostility, and the same was true of its implementation. And as Albright correctly pointed out, the doctrine has a long tradition in the US - elsewhere as well, including precedents that one might prefer not to think about.

Despite the precedents, the new imperial grand strategy was understood to be highly significant. Henry Kissinger described it as a "revolutionary" doctrine, which tears to shreds the international order established in the 17th century Westphalian system, and of course the UN Charter and modern international law, not worth mentioning. The revolutionary new approach is correct, Kissinger felt, but he also cautioned about style and implementation. And he added a crucial qualification: it must not be "universalized." The right of aggression at will (dropping euphemisms) is to be reserved to the US, perhaps delegated to selected clients. We must forcefully reject the most elementary of moral truisms: That we apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others.

Others criticized the doctrine and its first test on sharply different grounds. One was Arthur Schlesinger, perhaps the most respected living American historian. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, he recalled the words of FDR when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on "a date which will live in infamy." Now it is Americans who live in infamy, Schlesinger wrote, as their government follows the course of imperial Japan. He added that Bush and his planners had succeeded in converting a "global wave of sympathy" for the US to "a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism." A year later, it was much worse, international polls revealed. In the region with the longest experience with US policies, opposition to Bush reached 87% among the most pro-US elements, Latin American elites: 98% in Brazil and almost as high in Mexico. Again, an impressive achievement.

As also anticipated, the war increased the threat of terror. Middle East specialists who moniter attitudes in the Muslim world were astonished by the revival of the appeal of "global jihadi Islam," which had been in decline. Recruitment for al-Qaeda networks increased. Iraq, which had no ties to terror before, became a "terrorist haven" (Harvard terrorism specialist Jessica Stern), also suffering its first suicide attacks since the 13th century. Suicide attacks for 2003 reached their highest level in modern times. The year ended with a terror alert in the US of unprecedented severity.

On the first anniversary of the war, New York`s Grand Central Station was patrolled by heavily-armed police, a reaction to the Madrid bombing, the worst terrorist crime in Europe. A few days later, Spain voted out the government that had gone to war against the will of the overwhelming majority, and by so doing, had won great praise for its stellar role in the New Europe was the hope of the future; Western commentators succeeded brilliantly in "not noticing" that the criterion for membership in New Europe was willingness to dismiss the popular will and follow orders from Crawford, Texas. A year later, Spain was bitterly condemned for appeasing terror by calling for withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq unless they were under UN authority. Commentators failed to point out that this is essentially the position of 70% of Americans, who call for the UN to take the lead in security, economic reconstruction, and working with Iraqis to establish a democratic government. But such facts are scarcely known, and the issues are not on the electoral agenda, another illustration of the reality of "democratic credentials."

There is a curious performance underway right now among Western commentators, who are solemnly debating whether the Bush administration downgraded the "war on terror" in favor of its ambitions in Iraq. The only surprising aspect of the revelations of former Bush administration officials that provoked the debate is that anyone finds them surprising - particularly right now, when it is so clear that by invading Iraq the administration did just that: knowingly increased the threat of terror to achieve their goals in Iraq.

But even without this dramatic demonstration of priorities, the conclusions should be obvious. From the point of view of government planners, the ranking of priorities is entirely rational. Terror might kill 1000s of Americans; that much has been clear since the attempt by US-trained jihadis to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. But that is not very important in comparison with establishing the first secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world`s major energy reserves - "a stupendous source of strategic power" and an incomparable "material prize," as high officials recognized in the 1940s, if not before. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that "America`s security role in the region" - in plain English, its military dominance - "gives it indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region." As Brzezinski knows well, concern that Europe and Asia might move on an independent course is the core problem of global dominance today, and has been a prime concern for many years. Fifty years ago, the leading planner George Kennan observed that control of the stupendous source of strategic power gives the US "veto power" over what rivals might do. Thirty years ago, Europe celebrated the Year of Europe, in recognition of its recovery from wartime destruction. Henry Kissinger gave a "Year of Europe" address, in which he reminded his European underlings that their responsibility is to tend to their "regional responsibilities" within the "overall framework of order" managed by the US. The problems are more severe today, extending to the dynamic Northeast Asian region. Control of the Gulf and Central Asia therefore becomes even more significant. The importance is enhanced by the expectation that the Gulf will have an even more prominent role in world energy production in decades to come. US-UK support for vicious dictatorships in Central Asia, and the jockeying over where pipelines will go and under whose supervision, are part of the same renewed "great game."

Why, then, should there be any surprise that terror should be downgraded in favor of the invasion of Iraq? Or that Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney and associates were pressuring the intelligence community to come up with some shreds of evidence to justify invasion, Blair and Straw as well: Iraqi links to terror, WMD, anything would do. It is rather striking that as one after another pretext collapses, and the leadership announces a new one, commentary follows dutifully along, always conspicuously avoiding the obvious reason, which is virtually unmentionable. Among Western intellectuals, that is; not in Iraq. US polls in Baghdad found that a large majority assumed that the motive for the invasion was to take control of Iraq`s resources and reorganize the Middle East in accord with US interests. It is not unusual for those at the wrong end of the club to have a clearer understanding of the world in which they live.

There are plenty of other current illustrations of the fact, obvious enough to Baghdadis, that terror is regarded as a minor issue in comparison with ensuring that the Mideast is properly disciplined. There was a revealing example just last week, when Bush imposed new sanctions on Syria, implementing the Syria Accountability Act passed by Congress in December, virtually a declaration of war unless Syria follows US commands. Syria is on the official list of states sponsoring terrorism, despite acknowledgment by the CIA that Syria has not been involved in sponsoring terror for many years and has been highly cooperative in providing important intelligence to Washington on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups, and in other anti-terrorist actions. The gravity of Washington`s concern over Syria`s links to terror was revealed by Clinton ten years ago, when he offered to remove Syria from the list of states sponsoring terror if it agreed to US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on recovering its conquered territory, it remained on the list. Had it been removed, that would have been the first time a country was dropped from the list since 1982, when the present incumbents in Washington, in their Reaganite phase, removed Saddam from the list so that they could provide him with a flow of badly needed aid while he carried out his worst atrocities, joined by Britain and many others - which again tells us something about the attitude towards terror and state crimes, as does the fact that Iraq was replaced on the list by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US terrorist war against Cuba that has been underway since the Kennedy years had reached a peak of ferocity just then.

None of this, and much more like it, is supposed to tell us anything about the "war on terror" that was declared by the Reagan administration in 1981, quickly becoming a murderous terrorist war, and re-declared with much the same rhetoric 20 years later.

The implementation of the Syria Accountability Act, passed near unanimously, deprives the US of a major source of information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept US-Israeli demands - not an unusual pattern, though commentators continually find it surprising no matter how strong the evidence and regular the pattern, and no matter how rational the choices in terms of clear and understandable planning priorities.

The Syria Accountability Act of last December tells us more about state priorities and prevailing doctrines of the intellectual and moral culture, as international affairs scholar Steven Zunes points out. Its core demand refers to UN Security Council Resolution 520, calling for respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon, violated by Syria because it still retains in Lebanon forces that were welcomed there by the US and Israel in 1976 when their task was to carry out massacres of Palestinians. Overlooked by the congressional legislation, and news reporting and commentary, is the fact that Resolution 520, passed in 1982, was explicitly directed against Israel, not Syria, and also the fact that while Israel violated this and other Security Council resolutions regarding Lebanon for 22 years, there was no call for any sanctions against Israel or for reduction in the huge unconditional military and economic aid to Israel. The silence for 22 years includes those who now signed the Act condemning Syria for its violation of the Security Council resolution ordering Israel to leave Lebanon. The principle is very clear, Zunes writes: "Lebanese sovereignty must be defended only if the occupying army is from a country the United States opposes, but is dispensable if the country is a US ally." The principle applies quite broadly in various manifestations, not only in the US of course.

A side observation: by 2-1, the US population favors an Israel Accountability Act, holding Israel accountable for development of WMD and human rights abuses in the occupied territories. That, however, is not on the agenda, or apparently even reported.

There are many other illustrations of the clear but imperceptible priorities. To mention one, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a crucial component of the "war on terror." OFAC has 120 employees. A few weeks ago, OFAC informed Congress that four are dedicated to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen are dedicated to enforcing the embargo against Cuba - incidentally, declared illegal by every relevant international organization, even the usually compliant Organization of American States. From 1990 to 2003, OFAC informed Congress, there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. No interest was aroused among those now pondering the puzzling question of whether the Bush administration -- and its predecessors -- downgraded the war on terror in favor of other priorities.

Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the war on terror? The US is a uniquely open society; we therefore have quite a lot of information about state planning. The basic reasons were explained in secret documents 40 years ago, when the Kennedy administration sought to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, as Arthur Schlesinger recounted in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who ran the terror operations as his highest priority. State Department planners warned that the "very existence" of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; no Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere. Furthermore, this successful defiance encourages others, who might be infected by the "Castro idea of taking matters into their own hands," Schlesinger had warned incoming President Kennedy, summarizing the report of the President`s Latin American mission. These dangers are particularly grave, Schlesinger elaborated, when "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes … and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." The whole system of domination might unravel if the idea of taking matters into one`s own hands spreads its evil tentacles.

Successful defiance remains intolerable, ranked far higher as a priority than combating terror, just another illustration of principles that are well-established, internally rational, clear enough to the victims, but not perceptible to the agents. The clamor about revelations of Bush administration priorities, and the current 9-11 hearings in Washington, are just further illustrations of this curious inability to perceive the obvious, even to entertain it as a possibility.

Turning to terror, there is a broad consensus among specialists on how to reduce the threat - keeping now to the subcategory that is doctrinally admissible: their terror against us - and also on how to incite further terrorist atrocities, which sooner or later may become truly horrendous. It is just a matter of time before terror and WMD are linked, as has been anticipated in technical literature well before 9/11.

The Iraq invasion is typical: violence quite commonly incites a violent response. Serious investigations of al-Qaeda and bin Laden reveal that they were virtually unknown until Clinton bombed Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998. The bombings led to a sharp increase in support, recruitment, and financing for networks of the al-Qaeda type (al-Qaeda is not really an organization), turned bin Laden into a major figure, and forged closer relations between bin Laden and the Taliban, previously cool or hostile.

We can, if we like, learn something more about Western civilization by the reaction to the bombing in Sudan, which led to tens of thousands of deaths according to the few credible estimates, a humanitarian catastrophe that was predicted at once by the director of Human Rights Watch. As usual, investigation is sparse, and interest non-existent. The reaction might be different if a terrorist attack destroyed the major source of pharmaceutical supplies in the US, England, Israel, or some other place that matters - which would have been far less serious, since supplies could easily be replenished in a rich country. That is not at all unusual. Again, those at wrong end of the clubs tend to see world rather differently, arousing fury among the guardians of civilized values.

After Clinton`s bombings in 1998, the next major contribution to the growth of al-Qaeda and the prominence of bin Laden was the bombing of Afghanistan, with no credible pretext, as later quietly conceded. That led to a sharp increase in recruitment and enthusiasm for "the cosmic struggle between good and evil," the rhetoric shared by bin Laden and President Bush`s speech-writers (I presume bin Laden writes his own orations).

I have been virtually paraphrasing the most careful and detailed study of al-Qaeda, the very important book by British journalist Jason Burke. Reviewing many examples, he concludes that that "Every use of force is another small victory for bin Laden." The general conclusion is widely shared: among others, by former heads of Israeli military intelligence and the General Security Services (Shabak), in their own context.

There are new illustrations almost daily. The raising of Moqtada al-Sadr to prominence is an illustration. A still more instructive one is the recent horrors in Fallujah. The Marine invasion, killing 100s, was a reaction to the murder of four American security contractors. Responsibility for those brutal murders was claimed by a new organization calling itself "Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin." They were avenging the murder of the quadriplegic cleric Sheikh Yassin, along with half a dozen bystanders, as he left a Mosque in Gaza a week earlier. That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but inaccurately. Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by an Israeli pilot. Israel does not produce helicopters. The US sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly. Some of the circumstances, well documented but systematically evaded, are quite remarkable. In the preceding 6 months, "targeted assassinations" had killed about 50 suspects and 80-90 passersby. None of this enter the annals of state terrorism, by virtue of agency: the US is exempt from any such charge, by definition, and its clients inherit the immunity, particularly in joint actions. A crucial condition of the intellectual and moral culture is that the powerful are granted the right to make the rules. These are important principles of world order, rather as in the Mafia, to which the international order has more than a passing resemblance.

Tracing the chain of violence in this case, we find that it leads directly from the US-Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin to the conflagration in Iraq. That was known right away, but was virtually silenced in media; in the US at least, where media coverage is carefully studied.

Apologists for state terror will object that the chain of violence does not begin with the Yassin assassination. True, but irrelevant. And tracing the chain beyond yields even uglier conclusions.

There is also a broad specialist consensus on how to reduce threat of terror. It is two-pronged. Terrorists see themselves as a vanguard, seeking to mobilize others, welcoming a violent reaction that will serve their cause. The proper reaction to criminal acts is police work, which has been quite successful: in Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Much more important is the broad constituency whom the terrorists seek to mobilize, people who may hate and fear them, but nevertheless see them as fighting for cause that is right and just. Here the proper response is to pay attention to their grievances, which are often legitimate and should be addressed irrespective of any connection to terror.

There are many illustrations. England and Northern Ireland, to take a recent case. As long as London`s response to IRA terror was violence, terror and support for it increased. When, finally, some attention began to be paid to legitimate grievances, it declined. Belfast is not utopia, but it is a far better place than it was a decade ago. Incidentally, IRA terror was funded in the US, right where I live in fact. FBI counter terror experts were aware of this, but did not interfere, and believe that it would not have been possible to do so, though now such measures are demanded of Saudi Arabia, and are apparently being carried out with some success. As usual, "possibility" depends on whose ox is being gored.

Violence can succeed. There are many examples of that too. The fate of the indigenous population of the US is a dramatic example - also ignored or denied, often in startling ways, a typical reaction to one`s own crimes.

Violence can succeed, but at tremendous cost. It can also provoke greater violence in response, and often does. Inciting terror is not the most ominous current example.

Two months ago, Russia carried out its largest military exercises in two decades, displaying new and more sophisticated WMD, targeting the US. Russian political and military leaders made it clear that this was a direct response to Bush administration actions and programs, exactly as had been predicted. One prime example that they stressed was US development of low-yield nuclear weapons - "bunker busters," so-called. Russian strategic analysts know as well as their American counterparts that these weapons can target command bunkers hidden in mountains that control Russian nuclear arsenals. Washington`s insistence on using space for offensive military purposes is another major concern.

US analysts suspect that Russia is duplicating US development of a hypersonic Cruise Vehicle, which can orbit the earth and re-enter the atmosphere suddenly, launching devastating attacks anywhere without warning. US analysts also estimate that Russian military expenditures may have tripled in the Bush-Putin years.

Russia has adopted the Bush doctrine of "preemptive attack" - meaning aggression at will - the "revolutionary" new doctrine that impressed Kissinger. They are also relying on automated response systems, which, in the past, have come within minutes of launching a nuclear strike, barely aborted by human intervention. By now the systems have deteriorated, with the collapse of the Russian economy under the market fanaticism of the last years.

US systems allow 3 minutes for human judgment after computers warn of a missile attack - reported to be a daily occurrence. Then comes a 30 second presidential briefing. Pentagon analysts have found serious design flaws in computer security systems, which could allow terrorist hackers to break in and simulate a launch. It is "an accident waiting to happen," one leading US strategic analyst warns - Bruce Blair, head of Center for Defense Information. Russian systems are far less reliable.

The dangers are being consciously escalated by the threat and use of violence - and now we are considering real threats to survival.

The Bush administration announced that it will deploy the first elements of a missile defense system in Alaska in the summer of 2004, in time for the presidential elections. These plans have been criticized because they are obviously timed for partisan political purposes, use untested technology at huge expense, and probably won`t work. All of that may be correct, but there is a more serious criticism: the systems might work, or at least look as though they might work. In the logic of nuclear war, what counts is perception, not reality, and planners have to make worse case analyses. It is understood on all sides that "missile defense" is an offensive weapon, which provides freedom for aggression, including a first nuclear strike. That is pretty much agreed by US analysts and potential targets, who even use the same words: a missile defense system is not just "a shield," but also "a sword."

Recently released documents reveal how the US reacted to a small ABM system deployed around Moscow in 1968. The US at once targeted the system and radar installations with nuclear weapons. Current US plans are expected to provoke a similar Russian response, though now it is all on a much larger scale. China is expected to react the same way, maybe even more so, since a missile defense system would undermine the credibility of its currently very limited deterrent. That may have a ripple effect: India will react to expansion of China`s offensive strategic weapons, Pakistan to India`s expansion, and perhaps on beyond. Those prospects are discussed and are of real concern.

Not discussed, in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel`s nuclear capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as "dangerous in the extreme" by the former head of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat they pose but also because they stimulate proliferation in response. The Bush administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart from the US), not because this small country is powerful in itself, but because it serves virtually as an offshore US military base and high tech center. The US is now sending Israel over 100 of its most advanced jet bombers, F16I`s, advertised very clearly as capable of flying to Iran and back, and as an updated version of the F16s that Israel used to bomb Iraq`s nuclear reactor in 1981. It was known at once that the bombed reactor had no real capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Later evidence from Iraqi scientists who fled to the West revealed that the Israeli bombing had not retarded Saddam`s nuclear weapons program, but had initiated it, in the familiar cycle of violence. The Israeli press now also reports (only in Hebrew) that the US is sending the Israeli air force "`special` weapons." Iranian intelligence, to whose ears these reports are presumably directed, are likely to make a worst case analysis, assuming that these may be nuclear warheads for Israeli bombers. Perhaps these very visible moves are intended to incite some Iranian action that will be pretext for an attack, perhaps just to rattle the leadership, contributing to internal conflict and chaos. Whatever the goal, the likely consequences are not attractive.

The collapse of the pretexts for invading Iraq is familiar. But insufficient attention has been paid to the most important consequence of the collapse of the Bush-Blair pretexts: lowering the bars for aggression. The need to establish ties to terror was quietly dropped. More significantly, the Bush administration - Powell, Rice, and others -- now declare the right to attack a country even if it has no WMD or programs to develop them, but has the "intent and ability" to do so. Just about every country has the "ability" to develop WMD, and intent is in the eye of the beholder. It follows that virtually anyone is declared to be subject to devastating attack without pretext.

There is one particle of (apparent) evidence remaining in support of the invasion: it did depose Saddam Hussein, an outcome that can be welcomed without hypocrisy by those who strenuously opposed US-UK support for him through his worst crimes, including the crushing of the Shi`ite rebellion that might have overthrown him in 1991, for reasons that were frankly explained in the national press at the time, but are now kept from the public eye.

The end of Saddam`s rule was one of two welcome "regime changes." The other was the formal end of the sanctions regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, devastated Iraq`s civilian society, strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely on him for survival. It is for these reasons that the respected international diplomats who administered the UN "oil for food" programs, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest over what Halliday called the "genocidal" sanctions regime. They are the Westerners who knew Iraq best, having had access to regular information from investigators throughout the country. Though sanctions were administered by the UN, their cruel and savage character was dictated by the US and its British subordinate. Ending this regime is a very positive aspect of the invasion. But that could have been done without an invasion.

Halliday and von Sponeck had argued that if sanctions had been re-directed to preventing weapons programs, then the population of Iraq might well have been able to send Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other murderous gangsters supported by the current incumbents in Washington and their British allies: Ceausescu, Suharto, Marcos, Duvalier, Chun, Mobutu.... - an impressive list, some of them comparable to Saddam, to which new names are being added daily by the same Western leaders. If so, both murderous regimes could have been ended without invasion. Postwar inquiries, such as those of Washington`s Iraq Survey Group headed by David Kay, add weight to these beliefs by revealing how shaky Saddam`s control of the country was in the last few years.

We may have our own subjective judgments about the matter, but they are irrelevant. Unless the population is given the opportunity to overthrow a brutal tyrant, as they did in the case of other members of the Rogue`s Gallery supported by the US and UK, there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. These considerations alone suffice to eliminate the particle of truth that might support the new doctrines contrived after the collapse of the official pretexts. There are other reasons as well, some discussed in the introduction to the 2004 annual report of Human Rights Watch by executive-director Kenneth Roth.

Returning to the improved doctrine of invasion without pretext, capabilities to carry out the plans are being enhanced by new military programs. One major program, announced shortly after the release of the NSS, is intended to advance from "control of space" for military purposes - the Clinton program - to "ownership of space," meaning "instant engagement anywhere in world." This implementation of the NSS puts any part of the world at risk of instant destruction, thanks to sophisticated global surveillance and lethal weaponry in space.

The world`s intelligence agencies can read the AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND STRATEGIC MASTER PLAN, from which I`ve been quoting, as easily as I can. And they will draw appropriate conclusions, increasing the risk to all of us. We should recall that history -- including recent history -- offers many examples of leaders consciously enhancing very serious threats in pursuit of narrow power interests. By now, however, the stakes are much higher.

The collapse of the pretexts for invasion led to another new doctrine: the war in Iraq was inspired by the President`s "messianic vision" - as it is called in the elite liberal media -- to bring democracy to Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. The President affirmed the vision in an address last November.

The reaction ranged from reverential awe to criticism, which praised the "nobility" and "generosity" of the messianic vision but warned that it may be beyond our means: too costly, the beneficiaries are too backward, others may not share our nobility and altruism. That this is the motive for the invasion is simply presupposed in news reporting and commentary. The worshipful attitude extends to England, where, for example, the Economist reports that "America`s mission" of turning Iraq into "an inspiring example [of democracy] to its neighbors" is facing problems.

It is a useful exercise to search for evidence that the invasion was inspired by the messianic vision. One will discover that evidence reduces to the fact that our leader proclaimed the doctrine, so there can plainly be no question about veracity - even though we know perfectly well that such professions of noble intent carry no information because they are entirely predictable, including the worst monsters. And in this case, unquestioning acceptance of the "vision" faces an added difficulty: it is necessary to suppress the fact that the visionary is thereby declaring himself to be a most impressive liar, since when mobilizing the country for war the "single question" was whether Iraq would disarm. If there is an exception to this reaction of blind acceptance in mainstream reporting and commentary, I haven`t found it.

To be more accurate, I did find one exception. A few days after the President revealed his messianic vision to much awed acclaim, the Washington Post published the results of a US-run poll in Baghdad, in which people were asked why they thought the US invaded Iraq. Some agreed with near-unanimous articulate opinion among the invaders (including mainstream critics) that the goal was to bring democracy: 1 percent. Five percent felt that the goal was to help Iraqis. The opinions of most of the rest I have already mentioned: the motive dismissed in polite circles as "conspiracy theory" or some other intellectual equivalent of the four-letter words used by the less elevated classes.

The results of the Baghdad poll were in fact more nuanced. About half felt that the US wanted democracy, but only if it could maintain its influence over the outcome. In brief, democracy is just fine, in fact preferable if only to make us feel and look good, but only if you do what we say. Iraqis, again, know us better than we choose to know ourselves: choose, because evidence is ample, indeed overwhelming. Just in the past few months there has been ample evidence on the front pages, concerning noble "democracy enhancement" efforts in Haiti and El Salvador. Once again, it takes consider discipline "not to see" that the judgment of Baghdadis is very accurate in these cases, once again, but there is no time to run through the details here.

Iraqis, however, do not have to know American history to draw conclusions about the "messianic vision" that is driving US-UK policies, so we are instructed. Their own history suffices. They are well aware that Iraq was created by Britain with boundaries established to ensure that Britain, not Turkey, would gain control of the oil of northern Iraq, and that Iraq would be effectively blocked from the sea by the British-run principality of Kuwait, hence would be dependent. Iraq was granted "independence," a "constitution," etc., but Iraqis did not have to await the release of secret records to learn that the British intended to impose in Iraq and elsewhere an "Arab facade" that would allow Britain effectively to rule behind various "constitutional fictions." Nor did they have to wait for the declassification of the US-UK records of 1958 to learn that after Iraq broke out of the Anglo-American condominium, in high-level joint discussions Britain agreed to give nominal independence to Kuwait to stem the tide of independent nationalism while reserving the right "ruthlessly to intervene" if anything went wrong in this pillar of Britain`s economy, while the US reserved the same right for the really big prizes elsewhere in the Gulf - all publicly available well before the first Gulf war, and clearly quite relevant to the unfolding events, but systematically avoided, apart from the margins.

Furthermore, Iraqis can see what is happening before their eyes.

On the diplomatic front, the US is constructing the biggest embassy in the world. To underscore its goals, it appointed as Ambassador John Negroponte, an interesting choice. The Wall Street Journal described him (accurately) as a "Modern Proconsul," who learned his craft in Honduras in the 1980s, during the Reaganite phase of the current incumbents. There he was known as "the proconsul" as he presided over the second largest embassy in Latin America and the largest CIA station in the world - doubtless because Honduras was such a center piece of world power. As proconsul, Negroponte`s task was to lie to Congress about state terror in Honduras so that the flow of military aid would continue in violation of law, but more importantly, to supervise the bases for the US mercenary army that was attacking Nicaragua, devastating it, and leading to the US becoming the only country in the world to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (technically, "unlawful use of force"), backed by two Security Council resolutions, which the US vetoed with Britain politely abstaining, then escalating the international terrorist attack. So Negroponte is well-qualified to run the world`s largest embassy, and probably, again, its largest CIA station - all to transfer full sovereignty to Iraqis. Proconsul Negroponte is replacing the Pentagon`s Paul Bremer, whom UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi refers to affectionately as "the dictator" of Iraq.

Iraqis do not have to read the Wall St. Journal to discover that "Behind the Scenes, U.S. Tightens Grip on Iraq`s Future," staffing Iraqi ministries with US "advisers" and "hand-picked proxies" while proconsul Bremer is "quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make," along with edicts "that effectively take away virtually all the powers once held by several ministries." Hence after Bush-Blair`s "full sovereignty" is turned over, "the new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval"; and crucially, will cede "operational control" of all Iraqi military forces to US commanders. Just to be on the safe side, for the largely US-appointed interim administration that replaces the US-appointed Governing Council, Washington made sure that top military posts are in the hands of Kurdish commanders, who have good reasons to support the US military presence. To make doubly sure that Iraqis don`t miss the point and get funny ideas about "taking matters into their own hands," Negroponte`s embassy will remain in a Saddam palace that is "seen by many Iraqis as a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty." Investors can feel confident that everything is on track.

To be fair, we should recognize that the interim government that presents "the opinions of Iraqis" to the world is not devoid of domestic support. Recent polls reveal that the prime minister Ayad Allawi has almost 5 percent support, just below the president, with a 7 percent approval rating.

A current article by the Diplomatic Editor of the Daily Telegraph has the headline "Handover still on course." Its last paragraph reports that "A senior British official put it delicately: `the Iraqi government will be fully sovereign, but in practice it will not exercise all its sovereign functions`." Lord Curzon would nod sagely.

Speaking for the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz announced that there would be a prolonged US troop presence and weak Iraqi army -- in order to "nurture democracy." Wolfowitz is greatly admired by the national liberal press as the visionary leading the messianic mission to bring democracy. He is the "idealist in chief" of the administration, according to senior commentator David Ignatius, former editor of the International Herald Tribune. He also happens to have a unusually shocking record of visceral hatred of democracy, which there is no time to review here; easy to discover, but concealed. Since the idealist in chief declares that the Pentagon must remain in control to "nurture democracy," it doesn`t matter that according to Western-run polls, Iraqis overwhelmingly want Iraqis to be in charge of security, as the US command was forced to accept in Fallujah. Not all, it is true: 7 percent want US forces to be in control, and 5 percent the US-appointed Governing Council, since disbanded; not, however, Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, who had no detectable support.

None of this is relevant to the messianic vision.

While watching US efforts to maintain control through diplomatic and military measures, Iraqis can also see the modalities imposed by dictator Bremer, in particular, his decrees opening up industry and banking to effective US takeover (with Britain presumably thrown a few crumbs), along with a 15% flat tax that will leave Iraq among the least taxed countries in the world, eliminating hope for desperately needed social benefits and reconstruction of infrastructure. The plans were immediately denounced by Iraqi business representatives, who charged that they would be destroyed, apart from those who choose to be the local agents of the foreigners who run the economy. It is a well-established conclusion of economic history that without economic sovereignty, development is likely to be limited, and political independence can hardly be more than a shadow.

There may be fewer problems with Iraqi workers, despite their long tradition of labor militancy. The occupying army immediately took action to destroy unions, breaking into offices and arresting leaders, blocking strikes, enforcing Saddam`s brutal anti-labor laws, and handing over concessions to bitterly anti-union US businesses. Sooner or later the US union bureaucracy and the National Endowment for Democracy will probably move in to "build democratic unions," replaying a dismal record that is all too familiar elsewhere.

The economic measures being imposed are also familiar. They played a large part in creating today`s "Third World" by imperial force, while England and its offshoots, and the rest of Western Europe, followed a radically different course, relying on a powerful state and crucial state intervention in the economy, as they still do - most dramatically the US. The same is true of Japan, the one part of the South that resisted colonization, and developed.

It is an open question whether Iraqis can be coerced into submitting to the "messianic vision," with nominal sovereignty offered under various "constitutional fictions." For privileged Europeans and Americans, there is, however, a much more pertinent question: Will they permit their governments to "nurture democracy" in the style of "idealist in chief" Wolfowitz, as throughout the traditional domains of their power and influence? In part they have given an answer. The steadfast refusal of Iraqis to accept the traditional "constitutional fictions" has compelled Washington to yield step by step, with some assistance from "the second superpower," as the New York Times described world public opinion after the huge demonstrations of mid-February 2003, the first time in the history of Europe and its offshoots that mass protests against a war took place before it had even been officially launched. That makes a difference. Had the problems of Fallujah, for example, arisen in the 1960s, they would have been resolved by B-52s and mass murder operations on the ground. Today, a more civilized society will not tolerate such measures, providing at least some space for the traditional victims to act to gain authentic independence. It is even possible that the Bush administration may have to abandon its original war plans, well understood by Iraqis, though kept in the shadows in the societies of the occupiers.

Right at this point crucial questions arise about the nature of industrial democracy and its future - extremely important questions. The survival of the species is at stake, literally. But that is for another time.
http://www.jihadunspun.net/home.php

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June 29, 2004
Iraq to Take Legal Custody of Hussein on Wednesday
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Iraq`s new prime minister said today that the new Iraqi government would take over legal custody of Saddam Hussein on Wednesday to start proceedings leading to an open trial in the next few months.

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi spoke at a news conference in Baghdad that was broadcast live on television a day after the United States handed over formal sovereignty to Iraqis two days earlier than expected, to foil any possible disruptions by insurgents.

"We would like to show the world that the new Iraq government means business and wants to do business and wants to stabilize Iraq and put it on the road toward democracy and peace," Dr. Allawi said. "We want to put this bad history behind us and move toward a spirit of national unity and reconciliation in the future."

The Americans will retain physical custody of Mr. Hussein, but Dr. Allawi said that Mr. Hussein and 11 top Baathist officials would be transferred to Iraqi legal control and be charged by an Iraqi judge the next day.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal later announced it had issued arrest and detention warrants for Mr. Hussein and the 11 others. They include Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds; Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former Iraqi vice president, and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister and former foreign minister.

Others on the list — which was not read out at the news conference but released later and carried by news agencies — include Aziz Saleh al-Numan, Baath Party Baghdad regional command chairman; and Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, a presidential adviser and Saddam`s half brother.

Dan Senor, a former adviser to the occupation authorities, said the request to keep Mr. Hussein under American guard had come from Dr. Allawi.

"I think he just made a very realistic assessment of the state of the Iraqi security services, that they are not in a position right now to handle all of these responsibilities themselves," Mr. Senor said in an interview on the NBC "Today" program. "Compromise in the security around Saddam Hussein would be an enormous setback for the Iraqis."

"We want to make sure that Saddam Hussein is alive for his trial," Mr. Senor added "We want to make sure he is actually there for his trial."

Mr. Hussein and the others would have the right to legal counsel, and the state would pay for it if the accused could not; Mr. Hussein would also have the right to represent himself, if he chose. The trial will not begin for several months, Dr. Allawi said.

"They will be afforded rights that were denied by the former regime," Dr. Allawi said."I urge the Iraqi people to be patient."

The trial "will show that justice will prevail ultimately," he added.

In the first attack since the handover of formal sovereignty, three American soldiers were killed in a bomb attack today, the American military, quoted by news agencies, said.

Iraqi militants released three Turkish hostages today, shortly after another group of kidnappers claimed to have executed an American soldier captured nearly three months ago, according to The A.P.

There was no new word from the American military about a report by an Arab television network Monday that Spec. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, had been killed by a militant group. The network, Al Jazeera, broadcast a videotape showing a blindfolded man identified by his captors as Maupin sitting on the ground, The A.P. said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Heute mal wieder die Presseschau der `Post`. Hauptthema unter anderem das Urteil zu Guantanamo und das `Handover` im Irak. Viele Links.

washingtonpost.com

A Blow to the Executive Branch

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; 12:22 PM

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, it`s been the George W. Bush show in Washington.

The power has flowed almost exclusively from the executive branch. The legislative and judicial branches have stayed largely on the sidelines -- and out of the headlines. Seriously: Can you think of any big stories out of Congress or the courts over the past three years? It`s hard.

Whether it`s been war, the budget, or civil liberties, pretty much the only thing that has seemed to matter when it came to governance was the White House position. Bush and his aides have led the country with bravado -- and not much resistance.

Yesterday`s Supreme Court rulings come as the controversy over the treatment of prisoners held by the U.S. military also has emboldened Congress. Taken together, some analysts are seeing a return to power of the other branches of government.

"A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation`s citizens," wrote Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O`Connor. "Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake."

In a Washington Post analysis, David Von Drehle writes that the court`s opinions yesterday "represent a nearly unanimous repudiation of the Bush administration`s sweeping claims to power over those captives."

Von Drehle writes that "In this way, the court`s rejection of the executive-power arguments in the cases might be seen as part of a reemergence of the other branches of government from the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As the justices suggested several times in their opinions, emergency measures that might have been within the president`s power in the days and weeks just after 9/11 now must be reconciled with American norms of due process. In that sense, the cases struck a chord with congressional hearings into the rules for prisoner interrogations at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .

"(I]f, in the end, the justices could not agree on exactly how far the president can go, they were clear that he had already gone too far."

In a Los Angeles Times analysis, Doyle McManus writes: "Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists seized four jetliners and caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, President Bush has declared that the United States is at war -- and in wartime, presidents assume emergency powers they would not claim in times of peace. . . .

"But in an unusual series of reversals in recent weeks, the Supreme Court, Congress and public opinion all have intervened to draw new limits on the president`s wartime authority."

In a Newsday analysis, Tom Brune writes: "After more than two years of deferring to the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, the Supreme Court yesterday finally set limits on a president who since Sept. 11, 2001, has rapidly assumed unprecedented and unchecked new powers.

"That those limits appear to be flexible, vague and even confusing does not diminish the message a majority of the Supreme Court sent yesterday: The president must submit decisions on detention to the checks and balances of Congress and the courts."

Todd S. Purdum writes in the New York Times that the Supreme Court "offered a powerful reminder that in the United States, even in wartime, no prisoner is ever beneath the law`s regard, and no president above its limits. . . .

"While Mr. Bush will now have to seek explicit Congressional authorization in dealing with these terrorist suspects, that should not be an insurmountable task for this president. But it falls to him at a time when he is already facing challenges on many fronts, including the handover of sovereignty in a still-dangerous Iraq, questions about his administration`s policies on interrogation of prisoners of war and polls that show slipping public support for his handling the war on terrorism and uncertain prospects for his re-election."

Purdum writes that, asked for comment, the White House chose to emphasize the parts of the opinions that supported the president`s ability to detain "enemy combatants" without trial.

"`The president`s most solemn obligation is to defend the American people, and we`re pleased that the Supreme Court has upheld the president`s authority to detain enemy combatants, including citizens, for the duration of the conflict,` said a White House spokeswoman, Claire Buchan. `The administration is committed to fashioning a process that addresses the court`s concerns and permits the president to continue to exercise his constitutional responsibility as commander in chief to protect this nation during times of war.`"
A Low-Key Celebration of the Handover

Mike Allen writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush celebrated the transfer of political authority in Iraq on Monday as the fulfillment of his promises to a broken country, but warned that violence and the U.S. military presence in the country are unlikely to end soon. "

Bush said the transfer "marks a proud moral achievement for members of our coalition. . . . We pledged to end a dangerous regime, to free the oppressed and to restore sovereignty. . . . We have kept our word."

At a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Allen writes, "Bush was in a jovial mood, winking at a few reporters when the cameras were on Blair, but used somber tones when it was his turn to speak. An aide explained: `He knows that 10 hours after he walks off the stage, something terrible could happen in Baghdad.`"

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times: "The transfer represents yet another new start for Mr. Bush in Iraq. It is the president`s last, best hope of turning the page, of refocusing America and the world on the possibilities of remaking a broken nation, and of moving beyond the gruesome images of a star-crossed occupation. Several of his own advisers, in their more candid moments, admit they do not know whether that is still possible. . . .

"Iraq`s fortunes and Mr. Bush`s own are inextricably linked, the polls strongly suggest. And so Iraq strategy and campaign strategy have become linked as well."

Bush, who had earlier approved the early handover, was notified in a handwritten note from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, passed to him during a NATO summit meeting, while he was sitting next to Blair. He whispered the news to Blair, and the two shook hands.

"It was the diplomatic equivalent of a high-five," Bill Plante said on the CBS Evening News.

Here`s a photo of the note, a photo of the whisper, and a photo of the handshake.

"The NATO allies didn`t give the president what he had hoped for -- more peacekeepers on the ground in Iraq -- but they did agree to train Iraq`s security forces," Plante reported. "That, coupled with the early successful transfer of power, had Mr. Bush in high spirits, as he jokingly posed with photographers."

Here`s a photo of Bush horsing around with Reuters photographer Larry Downing.

"President Bush acted today like a man with a burden lifted from him," Plante concluded. "But the battle isn`t over. The success -- or failure -- of the new Iraqi government, and the number of U.S. casualties, could well be the decisive issue when voters go to the polls in November."

Here`s the transcript of the Bush-Blair press conference.

And here`s my protest against anonymous background briefings by senior administration officials who aren`t saying a darned thing that in any way legitimates their hiding behind a cloak of secrecy (see the Okrent Challenge in yesterday`s column). If you want to read the transcript of yesterday`s anonymous briefing about the handover, you`re going to have to cut and paste this URL -- http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040628.htm… -- into your browser. I`m not linking to it.
Let Freedom What?

It was the scribble read `round the world. At the bottom of that note from Rice, Bush wrote with his big fat black Sharpie pen: "Let Freedom Reign."

Did he mean "Let Freedom Ring?"
Irish Interview Update

As promised in yesterday`s column, I called the White House yesterday to find out why Carole Coleman, the Irish television correspondent who had a tense 10-minute interview with the president last week, said she had to submit her questions in advance. In a debrief on Friday, Coleman told a colleague it was White House policy.

But White House spokesman Jimmy Orr told me yesterday that Coleman, like others who request interviews with the White House, was simply asked for a heads-up.

"When somebody calls and wants to book somebody on a show, we`ll ask, what do you want to talk about? . . . She was asked to let us know what she was interested in speaking to the president about," Orr said. "She was told that she could certainly deviate from those topics. She was not bound by any means."

Orr said that is standard operating procedure for reporters, both print and broadcast, both foreign and domestic. (He said that is not the case, however, with press conferences. And it isn`t.)

I couldn`t reach Coleman for comment. But Carolyn Fisher, a spokesman for RTE news in Dublin, told me that Coleman "did indicate that it wasn`t an a-to-z`ed list. . . . There was no suggestion that only those words could be said. It was more, this is what it`s going to be about in general. These are the questions, in general."

Fisher added that in spite of a White House complaint that Coleman`s tone was disrespectful, RTE stands behind their correspondent unreservedly. "RTE has consistently said about the interview that we were very happy with it, about the way it was conducted, and with Carole`s professionalism and journalism."
Poll Watch

Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder write in the New York Times: "President Bush`s job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Here are the full results.

CBS.com leads its reports with these findings from that very same poll: "Despite concerns about his handling of Iraq, and an overall approval rating of 42%, George W. Bush is still running neck and neck with Democrat John Kerry as the choice of registered voters. Growing public optimism about the nation`s economy has helped lift support for the President."
Cheney Watch

Peter S. Canellos writes in the Boston Globe that "there has never been anyone other than a president as powerful" as Vice President Cheney.

"Cheney hides his influence behind a low public profile. . . . In recent weeks, however, the astonishing range of Cheney`s influence has been on display in virtually every controversy involving the administration. The chain of events drew Cheney out of the shadows even before he created a ruckus by lobbing an obscenity at his slightly thinner twin, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. . . .

"Cheney looms larger than Hillary Rodham Clinton in the `90s, with about a tenth as much scrutiny, even during a campaign."
Walk Away Point

Dana Milbank writes in his White House Notebook column in The Washington Post: "Every administration does its best to spin its way out of trouble caused by a leaked memo, an impolitic remark or an unfavorable conclusion in an agency`s policy analysis. Clinton, knowing a damaging report was being prepared, would preempt it by announcing new policies. In the latest version, Bush officials have been walking away from several conclusions produced by their colleagues."
Fictional Death Threat

Linton Weeks writes in The Washington Post: "In Nicholson Baker`s new novella, `Checkpoint,` a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.

"It`s a work of the imagination and no attempts on the president`s life are actually made, but the novel is likely to be incendiary, as with Michael Moore`s documentary, `Fahrenheit 9/11.`"
Michael Moore Watch

Will Lester writes for the Associated Press: "Michael Moore`s record-breaking documentary `Fahrenheit 9/11` is a pop culture phenomenon that is raising public interest in the Iraq war just as the United States is attempting a crucial handoff of power to Iraqis."
From the Pool Reports

Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder reports to his colleagues about the trip back from the NATO dinner last night in Istanbul:

"Motorcade uneventful, but while we were waiting to leave, Turkish police escorting another motorcade ran over a stray puppy outside the palace. White House advanceman Chris Edwards tried to grab the dog, but it ran into the oncoming car. The dog ran off yelping and did not seem likely to survive."
Wrapping Up Turkey

Deb Reichmann reports for the Associated Press: "A day after Iraq`s new interim government claimed power, President Bush said Tuesday that `freedom is the future of the Middle East` and that Islamic countries need not fear the spread of democracy."

The BBC reports: "US President George W Bush has repeated his call for Turkey to be admitted to the EU, despite being rebuked by France for interfering in Europe`s affairs. . . .

"On Monday, French President Jacques Chirac denounced Mr Bush`s call for Turkey to get a date for EU acceptance.

"Mr Chirac said the US president had gone too far, adding that his remarks were like Mr Chirac telling the US how to manage relations with Mexico."

Bush is expected back at the White House tonight.
Fox Matters

An excerpt from the Bush-Blair press conference yesterday. The question, I believe, was from Jim Angle of Fox News.

"Q We were reminded by the anniversary of D-Day that 60 years ago it took an active invasion to end the occupation of France and other European nations. Now, in Iraq, the coalition has gladly and willingly returned sovereignty to the Iraqis. And I wonder, is there any sign that this has changed the views of your more skeptical NATO brethren? Any evidence that the critics are now persuaded to the view that you both argued, that it was, in fact, a liberation, or, at this point, does it matter to each of you what the critics say?

"PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, it matters to me what you say. I mean, it matters to me what -- (laughter) -- sorry. (Laughter.) Just a little humor. (Laughter.) Yes, it matters. It matters because it is important for nations that are blessed by freedom to come together to help nations that are struggling to be free. And that`s why it matters."

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In the meantime, three actors - Iran, Turkey and Israel - are already involved in a dangerous game of promoting their clashing strategic presence and agendas, thereby making Iraq a highly unstable place.
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Sovereignty: Now the games really begin
By Ehsan Ahrari

The overt United States occupation phase of Iraq came to a close on June 28, but its stealthy phase is still continuing. The holding of the transfer of sovereignty ceremony two days earlier than its original deadline of June 30, and the decision to keep it short and simple, were in recognition of the extremely precarious security situation that prevails in Iraq. If it was the beginning of a momentous chapter in Iraq, the secretive, quiet and an uneventful departure of the former Iraqi administrator, L Paul Bremer, did not show it. In the present phase, the activities of the five actors - the US, Iran, Turkey, Israel and the Iraqi insurgents - will not only play a major role in determining the stability of Iraq, but also in formulating the prospects for the legitimacy of the interim government. At least for now, that government is seen as a puppet and a supplicant of the US, at a time when anti-Americanism is on the rise, not just in Iraq, but also across the Middle East.

The Bush administration changed its strategy in Iraq from a largely unilateral occupation - even though a number of nations have their forces present - to a presumed strategy of multilateralism before handing over the authority to an interim government. In that strategy the United Nations and the new Iraqi interim government were given a visible role. However, the very modality of the participation of the former representative of the world body, Lakhdar Brahimi, in the selection of the personnel of that government demonstrated that the UN remained indubitably squeamish about challenging the-behind-the-scenes scheming of Washington in that process.

The lingering question was how independent the interim government was going to be of US pressure and manipulation after it takes charge. Then, some representatives of that body had to go to the UN Security Council and personally assure the doubting permanent members - China, France and Russia - that they will indeed exercise autonomy, and thereby establish legitimacy. For a majority of Iraqis, the ball is now very much in the court of the new government. It must establish that it is not merely a willing supplicant in carrying out the wishes of its Western master. The continued escalation or de-escalation of violence in Iraq in the coming months will prove whether the interim government will fail or succeed in that test. The interim government will be in charge until Iraqis vote in a general election, which must take place by January 31 next year, according to a UN Security Council resolution.

In the meantime, three actors - Iran, Turkey and Israel - are already involved in a dangerous game of promoting their clashing strategic presence and agendas, thereby making Iraq a highly unstable place. Of the three, Iran`s presence or maneuverings are the most ancient ones because of Iraq`s historical role as the theological center of Shi`ite Islam. As such, Iran regards its role in the future political dynamics of its neighbor as genuine, and highly warranted. What is not clear, however, is what role Iran should play in influencing the nature of the future government in Iraq: whether it should push for a theocracy a la the Islamic Republic, or a moderate Islamic government? From the vantage point of the Iraqi Shi`ites, there is no overriding evidence that they want the creation of an Iran-style democratic theocracy, which is more theocratic than democratic, given the heavy-handed performance of the hardliners regarding political reforms. Even if the notion of separation of religion and politics were to prevail in Iraq, Iran would still play a crucial role in the power play inside Iraq, a reality that is deeply resented by the US and Israel. As a tactical move, Washington must now connive in the Israeli maneuvers to frustrate and undermine the Iranian schemes to enhance its own influence in Iraq, since the success of Israel will be complementary to the American clout and presence in Iraq, or at least so hope Bush officials.

Israel was playing a behind-the-scenes role in helping the Kurds undermine the Saddam Hussein regime for many decades. Since the Kurds hated Saddam as much as did the Israelis and the Americans, there was a powerful basis for that nexus among the three. But another major regional player, Turkey, watched that nexus with considerable consternation.

For Israel and the US, the prospects of the creation of an independent Kurdish state, while Saddam was in power, was a source of enormous comfort, and a driving force for destabilizing and eventually bringing an end of that dictator`s rule. However, from the Turkish vantage point, the end of Saddam`s regime did not have to result in the creation of an independent Kurdistan, which neither Turkey nor Iran wished to see materialize.

As the Turks envisage it, the creation of an independent Kurdistan means a resurgence of the Kurdish aspirations within their borders for increased autonomy, or even a potential seceding of the Kurdish populated areas of Turkey with Kurdistan. Besides, Turkey has always envisioned a small and independent Kurdistan as a pawn that would be exploited at will by all regional powers, especially Israel. If Israel were to play a crucial role in creating an independent Kurdistan, it would become a willing participant in the regional balance of power-related activities of the Jewish state. Such a potential was not going to be tolerated by Turkey, which aspires of becoming a regional hegemon, the current Kemalist tradition of isolationism notwithstanding.

For Iran, the creation of an independent Kurdistan means another independent Sunni state, and an entity that has the historical basis to be anti-Iranian, given the long-standing hostility of and antipathy to Iran against Kurdish autonomy and independence. Thus, it is easy for Iran and Turkey to cooperate in nipping in the bud all potential for the emergence of an independent Kurdish state. Even Iraqi Shi`ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani opposed the interim Iraqi constitution, which gave the Kurds veto power. It can be argued, however, that al-Sistani`s opposition was focused on safeguarding the Shi`ite power and dominance in the future government of Iraq, and was not necessarily based on theological differences between Shi`ites and Sunnis of that country. As long as the emergence of an independent Kurdistan remains a tenable option, Turkey and Iran are likely to set aside their competitive agendas of regional dominance and focus on eliminating all prospects of the Israeli presence and influence in northern Iraq.

From the preceding emerges a delineation of an intrinsically intricate and clashing strategic perspectives of the US, Iran, Turkey and Israel. The latter two countries have hitherto found many reasons to cooperate in the past. On the Kurdish issue, however, the government of Turkey is as unequivocal about foreclosing all prospects for the creation of an independent Kurdish state, as the government of Israel is about upholding them. Consequently, the Turks have made a decision to minimize the presence of Israeli operatives of Mossad as a condition for cooperating with the beleaguered Bush administration in Iraq. However, Ankara will hold its diplomatic fire for now to see whether Washington will bring pressure on the Israelis to deescalate their activities in Iraq. Besides, Turkey needs all the American support in persuading the Europeans to expedite its membership in the European Union. The US-Turkish strategic agenda has to be pursued with utmost care, but Ankara is in no mood to allow Israel any upper hand in Iraq.

But the Americans view the Israeli presence, not as much aimed at facilitating the emergence of an independent Kurdistan as applying pressure on Iran to minimize its influence in Iraq. More important, the US government could as a last resort hope that Mossad could blow up Iran`s nuclear plant at Natanz, a facility that is generally regarded as aimed at manufacturing weapons-grade uranium. The Bush doctrine has fallen on hard times, given the current deteriorating situation in Iraq and in the wake of the continuing intransigence of North Korea to agree to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. Washington could be hoping for an Israeli "miracle" in putting an end to Iran`s nuclear aspirations, much in the same way an Israeli air raid destroyed the Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq in early 1981.

The Iraqi insurgents may or may not have a comprehensive comprehension of the interplay among these countries inside Iraq, or their clashing and competitive agendas. All they want to do for now is to kill as many Iraqis and Muslim "collaborators" and Western occupiers as possible. They have recently added a new wrinkle to their long-standing strategy of making Iraq a living hell for the outside forces and "collaborators" by taking hostages and beheading them. That objective is clearly aimed at creating a stampede of foreign forces and international entrepreneurs
from Iraq.

If the end of occupation on June 28 meant the emergence of a sovereign interim Iraqi government, that reality has not yet materialized, at least not in the eyes of a majority of Iraqis. The most complicating factor for the interim government is not to appear as a pawn in the hands of the Americans, Turks, Iranians, but especially the Israelis. However, with everything else that it must accomplish in the meantime - the most important of which is the ability to reestablish or sustain basic services and oil distribution facilities and reduce the unemployment rate, which is reported to be between 30-60% - the interim government is indeed faced with an awesome, and potentially insurmountable, task.

The interim government in Iraq must do all it can to persuade the Iraqis that the current phase is not the extension of American occupation under another name. At the same time, the continued presence of foreign forces will constantly serve as a reminder that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and President Ghazi al-Yawar are wrong in their claims of being either sovereign or independent of the Americans. In the meantime, the insurgents will also do all they can to prove the new Iraqi rulers wrong.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.

(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 30, 2004
Reality Intrudes on Promises in Rebuilding of Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ and ERIK ECKHOLM

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 29 — The four big smokestacks at the Doura power plant in Baghdad have always served as subversive truth-tellers. No matter what Saddam Hussein`s propagandists said about electricity supplies, people knew they could get a better idea of the coming day`s power by counting how many stacks at Doura were spewing smoke.

Mr. Hussein is vanquished and a new Iraqi government has just gained formal sovereignty, but those smokestacks remain potent markers — not only of sporadic electricity service but of the agonizingly slow pace of Iraq`s promised economic renewal.

More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.

Inside the high-profile Doura plant, American-financed repairs, originally scheduled to be completed by June 1, have dragged into the summer even as the demand for electricity soars and residents suffer through nightly power failures.
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At the same time, an economy that is supposed to become a beacon of free enterprise remains warped by central controls and huge subsidies for energy and food, leaving politically explosive policy choices for the fledgling Iraqi government.

While the interim government has formally taken office, the reconstruction effort — involving everything from building electric and sewage plants to training police officers and judges — is only beginning.

Scrambling to speed up the process, the Pentagon has recently begun pumping out long-awaited money and work orders, committing $1.4 billion in just the last week even as a spreading insurgency cripples the ability of Western contractors to oversee their projects and has made targets of Iraqi workers.

American authorities, while admitting to a slow start and more aware than anyone of the security threat, insist that the rebuilding will proceed. "Some of the power plants may get blown up," David J. Nash, the retired rear admiral who directs the American building program, said in an interview last week. "But we`re not going to stop."

Of the $9 billion in contracts the Pentagon has issued so far, only $5.2 billion has actually been nailed down for defined tasks. Most of those projects are still in planning stages, though officials insist that the rebuilding effort will soon flower.

From the outset the designing of projects and awarding of billions of dollars in contracts proved slower than some officials had imagined.

Among other things, planning, oversight and competitive procedures were tightened after some of the earliest postwar contracts, awarded without competition to companies including Halliburton, were tainted by evidence of waste and overcharging.

But even more, the glowing economic promises met the realities of Iraq. Decades of neglect, sanctions and war left the country`s physical infrastructure in far worse condition than many expected. And as an anti-American uprising gained force, the reconstruction effort became a prime target, with oil pipes and power lines blown up as soon as they were repaired and Iraqi workers put in fear of retribution.

From the start, refurbishing Iraq`s dismal infrastructure and creating a thriving market economy were promoted by Bush administration officials as pillars of the American-led invasion — "the perfect complement to Iraq`s political transformation," in the words of Mr. Bremer.

But more than a year later, supplies of electricity and water are no better for most Iraqis, and in some cases are worse, than they were before the invasion in the spring of 2003.

Repairs of three giant wastewater treatment plants in Baghdad, for example, are weeks or months behind, while water supply systems in the south of the country are months or even years away from functioning properly. Unrepaired bridges continue to create monstrous bottlenecks in many parts of the country.

For Iraqis, the delays have bred frustration and anger. Recent interviews in the upscale Baghdad neighborhood of Harethiya suggest that the electricity woes have, among other things, created a nation of insomniacs, sweltering in their apartments through oppressive nights.

"We are so tired because of the electricity," said Abdul Razzaq, owner of a sundries shop, who said that to top it off, business was down so much that it was hard to pay for private generators.

Just down the street, Samir Ibraheem said security problems forced him to close his shop, which has good air-conditioning, early each night. "The problem is at my house, when I sleep at night," he said.

In less prosperous areas, sorry infrastructure is even more dispiriting. On Sunday a local paper reported that new sewage flooding in five poorer neighborhoods of eastern and western Baghdad was raising serious fears of disease.

Mais Khalid, 20, a student at Baghdad University who lives with her family in Al Elfain, a neighborhood in the southwestern part of the city, said a river of sewage entered her home whenever the door was opened. She traces the problem to a lack of electricity to run the pumps that keep sewer lines clear.

In perhaps the greatest technical success, oil exports have been restored to their prewar levels, bringing in money that will pay the national budget. But attacks shut down pipelines in the last two weeks, and exports are only partly restored.

One clear improvement is in telephone service, but an annoying patchwork system does not allow mobile phones from one part of the country to communicate easily with those in other parts.

The rebuilding effort is supposed to receive a total of some $24 billion in American grants and eventually some $13 billion in international loans. The United States military has already dispensed several additional billions, from oil revenue and seized Iraqi assets, for emergency repairs and small community projects such as renovating schools.

The bulk of the aid was provided in a special Congressional appropriation last fall of $18.4 billion in grant money. Three months ago, mindful of rising Iraqi frustration over the slow pace of change, Mr. Bremer made lavish promises that have only partly been met.

"Now the contracts are signed, and in the coming weeks the dirt will begin to fly on construction jobs all over Iraq," he announced on March 29. By the end of June, he said, "50,000 Iraqis will be working on jobs funded by the partnership for prosperity. But this is just the beginning."

But by this week, only about half of the $18.4 billion had been allocated to contractors, and little of the work was visible.

Construction has been debilitated by bombings and shootings of Western contractors and Iraqi workers, shortages of materials and poor planning. Many contractors have recently had to devote 20 percent or more of their money to armed security instead of building materials and to curb their oversight of subcontractors in the field, even evacuating workers for long stretches.

Because of safety fears, the last Western engineers fled the Doura plant a week ago, leaving disassembled machines on the enormous plant floor. The engineers were from the Siemens Company of Germany, working on a subcontract with American financing.

"They didn`t contact me," said Bashir Khalif Omir, the plant`s director. "They took their luggage at midnight and they left."

But the transfer of sovereignty has given Mr. Omir new hopes. Because Iraqis now ultimately call the shots on the work, Mr. Omir said, insurgents will no longer have so much reason to attack building projects and their workers.

Whether the rebels will make this distinction remains to be seen. In the meantime, the transfer opens new uncertainties. Will the new Iraqi government alter spending priorities, and how much power will it exert over American money? Will corruption rise as Iraqi ministries assert more influence on the subcontracting of American billions?

Will American decision-making be crippled by bureaucratic rivalries as the State Department takes over many functions from the Pentagon?

The construction office that Admiral Nash heads, until now a strictly Pentagon operation, has been split into two entities, a strategy office reporting to State and an implementing one reporting to the Defense Department. Admiral Nash has been appointed head of both.

"We`re still a little unclear about who we will have to interface with on a daily basis," said James Cartner, vice president for Iraq operations for Fluor, a major contractor.

On the broader question of reshaping Iraq`s economy, the occupation made limited progress but left some of the most politically tough decisions to the Iraqis.

The new government will inherit a new currency, a renewed banking system and, in measures that were pushed hard by a conservative Republican administration, low taxes and tariffs and a law permitting unhindered foreign investment in non-oil sectors of the economy.

But American officials, fearful of fanning more unrest, put off what economists say are crucial steps toward a functioning market economy and an end to rampant smuggling. They have not carried out plans to phase out Iraq`s huge subsidies for fuel and electricity and to end the dependency of a majority of Iraqis on handouts of imported food.

"It`s hard to make the economy start working with such irrational prices," said Keith Crane, an economist at the RAND Corporation who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority last year. "And in the long run it doesn`t make sense to build refineries so they can sell gas for three cents a liter."

The insurgency has been an obvious source of construction delays. But critics, including some Americans who spent frustrating months in Baghdad, also say the Pentagon`s approach to economic restoration was flawed from the outset — seen too much as a bricks and mortar task and in isolation from the country`s political and social wounds.

In the initial months of the American occupation, the hard-earned lessons of earlier nation-building campaigns by the United States and the United Nations in places like Bosnia, Afghanistan and East Timor were ignored by Pentagon planners, who tried to rush ahead with showcase infrastructure projects before securing public safety and a sense of participation, critics say.

"We mostly did what we know how to do, instead of what needed to be done," said James Dobbins, a retired diplomat who led American recovery efforts in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and elsewhere and said it was a mistake to put the Pentagon in charge of Iraq`s economy. "That`s what the Army Corps of Engineers does: it hires multinational corporations to build infrastructure."

Critics like Mr. Dobbins, who has not worked in Iraq but was President Bush`s envoy to Afghanistan after the American invasion there, say many of the problems should have been foreseen.

"What the Iraqis needed was security, and with that they could get their electricity back on themselves," said Mr. Dobbins, who is now with the Rand Corporation and is chief author of a 2003 study, "America`s Role in Nation-Building From Germany to Iraq."

James Glanz reported from Baghdad for this article, and Erik Eckholm from Washington and New York.

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June 30, 2004
INSURGENTS
Abducted Marine Had Reportedly Deserted
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NICK MADIGAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 29 — The American marine who is being threatened by his kidnappers with beheading had deserted the military because he was emotionally traumatized, and was abducted by his captors while trying to make his way home to his native Lebanon, a Marine officer said Tuesday.

The officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he believed that Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun was betrayed by Iraqis he befriended on his base and ended up in the hands of Islamic extremists.

The officer said Corporal Hassoun, a 24-year-old Marine linguist who was born in Lebanon, was shaken up after he saw one of his sergeants blown apart by a mortar shell.

"It was very disturbing to him," the officer said. "He wanted to go home and quit the game, but since he was relatively early in his deployment, that was not going to happen anytime soon. So he talked to some folks on base he befriended, because they were all fellow Muslims, and they helped sneak him off. Once off, instead of helping him get home, they turned him over to the bad guys."

"It`s all we know right now," the officer added.

Corporal Hassoun, a fluent Arabic-speaker who had been living with his family in West Jordan, Utah, outside Salt Lake City, joined the Marine Corps to work as a translator.

About two months ago, he told a cousin that several American deserters had escaped by bribing Iraqis to help get them out of the country.

"He said a lot of soldiers, they don`t want to die, especially when they see someone dying in front of them," said the cousin, Tarek Hassoun, who lives in Salt Lake City.

Marine officials said Sunday night that Corporal Hassoun had been missing since June 21. On Sunday, the Qatar-based television network Al Jazeera broadcast a videotape that showed him blindfolded with a sword over his head.

According to a statement provided with the video, an obscure group called The Islamic Reaction said it had abducted him near Falluja and was threatening to behead him unless American forces released all Iraqi prisoners.

The group, which also identified itself as the security wing of the 20th Revolution Regiment, a reference to the Arab uprising after World War I, did not give a deadline for the release or execution.

When Corporal Hassoun was first shown in captivity on video Sunday, Marine officials were reluctant to confirm that he had been kidnapped. On Monday, they acknowledged that they were now classifying his status as "captured."

Masked men have snatched dozens of foreigners in the past several months. On Tuesday, three Turks were freed after by their captors.

But several hostages have been executed. The latest victim appears to be Specialist Keith Matthew Maupin, an American soldier who vanished after an ambush on his convoy near Baghdad on April 9.

On Monday, Al Jazeera, which has been first to broadcast a number of videos showing the killing of Americans, broadcast a video it said ended with kidnappers shooting Specialist Maupin in the head. Army officials said they could not confirm that he had been killed.

Intelligence officials said it is not clear if the kidnappings are coordinated, although they suspect that some of the captors are at least loosely tied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant thought to be behind much of the mayhem in Iraq.

On Monday night, Muslims in Salt Lake City gathered at the Khadeeja Mosque, one of three mosques in the city, to pray for Corporal Hassoun.

Mahdi Jaff, 38, an Iraqi Kurd who immigrated to the United States 10 years ago, said he had met Corporal Hassoun a few months ago while the marine was home on leave.

"I loved him when I met him," Mr. Jaff said. Mr. Jaff said Corporal Hassoun had stayed true to his Muslim values while serving in the military.

When he heard the news that a member of the Hassoun family had been seized in Iraq, Mr. Jaff said he did not know who it was.

"He has a lot of brothers so, at first, I was not sure who was captured, but then when I saw the picture, I said, `Oh, man, that`s him,` ` Mr. Jaff said. "I was really shocked that it was him."

"Those people will not negotiate," Mr. Jaff said of Corporal Hassoun`s captors. "He just has to wait for his time to come. It`s just like when someone would be sent to Saddam Hussein`s jails; he would send a message to his family and say, `I`m gone.` "

Others in Salt Lake City were also praying Monday night. About 25 people stood in the rain on the steps of the Utah State Capitol, pleading for Corporal Hassoun`s release.

Pamela Atkinson, 68, of Salt Lake City, led the group in a prayer to God.

"As the insurgents threaten his life, we ask that Corporal Hassoun and his family feel your loving arms around them," she said.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Baghdad for this article and Nick Madigan from Salt Lake City. Melissa Sanford contributed reporting from Salt Lake City.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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June 30, 2004
Iraq Will Charge Hussein in Court Along With Aides
By JOHN F. BURNS
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BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 29 — Iraq`s interim government announced Tuesday that it would take legal, but not physical, custody of Saddam Hussein and 11 of his top associates from the United States on Wednesday.

The government will file charges against all 12 on Thursday in a special Iraqi court set up to try members of the ousted government on charges of crimes against humanity.

Under terms approved by President Bush, the men, including several of the most notorious figures in Mr. Hussein`s inner circle, will remain indefinitely under American military guard at an undisclosed location in or near Baghdad.

But they will cease to be prisoners of war from the moment they are arraigned, becoming criminal detainees with legal protections under Iraqi criminal procedures, including access to legal counsel, that were previously denied.

Also on Tuesday, three marines were killed by a roadside bomb in southeastern Baghdad, but there was no evidence of an overall surge in attacks since Iraq formally resumed sovereignty on Monday. [Page A10.]

In claiming jurisdiction over Mr. Hussein and the others as the interim Iraqi government`s first major act, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi acknowledged that American forces "will continue to maintain physical custody" until Iraq has a prison system capable of ensuring that they remain unharmed and do not escape.

Sensitive to suggestions that his government`s authority is constrained by its reliance on American military power, however, he underlined that the arrangement was "at our request," not under American duress.

"We believe that to truly be in control of our affairs and our own future, we must be in control of the people we believe most responsible for so much of the suffering the Iraqi people endured over the past 35 years," Dr. Allawi said at a news conference in the American-run international press center.

"More than a million Iraqis are missing as a result of events that occurred during the former regime," he said in fluent English. "Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis of all religions and ethnic groups are believed to be buried in mass graves. I know I speak for my fellow countrymen when I say I look forward to the day when former regime leaders face justice, God willing."

How soon the trials of the 12 will begin remained uncertain; Dr. Allawi said Mr. Hussein`s would not begin "for a number of months."

American and Iraqi lawyers involved in the process have said the prosecution of Mr. Hussein would be better timed after other former leaders are tried, so that emerging information can be used to build a case against the man ultimately responsible for much of the killing.

Among Iraqis who lived through the repression under Mr. Hussein and who were interviewed in Baghdad on Tuesday, there appeared to be broad support for the dictator to be brought to trial, even in areas like Adhamiya that were Sunni Muslim strongholds favored by the dictator.

But there were those who felt that trying him while the country was at war was not wise. "I hope the new government will postpone the trial until things settle down," said Wamidh Hathiq, 25, a mobile phone salesman. "They shouldn`t rush it."

Some international legal rights groups have expressed doubts that a legal process created by the Americans and controlled by Iraqis and Americans can yield justice in a political climate as charged as Iraq`s.

"Questions are being raised about the whole process," Hanny Megally, director of the Middle East program at the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York-based group that assists war crimes prosecutions. "The United States is funding the court, conducting the investigations, sifting through the evidence and developing prosecution strategy. While all this could be done with good intentions, it all seems to be controlled by one entity."

The list of the men to be placed under what Dr. Allawi called "Iraqi legal custody" was issued by the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which was established in December by the American occupation authority to try cases rising out of the worst excesses of Mr. Hussein`s rule.

In addition to the 66-year-old Mr. Hussein, they included a man synonymous among Iraqis with some of his government`s worst atrocities: Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in directing a poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988.

Others were Taha Yassin Ramadan, one of Mr. Hussein`s two vice presidents, long cited by international human rights groups for his role in the torture and killing of tens of thousands of Iraqis; Tariq Aziz, a deputy prime minister who conducted many of Iraq`s international negotiations, especially in the prelude to the Persian Gulf war in 1991; and Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, a relative of Mr. Hussein who oversaw his personal security.

Most of the 12 appear in the "deck of cards" the United States issued after the invasion that pictured the 55 most-wanted Iraqi officials. Iraqi and American officials declined to say why the 12 were chosen for transfer to Iraqi jurisdiction.

One theory was that the most compelling evidence has been accumulated against them. They may also be those viewed by most Iraqis as responsible for the most heinous offenses, especially Mr. Hussein, Mr. Majid and Mr. Ramadan.

Another theory was that some of the men not being transferred have cooperated with investigators and are thus viewed by the Americans as best kept beyond the reach of legal counsel while the trials of the 12 are prepared. American military commanders have said Mr. Hussein resorted early in his captivity to a posture of defiance, and was offering little under interrogation but resolute denials of any wrongdoing.

American officials hinted that on Thursday, at least some reporters and cameramen might be allowed to attend his arraignment in a media pool, in what may be his first semipublic appearance since his capture in December.

Dr. Allawi, keenly aware of the risks of being viewed as a pawn, had hinted in recent days that he would act to distance himself from the Americans. Their power will henceforth be exercised through the new American Embassy, which will operate, for now, out of the same Republican Palace that was the headquarters for the occupation.

Dr. Allawi, 58, a British-trained neurosurgeon who led an Iraqi exile group in London after fleeing in 1971, has also signaled that he intends tough action on the insurgency and other matters. At the news conference, he said: "We would like to show the world that the new Iraqi government means business, and wants to stabilize Iraq. We want to put this bad history behind us."

Iraqi polls have shown that most Iraqis favor reinstating the death penalty — suspended last year by L. Paul Bremer III, then the American administrator here — especially for Mr. Hussein and the most brutal of his aides. Dr. Allawi said his government was reviewing the issue.

But he also dwelled on the importance of fair trials. "The accused who will appear in front of an Iraqi court will be accorded rights that were denied by the former regime," he said, referring to the right to appoint their own legal counsel, free of charge if the defendants cannot afford them; the right "not to testify against themselves," and the right to remain silent.

One cause of unease among international legal experts has been the pervasive role played by a team of several dozen American lawyers and investigators. They were recently reformed into a new unit known as the Regime Crimes Liaison Office and operate from the American Embassy.

But American legal experts in Baghdad said Tuesday that the work of those investigators had been essential. "The investigative infrastructure in Iraq has been virtually nonexistent for decades," one said.

The new power alignment between the Iraqis and the Americans took formal shape on Tuesday with a ceremony in the palace complex, at which John D. Negroponte, formerly the American ambassador to the United Nations, presented his credentials to the new Iraqi president, Ghazi al-Yawar.

Mr. Negroponte, who will lead a staff of some 1,700, arrived in Baghdad just as Mr. Bremer prepared to depart Monday. Mr. Negroponte issued a statement saying: "The way ahead presents many challenges, but the government and people of Iraq have the courage and ability to succeed. The future is in their hands."

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 29, 2004
Q&A: Richard Haass on the Iraq Handover

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 29, 2004

Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and, in 2001-2003, the head of policy planning in the State Department, says it is difficult to make an accurate prediction about Iraq`s future now that sovereignty has been restored. But he says "my hunch--it`s actually half a hunch and half a hope--is that gradually Iraqis will come around to see the interim government as essentially legitimate and will come to appreciate their own stakes in the success of the interim government." He adds that questions about security and constitutional issues must be addressed.

Haass says he sees little difference in future policy toward Iraq between President George W. Bush and his putative Democratic opponent, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. "There is a general sense that we need to stay there as long as we are welcome; that the stakes are enormous, both in Iraq and, symbolically, beyond it; and that we need to do everything possible to get others to assist--whether it`s the Europeans, the United Nations, the Arabs, whatever," Haass says.

He was interviewed on June 29, 2004, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.

Now that there`s been a formal turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, what do you think the chances are for the new government to succeed?

I don`t know how to qualify that other than to say, there`s a chance; there`s a decent chance, but I simply don`t know how to ascribe percentages or odds.

This situation seems to defy prediction, because you can just as credibly predict disaster as success.

Predictions are just that, they are predictions. One hears a lot of extreme predictions: on one end of the spectrum, Jeffersonian democracy; at the other end of the spectrum, chaos. My hunch is it`s in between, but the real question is exactly where in between, and I don`t think anybody can answer that question.

If you were asked for advice by the U.S. government, what would you say the United States should be doing?

I don`t think there`s a lot we could be doing that the U.S. government is not already trying to do-- accelerating, to the extent possible, the training of Iraqi police and security forces, trying to get the rest of the world to help with security and economic reconstruction, and keeping U.S. forces somewhat in the background.

I say that to simply underscore the reality that there are no ideas that haven`t been floated; there is no silver bullet at this point. If there were easy answers, and I don`t think there were, there sure as hell aren`t any easy answers now. So at this point, it`s an old-fashioned struggle, essentially trying to help the interim government. Every day that they stay in business, every day that they send the message that Iraqis are running Iraq, is a good day.

Is there an analogy to Vietnam? In Vietnam, the United States was supporting the South Vietnamese government, but I guess the analogy is poor.

I don`t see any analogy here. And now that the occupation is formally over, my hunch--it`s actually half a hunch and half a hope--is that gradually Iraqis will come around to see the interim government as essentially legitimate and will come to appreciate their own stakes in the success of the interim government and in keeping to the calendar--having elections late this calendar year or early next, then turning to the constitutional question.

It will be interesting to see if the Iraqis can get support from other Arab states.

That`s important. I don`t think this was one of the principal focuses of U.S. policy. Essentially, the United States has spent the last few days working on the Europeans with, at best, limited success. It would help to get even a symbolic Arab presence that would somehow participate in the training of Iraqi forces.

Not only the training of Iraqi forces, but secondly, television and newspaper pictures of the Iraqi leadership meeting with their Arab counterparts would help the interim government to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the Arab world.

If President Bush wins again in November, will things change? And if Senator Kerry wins, what will be his Iraq policy?

I don`t think there`s a lot of difference between the two on Iraq at this point. Obviously, there would have been differences going backward, but going forward, I don`t see fundamental differences between a second Bush administration and a first Kerry administration. I`m not even sure if I see modest differences. There is a general sense that we need to stay there as long as we are welcome; that the stakes are enormous, both in Iraq and, symbolically, beyond it; and that we need to do everything possible to get others to assist--whether it`s the Europeans, the United Nations, the Arabs, whatever. So I don`t see, at this point, any real policy debate.

Does Bush get much credit for the Middle East Initiative? I`m surprised, given the animosity toward the Bush administration in the Middle East, that there`s that much interest in reform coming out of Arab states.

What the Bush administration has done, in some ways, is to reinforce the debate going on in the Arab world about these ideas dealing with reform, democracy, elections, and the rest. These ideas were out there, but the administration has given them much more visibility.

I don`t think there`s any turning back. These ideas have been debated and discussed in ways that they haven`t been before. These issues have made their way onto the agenda. I still think it is important for the United States to raise the reform agenda. Basically, it`s important when an American president meets his Arab counterparts that this issue is discussed both privately and publicly. The United States, if it continues to discuss these issues publicly, helps create some space in the Arab world by essentially sending the message that these issues can`t be avoided in the way they were for decades.

I think the American public has largely missed this.

I predict that this is going to be one of the most important foreign policy legacies of this administration. When you think about it, for decades U.S. policy toward the Middle East largely consisted of the [Arab-Israeli] peace process, energy issues, and security issues. The question of the quality of societies, the nature of economies, the details of political systems, even human rights questions, rarely, if ever, came up. The Middle East in that sense is an anomaly because these questions came up in every other part of the world. So this anomaly has ended. In some ways it took 9/11 to do it. It was the realization that flaws in societies in the region ultimately helped produce radicalism and terrorism, which in turn affected us; flaws in the societies in the region could cause instability, which in turn would also affect us.

You said the results of the NATO meeting were not so impressive. Was it not an accomplishment to get everyone to agree to help in Iraq?

It`s a modest accomplishment to get people to agree that they all have a stake in the trajectory of Iraq. What was disappointing were the specific results: the fact that NATO is not prepared to send forces to Iraq; the fact that NATO is not even prepared to send trainers into Iraq. If this was an accomplishment, it was a very modest one.

On Afghanistan, NATO members agreed to increase their support, but I suppose that`s still disappointing?

In Afghanistan, you still have what I would describe as "nation building light." You have an extremely modest international presence outside of Kabul, and it shouldn`t surprise us that the central government has had very little success in asserting its authority outside of Kabul. In nation building, as in most else in life, you get what you pay for. We approached Afghanistan in an extremely circumscribed way, and the results, or the lack of results, speak for themselves.

If you had to grade the administration`s tenure in Iraq until now, could you give it a grade?

It would be easy to criticize. On the other hand, this is still a process that`s unfolding. Neither you nor I nor anyone can predict for certain where Iraq will be in six months, let alone six years. As a result, any grade we might be tempted to give now would be heavily affected by where things ended up. But clearly, there were some questionable decisions along the way that made a difficult situation more difficult. Historians will no doubt have a field day on this. The focus now has to be on getting it right, which means helping this new Iraqi government, sticking to this calendar.

There are some really difficult questions--above all, the security challenge. It`s an open question whether U.S. and other international troops will be able to stay for as long as they are needed. What concerns me is that as Iraqi nationalism continues to build, the welcome mat may not be left out as long as is needed. We could face a gap between the security challenge and what Iraqis are able to do if either the interim government or its successor asks U.S. and other forces to leave or places them under such heavy constraints that they can`t really act.

Even if we can work ourselves through that, there`s the constitutional challenge over whether you can come up with a constitution that--to bring it down to the most basic--is acceptable to both the Shiite majority and to the Kurds. It`s clear that the so-called Transitional Administrative Law--the interim constitution--is not. The balance between the center and the periphery is too heavily tilted to the periphery; the degree of federalism is too great. But walking that back in a way that would satisfy the Shiites but still be acceptable to the Kurds is going to be an extremely difficult political exercise.

The Kurds, I suppose, have benefited these last few years, and now they are being asked to give a little.

They are going to be asked to give a little. I don`t think you`ll see that until early in 2005 when that issue comes to the fore. So you can see Iraq really in two phases: the next six to nine months, the focus is on bringing the security situation to a point where you can have elections; and then in early 2005, we enter the phase, assuming the security situation has still held up and assuming you`ve held elections, where we can resolve the tension that is inherent in the constitutional issue.

Without asking you to be chauvinistic, is it going to make much difference with the State Department becoming the prime player in Iraq?

I think it sends an important symbolic message. With the arrival of [Ambassador] John Negroponte, with the State Department taking a more visible role, it sends the message not only that the occupation has ended, which is an important symbolic message, but also it sends the message of a degree of normalcy: Iraq is now less different or more like everybody else. That`s healthy. It also will probably mean the United States is taking a lower profile, which, again, provides some opportunity for Prime Minister [Iyad] Allawi and others to fill the political space.

Who is Negroponte`s deputy chief of mission, or does he have several?

I don`t know. It will be an enormously large staff, and it`s hard to imagine a more difficult diplomatic assignment than the one John Negroponte is undertaking.

I`ve heard they`ve had more volunteers than they can accept.

It doesn`t surprise me, and that`s great. For a lot of younger Foreign Service officers and younger people in general, this is one of those special moments for a generation, and a lot of younger people--several of whom worked for me when I was at the State Department--volunteered to go to Iraq because there was this sense that this was going to be the test of their generation; this was their defining experience. They didn`t want to miss out on that.

And for a few people who did go, it proved to be exactly that. One--Drew Erdman, a young man in his 30s, a historian from Harvard, who`s now on the NSC [National Security Council]--ended up being the person who advised the Iraqis on their system for higher education. Another, Meagan O`Sullivan, who also worked with me at the State Department and is now heading to the National Security Council staff, was one of [Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul] Bremer`s inner circle and dealt on a daily basis with the Iraqi opposition and then with the interim government. So for people in their early-to-mid 30s, Iraq became an extraordinary opportunity to make a difference and do something that`s truly historical. I`m not surprised that a lot of people volunteered.

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Die Organisation Gehlen, die CIA, vertuschte Kriegsverbrechen, geschütze Kriegsverbrecher und die Lehren für den Irak.

June 24, 2004
Berlin to Baghdad: The Pitfalls of Hiring Enemy Intelligence
By TIMOTHY NAFTALI

From the July/August 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Timothy Naftali is Director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia`s Miller Center of Public Affairs and co-author of U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.

Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany`s Defense and Intelligence Establishments. James H. Critchfield. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003, 243 pp.$32.95

As the United States approached war with Iraq in early 2003, some journalists turned to an 86-year-old retiree for perspective. A decorated World War II Army officer, James Critchfield later joined the CIA and became one of the nation`s most influential spies. The journalists called him because of his stint supervising CIA activities in the Middle East in the 1960s, during which he helped arrange the 1963 coup that overthrew General Abd al-Karim Kassem and set in motion the Baath Party`s 40-year domination of Iraqi politics. Had they been sharper, they would also have asked about the lessons of an episode from still earlier in his career: his creation of the foreign intelligence service of West Germany from the ashes of the Nazi state.

Critchfield died two weeks after the toppling of Saddam Hussein`s statue in Baghdad, but, fortunately, he had been able to keep his cancer at bay long enough to finish a detailed treatment of his experiences in postwar Germany. Part memoir and part history, the posthumously published Partners at the Creation tells the story of the men behind West Germany`s emergence as a stalwart member of the Atlantic alliance in the 1950s. Its discussion of building new pro-U.S. security services from the remnants of a defeated tyranny could not be more timely: it serves as an uncannily appropriate backdrop to the agonizing dilemmas facing decision-makers in Iraq today.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

Partners at the Creation focuses on Critchfield`s mentoring of two of Hitler`s former generals, the controversial Reinhard Gehlen and the lesser-known Adolf Heusinger, both of whom would ultimately play large roles in West Germany`s national security community. During the war, Gehlen directed the German army`s intelligence organization on the eastern front, the Fremde Heere Ost, while Heusinger was wartime chief of the operations division of the German army general staff. Heusinger participated in the resistance movement against Hitler and was jailed for it in 1944; Gehlen did not.

A defender of old-fashioned realpolitik, Critchfield credits U.S. success in occupied Germany to flexibility in handling former enemies, and he uses his own experiences as an example. Washington`s relationship with Gehlen began in 1945-46, when the U.S. Army, looking warily at its Soviet counterpart, asked him to reconstitute both his wartime analytical group and the intelligence networks that had fed Berlin information on the Soviet military. Soon, the Gehlen organization ballooned in size (it eventually comprised 4,000 employees), and the Pentagon was looking for help in subsidizing and handling it. So, in 1947, the newly created CIA was brought into the picture, and by 1948 the agency was Gehlen`s sole sponsor, with Critchfield in charge as the man on the ground.

Heusinger ran Gehlen`s postwar analytical branch and was more pro-U.S. than his colleague. From 1948 on, he believed that Western Europe could not defend itself alone and that any future West German military would have to be closely tied to NATO. (He would go on to become chairman of NATO`s military committee in the 1960s.) "Germany`s transition from an enemy to an ally of the United States and the West was probably destined by broader forces," Critchfield writes. "But the ultimate success of this pivotal moment in history should be credited in no small part to Reinhard Gehlen and the small circle of former German Army General Staff officers at the center of the Gehlen Organization."

Those in favor of the swift and extensive rehabilitation of former Baathists and high-ranking military officers in Iraq might well cite Critchfield`s experiences in West Germany as evidence of how successful such an approach can be. Yet that would not reflect the true balance sheet of U.S. sponsorship of Gehlen and his crew, for even Partners at the Creation hints that the policy had significant flaws, and observers more detached than Critchfield might take a much dimmer view of the compromises involved.

Gehlen and the CIA, for example, never agreed on how much information the Germans were required to reveal to their occupiers and patrons. "I think Gehlen`s inclination to be secretive with the Americans about his organization was a major error," writes Critchfield. "When we reached what seemed to be an impasse on agreeing that he would provide essential information, I closed my briefcase and threatened to terminate my visit. Gehlen backed off and reverted to a compromise on these issues that was acceptable, under the circumstances. However, the issue was never entirely resolved." At the end of the book, Critchfield reveals that one of the costs of leaving this issue open was that the CIA could not force Gehlen to improve his group`s operational security. As a result, the Soviets found the Gehlen organization easy to penetrate, and Gehlen`s own chief of counterespionage against the Soviet bloc, Heinz Felfe, eventually proved to be a KGB agent.

Only this year, in fact, has the public learned the full extent of the moral and operational costs of the U.S. government`s marriage of convenience with these former Nazi intelligence officers, and the Felfe case turns out to have been merely the tip of the iceberg.

In accordance with the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the CIA and the U.S. Army have had to declassify thousands of documents on their relationships with Nazi war criminals. Gehlen himself may never have been indicted for war crimes, but we now know that at least 100 of his employees were former members of the SS.

To his credit, Critchfield assisted the Interagency Working Group (IWG) supervising these declassifications and made himself available to the historians (including this reviewer) tasked with providing initial assessments of what the newly public documents revealed. But he did not live to see the IWG`s interim report, which paints a significantly less flattering picture of the bargain he and the Germans struck.

A ONE-SIDED AFFAIR

Although Partners at the Creation hints at how difficult Gehlen could be, the book sanitizes what was essentially a one-sided relationship in favor of the Germans. Gehlen was insubordinate, deceptive, and incompetent, yet he continued to receive rations for his employees and a large monthly stipend of $175,000. In 1950-51, the CIA seriously considered firing him, and it was only support from the incoming German government of Konrad Adenauer that got him off the hook. After 1951, there was less controversy -- but only because the CIA stopped asking for background information on the West German intelligence agents it was funding.

The consequence of this "don`t ask, don`t tell" policy was that for eleven years U.S. taxpayers subsidized a foreign organization that employed war criminals. Among the dozens of murderers and thugs working for Gehlen was Konrad Fiebig, hired in 1948, who had served with Einsatzgruppe B (a mobile killing unit) in Belorussia and was later charged with shooting 11,000 Jews. Erich Deppner, who ran Gehlen`s operations out of West Berlin, had been deputy to Wilhelm Harster, an SS brigadier general who was Heinrich Himmler`s representative in the occupied Netherlands. Deppner helped his boss supervise the deportation of 100,000 Dutch Jews to the death camps and was personally responsible for executing Soviet prisoners of war interned there. And Gehlen`s chief Soviet expert, Emil Augsburg, had been detailed in 1939-40 to the special SS units that executed Jews and communists in Poland and later did the same thing in the western Soviet Union.

The CIA turned a blind eye to Gehlen`s protection of these people because it was doing something similar itself. In its drive to acquire human intelligence on the Soviet Union, the agency allowed its field officers to recruit former members of Hitler`s SS and excluded war criminals only if their war crimes were a matter of public record. As a result, it relied on men such as Otto von Bolschwing, who in the 1930s had helped design the system for expropriating Jewish property in Austria and then, as Himmler`s representative in Bucharest, had instigated the brutal 1941 pogrom there. In 1953, the CIA rewarded Bolschwing for his help by pressuring the Immigration and Naturalization Service into allowing him into the United States, and he subsequently became a U.S. citizen.

These same policies led the CIA in 1959 to try to recruit Erich Rajakowitsch, a resident of Italy then engaged in East-West trade. During the war Rajakowitsch had served as Adolf Eichmann`s representative in The Hague and personally supervised the deportation of Dutch Jews from France to the death camps in 1942. The only reason Rajakowitsch did not become a U.S. asset was because he refused the CIA`s offer.

WHO WILL GUARD THE GUARDS

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, there has been a lot of talk about the importance of "unleashing" the CIA. As one former national security "principal" put it to me, Americans should be prepared "to recruit people they would not want to have dinner with."

It is true that the intelligence community needs a more energetic and sustained recruitment campaign. And it is equally true that contacts with unsavory characters sometimes prove beneficial. From the late 1960s through 1978, for example, the CIA had an apparently useful relationship with Ali Hassan Salameh, Yasir Arafat`s intelligence chief -- and the mastermind of the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

But abandoning one`s principles in the quest for better intelligence can be an expensive proposition. In occupied Germany, the unregulated recruitment of former enemies brought dishonor to the country and operational failures to the intelligence community. For those seeking to reconstruct the Iraqi national security system and to expand the CIA`s stable of useful Middle Eastern contacts, the West German case ought to be a cautionary tale.

One problem was the absence of real checks and balances. On paper, Washington had to approve all recruitments, but there is no evidence that Richard Helms, who supervised the agency`s activities in Austria and West Germany throughout the early Cold War, ever turned down an operative because of his past. CIA headquarters established a climate that discouraged field officers from digging too hard. Not until Israel captured Eichmann in 1960, in fact, would the CIA bother to look at the records of captured Gestapo members to see how many of these killers it had recruited.

The motivations of individual CIA recruiters appear to have been generally honorable. They feared the Soviets and believed that all measures were permissible in learning about this new enemy. The problem was that no one at headquarters or in the field had time to do a cost-benefit analysis of hiring the worst elements of Hitler`s regime. If they had, they might well have paused.

Initially, former Nazi intelligence officers were employed as "bird dogs" -- pointing out their former colleagues for arrest by U.S. authorities. For the most part, the Nazis did this very well, and had the relationship ended there, the United States would have gotten the better end of the deal. But U.S. field officers found it hard to let their agents go, and the agents had an interest in keeping their case officers happy.

Case officers are rewarded for the number of agents they recruit and the amount of material they send home. Former enemy intelligence officers understand this very well and are adept at inventing networks to meet the needs of their new bosses. Former Nazis played this game, taking the Americans to the cleaners and getting nicely paid for work of no significance.

Former enemy intelligence officers also understand how little their new bosses usually know or want to know about their backgrounds. The Allies captured the personnel files of the SS, for example, but the CIA did not always bother to check those files before hiring agents. The recruits complicated matters by lying about their own participation in "resistance" movements against the fallen tyrant. By the time the U.S. government figured out that its new friends were frauds, it was stuck with a massive disposal problem.

Hiring former enemy intelligence officers, even those not directly responsible for war crimes, also opened the U.S. intelligence community and its local client to penetration. Some SS men went over to the Soviets and helped the KGB identify people for recruitment. The KGB then blackmailed these individuals into working as penetration agents by threatening to reveal their crimes.

Finally, providing haven to former instruments of a vicious dictatorship plunged the United States into moral and political corruption. Gehlen was not the only German allowed to protect former members of the SS, and fascist elements were permitted to poison West German life for years.

The United States, incidentally, was hardly the only occupying power to follow such a course. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the West German domestic security service led after the war by the British client Otto John, systematically hired former Gestapo officers, many of whom had served on the brutal eastern front. These men were kept on a secret list so that they could be paid without being formally de-Nazified. (Neither Washington nor London moved to shut down this operation for fear of discomforting the Adenauer administration.)

In the end, the rot spread far. The Soviet Union and East Germany reaped benefits from being able to sow doubt in West Germany by suggesting that Nazi killers were being protected by the Allies and the Adenauer government. In the United States, the need to cover up the protection of Nazi war criminals led to the perversion of the immigration process, stonewalling of Congress, and a decision by the CIA not to share with the U.S. Department of Justice information on war criminals residing in the United States.

LESSONS LEARNED

The CIA`s work with Gehlen, of course, was not a complete failure. The Bundesnachrichtensdienst, the German foreign intelligence service that emerged from the Gehlen organization, has indeed proven itself a staunch ally. But at what cost? The West German organization the United States sponsored was thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets, and its ability to collect useful intelligence for NATO questionable. Meanwhile, the West German government paid pensions to Nazi killers into the late 1980s. The cost of this Faustian bargain for West German society is hard to calculate.

As U.S. forces scramble for help in setting up new police, military, and security services in Iraq, the temptation to rely on tainted personnel from the former regime will be great. But the costs of doing so too casually should be kept in mind. After all, the situation in Iraq today is even more dangerous than that of postwar Germany, not least because Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower`s decision to rely on overwhelming force broke the spirit of even the most dedicated Nazis and left little option for regime loyalists to surface openly. Moreover, in Iraq, the lack of any real cohesion means that relying on compromised individuals from one or another ethnic group could inflame sectional passions.

The mistakes made by the CIA and the U.S. Army in West Germany need not be repeated in Iraq. The sorry case of General Jasim Muhammad Salih and his 24-hour command in Falluja suggests, however, that U.S. recruitment is in disarray. Salih appears to have been tapped by Washington even though no one knew what he had done for Saddam. If coalition forces have a central registry of information on the backgrounds of Iraqi personnel, local commanders do not seem to have access to it. Salih`s downfall was that he was given a high-profile assignment; one can only guess at how many Salihs there are in less visible jobs. The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse tragedy has awakened congressional interest in providing effective oversight in Iraq. Before the United States turns sovereignty over the country to the Iraqis and washes its hands of the institutions it has created there -- as the CIA did with the Gehlen organization in 1951 -- someone in Congress or the executive branch should ask, Whom have we hired in Iraq, and why?

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June 30, 2004
Abu Ghraib, Stonewalled

While piously declaring its determination to unearth the truth about Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has spent nearly two months obstructing investigations by the Army and members of Congress. It has dragged out the Army`s inquiry, withheld crucial government documents from a Senate committee and stonewalled senators over dozens of Red Cross reports that document the horrible mistreatment of Iraqis at American military prisons. Even last week`s document dump from the White House, which included those cynical legal road maps around treaties and laws against torturing prisoners, seemed part of this stonewalling campaign. Nothing in those hundreds of pages explained what orders had been issued to the military and C.I.A. jailers in Iraq, and by whom.

It took the Pentagon more than two weeks to appoint a replacement for Maj. Gen. George Fay, who had to be relieved of the task of investigating the military intelligence units at Abu Ghraib because he was not senior enough to question Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq. The process underscored the inability of the military to investigate itself at this level. The Pentagon named someone of high enough rank — just barely. That officer is a three-star general, as is General Sanchez. He will have to get up to speed before questioning General Sanchez, and the Pentagon will undoubtedly stall again when the new investigating general, inevitably, needs to go yet higher.

The Pentagon has also not turned over to the Senate the full report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted the Army`s biggest investigation so far into abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon has still not accounted for the 2,000 pages missing from his 6,000-page file when it was given to the Senate Armed Services Committee more than a month ago; the missing pages include draft documents on interrogation techniques for Iraq. The committee`s chairman, Senator John Warner, said last week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had assured him that he was working on the problem. Mr. Warner`s faith seems deeply misplaced.

Mr. Rumsfeld`s handling of another issue, the Red Cross reports on Iraq, is the most outrageous example of the administration`s bad faith on the prison scandal. The Bush administration has cited Red Cross confidentiality policies to explain its failure to give up the reports. The trouble is, the Red Cross has repeatedly told the administration to go ahead and share the agency`s findings with Congress, as long as steps are taken to prevent leaks.

On May 7, the Senate armed services panel asked Mr. Rumsfeld for these reports on widespread abuse in the military prisons in Iraq; one of the reports had already appeared on the Internet. Mr. Rumsfeld assured the committee that he would turn them over, if the Red Cross agreed. Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides have not handed over the reports — 40 in all, including 24 from Iraq. Over the weeks, the Pentagon has assured increasingly angry senators that it was negotiating with the Red Cross, and then offered the rather absurd claim that it was still "collecting" the documents.

In fact, the International Red Cross gave its consent within 24 hours of Mr. Rumsfeld`s empty promise, and has repeated it several times.

In late May, Kevin Moley, the American ambassador to the international organizations based in Geneva, invited the head of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, to "express any concerns" his organization had about giving the documents to Congress. Dr. Kellenberger replied that it was never a problem as long as the documents were kept confidential. Given the administration`s habit of selective disclosure, however, Dr. Kellenberger insisted that all of the reports, not just some, be sent to Congress, in their entirety. He has also asked for an inventory of what is shared.

Still, the Pentagon told Senator Warner`s committee that it had not worked out an arrangement. On June 15, Christophe Girod, head of the Red Cross delegation in Washington, wrote to Senator Edward Kennedy, a leader in the fight to get the prison reports, that the decision "lies with the U.S. authorities." He confirmed that the Red Cross had given the Pentagon permission to hand over the documents in early May.

Last Thursday, members of the Armed Services Committee attended a closed-door briefing with the Pentagon, ostensibly on the Red Cross reports. But the briefers did not turn over any documents; they merely showed the senators reports on Guantánamo Bay that had no bearing on Iraq.

The Senate is now in a two-week recess. In one of the few signs of life on Capitol Hill on this issue, Mr. Warner promises to resume his hearings after the recess. But even the Red Cross in Geneva has got it figured out: the administration has no intention of cooperating. It`s time for the Republican majority in Congress to stop covering for the White House and compel the administration, by subpoena if necessary, to turn over all documents relating to Abu Ghraib — starting with those Red Cross reports.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 30, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Calling Bush a Liar
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

So is President Bush a liar?

Plenty of Americans think so. Bookshops are filled with titles about Mr. Bush like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," "Big Lies," "Thieves in High Places" and "The Lies of George W. Bush."

A consensus is emerging on the left that Mr. Bush is fundamentally dishonest, perhaps even evil — a nut, yes, but mostly a liar and a schemer. That view is at the heart of Michael Moore`s scathing new documentary, "Farenheit 9/11."

In the 1990`s, nothing made conservatives look more petty and simple-minded than their demonization of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were even accused of spending their spare time killing Vince Foster and others. Mr. Clinton, in other words, left the right wing addled. Now Mr. Bush is doing the same to the left. For example, Mr. Moore hints that the real reason Mr. Bush invaded Afghanistan was to give his cronies a chance to profit by building an oil pipeline there.

"I`m just raising what I think is a legitimate question," Mr. Moore told me, a touch defensively, adding, "I`m just posing a question."

Right. And right-wing nuts were "just posing a question" about whether Mr. Clinton was a serial killer.

I`m against the "liar" label for two reasons. First, it further polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.

Lefties have been asking me whether Mr. Bush has already captured Osama bin Laden, and whether Mr. Bush will plant W.M.D. in Iraq. Those are the questions of a conspiracy theorist, for even if officials wanted to pull such stunts, they would be daunted by the fear of leaks.

Bob Woodward`s latest book underscores that Mr. Bush actually believed that Saddam did have W.M.D. After one briefing, Mr. Bush turned to George Tenet and protested, "I`ve been told all this intelligence about having W.M.D., and this is the best we`ve got?" The same book also reports that Mr. Bush told Mr. Tenet several times, "Make sure no one stretches to make our case."

In fact, of course, Mr. Bush did stretch the truth. The run-up to Iraq was all about exaggerations, but not flat-out lies. Indeed, there`s some evidence that Mr. Bush carefully avoids the most blatant lies — witness his meticulous descriptions of the periods in which he did not use illegal drugs.

True, Mr. Bush boasted that he doesn`t normally read newspaper articles, when his wife said he does. And Mr. Bush wrongly claimed that he was watching on television on the morning of 9/11 as the first airplane hit the World Trade Center. But considering the odd things the president often says ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family"), Mr. Bush always has available a prima facie defense of confusion.

Mr. Bush`s central problem is not that he was lying about Iraq, but that he was overzealous and self-deluded. He surrounded himself with like-minded ideologues, and they all told one another that Saddam was a mortal threat to us. They deceived themselves along with the public — a more common problem in government than flat-out lying.

Some Democrats, like Mr. Clinton and Senator Joseph Lieberman, have pushed back against the impulse to demonize Mr. Bush. I salute them, for there are so many legitimate criticisms we can (and should) make about this president that we don`t need to get into kindergarten epithets.

But the rush to sling mud is gaining momentum, and "Farenheit 9/11" marks the polarization of yet another form of media. One medium after another has found it profitable to turn from information to entertainment, from nuance to table-thumping.

Talk radio pioneered this strategy, then cable television. Political books have lately become as subtle as professional wrestling, and the Internet is adding to the polarization. Now, with the economic success of "Farenheit 9/11," look for more documentaries that shriek rather than explain.

It wasn`t surprising when the right foamed at the mouth during the Clinton years, for conservatives have always been quick to detect evil empires. But liberals love subtlety and describe the world in a palette of grays — yet many have now dropped all nuance about this president.

Mr. Bush got us into a mess by overdosing on moral clarity and self-righteousness, and embracing conspiracy theories of like-minded zealots. How sad that many liberals now seem intent on making the same mistakes.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The west`s Arab racket

George Bush is right about the lack of freedom in the Middle East - but wrong about its causes and solution
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday June 30, 2004

The Guardian
George W Bush may not have read much history but he likes making it. The recent run of insider accounts of the Bush White House show the president is a man with a constant eye on the historians of the future, anxious to lend every moment just enough semi-Churchillian gravitas to make him look good in the decades to come.

So it was on Monday when he was handed a note that declared "Iraq is sovereign", immediately scrawling on it "Let freedom reign!" - as if ready for instant display behind the glass case at the future George W Bush presidential library. Those three words confirm how Bush sees himself and how he wants to be seen in the future - as a latter-day George Washington, leading subject peoples to liberty.

He has in mind not only the Iraqi nation but all the people of what he calls the Greater Middle East. The "liberation of Baghdad" is but the first step towards the transformation of the entire region.

It is not a secret plan, contained only in classified memoranda. On the contrary, Bush has declared it loud and proud, returning to the theme again in Istanbul yesterday. He articulated it most clearly in a November 2003 speech to America`s National Endowment for Democracy where he set out how, though there were now 120 functioning democracies in the world, the wave of self-rule had barely touched the Middle East. Democracy had made inroads in Latin America and Asia, but had still failed to make a dent in the Arab world. Why not, the president asked: "Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism?"

Bush went on to reject such "cultural condescension", insisting that liberty is universal. He called on the Arab states to open up - to respect the rule of law, recognise the equal rights of women and allow political pluralism and free speech.

For my money, it was the best speech Bush has ever given. Because on this fundamental point he is surely right. One has only to flick through the 2002 joint report of the UN development programme and the Arab fund for economic and social development to see why. This document, written by a group of Arab intellectuals, bursts with findings as stunning as they are bleak. All 22 Arab states combined, oozing as they are with natural resources and the black gold that is oil, still have a GDP smaller than Spain`s and less than half that of California. Education is in a dire state: the whole Arab world translates around 300 books annually, one fifth the number translated by Greece alone. Rates of internet connection, the Arab scholars found, were less than those in sub-Saharan Africa.

What`s more, the Palestinians of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza are not the only Arabs to be denied fundamental democratic rights. Using the widely accepted freedom index - which assesses everything from civil liberties to government accountability and a free press - the Arab states come at the foot of the global league table. The report was especially damning on the exclusion of women, often denied the vote and access to a basic education: "Sadly the Arab world is largely depriving itself of the productivity and creativity of half its citizens."

Bush was right to draw attention to this story of oppression and failure. Nor can he be faulted for placing it in the context of his war against al-Qaida. For if Bin Ladenism feeds off anything it is surely the frustration and despair of those who have to live in such suffocating conditions. If the right approach to the current global conflict is the one advocated by the likes of Bill Clinton and Gordon Brown -tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror - then surely the foremost "cause" is the desperate state of the Arab world.

So Bush is right in identifying the problem. Where he is wrong is in understanding its causes - and in finding a solution.

To his credit, the president does not imagine some innate Muslim or Arab incapacity for self-government: he attributes such attitudes to his enemies. But he speaks as if the Arab world became a desert for democracy through some strange act of nature, a freak accident with no rational explanation besides the evil rule of a couple of twisted dictators. What neither he, nor Tony Blair for that matter, ever acknowledges is the west`s own culpability.

One does not have to be a placard-waving anti-imperialist to note that for nearly a century the Arab world has been on the receiving end of constant western meddling. If they have not got on with choosing their own governments, that`s partly because we kept (and keep) stopping them! Iraq is a case in point as Britain repeatedly, from the 1920s to the 1950s, ensured the regime was to our liking. That pattern has been repeated across the region, from the tiny emirates created by a stroke of a western pen, to mighty Egypt: first Britain and then America has always plotted and connived to secure a friendly face at the top, even if the price has been the denial of the people`s will.

So Bush`s rhetoric is all very well, but it would ring truer if it entailed an explicit renunciation of that colonial habit. And this is not ancient history. The US still props up hideous, human rights-abusing regimes so long as the top man remains "our son of a bitch". Look no further than Bush`s closest chum, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. When Bush severs his links with the House of Saud over their beheadings, oppression of women, rank corruption and denial of basic human freedom, then his words will have meaning.

But the president is wrong on the solution, too. Democracy only very rarely flows down the barrel of a gun. Post-1945 Germany and Japan were surely the exceptions in exceptional circumstances. Even putting the 2003 war to one side, the images of abuse in Abu Ghraib alone would disqualify America as a credible bringer of democracy to the Middle East.

Instead that task will have to be performed by other people and in a different way. That does not mean a new European mandate to meddle, but rather a more creative use of influence. The first move will be a withdrawal of support from offending regimes, Riyadh and Cairo among them. Next, aid and trade should be tied to democratic performance. (A cheaper and less lethal way to create a democratic model in the Middle East than invading Iraq was surely to make Egypt`s annual $2bn aid package from the US conditional on Cairo sharpening up its act in the liberty department. That would have done the trick, without a shot being fired.) The west could put current Arab and other tyrannies on notice that their only way back into the global community is not simply to arrest al-Qaida suspects, but to grant basic freedoms to their own people.

Do that and then Bush will have every right to his Washingtonian rhetoric. He can chant "Let freedom reign" at the top of his voice. But not till then.

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Abductions in Iraq Reflect New Strategy, U.S. Says

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 30, 2004; Page A14

The United States believes the increasing spate of hostage abductions in Iraq reflects a new strategy by a loose confederation of insurgents designed to increase public pressure on the U.S.-led multinational force and other foreign interests to abandon Iraq because bombings and other terrorist tactics have not had sufficient impact, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. officials said they detected a turning point in April when random abductions based on "targets of opportunity" and random access to foreigners evolved into a more regular and calculated pattern. Based on interviews with released former captives, Washington believes that many of those abducted end up in the hands of a fluid network of cells.

"We`ve seen this tactic now for several months, but it clearly took on the form of an established tactic six weeks to two months ago -- rather than a one-off or target-of-opportunity sort of thing," said a senior counterterrorism official familiar with the situation in Iraq.

About 90 foreign hostages have been abducted in recent months -- with about 60 since the April 8 abduction of three Japanese civilians, which U.S. officials mark as the turning point.

Various groups have claimed responsibility for the seizures. Followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian extremist, this month claimed the abduction and execution of American Nicholas Berg and South Korean Kim Sun Il; another cell appears to be responsible for the kidnapping of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, a U.S. Marine not seen since June 19 and whose status was changed yesterday from missing to captured.

But as with the hostage abductions in Lebanon from 1982 to 1991, U.S. officials believe there are links among most of the abductors. "We have the impression now that there`s a loose amalgamation where people can get picked up for any of a number of reasons and then enter an amorphous system that leads them to be handed off from one group to another and then they`re evaluated for their value," said a senior counterterrorism official familiar with the Iraq kidnappings.

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials are also investigating possible ties among the groups taking hostages in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, based on initial but sketchy information indicating the abductions are the work of extremists tied or sympathetic to al Qaeda and its allies.

"It`s quite possible that there could be linkages," said a senior U.S. official tracking the trend. He noted that the Saudi group that seized and later beheaded American defense contractor Paul M. Johnson Jr. two weeks ago called itself the Fallujah Brigade of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Fallujah is the Iraqi city at least partly controlled by militants who rose up against U.S. troops this spring.

Despite the transfer of political power in Iraq, the Bush administration is increasingly concerned about the abduction threat to Americans and allies. Kidnappers released a video Monday that appears to show the execution of Army Pfc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, who was captured April 9.

Hostage seizures are often more traumatic and enduring than any other terrorist tactic, U.S. officials said.

"It`s effective because it`s a prolonged drama, unlike a terrorist event which is over after the bomb explodes or the bullet is fired and the bodies are taken away and the shattered glass is swept up and the buildings repaired. A hostage story takes on a life of its own. It`s the apotheosis of terrorist theater," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and director of Rand Corp.`s Washington office.

Taking hostages -- an age-old tactic used by Persians in the 6th century B.C., European rulers in the Middle Ages, Barbary pirates in the 19th century, and Latin American revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s -- can change the dynamics of political conflict by giving the weaker party a new edge, U.S. experts said.

"Taking hostages brings them attention. It makes them appear to be potent players. It brings them recruits. It dismays their foes and makes their foes` lives untenable. And it creates political crises at home," terrorism expert Brian Jenkins said. "It`s already brought about some withdrawals from Iraq and Saudi Arabia and created policy dilemmas for several governments. If we were cold-blooded analysts, we`d have to concede that it is in their view a good return on their investment."

Unlike in Lebanon, where Americans and other Western hostages were held as long as seven years mainly by Islamic extremists, the worst hostage dramas in Iraq have had more decisive and grisly endings. Some, such as the three Japanese in April and three Turkish hostages yesterday, were freed, but others have been beheaded -- to graphic effect.

"Terrorists don`t even need the media as they once did to have impact. Technology has made it possible to put their savagery on their Web sites, which will be seen and onpassed," Hoffman said.

The United States has limited means of coping with hostage seizures or striking back. U.S. officials said they have some indications that other nations have negotiated with hostage takers or intermediaries, as happened in Lebanon in the 1980s and Latin America in the 1970s.

U.S. policy allows negotiations with hostage takers, but no concessions, leaving few options, a State Department official said.

"We hope that the world community will reject this tactic as extraordinarily inhumane and brutal so there`ll be a consensus that this crosses beyond any reasonable standard of behavior," the counterterrorism official said. "If it`s devalued, then you hope that people who have any information that can help resolve and return these people will be motivated to tell the authorities."

Researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this report.

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Chalabi, Shunted to Sidelines, Shares His Playbook for Iraq
Party Leader Emphasizes Elections, Shaking Off U.S. Tutelage

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 30, 2004; Page A12

BAGHDAD, June 29 -- Ahmed Chalabi smiled contentedly at the thought. L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator who ran Iraq like a viceroy for more than a year, was reduced to a hasty exit with a stealthy helicopter ride to the airport, seen off without fanfare by no one higher-ranking than a deputy prime minister.

"Bremer put his hand in his pocket and went to the airport ignominiously," Chalabi chortled Tuesday, the day after Bremer`s departure. "And Dan Senor with him," he added, referring to Bremer`s spokesman, who had denigrated Chalabi on television.

In essence, Chalabi was saying, Bremer is now gone, Senor is now gone and Ahmed Chalabi is not.

True, Chalabi has been disowned by the Pentagon and his other sponsors in Washington, the ones who not long ago were paying him for intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that seems to have been groundless. Thanks in part to Bremer, he also was excluded from the new government headed by his longtime rival from exile days, Ayad Allawi. And warrants or subpoenas have been issued for about 15 of his aides, including his intelligence chief, while sources in the United States, speaking anonymously, suggest he may have passed U.S. secrets to Iran. Chalabi, who was not charged, has denied any wrongdoing by himself or his associates.

Now, as the Bush administration`s efforts in Iraq enter a new phase and many key Americans have departed, Chalabi remains.

The cunning and determination that served him during more than a decade of encouraging the United States into war against Saddam Hussein have not deserted him. From headquarters in Mansour, Baghdad`s toniest neighborhood, the former exile leader, the former Washington protégé, the former Iraqi Governing Council member has taken to watching, waiting and laying closely held plans.

Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress, which once drew funds from the CIA and the Pentagon, has not gained a high profile as a political force in Iraq, but neither have the other exile groups. The INC will participate as a political party in next January`s elections, Chalabi said. But in a shirt-sleeves conversation at his expansive residence, the portly campaigner, 59, danced and jabbed relentlessly when asked about what is left of his own political ambitions.

When pressed, he cited a bit of wisdom attributed to Imam Ali, a 7th-century warrior who married a daughter of the prophet Muhammad and became a central figure of Shiite Islam: "He who seeks authority should not be given authority." In more modern terms, he said he was lying low because "people immediately ascribe to me aims and ambitions of achieving power."

Chalabi, a secular Shiite, has kept only a modest hand in public affairs since the Governing Council on which he served disbanded a month ago. He has helped organize the grand assembly convening next month to pick a quasi-legislature, and he meets regularly with the Shiite Caucus of Iraq`s Shiite political leaders. But he is the only senior figure in the U.S.-backed exile movement whose group was frozen out of the new government by the Bush administration`s political process.

Yet even from the sidelines, Chalabi said, he has clear ideas about what the Iraqi government should do -- ideas formed in years of maneuvering through the many agencies of the U.S. government. His ideas, forcefully expressed, have gotten him into trouble before, he acknowledged, generating hostility at the CIA, enraging Bremer and irritating even fellow members of the Governing Council.

The CIA had a long grudge against him, he said, because he warned that Iraqi intelligence had penetrated a 1996 coup plot supported by George J. Tenet, then deputy director of intelligence. Bremer turned against him because of his repeated insistence that Iraqis be given authority more swiftly to run their own country, Chalabi said.

It was Bremer, he said, who was behind the raid May 20 in which his office was searched for compromising documents on the strength of a warrant issued by an Iraqi judge. However, Senor, Bremer`s spokesman, said at the time that Bremer`s only connection with the case was administrative. "Ambassador Bremer doesn`t intervene in these respective cases," Senor said then, "he just handles the procedural matter of referring it."

Now things have changed. Bremer has gone home and the Bush administration has cut its ties, leaving Chalabi in Baghdad with a future just as uncertain as that of the rest of his 25 million countrymen. As the new government takes its first steps with restored political authority, there was no longer any reason not to lay out his ideas.

The first imperative, Chalabi said, is to make sure the elections scheduled for January are carried out as promised. Allawi suggested over the weekend that the voting might have to be postponed until February or March if the security situation did not improve. But he swiftly disavowed the idea of delay the next day, recognizing the issue`s sensitivity in a country repeatedly told that democracy had arrived.

The next priority should be to shake off U.S. tutelage and show Iraqis they have a government that really is in charge of the country, Chalabi declared. Even if the departure of U.S. troops is not a practical possibility, he said, the Iraqi government should display as much authority as it can under the circumstances.

"This is a quandary," he acknowledged. "The Iraqi government needs to assert itself as an Iraqi government, independent of the Americans, but it has to rely on the Americans to assert itself."

As he and many Iraqis acknowledge, Iraq`s army and security services have not acquired the numbers or ability to confront violent resistance to U.S. occupation. As a result, the 141,000 U.S. troops and about 25,000 other foreign forces in Iraq will be in charge of security for the foreseeable future.

Allawi has few tools to back up his repeated pledges to crack down on the anti-occupation underground, Chalabi said, but he should move swiftly to give Iraqi security forces visibility on the streets. "At this time, the government doesn`t have the power, but it has to show that it is doing it."

A good place to start, Chalabi suggested, would be with the new Iraqi National Intelligence Service set up by the CIA to replace Hussein`s much-feared services. The new intelligence apparatus, hundreds strong, was organized in secret without a known budget or statute, he said.

The director, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, was recruited by the CIA station in the Jordanian capital Amman after he fled Iraq in 1991, Chalabi said, and has been a favorite ever since. A member of Iraq`s Turkmen minority, Shahwani reports directly to the prime minister but is closely supervised by CIA officers, Chalabi added. Under their guidance, the service has turned much of its focus toward neighboring Iran, he said.

According to a report prepared in April by knowledgeable officials for members of the now-disbanded Governing Council, the service roster is two-thirds Sunni Muslim and one-fourth Shiite in a country that is about 60 percent Shiite, giving rise to fears that the new service has incorporated many former members of Hussein`s Sunni-dominated services.

"This won`t fly here," Chalabi said.

Next, Chalabi said, the new government should grab control of the country`s finances. Specifically, he said, it should demand a full accounting of how Bremer, who had check-signing authority, spent funds from the Development Fund for Iraq, a pool of cash from Iraqi oil sales designated to pay for reconstruction.

KPMG, the firm contracted to do an audit, issued an interim report recently complaining that lack of cooperation from Bremer`s Coalition Provisional Authority was preventing it from meeting a June 30 deadline.

In addition, Chalabi said, the U.S. Embassy, which replaced the occupation authority on Monday, has sought power to disburse some of the funds even though political authority has been returned to the Iraqi government. Allawi`s government should insist that the money flow exclusively through the Iraqi Finance Ministry, Chalabi said.

Another step the government should take to show Iraqis that it is in charge is to shed the American and other foreign advisers who remain in some ministries, he said. These advisers have largely left such ministries as education and housing, but remain in others, such as defense and interior.

Finally, Chalabi suggested, Allawi and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari should make sure that they, not the United States, determine Iraqi foreign policy.

Iraq has a long history of Arab nationalism and support for Palestinians against Israel, dating from before Hussein`s Baath Party took over in 1968. As a result, its foreign policy, if tradition and popular sentiment are followed, could end up being adversarial with that of the Bush administration.

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How Polarization Sells

By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, June 30, 2004; Page A21

Let me raise a red flag about the "red and blue states," which is the reigning theory of U.S. politics. All those blue states (heavily urban and mainly on the East and West coasts) voted for Al Gore. The red states (more rural, Southern and Western) voted for George Bush. Presto, the map defines us. We`re a country geographically "polarized" by values and lifestyles. This is a masterful explanation for the increasing nastiness of politics, with only one big drawback. It`s wrong.

No one denies that the nastiness is real. It stems partly from the unfolding presidential campaign, the spreading doubt about Iraq and the intense personal contempt many feel for President Bush. But the nastiness preceded these causes -- it existed all through the Clinton years -- and almost certainly will survive them. Why?

If the country were more polarized, you`d expect to find it in the polls. You don`t. After scouring surveys, sociologist Paul DiMaggio of Princeton University concluded that "the public actually has become more unified in attitudes toward race, gender and crime since the 1970s." One standard poll item asks respondents to react to this statement: "I don`t have much in common with people of other races." In 1987, 23 percent agreed; by 2002, only 15 percent did. Of course, strong disagreements (on abortion, for instance) remain. But these disguise large areas of consensus; 80 percent or more of Americans regularly support environmental regulation.

What`s even more absurd is the idea that regions have -- after jet travel, interstate highways, air conditioning, TV and mass migration -- become more different. Texas and New York have more in common now than in 1950 or 1960.

Perhaps party programs have diverged? Not so. On many issues, the parties broadly agree. In practice, both favor bigger government and lower taxes (and aren`t embarrassed by the contradiction). President Bush pushed through the Medicare drug benefit, the largest new entitlement since 1965. John Kerry supports most of Bush`s tax cuts -- except those for taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000. Both parties favor environmentalism, precisely because support is widespread. Both parties ignore the looming budget costs of retiring baby boomers.

To be sure, differences exist, but they often involve critical details, not grand philosophy.

The red and blue states make a pretty graphic. But in 19 states, the victor in the 2000 presidential election won with about 51 percent of the vote or less; small shifts would have reversed the outcomes. Then the graphic and its message -- geographic polarization -- would be ruined.

What`s actually happened is that politics, and not the country, has become more polarized. By politics, I mean elected officials, party activists, advocates, highly engaged voters and commentators (TV talking heads, pundits). In his search for polarization, sociologist DiMaggio examined many subgroups by age, race, sex and education. None exhibited more polarization, with one exception: people who identified as "strong" Republicans or Democrats. That`s about 30 percent of adults.

Similarly, members of Congress are more polarized: Democrats are more liberal, Republicans are more conservative and "moderates" are scarcer. Political scientist Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego says that members of Congress have "moved further apart [ideologically] than . . . at any time since before World War I."

Congressional polarization has many causes. Republican advances in the South pulled the party from its moderate Northeastern tradition. In the 1950s, 37 percent of House Republicans came from the Northeast, reports Jacobson; now 17 percent do. For Democrats, the opposite has occurred. Fewer conservative Southerners make the party more liberal. Meanwhile, redistricting by both parties has created ever-safer seats. In 1992, Jacobson estimates, 281 House seats were safe; by 2002, the number was 356. Candidates appeal less to centrist voters. In Congress, both parties have adopted confrontational tactics.

The result is a growing disconnect between politics -- and political commentary -- and ordinary life. Politics is increasingly a world unto itself, inhabited by people convinced of their own moral superiority: conspicuously, the religious right among Republicans; and upscale liberal elites among Democrats. Their agendas are hard to enact because they`re minority agendas. So politicians instinctively focus on delivering psychic benefits. Each side strives to make its political "base" feel good about itself. People should be confirmed in their moral superiority.

Polarization and nastiness are not side effects. They are the game. You feel good about yourself because the other side is so fanatical, misguided, corrupt and dishonest. Because real differences between party programs have narrowed, remaining differences are exaggerated. Drab policy debates become sensational showdowns -- one side or the other is "destroying" the schools, the environment or the economy. Every investigation aims to expose the other side`s depravity: One side`s Whitewater becomes the other`s Halliburton.

Entertainment and politics merge, because both strive to satisfy psychic needs. Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore are more powerful political figures than most senators, because they provide more moral reinforcement. Politicians, pundits and talking heads all heed the same logic: By appealing to their supporters` strongest passions and prejudices, they elevate their standing. Of course, much of this is essential to legitimate debate. But it`s also a marketing strategy and a formula for power. Stridency sells, because, for many, polarization feels good.

Politics should reflect and, at its best, conciliate the nation`s differences. Increasingly, it does the opposite. It distorts, amplifies and inflames conflicts. It`s a turnoff to vast numbers of centrist voters who do not see the world in such uncompromising absolutes. This may be the real polarization: between the true believers on both sides and everyone else.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
Embedded Filmmaker Who Shot "Fahrenheit 9/11" Iraq Footage Describes Humiliation and Sexual Abuse of Iraqi Families in U.S. Raids

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/29/1420223

Watch 256k stream

http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2004/june/vide…

Swedish-Iraqi filmmaker Urban Hamid, who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq for two and a half months, describes Iraqis being bound, hooded, humiliated and sexually abused by U.S. troops in neighborhood raids. The rarely-seen footage is broadcast on Democracy Now![includes transcript] Michael Moore`s new film Fahrenheit 9-11 has been shattering box office record for a documentary and is being credited by some with boosting public interest in current events in Iraq. The film deals extensively with the build-up to the war, as well as the occupation as well.

In producing the film, Moore relied on a number of independent filmmakers on the ground in Iraq to get much of the footage he uses to paint a picture of the occupation. One of the filmmakers who provided Moore with some disturbing footage is in our studio today.

* Urban Hamid, independent filmmaker who recently returned from Iraq. His footage of U.S. troops taunting and humiliating Iraqi prisoners appears in Michael Moore`s latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: He`s Urban Hamid, independent filmmaker, recently returned from Iraq. His footage of U.S. troops taunting and humiliating Iraqi prisoners is extremely graphic. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

URBAN HAMID: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: It`s good to have you with us. How long were you in Iraq?

URBAN HAMID: For that particular time, about two-and-a-half months.

AMY GOODMAN: And altogether?

URBAN HAMID: Altogether, I think we`re looking at about six months now.

AMY GOODMAN: That you have been there?

URBAN HAMID: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You were embedded with U.S. troops?

URBAN HAMID: Just for that particular time when I, you know, filmed the raids and whatnot. Otherwise, I have not been, and I`m totally independent.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe one of these raids. Describe where you got some of this graphic footage, and if you could graphically describe it -- because we`re broadcasting on television and radio -- so for those who won`t be able to see it now.

URBAN HAMID: This particular footage is from December 12. It`s shot in Sumara, which is part of what`s called the so-called Sunni triangle. And what you can see is, to me, extremely disgusting and horrible, because we can see how American soldiers go into a house early in the morning, and with no respect for the people, for the women, for the men. I think we can all sort of put ourselves into their shoes: what it would feel like if people came into our house speaking a foreign language with weapons and just sort of took over the house. I think we can all relate to that.

AMY GOODMAN: I`m looking at a man who has got a cane and he is trying to walk and has a hood over his head, and now a number of Iraqis who have something on their heads. What is it that has been put on their heads?

URBAN HAMID: Well, this is a plastic bag that they put over their heads, and it`s part of -- as far as I`m concerned -- the process of humiliating the Iraqis. I think we can all relate to what it would feel like to be totally isolated from what`s going on: not knowing what`s going on, just hearing the sounds of the American soldiers yelling orders in English, being pushed around. It`s just horrible. And I saw this. They were used, as you know, the whole time, even when they put people in Humvees and in trucks and in APCs. They put these hoods on their heads and they were -- It must have been extremely difficult to breathe and whatnot.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you feel filming?

URBAN HAMID: I beg your pardon?

AMY GOODMAN: How did you feel filming?

URBAN HAMID: Of course, you are sick to your stomach, but you also know that you have to film, because this is something that everybody has to know. We have to know what our boys are doing in our names in Iraq. I felt that, you know, in spite of how sick and horrible I felt, I had to go on. I`m still dealing with this sort of trauma, of course: feeling that I couldn`t do anything, and I`m hoping that in getting this footage out, people are going to get as outraged as I was and try to stop this.

AMY GOODMAN: You have very humiliating pictures: how the soldiers are dealing -- sexual abuse of prisoners. Can you describe that?

URBAN HAMID: It`s basically when U.S. soldiers touch the penis of one Iraqi man. He`s hooded, he`s on the stretcher, and totally powerless. I think we can all, you know, relate to what it would feel like to be in such a position, not being able to do anything, and, you know, totally --

AMY GOODMAN: Why are they doing this?

URBAN HAMID: It`s a way of emasculating the Iraqis. It`s a way of really, really humiliating the Iraqis. This is against human nature. This is against religion. This is against human feelings.

AMY GOODMAN: This is some of the footage that Michael has in his film, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

URBAN HAMID: Yeah. That`s correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you try to give it to the networks?

URBAN HAMID: Oh, yeah. I came to the States mid-February until mid-March and, you know, we sent out lots and lots of press releases, and nothing.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has changed? Now they`re showing the photos of Abu Ghraib.

URBAN HAMID: You know, I think that in revealing what happened in Abu Ghraib-- there was no way of stopping this. I feel that the administration felt that, well, you know, it`s out, and now we have to sort of try to at least make it look like we are doing something about this. But I really feel that it is a red herring. It`s a red herring to cover up what`s really happening in Iraq. It`s a red herring to cover up how many civilians are being killed. It’s a red herring to cover up what happened in Fallujah, where between 600 and 800 people, most of which were civilians, were killed, massacred, where the U.S. snipers shot women and children.

AMY GOODMAN: We`re talking to Urban Hamid, who is an independent filmmaker, provided some of the shocking footage in Michael Moore`s new film, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 [phone].

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A Grim Graduation Day

By Richard Cohen

The Washington Post

Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A23

The New York City schools implemented a very controversial program this year to end social promotions. One of the fail-safe points comes in the third grade, when students, for some odd reason, have to prove that they can read and do some math. It`s a good thing for the Bush administration that Mayor Mike Bloomberg was not doing Paul Bremer`s job. If so, Iraq would have been left back.

Instead, Iraq graduated to sovereignty two days early -- a ceremony accelerated not because Iraq was doing so well but because it was doing so badly. The event was a surprise, moved up and held within the U.S.-controlled Green Zone for security reasons. "You are ready now for sovereignty," Bremer declared in the straight-faced manner of a principal who has just shaken hands with an illiterate. We will, it seems, leave no child behind.

The real failure here is not Iraq`s, of course, but the Bush administration`s. It is the parent and it once set out certain goals for its progeny that, by any measure, Iraq has not met. The first and most important is security. In the week preceding the sovereignty ceremony, about 140 Iraqis were killed in terrorist attacks. A day before, a U.S. Marine was shown as a hostage and a Pakistani civilian worker, kidnapped sometime earlier, was threatened with decapitation. Iraq is by no means secure.

Nor can it stand on its own -- another goal once enunciated by the Bush administration. About 130,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, fighting an insurgency that even the Pentagon, not known for its frankness, concedes is "much stronger" than anyone anticipated. Beyond that, no one seems to know who leads it, how it is coordinated and what, besides an American exit, it really wants. To quote "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": "Who are those guys?" The insurgency clearly exists, but just who controls it -- if anyone does -- is unknown to American intelligence.

The ceremony in Baghdad is the appropriate time to pronounce the war in Iraq a failure, maybe even a debacle. Its only success was the removal of Saddam Hussein -- an ogre, yes, but one who had been largely defanged by years of U.N. sanctions, arms inspections and his own stunning incompetence. No meaningful link to al Qaeda has been established, no weapons of mass destruction have been found and no diminution of terrorism has resulted -- an astounding trifecta of failure.

In fact, as the State Department reluctantly reported, there is now more worldwide terrorism than ever before. Even Saudi Arabia, our friendly filling station, is a risky place for Americans. More successes like Iraq and Americans won`t want to travel farther than Bruce Springsteen`s Jersey shore.

Yesterday`s ceremony was propelled by both logic and politics. The first has to do with one reason for the insurgency -- the U.S. occupation. The sooner Iraqis deal with Iraqis, the better the chances that a stable government of some sort can be formed. The swiftness with which the liberation became the occupation testifies to Iraq`s low tolerance for anything that suggests Western (colonialist) interference.

But politics, too, plays a role -- the coming U.S. elections. The apparent policy of the Bush administration is to keep combat deaths to a minimum -- even if that means letting the bad guys go. It has enacted the doctrine first enunciated by Richard Nixon`s attorney general, John Mitchell, who, in paraphrase, said, "Watch what we do and not what we say." So watch when American soldiers do not clear out infestations of militia fighters, as has already been the case in Fallujah. That might be bad for Iraq, but it`s good for Bush in November.

We all should wish the graduate well. If Iraq implodes -- civil war, etc. -- then the Middle East that Bush wants to transform into an Islamic Iowa is going to go to pieces, the final repudiation of the British Colonial Office`s grand design for the region. Already the Kurds are making noises that sound suspiciously like a declaration of independence and no one, it seems, knows what the Iranians are up to -- or what they will do if their fellow Shiites, a majority in Iraq, somehow manage to lose the promised elections. Iraq faces so many formidable problems that if it were a stock I`d sell it short.

A supposedly new Iraq was born this week, a graduate going off -- really being kissed off -- without the necessary skills. It is riven by an insurgency and burdened by an economy that Saddam Hussein ruined and war hardly helped. The insincerely proud parent of this miserable misfit is the Bush administration, whose incompetence has been staggering. Yesterday`s charade, though, is only half-done. Graduate the kid, if need be, but fail the principal.

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Detainees May Be Moved Off Cuba Base
By John Hendren
Times Staff Writer

June 30, 2004

WASHINGTON — Senior Bush administration officials are considering moving hundreds of detainees from a facility in Cuba to prisons within the United States in response to Supreme Court rulings this week that granted military prisoners access to U.S. courts, officials said Tuesday.

As attorneys for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, began preparing the first of hundreds of expected lawsuits demanding that the government justify the detentions, administration officials acknowledged that they were unprepared for a rebuke in two landmark Supreme Court decisions that rejected the military`s treatment of prisoners in the war on terrorism.

Now, after being handed the losses, the administration has been left to scramble to develop a strategy for granting hearings to detainees without having to cope with an unwieldy series of lawsuits throughout the nation.

"They didn`t really have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost," a senior Department of Defense official said on condition of anonymity. "The Justice Department didn`t have a plan. State didn`t have a plan. This wasn`t a unilateral mistake on Department of Defense`s part. It`s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan."

To avoid ferrying prisoners and government lawyers to federal courts across the country, as might be required, Pentagon and Justice Department officials said they had discussed moving all detainees to a military prison in a conservative judicial district within the United States to enable the consolidation of all the proceedings in one court. They said possible locations could be Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where there is an Army base with a military prison, or Charleston, S.C., home of the Charleston Naval Weapons Station, which houses the Navy brig.

Another option would be to allow prisoners to file for writs of habeas corpus — a demand for legal justification for their imprisonment — at a makeshift court at the base in Cuba. The Supreme Court left open the possibility of such an option.

Under a third proposal offered Justice Department officials and discussed at a high-level interagency meeting Tuesday, a senior administration official said, the administration would ask Congress to designate one federal court district to try the cases — most likely Washington, D.C., or the Eastern District of Virginia, whose jurisdiction includes the Pentagon.

The changes could occur as part of a general reorganization of Guantanamo currently under consideration in which the prison facility would be revamped, with detainees segregated by the level of threat they are thought to pose, the senior administration official said.

The administration has faced months of criticism over its prisoner detention program. Critics say the issue, combined with the prison abuse scandal in Iraq and this week`s rulings, have undermined the administration`s contention that it could be trusted to offer detainees "full and fair" justice.

"The `trust us` era is over," said Joshua Dratel, a New York attorney who is representing Australian detainee David Hicks, one of three detainees who was referred Tuesday to the first military commission proceedings to be held since World War II.

Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo challenged the view that legal and military planners had failed to adequately consider major setbacks by the high court.

"We obviously were prepared for any outcomes," Corallo said. "The Defense Department was already providing some amount of process to Guantanamo prisoners. The court said that is not enough. So now we have to figure exactly what type of process will satisfy their rulings."

But administration officials apparently guessed wrong on how the high court would rule.

An internal Justice Department memo reviewed Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times outlining communications plans in response to high court rulings on the issue listed two pages of talking points to be used "in case of win," and a page of talking points to be used "in case of win if some sort of process is required" — a partial victory. Yet, there was no category for action in the event of a broad defeat in the memo, titled "Supreme Court Decision Communications Plan."

Few lawyers inside or outside the government doubted that the high court would allow the government the right to detain combatants during wartime, as has been allowed in every major war for two centuries. That option was upheld.

But the memo wrongly predicted an outright win in the case Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, involving Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man of Saudi descent captured in Afghanistan.

"The DOD/DOJ position on the detention of Hamdi will be decided in our favor as a clear-cut POW case," the memo said, although Hamdi was not held as a prisoner of war.

The memo predicted a 5-4 vote in favor of the government in Rasul vs. Bush and Al Odah vs. United States. Justices in that case, involving 16 Guantanamo detainees seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan, found in the reverse, voting 6 to 3 that military prisoners who are not U.S. citizens cannot be held without access to American courts.

The Justice Department memo assumed that the case of Rumsfeld vs. Padilla, involving Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago on suspicion of plotting to explode a radioactive device, would prove the hardest to win.

"The DOD/DOJ position on Padilla is the most tenuous and the one the court is most likely to take issue with, given that he has strong ties to the U.S.," the agency wrote.

The detainee`s claims in that case were rejected on technical grounds because justices said it was filed in the wrong court.

Defense attorneys and government officials predicted that lawyers and human rights activists would rush to obtain the identities of detainees so they could file a flurry of so-called next friend petitions on behalf of friends and families of detainees.

Because Guantanamo Bay is not within any federal court jurisdiction, prisoners held there would be allowed to seek redress from any U.S. district court, officials said. "We do expect that people will file in every district in the country. The question is: Is that within the parameters of the Supreme Court`s ruling?" said Corallo of the Justice Department. "That`s what we`ve got to figure out — would we then be forced to respond in 94 different district courts?"

A series of court cases on other matters may determine related issues in the next few years, such as whether Guantanamo prisoners can be exempted from international law and whether military commissions satisfy constitutional and international law, as the Bush administration contends.

The Pentagon on Tuesday named officers who will constitute the first commission, which will review the cases of three Guantanamo prisoners. Retired Army Col. Peter Brownback III was named presiding officer for the commission, and four other officers were assigned as commissioners. The defendants will be Hicks of Australia, Ali Hamza Ahamad Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan. No trial dates were set.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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COLUMN ONE
Indian City Rides Tech Euphoria
An outsourcing boom is altering lifestyles and landscapes in Bangalore. The explosion of wealth may not last, but no one seems too worried.
By David Streitfeld
Times Staff Writer

June 30, 2004

BANGALORE, India — High tech is king. Traffic is impossible. Real estate is soaring. The future seems a little closer than it does anywhere else.

If you ignore the occasional wandering cow, this low-slung city feels a lot like Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, when everyone was getting rich by inventing dot-coms and no one saw any reason they wouldn`t be able to do so forever.

Bangalore`s ascent is fueled by outsourcing. When a software programmer in San Jose or Seattle loses his job, this is often where it ends up. If you`ve gotten a call about switching your long-distance plan or a query about why you haven`t paid your credit card bill, there`s a good chance that call came from Bangalore.
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Like all booms, this one feels frantic and oddly fragile. The outsourcing industry is growing 30% a year, but a U.S. backlash could put on the brakes. In mid-May, Indian voters rose up in revolt against politicians who favored high tech, throwing almost all of them out in favor of pro- rural legislators. The stock market tumbled 16% in two days.

But no one appears very worried that Bangalore will replay Silicon Valley`s crash as well as its ascent. American corporations will always want to cut costs, the thinking goes, which means they`ll send increasing amounts of business here.

Anyway, the Indians have their minds on other things, like the size of their paychecks.

"I`d be willing to work for half this rate in Bhopal, where my family is, but there aren`t any jobs there," says software engineer Rohit Johri. "This place is a gold mine. It`s good for India too. Unemployed people get into trouble. They go into politics or crime."

Employed people, meanwhile, go into stores with fistfuls of rupees.

"Shopping in India used to be an ordeal," says the 28-year-old Johri. "Something as simple as a wristwatch would take three months. A scooter would take a year, a telephone two years. Those were luxuries."

Scooters, including Johri`s Kinetic Honda, now clog the streets. There`s a mobile phone shop on every block, often next to swank stores devoted to upscale lifestyles. One big emporium is called simply that, Lifestyle.

The boom in Bangalore is influencing more than fashions; it`s reshaping India`s political geography. The message of the May elections was that the hundreds of millions of Indians who were not involved in the outsourcing industry felt they were being neglected. They didn`t want to end the party, they wanted to join it.

Bangalore displays little of the overt poverty of New Delhi or Bombay, but it`s full of clashes between the old India and the new. Tommy Hilfiger shirts in the new Forum mall sell for $50. That`s more than a month`s income for many rural Indians but affordable to a programmer making $11,000 a year or even a call center employee who makes $4,000 but can spend freely because he lives with his parents.
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The tech growth in Bangalore is altering the city scene, displaying the clashes between the old India and the new.
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A billboard touting Sun Microsystems Inc.`s ability to "take you places you`ve never been before" looms over peasants who, until recently, didn`t appear to be going anywhere. Now, thanks to the needs of Sun and hundreds of other technology companies, their lives are getting a bit better too.

All these growing tech companies need new office space, much of which is still built by laborers in the traditional labor-intensive manner. The employees need places to live — every second billboard is for a new apartment complex. ("Go on," one ad urges. "Choose your dream home.") There`s a big demand for security guards to patrol these properties, and for drivers to transport people between them.

One of the most basic jobs here is driving a three-wheeled minicab. A driver named Srinivasan says he rents his vehicle for 150 rupees a day, about $3. With fares of 10 or 20 rupees, he makes $100 a month.

"Everyone`s earning so much money here, except me," Srinivasan says. "But even I`m earning a little."

S. Gopalakrishnan, chief operating officer of the second-largest Indian tech firm, Infosys Technologies, says there is a "trickle-down effect. It`s pulling people up."

A decade ago, there were an estimated 100 million members of the Indian middle class. "Now there are 300 million, and they`re buying things like crazy," Gopalakrishnan says.

National figures bear him out. New-car registrations rose 75% in 2003. Cellphone sales jumped to 25 million last year from 2 million in 2001. Sales of TV sets have quadrupled since 1996.

But like many boom towns, Bangalore`s very success is choking it. The city is growing faster than the government can improve the infrastructure. The population is up 40% over the last decade to 6.5 million. It`s now the fifth-biggest city in India.

Gridlock is perpetual. About 1.5 million vehicles are on streets designed to handle a tenth that number. Sidewalks are in poor repair, with regular gaps that cause the unwary to stumble or plunge. Power outages are so frequent that the local paper publishes a daily list of which neighborhoods are due to be hit.

All this is quite a rude shift for a city that used to be so sleepy it was known as the Pensioner`s Paradise. Afternoons were spent at the racetrack, one of the finest in India, and strolling the lovely gardens. The biggest industry was administering the local bureaucracy. "Government Work is God`s Work" was carved in stone on the imposing Raj-era state legislature building.

A more accurate version now would be "The U.S.` Work is Bangalore`s Work." Infosys took 18 years to achieve $100 million in revenue but, powered by surging U.S. demand, only five more years to hit $1 billion. When that achievement was recorded this spring, the company celebrated by giving all 25,000 employees raises of at least 10%.

"People say, `I`m dreaming about the day I`m going to buy my first Beemer,` " says Joseph Alenchery, a senior associate at Infosys, using the slang for BMW cars. "Ten years ago, they wouldn`t have known what a Beemer was, much less conceived of affording one."

Infosys develops software for such clients as Trader Joe`s, Gap Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Gateway Inc. from a rambling complex on the outskirts of town that has the flavor of a college campus, something both more relaxed and grander than mere industry. Thirty-six buildings — the newest a multimedia center in the shape of a pyramid — sprawl over a property so large that the programmers use bicycles to get around.

There`s a resort-quality swimming pool, library, recreation center, gym, golf course and a store where those working late can stock up on necessities. The grounds are lavishly green, in sharp contrast to the parched land on the other side of the fence. Out there is traditional India: shabby buildings, people cooking on open fires, crowds of people standing around, doing nothing.

Every local entrepreneur wants to develop the next Infosys, or at least start something that it might acquire. "So many guys get a little shack, put five computers in it and say, `Hey, we`re an outsourcing company,` " says Nitesh Kripalani, a veteran of several firms.

Some start-ups will go bust, but others will get bought. Transworks, the outsourcing arm of the Aditya Birla conglomerate, wants to double in size by next spring. It`s just announced it`s on the prowl, willing to pay up to $15 million for a call center that has 100 to 500 employees.

Experienced employees recognize their value and trade up. India has 40 million unemployed, but the Bangalore papers are fat with help-wanted ads that are tinged with desperation.

"Talk and walk laughing all the way to the bank," promises Vigent Info Solutions, a staffing agency looking for 400 workers immediately. ICICI OneSource, which calls its call-center workers "customer jockeys," is selling itself as "the one place that takes your dreams and turns them into reality. And lets you have fun along the way."

Mphasis, a call-center firm that has tripled in size in the last two years, is offering a bounty of about two weeks` salary to anyone who brings in a new employee. Bhaskar Menon, the company`s president, laments that demand for employees is so high that other firms regularly try to poach his staff. "Anyone with a pay slip can get 100% more money overnight," he says.

Mphasis, like other call-center firms, won`t reveal the names of its clients. That secrecy lends the industry a slightly dubious quality and underlines how all this growth is dependent on political winds on the other side of the world.

Last winter it seemed that stagnant job growth in the U.S. might suddenly kill Bangalore`s good times. As public and political outrage against outsourcing mounted, measures to curtail it were introduced in state legislatures and in Congress. When employment finally began to rise in the spring, largely defusing the controversy, no one — aside from the Bush administration — was happier than the executives here.
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Women carry their belongings across the campus that houses Infosys Technologies, the second-largest Indian tech firm, on the outskirts of Bangalore. Progeon, far left, is a unit of Infosys.
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Critics of outsourcing argue that it`s a one-way street. When U.S. companies lay off workers in favor of Indians, they say, it`s not only unpatriotic but bad for the U.S. economy. An unemployed worker can`t afford to buy much.

Bangalore, however, is full of evidence that outsourcing directly benefits the U.S. The city`s well-paid workers are taking their wages and giving them right back to U.S. as well as European companies.

The traditional shopping strip is along Mahatma Gandhi Road. The stores are single-story affairs, slightly dusty, a place where you know what you want when you come in, buy it and leave.

Bangalore Central, a six-floor mall that opened in May, is only a block away but a couple of centuries distant. People don`t just shop here, a sign proclaims, "they get shop-ertained." There`s a spot to park kids, an in-house deejay who spins music for sale and a sleek cafe to refresh the weary.

This is India`s first "seamless" mall, which means there are no walls between stores, making it more akin to a department store. Many of the 300 brands are imports: Lacoste, Reebok, Levi`s, Wrangler, Jockey, Polo and Dolce & Gabbana.

The style is imported hip. John Miller touts one of its shirts as having a "he-closes-the-deal look." Another clothing company, Theme, offers a $125 suit in its "offshore" line. Traditional Indian dress is relegated to a small "Ethnic Wear" section.

Eight more malls are in development in Bangalore. Longtime residents, though they might decry the lousy traffic and the pollution it spawns, see the benefits of all this new consumerism.

"For bathing, we used to have to heat water on a wood stove," says M.G. Raghuram, who runs a small machine-component shop. "The maintenance of the house and even cooking has become easier. There are so many electric gadgets."

But the price of a home to park those gadgets has been surging. Last December, Raghuram bought a pleasant three-bedroom house about half an hour from the city center. He paid 4 million rupees, about $87,000, which seemed like quite a bit when he remembered that his parents bought a big house in the late 1950s for $350.

Real estate agents are already telling him he could sell his new house for 6 million rupees. "It`s crazy," he says. "Real estate in Bangalore is like the stock market."

As for the actual stock market, that`s also behaving in unprecedented ways. "Quite a few people speculate," says Raghuram. "The awareness that one could become rich overnight was never there before."

That desire for instant wealth killed Silicon Valley`s boom. In India, high tech is threatened most directly by its perceived arrogance. The recent elections neatly demonstrated that threat in a way no one anticipated.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had ruled for the last four years, was expected to coast to another victory on the strength of a vibrant economy. "India Shining" was the campaign rallying cry, and it seemed no less than the truth. Not only Bangalore but Hyderabad, Pune, Bombay, Chennai and even Kolkata have turned themselves into high-tech centers.

The slogan backfired. The voters didn`t see technology as the savior of India but as a spoiled child who demands all the attention.

"It`s a bit of a danger to raise expectations. They rise faster than reality," concedes Kiran Karnik, president of the National Assn. of Software and Service Companies.

"The truth is, Karnik says, "we`ve not done much for this country. We`ve been looking outside, not inside." Software engineers have focused on products that can serve the U.S. customer better, not help the beleaguered Indian farmer.

But Karnik also defends the software industry as "a convenient scapegoat for the neglect of the poor." The entire industry, he notes, is only 800,000 people in a country of 1 billion.

The failure of "India Shining" doesn`t mean the country`s fortunes haven`t been improving, or that the poor weren`t benefiting. It just means that more people want more.

Consider the negotiations that Uma Mukherjee, a recent retiree to Bangalore, has been having with her gardener. He used to earn 3,000 rupees a month — about $65. Then he announced he was quitting unless he got 4,000.

"A few years ago," Mukherjee says, "the gardeners were only getting a thousand rupees a month."

They`re not the only ones asking for a raise. "A big house is very difficult to maintain now," Mukherjee says. "You can`t get anyone to clean or help you maintain it. Instead, they want to open a shop, or work in a restaurant or on a construction site."

The pace of that new construction, and the customers for those shops and restaurants, will depend on the continued success of outsourcing. India will have to do it better and cheaper than anyone else, which is by no means assured.

The Philippines is touting itself as a place more attuned to American ways than India, and therefore a better place to find call-center employees who will be talking to Americans all day. And the specter of China is always looming.

At the moment, however, the boom seems close to eternal. Employment in the Indian tech industry is expected to grow 150% in the next five years.

One of those new jobs is destined for the younger brother of Johri, the software engineer. Rajat has been working 14-hour days in Bhopal doing marketing for a local telecom firm. At a Bangalore call center, his hours will be shorter.

"It`s a good job, a good working environment," Rajat, 27, says by cellphone from Bhopal.

Even working the night shift — required at most call centers, because India`s night is the U.S.` day — has its advantages. He`ll be able to avoid the worst of the traffic.

But mostly, Rajat says, it comes down to this: "I`ll make good money."


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Um so ungebildeter, um so weniger politisch polarisiert. Die Lösung heißt weniger Bildung?


SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/180023_brooks30.html

Political polarization runs deep in U.S.

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

By DAVID BROOKS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

I`ve been writing about polarization a fair bit recently, and the more I look into it, the more I think I`ll just move to Tahiti. That`s because the causes of polarization -- at least among elites -- have little to do with passing arguments about the war, the Bush leadership style or the Clinton scandals. The causes are deeper and structural.

To a large degree, polarization in America is a cultural consequence of the information age. This sort of economy demands and encourages education, and an educated electorate is a polarized electorate.

In theory, of course, education is supposed to help us think independently, to weigh evidence and make up our own minds. But that`s not how it works in the real world. Highly educated people may call themselves independents, but when it comes to voting they tend to pick a partisan side and stick with it. College-educated voters are more likely than high-school-educated voters to vote for candidates from the same party again and again.

That`s because college-educated voters are more ideological. As the Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz has shown, a college-educated Democrat is likely to be more liberal than a high-school-educated Democrat, and a college-educated Republican is likely to be more conservative than a high-school-educated Republican. The more you crack the books, the more likely it is you`ll shoot off to the right or the left.

Once you`ve joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with people like yourself. And if there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it`s that we are really into self-validation.

We don`t only want radio programs and Web sites from members of our team -- we want to live around people like ourselves. Information age workers are not tied down to a mine, a port or a factory. They have more opportunities to go shopping for a place to live, and they tend to cluster in places where people share their cultural aesthetic and, as it turns out, political values. So every place becomes more like itself, and the cultural divides between places become stark. The information age was supposed to make distance dead, but because of clustering, geography becomes more important.

The political result is that Republican places become more Republican and Democratic places become more Democratic.

Between 1948 and 1976, most counties in the U.S. became more closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. In 1976, Gerald Ford, a Republican, could win most of New England and the entire Pacific Coast, and he almost won New York.

But since then we`ve been segregating politically. As Bill Bishop of The Austin American-Statesman has found, the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-quarters of us, according to Bishop, live in counties that are becoming less competitive, and many of us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.

When we find ourselves in such communities, our views shift even further in the dominant direction. You get this self-reinforcement cycle going, which social scientists call "group polarization."

People lose touch with others in opposing, now distant, camps. And millions of kids are raised in what amount to political ghettoes.

It`s pretty clear that nobody in this election campaign is going to talk much about any of this. This election apparently will be decided on the question of whether it was worth it to go to war in Iraq. That`s sucking the air out of every other issue and inducing the candidates to run orthodox, unimaginative campaigns.

Still, it`s worth thinking radically. An ambitious national service program would ameliorate the situation. If you had a big but voluntary service program of the sort that Evan Bayh, a Democrat, and John McCain, a Republican, proposed a couple of years ago, millions of young people would find themselves living with different sorts of Americans and spending time in parts of the country they might otherwise know nothing about.

It might even be worth monkeying with our primary system. The current primaries reward orthodox, polarization-reinforcing candidates. Open, non-partisan primaries might reward the unorthodox and weaken the party bases. To do nothing is to surrender to a lifetime of ugliness.

David Brooks writes for The New York Times. E-mail: [e-mail]

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Jetzt schlägt Disney staatstragend zurück. Der Film gegen den Film.

New Disney film takes different view of U.S.
`America`s Heart and Soul` a contrast to `Fahrenheit 9/11`
- John M. Hubbell, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Sacramento -- In an irony even Mickey Mouse would find hard to miss, America is about to weigh two wildly contrasting versions of itself in theaters this weekend as the Walt Disney Co. debuts its own foray into documentary filmmaking right alongside Michael Moore`s "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- which the studio refused to release.

Disney officials insist their 88-minute film, "America`s Heart and Soul" -- stitching simple, positive vignettes of everyday Americans with sweeping vistas and up-tempo music -- is neither a response to Moore`s politically charged hit nor any type of political statement itself.

But the studio invited the Sacramento-based conservative group Move America Forward to a screening this week a block from the Capitol, allowing its members to make the comparison to Moore`s film that the studio has refused to make. The political group`s invitation to its members praised the movie`s virtues, "unlike the negative and misleading story line of Michael Moore`s `Fahrenheit 9/11.` "

"We want everybody to see our movie," said Dennis Rice, head of publicity for Walt Disney Studios. "By definition, it has to be seen as a nonpartisan approach. We are not teamed up with anyone, let alone Move America Forward. We just want our movie to be seen in its purest form."

More diorama than documentary, the film, to be released nationwide Friday, introduces audiences to a varied collection of Americans -- from a Vermont dairy farmer to a Colorado cowpoke to the Rev. Cecil Williams, leader of San Francisco`s Glide Memorial United Methodist Church.

"I`m encouraging people to see it, but it would be a different thing if the movie is under attack," said Melanie Morgan, a KSFO-AM talk show host and vice president of the group, which formed to publicize progress in the war against terrorism it feels is underplayed in the mainstream media. "But if I perceive a direct frontal launch on it, then we`ll definitely fight back."

Already, the attack is forming. Responding to Monday`s Sacramento screening, Moore posted a statement on his Web site accusing Disney of "joining forces with the right-wing kooks who have come together to attempt to censor `Fahrenheit 9/11.` "

The film also has been shown to selected audiences with other political bents, such as the Sierra Club, and more apolitical groups, such as the Future Farmers of America, Rice said. Others noted that the marketing technique is similar to that used frequently by independent filmmakers who first look to win over a niche audience -- and recently employed by director Mel Gibson in the walk-up to the release of his controversial "The Passion of the Christ."

"It`s a great strategy, and it works," said Pat Forerro, a documentary filmmaker and cinema professor at San Francisco State University. "You go to those specialized audiences and let them do the publicity."

Though Disney states the contrary about its film, "I would argue it`s incredibly political," Forerro said. "I don`t believe that documentaries are truthful. Their goal is not to tell the truth. Their goal is to make you think. "

Moore`s "Fahrenheit 9/11" was released through Lions Gate Entertainment last weekend after Disney helped ignite controversy around the film by refusing to release it. The film, which took the top prize at this year`s Cannes Film Festival, grossed $23.9 million in its debut weekend to become the nation`s most popular film and is playing on hundreds of screens nationwide.

In contrast to its scathing critique of Bush foreign policy, the messages in "America`s Heart and Soul" -- which will begin playing on 100 screens Friday -- are more thematic, general and affirming. Besides their espoused patriotism, Puritan work ethic and shared can-do-it-ness, Disney`s mini- profile subjects give voice to no particular political philosophy. Message detection may prove a more nuanced, subjective exercise -- a bit like deconstructing "Up With People" or a Super Bowl halftime show.

"You get a horse to trust you, and you have a wonderful thing," says Roudy Roudebush, an on-the-wagon cowboy who a few minutes into the film rides his steed into a Telluride, Colo., saloon for a deep drink of water. He soon adds: "We`ve experienced being free ... because there aren`t many people, and there isn`t much government. And so it`s hard to have your freedoms even infringed a little bit. Cherish your freedom."

A young New York opera singer, Ben Cohen of "Ben & Jerry`s," and blind mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer follow suit, offering thoughts on entrepreneurialism, achieving goals and caring for family. George Woodard, prone to pick a little banjo when not milking cows with his young son in Waterbury Center, Vt., opines: "There`s nothing more important than watching a child grow up."

"If those are Republican values," said KSFO`s Morgan, who saw the film Monday, "then I`m glad to be a Republican."

But as Americans prepare for an election-year Independence Day weekend when some theaters will offer two takes on reality, some say Disney will unwittingly join with Moore to play into a political polarization they see advancing in America.

"America`s Heart and Soul" is "like Disneyland, being the antiseptic, squeaky-clean version -- no disturbing thoughts allowed," said Howard Suber, a professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television who specializes in producing and marketing. "I take it for granted that the same people who went to see `Fahrenheit 9/11` are not going to rush out and see `America`s Heart and Soul.` "

While he doubts the Disney movie will be much of a hit, author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Dale Maharidge, who conducted hundreds of interviews with average citizens nationwide for his new, pulse-taking book "Homeland," said Tuesday that Disney`s movie may prove "fiscally brilliant. Michael Moore`s work is mirror," he said, "and people don`t like to look in the mirror. "

As for the movie`s softer take on average citizens, "there is some of that Norman Rockwell America," he said, "but to focus on it at the exclusion of everything else, you`re deluding yourself, and you`re not doing a service to society. Why not talk to a Wal-Mart worker who loves America and yet works for $7 an hour and wants health care?"

In Sacramento on Monday, no one at the Move America Forward screening of "America`s Heart and Soul" saw the two films as juxtaposed, even though some had opinions on Moore`s work.

"I didn`t see it as being an answer to `Fahrenheit 9/11,` " said Paul Johnson, 26. "I thought it was cool to see average Americans you don`t normally see."

Ronni Diel, who came from Nevada City to attend the screening with her husband, Larry, agreed.

"I don`t think they compare at all," she said of the two films. "This is positive, and Michael Moore tears everything up."

E-mail John M. Hubbell at [e-mail].

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Was hilft die schöste Unabhängigkeitserklärung, wenn es kein Strom gibt.

POWER STRUGGLE
Baghdad fumes over off-on electricity -- a critical economic, political problem
- Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Baghdad -- Iraq may have regained its sovereignty, but Bashir Omin still can`t get the most basic sort of power -- electricity.

On Tuesday, like nearly every other day since the U.S. invasion, Omin`s home received an off-and-on spattering of electricity, two or three hours of power at a time followed by infuriatingly long blackouts.

Omin might be expected to get some sort of special power supply. He is, after all, the director of Baghdad`s largest power plant. But his home in a middle-class suburb suffers the same electricity problems as everyone else`s.

"There`s a schedule," Omin said, explaining how power is apportioned across the Baghdad grid. "Sometimes it`s one by five, sometimes two by four, sometimes three by three. Of course, sometimes the schedule doesn`t work. We don`t always know why."

As the new Iraqi government takes over the basic trappings of sovereign power, the lack of electricity is one of its most severe political challenges.

For millions of people in Baghdad and other cities, constant blackouts were one of the most visible signs that the U.S.-led occupation had failed to provide a better life. Now, pressure is on the new Iraqi government to get the power system up and running -- and to get the lights and air conditioners turned on.

With early-summer high temperatures already averaging about 110 degrees across much of the nation, Iraq may be losing a race between generation and demand because Iraqis` newfound taste for imported household appliances has jacked demand for power sky-high and has perpetuated blackouts. Insurgents and looters have also damaged the power grid, bombing installations, killing foreign technicians and stealing equipment.

Electricity production is generally estimated to hover between 4,000 and 4,500 megawatts a day, no more than the prewar norm of 4,500 megawatts. By contrast, California`s electrical consumption this summer is projected to be 44,000 megawatts, according to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state`s power grid.

U.S. officials hired a number of American companies, including San Francisco`s Bechtel Corp., to repair the battered electrical system and lift national production, setting a target of 6,000 megawatts by the time sovereignty was transferred -- a goal they did not meet. They now say the target will be met sometime this summer, a prediction many Iraqis view as overly optimistic.

In Baghdad, most residents get about eight hours of electricity per day, far less than the 22 hours per day they averaged under Saddam Hussein. Part of the reason is that other parts of the country, which were starved for electricity as Hussein doled out benefits to his favored tribes, are now being treated more equitably and getting more electricity. In some places, there has even been an increase in power supply.

The sharp power cutbacks in the Baghdad area illustrate Iraq`s paradox --

increased salaries and open borders have allowed average Iraqis to own more electronic gadgets and appliances than ever before, but they usually can`t enjoy them.

"I bought three air conditioners," said Omin. "I now have a (satellite) dish, a computer. I bought a new freezer. My son has a CD stereo. But most of the time we can`t do a thing with them because there`s no electricity. What are they for?"

"We`re chasing a target that`s always a little faster than us,`` said a U. S. power sector official last week, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity because of the subject`s political sensitivity.

The Bush administration has long emphasized the importance of restoring electricity in Iraq, noting its importance as political symbol and economic engine.

In 2003 and 2004, $9.2 billion was budgeted for Iraq`s electricity and petroleum sector. Analysts say that because chaos and violence have driven away international officials and contractors, less than $2 billion has been spent so far.

With power outages a part of the fabric of life in Baghdad, Iraqis have become expert at making do. Most middle-class families now have home generators, which produce enough power to run lights, a fan and a refrigerator but not an air conditioner.

So a new tradition has sprung up, invariably carried out by the male head of the family, who must leap out of bed several times during the night when the electricity suddenly begins or ends. Running out of the house into the back yard, he turns off the generator when the lights go on. When they go off, he pulls the plugs on all the major appliances to protect them from damage when the power comes back on. Surge protectors are not commonly available in Iraq, even though sudden power changes like the ones residents experience daily can fry thousands of dollars worth of gear in a flash.

In the daytime, residents check the tall smokestacks of the Doura Power Plant, where Bashir Omin works, to see how many of the four stacks are belching smoke -- a pretty accurate barometer of how much power can be expected.

On this day, only two of the stacks are smoking. Inside the plant, two of the giant steam generator units have their guts spread open, with huge, multi- ton turbines and shafts and other parts squatting on blocks awaiting repair.

Omin explains that Doura has a capacity of 790 megawatts but is producing only 230 per day. The explanation is complex and sad, and his face grows weary and his manner bored as he describes the reasons: Thirteen years of international economic sanctions on Iraq prevented most repairs and blocked modernization. Widespread looting after the war stripped away cables, switching equipment and whole transformers in nearby installations. Then came guerrilla attacks on fuel lines. Then the killings of foreign electrical technicians who were working under U.S. contracts.

There were repair supplies that did not arrive from abroad on time. Fuel oil that didn`t come from the nearby refinery. Snafus elsewhere on the Baghdad grid that caused production problems at Doura.

"The problem is the system," he said exasperatedly. "Electricity is a system; you can`t just deal with part of that system. This system has lots of problems."

As the summer grinds on, the big question is whether the periods of blackout can be shortened.

"In the past two weeks, we`ve had more than 17 attacks, and we still have electricity," said Electricity Minister Ayham Samaraei at a ceremony Saturday honoring the completion of a new power-generating turbine near Baghdad. "We will succeed in putting electricity on line, and we will succeed in providing it to all Iraqis. Those guys cannot do this forever. They will do this for a while and then get tired."

But in numerous conversations on the streets of Baghdad, Iraqis said life at home had become a source of rage.

"The Americans said they were going to give us electricity and freedom," said Hamoud Rathy, a laborer who lives in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in east Baghdad that is the home base of firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"If it doesn`t get better, I don`t know what I`ll do," he said, throwing up his hands. "We cannot live in the dark.``

E-mail Robert Collier at [e-mail].

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An Uzi Up Your Liberal Nose
Who cares if the assault-weapons ban is about to expire? The gun lobby can`t wait to blow stuff away
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Machine guns. Aren`t they just the cutest things?

And isn`t it just so sweet and fall-down uproarious how the NRA and all its knuckle-draggin` right-wing pals in the U.S. Senate are all cheering right this minute, as the much-loathed 10-year-old ban on assault weapons, the one outlawing Uzis and TEC-9 semiautomatics and AK-47s and all other way-cool manly guns that have no other purpose in this world than to annihilate crap at 200 rounds per minute, is about to expire?

Because, get this: The ban will not be renewed. It`s true. Even if that commie liberal Feinstein somehow gets it passed in the Senate, the NRA lobby has promised to keep it from ever coming up for a vote in the House, and the law will just expire and they will all cheer and slather each other in gun-barrel polish and go off and shoot stuff, because that`s the only thing that seems to give life any meaning.

Isn`t that great? To hell with logic and to hell with your kids` safety and to hell with even trying to prevent moron gangbangers and terrorist wanna-bes and imbecilic white supremacists from easily getting their hands on a nice AK-47 that can mow down a schoolyard full of tots in 10 seconds flat. Instead: Down with liberal scum who would take away our God-given right to bear nasty ultraviolent weaponry that no one anywhere can justify the existence of. Go, NRA!

What, too sarcastic? Well, hold onto your sides, because it gets even funnier. Even little gun-lovin` Bushie himself declared during the 2000 campaign that he actually supported an extension of the ban (pretty hard, even for Shrub, to defend Uzis in the wake of Columbine and 101 California, et al.), a law that outlaws 19 types of insidiously lethal weaponry, the very guns most highly prized by jittery meth-lab owners and killing-spree advocates and homophobic militia members deep in the Montana woods. Oh, and also by upstanding, white-bread NRA members. Oh my yes. They need assault weapons. Must have them. Or so they claim.

But Bush, he is just so happy. He won`t have to see that bill at all. He won`t have to sign a thing before the election and risk annoying the Bible-quotin` gun lovers of America. The NRA lobby will kill it before he even has to try to pronounce the phrase "high school gun rampage." Oh man is he ever relieved.

Because to the NRA, the rule is absolute: No gun law is a good gun law, and any ban of any kind is a slippery slope (always, always a slippery slope) until the government stomps in and takes away all your rights to do anything fun at all, and so screw the painfully obvious, skull-crushingly sad fact that allowing assault weapons back into the culture is the equivalent of allowing, say, convicted rapists loose in a sorority house.

What, too extreme? Bull. Even "normal," responsible gun owners -- and, yes, they do exist, in huge numbers -- know there is zero justification for allowing Uzis and AK-47s and their ilk back onto the market, just as there is no validation for suddenly legalizing, say, bazookas and flamethrowers and a swell grenade launcher for the Hummer. Dude! Wouldn`t that be so cool! Imagine a flame-throwing grenade-launching badass H2 with roof-mounted machine guns, barreling down I-5 and shooting up those goddamn wimpy Priuses and Mini Coopers! Ha! High five! Goddamn liberals!

Whoops, sorry. Getting carried away again. Hard not to, really. Because you simply have to love that NRA logic. It is pure genius, their insidious small-minded one-note hunk of reasoning that says banning assault weapons is just one step away from the government breaking down the door and taking away their shotguns and their Cheez Puffs and their Guns & Ammo subscription and their secret stash of gay porn.

This is the thinking. And it applies to all aspects of the frightening NRA mind-set. What, damn libs make me wear a seat belt in the car? Won`t let me breed African killer bees in my backyard? Make homemade bombs out of weed killer and turpentine? Buy cop-killer bullets at Wal-Mart? What`s next, invading my home and making my kids read feminist lit and stealing my kidneys while I sleep? I knew it! Damn liberals!

It gets better. It gets funnier. It gets sadder. Let us note how the current, about-to-expire legislation is already full of loopholes and flaws of sufficient breadth that gun manufacturers can mostly skirt the ban by making simple cosmetic changes to their guns and then selling them as something else, completely legal, even though the gun is essentially the same, ha ha suckers.

And if you are at all sentient and aware and feel even the slightest twinge of humanitarian concern for the spiritual progress of the human animal, a bitter, uncontrolled, fall-down fit of pained hilarity would seem to be the only real reaction you can possibly have.

Because if you don`t laugh it off, right now, at the bloody cosmic circus of it all, you will tear out your hair and start popping Vicodin like candy and pound a large nail into your own skull to deflect the pain, and then move to Canada, where they look down at America`s bizarre right-wing macho inbred obsession with guns and just go, oh my freaking God what the hell is wrong with you people.

And the kicker? The cutest aspect of all? There is no effort to hide it. The NRA is making not the slightest stab at concealing how their snide little lobby controls the right-wing side of the senate, nor are those same senators denying how they happily and with full enthusiastic intent suck at the bitter macho metallic tit of the gun lobby.

Simply put, they just do not care whether you know. Why? Because the Right, they still have majority control. They still make the rules, and, no matter how many Dems or progressives or commonsense Americans still think the assault-weapons ban is a good idea overall, they just don`t give a crap. The NRA is in charge. The sheer force of the gun lobby will make Uzis available again, just because they can. Don`t like it? Suck my shotgun barrel, commie liberal tree hugger. God bless America.

And, finally, here is NRA prez and noted ball of rancid cottage cheese Wayne LaPierre, talking up the sheer orgiastic joy of watching the ban expire: "I`m here to promise you that`s the end of [the ban]. It`s over. On Sept. 14, the sun will rise and it will never see the light of day again as long as we stay strong." Yes, he`s actually comparing buying Uzis and AK-47s to a sunrise. And lo, the Earth shuddered, children everywhere felt suddenly soiled and defiled and lightning, sadly, did not strike LaPierre dead on the spot.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to type this column. I am now laughing so hard at the warped hypocritical savagery of it all, at so many Republicans wailing about, you know, the necessity of war on terror and war on drugs and war on gays and war on women`s rights and war on just about everything they don`t understand, and then how they turn right around and fall prostrate in front of Mr. NRA Lobbyist and say yes yes, what this country really needs goddammit is to get those Uzis back into the hands of angry Americans.

Laughing. Laughing so very hard. Oh you poor, sad senators, lobbyists, NRA chiefs, stroking your Uzis and cheering your right to own multiple TEC-9s and not caring a whit for how anyone thinks. Or feels. Or intuits. Or loves.

Do you really not see? Do you really not understand the sad dose of malevolence your agenda pumps into the cultural bloodstream? Do you not, finally, when you go to bed at night, get hit with a white-hot realization of what comical, bleak little clowns you are? No, I suppose you don`t.

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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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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Wednesday, June 30, 2004

The New Improved Iraq

My essay about the so-called transfer of sovereignty in Iraq is now available online at In These Times. An excerpt:

The so-called transition to sovereignty for Iraq set for June 30 [actually held on June 28] has been trumpeted as a turning point by the Bush administration. It is hard to see, however, what exactly it changes. A symbolic act like a turnover of sovereignty cannot supply security, which is likely to deteriorate further as insurgents attempt to destabilize the new, weak government. The caretaker government, appointed by outsiders, does not represent the will of the Iraqi people. Some 138,000 U.S. troops remain in the country and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad will be the largest in the world, both of which bode ill for any exercise of genuine sovereignty by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

The caretaker government faces five key issues, any one of which could be destabilizing. It must jumpstart the creation of an Iraqi army that could hope to restore security. It must find a way to hold free and fair elections by next January, a difficult trick to pull off given the daily toll of bombings and assassinations. It must get hospitals, water treatment plants and other essential services back to acceptable levels. It must keep the country’s various factions from fighting one another or from pulling away in a separatist drive. And it must negotiate between religious and secularist political forces.

The issue of separatism already has arisen. The U.N. resolution that created the new government neglected to mention the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or temporary constitution passed by the Interim Governing Council under American auspices in February. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of most of Iraq’s majority Shiite population, had warned U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan against endorsing that document. The TAL calls for a secular legal code and gives the minority Kurds a veto over the permanent constitution, to be hammered out by an elected parliament in spring of 2005. Sistani objects to the Kurds’ veto. The major Kurdish leaders, for their part, worry that the United Nations and the Bush administration might go back on the promises made to the Kurds of semi-autonomy and special minority rights. Some angrily threatened to secede from Iraq if that should happen. The creation of the caretaker government, which was supposed to help resolve problems of instability, instead has provoked a major crisis with one major Iraqi ethnic group.

Early last January a member of the U.S.-appointed Interim Governing Council (IGC) in Iraq, Mahmoud Osman, gave a revealing interview to Al-Hayat of London. He said that officials of the Bush administration in Iraq had been “extremely offended” when the IGC called for U.N. involvement in the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. The administration, he explained, did not want any international actor to participate in this process; rather it wanted to reap the benefits in order to increase President Bush’s political stock in the months leading up to the November election. He added: “The fundamental issue for Iraqis is the return of sovereignty. The Americans are in a hurry for it, as well, though for their own interests. The important thing for the Americans is to ensure the reelection of George Bush. The achievement of a specific accomplishment in Iraq, such as the transfer of power, increases, in the eyes of the Republican Party, the chances that Bush will be reelected.”

In the end, Sistani and other Iraqi politicians forced Bush to involve the United Nations and to seek a Security Council resolution. He also was forced to give away far more actual sovereignty to the caretaker government than he would have liked in order to get the U.N. resolution he had not originally wanted. In particular, the U.S. military must now consult with the Iraqi government before undertaking major military actions.

But is the turnover really much of an accomplishment? All that has happened is that the Bush administration worked with special U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to appoint the four top officers of state and the cabinet ministers. This group of appointees will then be declared the sovereign government of Iraq.

Iraq already had the U.S.-appointed IGC, consisting of 25 Iraqi politicians, many of them longtime expatriates associated with significant Iraq parties or ethnic constituencies. They had in turn already appointed cabinet ministers. Why is a second appointed government better? Moreover, the overlap between the two is substantial. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a group of ex-Baath officers and officials who had fallen out with Saddam, was an influential member of the IGC. Allawi’s group engaged in terrorist actions against the Saddam regime with backing from the Central Intelligence Agency. Consequently, his emergence as prime minister is something of an embarrassment to both countries. And it was Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord that also provided false intelligence to the Bush administration and the Blair government about the dangers of Saddam’s regime.

Read the rest.

posted by Juan @ 6/30/2004 09:07:10 AM
Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Rashid Khalidi`s talk at UCLA, "Government Attacks on Area Specialists Called Disservice to U.S. Middle East Policy," is absolutely essential reading. Khalidi covers the group-think at the Pentagon, the exclusion and intimidation of State Department Middle East experts, the willful disregard by the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith crew of Middle East expertise generally, and the recent attempt to muzzle academic Middle East specialists. Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University and the author of an important recent book,
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America`s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Beacon Press, April 2004).

posted by Juan @ 6/29/2004 06:03:30 PM

3 US Marines Killed, 2 Injured; 2 Police Officers Killed in Continued Iraq Violence on Tuesday

The Associated Press reports:

Guerrillas killed three U.S. Marines and wounded two others with a roadside bomb in southeast Baghdad on Tuesday, damaging their Humvee.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US patrol in the upscale Sunni Azamiyah district. They appear not to have hurt any US soldiers, but they killed a civilian bystander, according to an anonymous source in the Iraqi ministry of the interior,

In Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a police station. They killed one police officer and one civilian, reciting verses from the Koran before firing small arms and rpgs at the police station. This detail suggests that the guerrillas are radical Salafi Sunnis. Salafis are Sunni Muslims dedicated to going back to the practice of the "pious ancestors" (al-salaf al-salih), sort of like Protestants in Christianity. They want to slough off medieval practices and commentaries. Most are peaceful, but some Salafis have turned radical and take up arms, just as there were violent Lutheran peasant rebellions in early modern Europe.

In Kirkuk, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a senior Kurdish policeman was passing. It killed one of his guards and wounded him. The police in Kirkuk are dominated by the Kurds, even though the city is 2/3s non-Kurdish (Turkmen and Arabs make up one third each of the city`s population.

In better news, guerrillas released three Turkish captives on Tuesday, saying that they had done so "for the sake of their Muslim brothers." This phraseology reflects the anger among Muslims, Iraqi or otherwise, at the guerrillas in Iraq who have killed Muslims with bombings and attacks. Apparently these radical Islamist fighters feared that killing the Turks, as they had Americans and a Korean, would dry up support for them among the Muslim population. The current Turkish government is the second most pro-Islamic Turkey has had since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, though the army and most Turkish institutions remain dedicated to the secularist principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It appears to have succeeded in appealing to the guerrillas on the basis of Islamic fellow feeling.

posted by Juan @ 6/29/2004 05:23:03 PM

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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
War News for June 30, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: US troops mortared near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis wounded in car bomb attack on Samawah police station.

Bring ‘em on: Eleven US soldiers wounded in mortar attack near Baghdad airport.

Bring ‘em on: British security contractor killed in ambush near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Two insurgents killed in attack on Baghdad police station.

Bring ‘em on: Two insurgents killed building a bomb in Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: US troops ambushed by roadside bomb near Baghdad.

NYT reports abducted Marine had deserted.

Miserable failure. “More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.”

Thailand begins troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Let freedom reign. “But the past 14 months were nothing like they`d seen - a foreign occupation that most of them considered heavy-handed and insensitive, bombings that killed thousands and maimed many more, an insurgency that often triggered harsh retaliations, and violent crime. With the spirit of the city near breaking point, Monday`s restoration of sovereignty meant little - not least because many Iraqis are convinced that it means little with 160,000 foreign troops still in the country. The woes of the past 14 months manifest themselves in multiple ways - from what people talk about to the graffiti and the lifestyle many have had to adopt. Upbeat views are rare. Grim outlooks are common.”

Basra airport won’t open as scheduled. “Capt Francis said to date no money had been spent on infrastructure but £14.6 million had been allocated by the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority to spend on buildings, a radar and air traffic control equipment.” But the good news is that the CPA organized a Baghdad chapter of the Optimists Club and bought summer-camp property for the Iraqi Boy Scouts.

Commentary

Editorial: “While piously declaring its determination to unearth the truth about Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has spent nearly two months obstructing investigations by the Army and members of Congress. It has dragged out the Army`s inquiry, withheld crucial government documents from a Senate committee and stonewalled senators over dozens of Red Cross reports that document the horrible mistreatment of Iraqis at American military prisons. Even last week`s document dump from the White House, which included those cynical legal road maps around treaties and laws against torturing prisoners, seemed part of this stonewalling campaign. Nothing in those hundreds of pages explained what orders had been issued to the military and C.I.A. jailers in Iraq, and by whom.”

Opinion: “The ceremony in Baghdad is the appropriate time to pronounce the war in Iraq a failure, maybe even a debacle. Its only success was the removal of Saddam Hussein – an ogre, yes, but one who had been largely defanged by years of U.N. sanctions, arms inspections and his own stunning incompetence. No meaningful link to al-Qaida has been established, no weapons of mass destruction have been found and no diminution of terrorism has resulted – an astounding trifecta of failure. In fact, as the State Department reluctantly reported, there is now more worldwide terrorism than ever before. Even Saudi Arabia, our friendly filling station, is now a risky place for Americans. More successes like Iraq, and Americans won’t want to travel farther than Bruce Springsteen’s Jersey Shore.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Two Maryland airmen wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Florida contractor killed in Iraq.


Note to Readers

"Today in Iraq" is one year old today. I just wanted to thank everybody who takes the time to read this blog and contribute comments. Atrios over at Eschaton is running a John Kerry Wednesday fundraiser. If you really want to help America take out the trash in November, go there and throw Kerry a few bucks. It`s worth it and I have it on very good authority Kerry will reward Atrios` fundraising by appointing him ambassador to Iraq.

For any readers who are interested, here are the latest statistics from Sitemeter. I have no idea what these numbers mean, but I present them for your edification and amusement.

VISITS

Total 289,033
Average Per Day 1,298
Average Visit Length 1:16
Last Hour 84
Today 614
This Week 9,089

PAGE VIEWS

Total 349,914
Average Per Day 1,566
Average Per Visit 1.2
Last Hour 104
Today 740
This Week 10,959


86-43-04. Pass it on.



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Looking towards November: Is rural U.S. still Bush country?
Date: Wednesday, June 30 @ 10:36:33 EDT
Topic: Conservatives And The Right

By Ken Herman and Bill Bishop, Longview News-Journal

MOOREFIELD, W.Va � In a town where a small detachment of National Guard troops recently returned safely from Iraq, that far-away conflict has become a local concern. Moorefield is festooned with patriotic bunting and yellow ribbons but also laced with new doubts about a president who carried this county in 2000 as he won a surprising victory in West Virginia.

Places such as Moorefield and Hardy County are important to President Bush because they`re rural. Without the rural vote, Bush would not have won in 2000. Unless he hangs on to those voters, he may not win in pivotal contested states this year, according to a new poll of rural voters in 17 battleground states.

Rural voters "constitute the margin of difference in those critical states, and therefore they constitute the margin of difference in the election as a whole," said Bill Greener, a consultant who normally works with Republican candidates and one of two pollsters who conducted the survey in mid-June.

Greener and Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg found that Bush`s support among rural voters in competitive states is strong but below his showing in 2000 and down from stronger backing found in a broader national poll of rural voters earlier this year.



The new survey shows Bush leading John Kerry by nine points, 51 percent to 42 percent, in the rural portions of the 17 states considered in play this election.

Nationally, rural voters support Bush by eight points, Greenberg said. At the beginning of 2004, Bush had a 15-point advantage.

The poll, provided to the Austin American-Statesman and National Public Radio, was commissioned and paid for by the Center for Rural Strategies, a nonpartisan rural advocacy group in Whitesburg, Ky.

Results were based on interviews with 536 registered voters living in rural areas and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

An ambivalence toward Bush � a softer support � is easy to find in Hardy County.

Fallout from Iraq

Jay Vetter, a chef by trade who recently opened a bed and breakfast, labels himself a probable repeat voter for Bush. But he knows folks who are less certain.

"I think (Bush) has lost a lot of votes because of what happened. Some of my close friends have told me they won`t vote for him this time that voted for him last time," he said.

What happened was Iraq. "I thought it was the right thing to do," Vetter said. "We had a dictator over there that was mean and evil, and I thought that was what we were supposed to do."

But recent news reports from Iraq don`t square with what Vetter expected.

"I guess you had this picture of celebration in the streets that was going to happen," Vetter said. "It didn`t happen that way."

Those kinds of doubts, mostly about Iraq, have changed the way Democrats and Republicans look at rural America, particularly in the so-called battleground states.

"I feel pretty certain that rural areas are more competitive" than they were in 2000, Greenberg said.

In 2000, Bush beat Gore by 11 points in rural counties in the 17 crucial states. Gore had 42 percent of the vote; Bush had 53 percent. However, in urban counties in the same 17 states, Bush received only 46.4 percent of the vote, and Gore got 50 percent.

Rural voters were essential to Bush`s victory nationally in 2000. Bush won 55.8 percent of the rural vote, building a 16-point, 3.2 million-vote advantage. Gore won the nonmetropolitan vote in only six states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont.

Connecting with Bush

Bush`s advisers understand the importance of rural America. Karl Rove, Bush`s top political hand, calls the rural vote "very important," perhaps the key to this election.

"It was a solid source of support for us last time around, and we think it is going to be a solid source again," he said.

Rove thinks Bush connects with rural America.

"He has respect for people who own the land," Rove said. "It`s essentially a very patriotic part of the country, and they like what they`ve seen in the last three years" in Bush`s handling of terrorism.

Greener said that support for Bush in 2000 was based on social issues, such as gun ownership and church membership. But in 2004, Greener said, "there`s a little different mix" in issues. People are concerned with education and the war, he said, and the election in West Virginia and other battleground states could well turn on the "durability of the social cleavage" of 2000.

The gun issue still runs like a tall fence through rural America. In the new poll, those who own more than three guns supported Bush over Kerry by 34 percentage points. Rural residents who weren`t gun owners � half the people in the Greenberg/Greener poll � backed Kerry 51 percent to 43 percent.

Greenberg concedes that "Bush is still going to win (in rural America), and it`s still going to be driven by these cultural issues. But there are chinks in the armor, and that`s largely due to Iraq."

Less love for Kerry

If rural voters are less enamored of Bush, they also haven`t warmed to Kerry. The Massachusetts senator pulls the same percentage of rural battleground voters as Gore won in 2000, and the Greenberg/Greener poll shows that the eventual Democratic nominee is less popular in these rural areas than he is nationally.

Seated behind a desk in his Moorefield insurance agency, Harold Michael talks in similar tones. Michael, a Democrat and an influential member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, said he could not back Gore in 2000 for several reasons, including his perceived support for gun control, a highly unpopular concept in West Virginia.

Michael also is worried about the war, Vice President Dick Cheney`s connection with Halliburton and that company`s contracts in Iraq. He said he "would like to vote for Kerry" but isn`t quite ready.

"I need to know a little more about him," Michael said. "I know he has been in Congress a long time, but I really don`t know much about him. I need to be comfortable with him as a leader."

The symbolic, if not catalytic, event that led to Bush`s West Virginia victory in 2000 was a rally in the southern part of the state organized by the National Rifle Association days before the election. Actor and then-NRA President Charlton Heston addressed an overflow crowd of hunters, warning them, "Our freedom has never seen greater peril or needed you more urgently to come to its defense."

Democrats say they lost West Virginia because of Gore`s inattention and a campaign run by outsiders. This year, Kerry`s top campaign officials are all from West Virginia, said Terri Giles, who took a leave from Sen. Jay Rockefeller`s office to head the campaign. The campaign`s political director comes from Sen. Robert Byrd`s office, Giles said.

"We are really taking this back to our West Virginia roots," Giles said. "We`re gearing up to do a major campaign, unlike anything anybody has seen in West Virginia since John Kennedy in 1960."

Much of the campaign � as in other battleground states � will be run in the long reaches that lie outside the cities. "This thing is probably going to be decided in places like Moorefield," Giles said.

Talking politics

In Moorefield, as in much of small-town USA, McDonald`s has replaced local Chat `n Chews as the place where locals chat and chew. Recently, Pauline Funkhouser and Joyce Wolfe, both retired, were in for coffee after a morning of church work.

Funkhouser typifies Rove`s picture of the rural voter. She offers no specifics in explaining her unwavering support for Bush, talking in personal terms about a man she has never met.

"I like him as a person, really," she said. "He is down to earth. I think he would fit in right here with us today. If he came in and sat down there, we could talk about things."

Mark McKinnon, Bush`s media strategist, likes to talk about an "instinctive attraction" for residents in rural America. It`s an asset McKinnon believes will be magnified in the race against Kerry.

"It was true with Gore. It`s more true with Kerry. People see Kerry as a big-city, Northeastern senator who has no clue about rural voters," McKinnon said, noting results from a recent focus group convened by the campaign.

"We asked voters, `How many of you can imagine George Bush filling up his own car at the gas station?` Half the respondents said they could see that happen. We asked the same about Kerry. Not a single person thought they could see John Kerry filling up his car," McKinnon said.

"That tells you people think he is elite, aloof and arrogant, and George W. Bush is more of a Bubba. Rural likes Bubba."

Ken Herman and Bill Bishop write for the Austin American-Statesman.

© 2004 Cox Newspapers, Inc. - The Longview News-Journal

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Buchanan hält sich und seine Gefolgsleute für die wahren Konservativen. Er behauptet er vertritt die politische Richtung der Republikaner, die durch Goldwater und dann auch Reagan (Baker) aus dem Programm verdrängt wurden. Dieser Traum von der amerikanischen Freiheit und Unabhängigkeit der verschwunden ist in religöser Beschränkung und staatlicher Regulierung.

The war we`re losing
Posted: June 30, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Patrick J. Buchanan
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

June 28, the day in 2004 that the Americans transferred sovereignty to Iraqis and proconsul Paul Bremer hastily departed Baghdad, is a day freighted with historic significance.

On June 28, 1914, 90 years before, Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and led, five weeks later, to World War I.

On June 28, 1919, German representatives, their country under an Allied starvation blockade, prostrate before a threat by Marshal Foch to march on Berlin, signed the Versailles treaty that ended World War I and set the stage for Hitler and World War II. Seen as an Allied triumph in 1919, Versailles proved a disaster.

Thus, it is a good time to attempt to draw up an interim profit-and-loss statement of what President Bush has accomplished in what he calls the "War on Terror." Who is winning this war?

To answer that question, we must first ask and answer antecedent questions. What is the war about? What are we fighting for? Who, exactly, is the enemy in this war? What is he fighting for?

Since 9-11, the president`s objectives have been to exact retribution for the massacre, overthrow the Taliban enablers of Osama, run al-Qaida out of Afghanistan, remove Saddam, disarm Iraq and defend America. He has attained them all. Yet, 54 percent of Americans believe invading Iraq was a mistake. The nation understands that something has gone wrong.

The nation is right. For what this war is really about is who shall rule in the Islamic world. Will it be the men who share our views and values? Or will it be True Believers who will purge that world of what they see as our odious and corrupt presence?

What our enemies seek in the great Sunni Triangle from Rabat to Chechnya to Mindanao is what the Iranian Revolution achieved: to be rid of the Americans and of rulers that they view as vile puppets of the United States, to purify their societies and to unite their world against the West.

If this is indeed the ultimate goal of the radical Islamists, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a strategic victory for the enemy.

Consider what has happened as a result of our war on Iraq. An enemy of Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam, has been removed. His secular Baath Party is gone. A vacuum has opened up in Iraq that the Islamists and their allies may one day fill. The Arab world has been radicalized and supports the Iraqi resistance in its drive to defeat and expel the Americans.

The destabilization of the Saudi monarchy through terror has begun. Rulers in Arab countries have been forced to distance themselves from the Americans if they wish to retain the support of their people. Western tourists are staying away from the Middle East, Western investment is on hold, and Western workers have begun to depart Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

"There exists today a hatred of Americans never equaled in the region," Egyptian President Mubarak told Le Monde. "In the beginning, some people thought the Americans were helping them. There was no hatred toward Americans. After what happened in Iraq, there is an unprecedented hatred, and the Americans know it."

This longtime friend added, "American and Israeli interests are not safe, not only in our region but in other parts of the world, in Europe, in America, anywhere in the world." The war on Iraq into which his neo-conservative advisers prodded the president seems to have ignited the very "war of civilizations" between Islam and America that the president said he wanted to avoid.

Raised to believe in the innate goodness of America and the nobility of her purposes, President Bush finds it hard to believe the best recruiting tool al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgents have is the presence on Iraqi soil of the U.S. soldiers he sent to "liberate" Iraq.

Of late, the president appears to have begun to understand that our presence is a primary cause of the war of resistance and that, when this phase ends, the real war, the civil war to decide which Iraqis rule in Iraq, begins. Will it be Iraqis who wish to belong to the modern world? Or Iraqis who wish to be part of the anti-American Islamic revolution?

War, Clausewitz reminded us, is but the extension of politics by other means. All wars, even wars in which terror is the weapon of choice of the enemy, are about, as Lenin said: "Who? Whom?" Who shall rule whom? And even in an Arab world where monarchs and autocrats now rule, the victors will be those who win the hearts and minds of Arab peoples.

This is the war we are losing. And to win this struggle, the United States needs to do three things that may go against the political interests of both parties: Stand up for justice for the Palestinians. Remove our imperial presence. Cease to intervene in their internal affairs.

We Americans once stood for all that. And if we go only where we are invited, we would be invited more often to come and help.



Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party�s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of the new magazine, The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national television shows, and is the author of seven books.

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Published on Wednesday, June 30, 2004 by the lnter Press Service
Clusters of Death
A global campaign is aimed at halting the use of cluster bombs, which scatter hundreds of ``bomblets`` and are responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians worldwide, most recently in Iraq. The 57 nations that stockpile these munitions reject a moratorium.
by Katherine Stapp


NEW YORK (Tierramérica) - Growing international demands to suspend the use of cluster munitions, which scatter hundreds of small ``bomblets`` over a wide area and are blamed for thousands of civilian deaths around the world, appear to be falling on deaf ears among the governments that stockpile them.

``The war in Iraq has sharpened the call for action on cluster munitions... Over a thousand Iraqis were injured or killed during the bombing and its immediate aftermath by cluster sub-munitions, or bomblets,`` said Virgil Wiebe, a legal adviser to the U.S.-based Mennonite Central Committee, one of the leading groups working for a moratorium.

``It is becoming increasingly clear that some cluster munitions should simply be banned,`` he told Tierramérica. ``These fail to explode on contact so often that they create minefields every time they are used, and ongoing civilian casualties are virtually guaranteed.``

In November, the Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC), comprising 85 groups from 42 countries met at The Hague in the Netherlands to call for a moratorium on the use, production and trade of cluster munitions, ``until their humanitarian problems have been resolved.``

The coalition includes prominent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The CMC gathering was timed to coincide with a meeting in Geneva of the parties to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a treaty that bans or restrict the use of various types of weapons that are deemed to cause unnecessary suffering or affect either soldiers or civilians indiscriminately.

A new fifth protocol was approved at the meeting that would address some of the after-affects of cluster bombs, but does not deal with targeting or use.

Only one country, Sweden, has ratified the new protocol so far. None have endorsed the call for a moratorium.

At least 57 nations currently stockpile cluster munitions, primarily the United States, Russia and China.

The ``worst culprits`` include the BLU-97 Combined Effects Munitions, used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. air force, and the Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM) used by the U.S. army in Iraq, Wiebe said.

The effects of cluster munitions were detailed in a December 2003 report by Human Rights Watch, which found that they caused more civilian casualties than any other factor in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq during March and April of that year.

``The U.S. government has not officially replied to our report,`` said Mark Hiznay, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch`s arms division.

``We have been engaged in lobbying efforts in Congress, to address the issue through the president`s budget request`` by blocking funding for new cluster munitions, said Hiznay.

However, he noted that this does not address the more than one billion sub-munitions that the U.S. has already stockpiled.

One of the main dangers of cluster bombs lies in the so-called ``dud`` munitions that fail to detonate, and can be picked up by curious civilians, often children.

The United Nations Children`s Fund (UNICEF) reports that more than 1,000 children have been injured by unexploded ordnance since the end of the Iraq war.

The British group Iraq Body Count has documented at least 200 civilian deaths in Iraq from cluster munitions, contradicting assertions in April by the U.S. chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Richard Myers, that ``there`s only been one recorded case of collateral damage from cluster munitions noted so far``.

In one of the most high-profile incidents, on March 31, 2003, a U.S. cluster munitions attack on al-Hilla in central Iraq killed at least 33 civilians and injured 109.

It is a ``terrible shame`` that only ``small numbers of representatives raise this in (the British) parliament from time to time,`` John Sloboda, the spokesman for Iraq Body Count, told Tierramérica

Sloboda stressed the importance of greater media coverage of the problem, although an analysis last year by the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that among the U.S. media at least, the issue has been largely off the radar screen.

Teams from the U.S. military and the State Department are now working to clear dud munitions from some sites in Iraq, and say they have tried to warn Iraqis about the dangers of unexploded sub-munitions by speaking at schools and town councils and putting up educational posters.

In recent years, Washington and London have also unveiled a new generation of cluster munitions that they say are more accurate and have failure rates of less than one percent. Both countries insist that cluster munitions are legitimate weapons, and refuse to remove them from their weapons arsenals.

Douglas Karas, a spokesman for the Pentagon (U.S. Defense Department) told Tierramérica that the air force used ``wind corrected munitions dispenser munitions`` in Iraq, which he said ``are very accurate to ensure they function against intended targets,`` and have ``fail safes`` so they do not dispense if the target is missed.

Further questions about civilian victims and the proposed moratorium were not addressed by Karas or by other Pentagon officials who Tierramérica consulted.

Katherine Stapp is a Tierramérica contributor. Tierramérica is a specialized news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.

© 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service

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The house always wins

23.Teil davor #18091 (22.Teil)

Jul 1, 2004

LAS VEGAS - No wonder Ocean`s Eleven, the remake of the Brat Pack classic with George Clooney and Brad Pitt was a smash hit: which red-blooded Americans in their right minds would not dream of breaking into the vault at three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously and leaving with the loot through the front door?

Vegas bills itself officially as "The City of Entertainment" - and unofficially as America`s most fabulous city. A carefully constructed public relations myth rules that while the rest of the United States is devoted to "family life and economic liberty", Vegas concentrates on the "pursuit of happiness". In Vegas, more than anywhere else in America, perception is indeed reality. But even if Vegas is the national capital of the pursuit of happiness, "a little less conversation"(Elvis) and some investigation reveals that some dudes are definitely getting happier than others.

Charge my life to my room
The whole Vegas strip can be experienced as an ultra-tacky competition over who rakes in more bucks in the sport of converting Europe (or "Yrup", in mid-America speak) into a shopping mall.

The Paris-Las Vegas casino, with its fake Eiffel Tower and opera house, almost takes the cherry in the showgirl cake ("a taste of France without leaving the States"). The fake cobblestone street, Le Boulevard, "lined with store facades designed to resemble charming country-style cottages and houses", would enrage many a Washington neo-con: the food is predictably lousy, but why aren`t there any "freedom fries" on sale?

In the average Vegas casino mogul`s Italian obsession stakes, the only one that delivers a decent "luxury experience" is the relatively discreet (for Vegas standards) Bellagio - the imitation of a deluxe belle epoque hotel on Lake Como in northern Italy. The Venetian, with its fake frescoes in the grand lobby and fake Vegas gondolas under a mini-replica of the Rialto bridge, is just plain tacky. More to the point would be to shop like a gladiator in the Forum Shops at Caesar`s Palace, which, in the imperial words of Wallace Barr, Caesar`s entertainment chief executive officer, "gives Las Vegas visitors even more reasons to make Rome their home". For those on a Russell Crowe swords-and-sandals trip and a Bush family budget, it`s even possible to buy a "timeless Tuscan setting" in the desert: the Chateau Bella villa sells for a cool US$6 million.

The MGM Grand - the largest hotel in the world, with almost 6,000 rooms - is still afflicted with a serious identity problem: it strives to be hip while its customers tend to the trailer-park variety. Gastronomically at least, the parts of Vegas that consider themselves hip seem to have solved the all-you-can-eat buffet syndrome: enough of it. Vegas is now importing great chefs such as world number two Alain Ducasse, as well as Thomas Keller, Mario Batali, Julian Serrano - the chef at Bellagio`s Picasso, Vegas` best restaurant - and even world number one Joel Robuchon, who will be hosting his own atelier at the MGM Grand next year.

Still, some things never change. Tom Jones will be singing Delilah till he`s a century old. The old guard - from the perennial Wayne Newton to the Eagles - performs never-ending comebacks, while the new guard slugs it out in the MGM Grand boxing ring. Blunt forms of Chinese torture like Celine Dion keep attracting masochistic hordes. There`s even some fine art on display - although the hordes may not distinguish a Monet at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts from a Manet.

For those who charge their life to their room and plan of escaping to a desert island before the credit card company collects, there`s always that dreamy "whoooosh" of the Bellagio dancing fountains - synchronized to Frank Sinatra or Andrea Bocelli`s Con te Partiro. It takes a planeload of high-tech equipment to make water dance in the Nevada desert, the whole thing housed in the Bellagio`s "Bat Cave". Curtis Hunton directs a team of 36 engineers through the daily shows - one every half hour until 7 pm and then one every 15 minutes until midnight. Nine main compressors supply water, taken through high-pressure air to "dizzying heights". The air creates the "whoooosh", while supershooter jets create the "boom"; everything operated from a show control room stuffed with computers and fiber-optic cables.

One can`t stop imagining a similar franchise in Baghdad`s Green Zone: that would seal the end of the insurgency. The Bellagio even collects buckets of money from the lake around the dancing fountains (people dream they may be at the Trevi Fountain in Rome). "But we donate everything to the local Red Cross," adds a politically-correct Hunton.

Vegas recently discovered the ultra-lounge - such as Tabu in the MGM Grand, self-billed as "one step ahead of the seven deadly sins". In the 1990s, Vegas was heavily sold as a family destination. Not anymore - not in the age of Survivor and Big Brother sleaze. Room service now reaches new heights in Vegas for those who prefer to order two choice blondes, private, in person and totally nude ("direct to your room in 20 minutes or less"), 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and with all major credit cards accepted.

So much fun elicits paranoia. Take, for instance, the security agent on a bike, probably on minimum wage, intercepting a heavily suspicious operation: the taking of a photograph in a Vegas parking lot. "Is this a political statement?", he asks. Echoes of Fallujah come to mind - or just another sample of the private militarization of American life.

Kirk`s house always wins
The MGM Mirage group owns the Bellagio, the MGM Grand and the Mirage - whose common vault, housed at the Bellagio, was broken in Ocean`s Eleven. The group also owns Treasure Island, the New York-New York and other minor additions such as the MGM Grand in Detroit and the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi. Now MGM Mirage has offered nearly $8 billion to buy the Mandalay Resort group - which owns, among others, Mandalay Bay (of caged tigers fame) and the fake-pyramid Luxor.

Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, 87, MGM Mirage`s boss, is bound to control more than 30 casinos and at least 36,000 hotel rooms - including more than half of all the hotel rooms in Vegas. Kerkorian, already instrumental in positioning Vegas as the world`s gambling capital, now is the undisputed king of the strip. The buck stops with Kirk. Or should that be the bucks stop with Kirk?

Vegas and war
After severe exposition to the Vegas lifestyle, it`s irresistible to examine the possible correlations between this land-of-make-believe, the charge-my-life-to-my-room syndrome, exploding cholesterol, the Western life of privilege, and the situation in Iraq. Vegas is the American apotheosis of distortion of perception, a phenomenon closely linked to distortion of information. A case can be made of a naturally good and decent American population eager to buy distorted perception and information.

Vegas became the fastest-growing major city in the US not because it is Disneyland on steroids, but because it has exploited the "sunk cost" fallacy (the more one`s invested the less likely one is to leave) with extreme success. Wily casino managers of course always fix the odds in favor of the house. This means that Vegas gamblers consistently lose to the house, and they will keep on losing forever while charging their life to their rooms.

At the "Mesopotamian casino", things are not very different. The sunk cost argument holds in the form of "we have to stay the course". After all, previous arguments failed (liberators greeted with flowers, weapons of mass destruction, a self-financing occupation, peace and democracy expanding to the Middle East, etc). American taxpayers will soon have committed $200 billion to Iraq, plus the sunk cost in casualties - even though Washington has not met a single pre-war target, save deposing an already defanged Saddam Hussein.

Pill-popping nation
And then there are all those hugely expanding waistlines. Vegas, more than America`s capital of entertainment, seems to be America`s capital of obesity.

Impeccably sipping a martini at the Tabu ultra-lounge in the MGM Grand, surrounded by a brash mob, Paris-based Dr Jean-Philippe Minart, a doctor-communicator and a fixture at every major international medical congress in different domains, has granted a few minutes between meetings to talk to Asia Times Online about America`s number one problem.

"According to the World Health Organization [WHO], in a report last March, obesity is fast becoming the number one cause of mortality, before cancer. The WHO talks of a global epidemic; at first, we thought it was a purely American problem. The main causes of obesity are the uniformization of eating habits and a sedentary way of life. This is extremely serious in the US: the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta [Georgia] has announced that in 2005 obesity will be the number one cause of mortality in the US, even worse than smoking."

Minart frames the problem in simple formulas: "The more you eat fat, the more you get obese. Just a minority of the American population exercises. Sixty-five percent of the American population is overweight." At least now there`s deep concern among medical associations. "The first to move was the American Diabetes Association, because obesity is a major factor in the risk of diabetes and hypertension, coronary artery disease and strokes," Dr Minart says.

He explains that there are "multiple metabolism factors which are altered by obesity, like cholesterol. Ten years ago, the first statin appeared on the market. Statin lowers cholesterol and saves lives. Cardiologists started to be interested in cholesterol and soon discovered the real problem - obesity." The statin drug business is a business of billions. The leading statin medicine is Lipitor - a billion-dollar drug produced by Pfeizer, the world`s number one pharmaceutical giant.

So obesity, according to Minart, is "both a real threat and a real business. The pharmaceutical business is the second-largest investor in volume behind the automobile industry in this country, where more than half of the population has no health insurance." He says "this may be the land of the hamburger - but hamburger is not good for your health. Junk food plus TV equals short life."

Now there`s something even juicier in the horizon. The first results of a new medicine that acts directly on the causes of obesity were revealed at the latest congress of the American College of Cardiology. "It has a revolutionary potential," says Minart. This latest frontier is a smart drug - a weight-loss pill. "It acts directly on the rewarding centers in the brain, so you have less stimulation. The same receptors are found in the adipocytes [fat cells]. The drug has a central action over the centers of pleasure and the adipocytes. The result: you eat less, you stop smoking and your waistline is reduced."

The whole, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry is involved in this breakthrough. "The first smart drug was Prozac. Another great example is Viagra. Prozac, Viagra and the weight-loss pill are lifestyle drugs." Sipping the last of his martini, paying no attention to the chill-out lounge music on offer, but always pointing out potential stroke victims crowding at the bar, Minart enunciates his formula for the future: "Be positive, take Prozac. Have good sex, take Viagra. Look smart, take the weight-loss pill." Cynics would argue about the side effects on the libido. The answer would be circular: take more Viagra.

America is already a pill-popping nation - and there`s many a place in Vegas, including the Tabu ultra-lounge, where patrons happily imbibe their "secstasy cocktails", Viagra included. But if a combination of Prozac, Viagra and the weight-loss pill may represent the ultimate bright future of the American consuming hordes, there`s always that nagging question of money, and where will it come from to finance so much fun?

Bring on the dancing fountains
Answering this question requires a tortuous pilgrimage through the interconnected bowels of casino-land as we look for a specialist in casino economics. We`re ultimately lucky: we find a character who is happy to talk but requires anonymity. Let`s call him Dan the Fat Cat.

Dan the Fat Cat, a very successful ad executive from Colorado via California, is a would-be candidate for the weight-loss pill. He is also a high roller. He`s in Vegas practically every other weekend and enjoys the customary perks at the Mirage. Donna Harris, director of poker operations at the Mirage, says that to play "you have to give your name at the door, get on waiting lists, know where to go for the limit you want to play". None of this for Dan the Fat Cat - he only plays high stakes in the high-roller room. He`s the quintessential poker man: familiar with nuts (an unbeatable hand), trips (three-of-a-kind), holes (the first two cards one is dealt, face down, in the game Texas Hold`Em) and flop (the first three cards on the table in Texas Hold`Em). He`s a Republican who will vote Democrat next November (John Kerry is carrying a five-point lead over Bush in Vegas at the moment).

Poker players better take Dan the Fat Cat`s message seriously: America will have to stop consuming like crazy because its economy is in trouble. "Politicians always promise the free market is our salvation and the key to our prosperity. That`s wrong, because we cannot live with an everlasting trade deficit. Last year it was almost half a trillion dollars," he says.

How does America manage? According to Dan the Fat Cat, "China, Japan and Europe lend us a fortune, so we can keep on buying more and more imports. And the trade deficit keeps growing. Imagine when they decide to stop lending. When that happens, we will have huge interest rates, a collapse in the stock market, a collapse in home prices. That`ll be the end of easy credit. I don`t need to tell you that when you have these everlasting trade deficits getting bigger and bigger, this is always interpreted as a sign of weakness."

Dan the Fat Cat, never a man to spurn a first-growth Bordeaux at a four-digit price at the Renoir restaurant in the Mirage, is nevertheless worried: "Last year we had to borrow something like $540 billion from Europe, Japan and China. We became a debtor nation in the late 1980s. Now our debt abroad is something like $3 trillion. It will be double before 2010. Some people say that when the dollar hits new lows, Americans will buy less and less imports. That`s bull. The way I see it, we are indebted to the house. And the house one day will come to collect. The house is now a bunch of countries. They hold our debt paper, they collect interest on our Treasury bonds and private bank loans. We may be a very wealthy nation, but we can`t keep spending what we don`t have and borrowing money forever. One of these days America will lose control of its destiny."

So when does the poker game end? "It ends when one of the major players decides it`s time to collect and go home. Suppose China has a banking crisis. They would have no choice except selling off their US bonds and use the proceeds to correct their financial system, and also to politically appease their masses."

Dan the Fat Cat would be branded a dangerous communist in many poker circles when he says that the American labor force is paying the price for the casino economy. "US multinationals would never allow themselves to be on the losing side, nor would the US government be able to resist them. These huge trade deficits are in large part a `gift` from the multinationals. They export and import within themselves, between US-based factories and their subsidiaries abroad. Half of US foreign trade - excluding oil - is intra-trade. That`s why trade deficits equal job losses in the US. Suppose an American multinational switches production to China: they still produce the same thing, but the labor costs are much lower and the products become imports - and that makes the trade deficit rise. But of course you know that in America the government puts the interests of multinationals way ahead of its own citizens."

After all his talk, Dan the Fat Cat sips his cappuccino and leaves - he has a game to play. He`s a moderate consumer, for American standards. He never charges his whole life to his room, and he makes sure he has kept enough collateral. He knows the house always wins, so as a rule of thumb he always collects when he`s still flush - after all, he refuses to further enrich Kerkorian, the king of the strip. As for the legions of losers, there`s always the sight of the dancing fountains of the Bellagio erupting to the sound of Sinatra.

Also in this series:

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)
The Spirit of Detroit (Jun 16, `04)
Iraq as the 51st state (Jun 18, `04)
The brown vote (Jun 23, `04)
Cops and cars, topless bars (Jun 25, `04)

(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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Distributed to Newspapers on Wednesday, June 30, 2004 by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services
Fahrenheit 9/11 Could Change History
by Mark Weisbrot


Michael Moore`s Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" was the highest-grossing documentary ever made, until his latest "Fahrenheit 9/11" beat that record in just its first few days. And now the film that Walt Disney didn`t want to distribute could set another record: the first movie to change history.

With all the media discussion that Fahrenheit 9/11 has generated, and the millions who will actually see it, the November presidential election will not have to be that close for Mr. Moore`s two-hour "op-ed," as he calls it, to make the difference. It is a powerful, moving, and brilliantly assembled op-ed, one that lays bare the rottenness, the cynicism, and the sinister deceitfulness of the Bush Administration`s manipulation of post-9/11 America.

In some ways it should not be surprising that an award-winning film could play such a big role in an election year. For some time now we have become increasingly reliant on the arts and entertainment world to give us the unvarnished truth about politics: cartoon strips like Doonesbury and more recently The Boondocks, or comedians such as Al Franken and Comedy Central`s Jon Stewart (The Daily Show). With Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry pursuing the safe strategy of letting the Bush team self-destruct, people outside of traditional political circles will be even more important sources of hard-hitting criticism.

Some of the film`s techniques are Moore`s trademark moves, as when he stalks U.S. Congressmen to try to recruit their sons and daughters for the war effort. Or circles the Capitol with an ice cream truck blasting the Patriot Act to our lawmakers, who had never bothered to read it.

He follows Marine recruiters who troll the shopping malls frequented by poor and working class kids, playing on their dreams and their lack of access to financing for education and training. And never mentioning the chance that they would not reap the benefits of enlistment if they don`t make it home alive or in one piece.

This is a major theme of the movie, and one that ought to be at the front and center of any debate over military policy. There is a vast economic and social gap between the people who have planned or supported this war, and those who are fighting it. If the children of America`s executives and professionals, rich people and Congressmen, had to fight in this war, it is doubtful that American troops would be in Iraq.

Then there is the friendly, harmless peace group in Fresno, California, that discovered they had a sheriff`s deputy in their midst -- attending their meetings as part of the government`s "anti-terrorist" efforts.

The film has ignited a firestorm of outrage on the right, as expected. But because there is little to challenge in the way of facts presented, the attack dogs have gone after Moore himself. The New York Times` columnist David Brooks, the liberal media`s favorite conservative, has tried to portray Moore as someone who hates America and is contemptuous of Americans. Others have tried to discredit him by questioning his patriotism.

But anyone who has seen his movies knows that Moore loves this country as much as anyone who has ever lived here. When Moore pokes fun at ordinary people like the Amway color analyst in "Roger and Me," or a Michigan high school kid in "Bowling for Columbine," his humor is obviously empathetic. He is, after all, a fast-food munching, TV-watching, big fat American himself -- from the heartland. He loves the people he grew up with, and when he makes fun of Americans, he`s including himself.

And in Fahrenheit 9/11, the most eloquent and convincing words come not from the narrator or from self-important officials, but from modest and unassuming people caught up in the tragedy of war and deception: A marine corporal who explains why he won`t go back to Iraq "to kill other poor people"; the father of a soldier who was killed in combat describes how it sickens him to see other people`s children still dying there, "and for what?"

That is the question that the Bush team cannot answer, and one that they must try to bury for the next four months. But with Fahrenheit 9/11 playing to sell-out crowds in towns like Fayetteville, North Carolina -- the home of Fort Bragg -- they could have a problem.

Mark Weisbrot is co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, DC.

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Defaced images of Saddam Hussein on a wall in Baghdad. The former dictator is to be arraigned today.

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July 1, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Hussein`s Trial Offers Both Peril and Promise to Iraq and U.S.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 30 — When Saddam Hussein is charged with crimes against humanity in an Iraqi court on Thursday, much more will be at stake than his own fate.

For the people of this country, the Iraqi Special Tribunal could open the door for a thorough accounting of the crimes committed by his notoriously repressive government.

For the fledgling Iraqi government, it could offer an opportunity to shore up confidence among a weary citizenry.

For the Bush administration, known for its dislike of international criminal tribunals, it could mean a chance to establish a war-crimes court it can hold up as a model.

Mr. Hussein appeared before an Iraqi court on Wednesday, after being held in American custody for seven months, but his formal trial is unlikely to begin before next year, Iraqi officials said.

With so much at stake, the proceedings carry as much promise as peril. Already, questions have come up about whether the Iraqi Special Tribunal, relying on Iraqi law and American legal expertise, can produce credible, transparent proceedings or whether the result will amount to little more than victor`s justice — or victim`s vengeance.

On the one hand, the trial of the former dictator could deliver a degree of empowerment to a country still reeling from the excesses of Mr. Hussein`s rule. On the other, it could present the defendant with a political platform of his own.

Compared with war-crimes courts from Nuremberg to Sierra Leone, the Iraqi Special Tribunal is unique in that it is not an independent international judiciary from the start. The Iraqi government has insisted on trying him in the country, under Iraqi law and by Iraqi judges. American lawyers and law enforcement agents have been dispatched to sift through the evidence against Mr. Hussein, dig up mass graves for forensic proof of his crimes and develop the prosecution strategy.

Critics say they wonder whether an Iraqi judiciary, crippled from years of isolation and repression, is up to the task of carrying out such a complex war-crimes case. They also question the degree of American influence over the entire enterprise. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading the investigation, along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and agents from the Justice Department. The American military is guarding Mr. Hussein, even as he is transferred to the legal custody of the Iraqis. Washington is financing the court.

"The tribunal, the statute, can be seen as a microcosm of the larger undertaking," said Richard Dicker, head of transitional justice for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights group. "It`s an occupation-supported effort with Iraqi judges and lawyers."

Americans guiding the process say they are taking pains to preserve independence and credibility. American expertise is needed now to rebuild a judiciary eroded under Mr. Hussein`s rule. But with time and training, they say, Iraqis will be in full control.

One American legal expert working on the tribunal said all key decisions, including what people are to be investigated, what charges are to be brought, and what evidence is to be heard, would be made by the Iraqi judges who are to sit as a panel at each trial. Eventually, he said, speaking on condition that he not be named, the Iraqi judges would probably ask the Americans to step aside.

"There clearly will be a certain time and place when the Iraqi Special Tribunal will say, `We`re up to speed, we don`t need any more help,` and that will be it, we`ll be on our way," he said.

The charges against Mr. Hussein are likely to include a range of crimes against humanity, including genocide, in connection with roughly a dozen specific incidents, from the quelling of the 1991 Shiite uprising to the 1988 poison gas attacks that killed 5,000 people in the Kurdish village of Halabja. According to the statute that established the tribunal last December, any crimes committed between July 1968 and May 2003 fall under the court`s purview.

Mr. Hussein`s lawyers have already challenged the very legitimacy of the court, created last December by the now-defunct American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

Several vital issues remain unresolved. The rules of evidence are still being drafted. A witness protection program must be developed. Potential documentary evidence lies scattered across the country, subject to tampering and loss. The widespread insurgency has made it difficult to appoint judges and prosecutors, and the handful of those who have been selected have not yet been identified, out of concern for their security. A sufficiently secure building has not yet been found to house the tribunal.

The Iraqi experiment will differ from the growing body of protocols on international criminal tribunals in important ways.

Both the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia and the corresponding body for Rwanda are seated outside the two countries, in an attempt to keep the trials from stirring further unrest. The Special Court for Sierra Leone, while it is taking place inside that country, relies on international human rights law and is made up of judges and lawyers from both Sierra Leone and outside the country. There is no prohibition, as there is here, on trying a citizen of another country.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal will rely on a mixture of international and domestic laws. "We try to meet as many international standards as we can, while keeping it a domestic tribunal," said Salem Chalabi, the administrator of the court and a nephew of the former American ally, Ahmad Chalabi.

He added that he did not want to be accused abroad of "running roughshod over rights."

Many Iraqis say they do not want Mr. Hussein to use the trial to advance his own political platform, as Slobodan Milosevic has been able to do in the tribunal in The Hague.

"Our courts will try to get a ruling as soon as possible," said Nor al-Din, an Iraqi judge who was imprisoned by Mr. Hussein`s government and will, therefore, not serve on the tribunal in the former dictator`s case. American lawyers assisting the Iraqi tribunal say Iraqi rules of procedure will give judges wide discretion to curb defendants who attempt to use the hearings for political ends.

Many Iraqis say that having a court composed of fellow Iraqis try the former dictator could provide a kind of catharsis that an international tribunal could not.

L. Paul Bremer III, the American occupation chief who left Baghdad on Monday after the formal transfer of sovereignty to Iraq, said he was deeply touched by the extent of trauma suffered by many Iraqis. Mr. Bremer said in an interview before leaving the country that Iraq`s return to normality would depend, in some measure, on finding ways to heal the psychological scars suffered under Mr. Hussein.

"These people lived in a society where any mistake was potentially fatal," Mr. Bremer said.

He recounted a dinner conversation with an Iraqi woman. In tears, the woman told him her younger brother had been taken away from his school by secret police agents after a "prank" in which he had mildly criticized Mr. Hussein. The boy was never seen again, and the woman told Mr. Bremer she was so fearful of betrayal by her own family that she waited more than 20 years, until Mr. Hussein`s capture by American troops last December, before telling her own children that she had a brother who was lost.

Concern has been expressed that defendants` rights could be prejudiced if they are tried under laws that were put on Iraq`s statute books under Mr. Hussein and then modified by the Americans. One legal expert responded by saying that changes made by the occupation authority were aimed at removing prejudicial elements, including provisions that discriminated based on ethnicity or political beliefs.

Privately, some legal experts who are independent of the tribunal worry that the new government`s rush to try Mr. Hussein could turn the effort into a high-profile political charade. One such expert here said he feared it might be undermined by violence, a fragile judiciary and the government`s "political immaturity."

"You need better security, you need better capacity, you need the new government to have seasoned a bit and to have embedded itself in the psyche of Iraqis," the expert said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 30, 2004
Federal Reserve`s Statement

Following is the statement issued by the Federal Reserve today announcing a quarter point increase in the federal funds rate.

The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to raise its target for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 1-1/4 percent.

The Committee believes that, even after this action, the stance of monetary policy remains accommodative and, coupled with robust underlying growth in productivity, is providing ongoing support to economic activity. The evidence accumulated over the intermeeting period indicates that output is continuing to expand at a solid pace and labor market conditions have improved. Although incoming inflation data are somewhat elevated, a portion of the increase in recent months appears to have been due to transitory factors.

The Committee perceives the upside and downside risks to the attainment of both sustainable growth and price stability for the next few quarters are roughly equal. With underlying inflation still expected to be relatively low, the Committee believes that policy accommodation can be removed at a pace that is likely to be measured. Nonetheless, the Committee will respond to changes in economic prospects as needed to fulfill its obligation to maintain price stability.

Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Alan Greenspan, Chairman; Timothy F. Geithner, Vice Chairman; Ben S. Bernanke; Susan S. Bies; Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.; Edward M. Gramlich; Thomas M. Hoenig; Donald L. Kohn; Cathy E. Minehan; Mark W. Olson; Sandra Pianalto; and William Poole.

In a related action, the Board of Governors approved a 25 basis point increase in the discount rate to 2-1/4 percent. In taking this action, the Board approved the requests submitted by the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Im Irak nichts Neues. Die US-Truppen suchen weiter nach einem Phantom.

July 1, 2004
U.S. Launches Airstrikes in Falluja
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:04 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. jets pounded a suspected safe house of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Fallujah on Thursday, the latest in a series of strikes against the man suspected of masterminding deadly attacks and beheadings in Iraq.

The missile strike, which a doctor in the insurgent-controlled city said killed four people, came shortly before former-dictator Saddam Hussein was to appear in an Iraqi court.

As the morning wore on Thursday, a roadside bomb exploded near the car of a senior Iraqi Finance Ministry official, slightly wounding him but killing his guard and driver, police and hospital officials said.

The bomb exploded near Yarmouk Hospital in central Baghdad, said Col. Adnan Hussein, head of the Interior Ministry`s information office. Ehsan Karim, the head of the ministry`s audit board, was driving by on his way to the office.

Karim`s guard and driver were killed, said Karima Ali Salam, a nurse at the hospital. Four bystanders were also injured.

The attack on the safe house was launched after ``multiple confirmations of Iraqi and multinational intelligence,`` said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for the multinational force.

``This operation employed precision weapons to attack the safe house and underscores the resolve of multinational and Iraqi security forces to jointly destroy terrorist networks within Iraq,`` Kimmitt said.

Kimmitt did not mention casualties in his statement, but Dr. Loai Ali of the Fallujah General Hospital said four people were killed and 10 injured. There was no word on whether al-Zarqawi was in the house.

Fallujah residents contacted by telephone said U.S. jets fired missiles at a house on the eastern side of the city.

The raid came hours after rebels fired mortar rounds at a U.S. base on the outskirts of Baghdad`s airport, wounding 11 soldiers and starting a fire that burned for more than an hour.

U.S. forces have mounted three previous airstrikes against suspected terrorist hideouts in recent days. On Friday, U.S. jets pounded a suspected al-Zarqawi hideout, killing up to 25 people, U.S. officials said.

Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant said to be connected to al-Qaida, is believed to be behind a series of coordinated attacks on police and security forces last week that killed 100 people. He is also believed to be behind the beheading of two hostages, an American and a South Korean.

U.S. authorities Wednesday increased to $25 million the reward for information leading to the arrest of al-Zarqawi, more than doubling the previous offering of $10 million. Osama bin Laden has a $50 million bounty on his head.

Fallujah is believed to have become a stronghold of the al-Zarqawi`s Tawhid and Jihad movement since Marines lifted their three-week siege in April and handed security over to a locally raised force commanded by officers from Saddam Hussein`s army.

The Tawhid and Jihad movement claimed responsibility for the beheading of American Nicholas Berg and South Korean Kim Sun-il.

Meanwhile, police slapped a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew on the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Wednesday, a day after discovering about 150 pounds of explosives in a white BMW, police Brig. Ghalib al-Jazaari said.

One Libyan man who allegedly entered Iraq from neighboring Syria to fight U.S. forces was detained over the incident, al-Jazaari said.

The police chief also said militiamen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr kidnapped 25 policemen Tuesday in Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, in response to the arrest of two of their colleagues but released 16 of them on Wednesday.

Ahmad al-Shibani, an al-Sadr spokesman, confirmed the kidnappings, but said all 25 had been freed. ``We just wanted to teach them a lesson,`` he said.

With the end of the occupation, about 160,000 foreign troops, mostly American, remain in Iraq to provide security and train Iraq`s new security services. U.S. officials have warned that the transfer of sovereignty would not stop assaults.

The United States was still looking for U.S. Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. On Tuesday, his status was changed from ``missing`` to ``captured.``

An insurgent group has claimed the kidnapping of Hassoun and has threatened to behead him unless Iraqi prisoners are released. Hassoun was shown blindfolded with a sword brandished over his head in a video aired on Al-Jazeera television.

Hassoun, of Lebanese descent, was last seen about a week before the videotape was broadcast Sunday, the military said.

``The circumstances surrounding the Marine`s absence initially indicated that he was missing,`` a statement by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said. ``However, in light of what we have observed on the terrorists` video, we have classified him as captured.``

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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Bush braucht sich keine Sorgen zu machen er wird in die Geschichte eingehen. Aber so wie es der Dean der US-Presse Helen Thomas sagte:"This is the worst president ever," she said. "He is the worst president in all of American history."
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Die Republikaner unterstützen massiv Nader, damit er Kerry Stimmen wegnimmt.

July 1, 2004
Odd Alliances Form in Efforts to Place Nader on the Ballot
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY and SARAH KERSHAW

WASHINGTON, June 30 — In his search for access to the ballot, Ralph Nader can sometimes seem as if he has never met a third party he did not like.

After all, Mr. Nader, the left-leaning consumer advocate, and Patrick J. Buchanan, the right-leaning commentator, hardly seem like political soul mates. But four years after Mr. Buchanan won the endorsement of the Reform Party, Mr. Nader has succeeded him as the party`s standard-bearer.

His alignment with the Reform Party is but one example of how Mr. Nader is facing such daunting forces to get his name on statewide ballots this year that he is seeking support from groups that do not necessarily share his long-held liberal beliefs.

Mr. Nader`s efforts have only intensified given that last weekend he was spurned by the Green Party, which endorsed him for president in 1996 and 2000.

He is also getting helping from other unexpected quarters. Democrats have sued to keep Mr. Nader off the ballot in Arizona and Illinois and may be planning a similar challenge in Texas, but Republicans and some conservative groups in Oregon, Arizona and Wisconsin are feverishly, if not cynically, mobilizing to get him on ballots in those states in a drive to siphon votes from the likely Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry.

Mr. Nader said in an interview on Wednesday that "there`s no quid pro quo" with the Reform Party or any other that would require him to alter his views.

But political analysts say that by turning to parties that may not be consistent with his ideology and reaping benefits from Republican operatives, Mr. Nader risks tarnishing his longtime reputation as a champion for consumer causes.

"He`s grasping at straws," Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, said of Mr. Nader`s alliance with the Reform Party, which drew most of its votes in the last three presidential elections from disaffected Republicans. "It suggests that this is somebody acting with a degree of desperation. He has a drive to run that propels him, irrespective of the consequences. He risks appearing to be a figure of ridicule."

So far, Mr. Nader is on the ballot in six states — Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Colorado, Kansas and Montana — because of his affiliation with the Reform Party, while David Cobb, the Green Party nominee this year, will be on at least 23.

Oregon had a nominating convention in Portland on Saturday and county officials there are still verifying the signatures gathered for Mr. Nader. State election officials said it was not at all certain whether he had enough signatures to make the ballot; the results are expected in about two weeks, they said.

Richard Winger, the publisher of the newsletter Ballot Access News, which tracks third-party fortunes, said it was common for presidential candidates outside the mainstream to seek out an alternative party for support, even one with divergent ideologies.

He cited three examples: Robert M. LaFollette, a member of the Progressive Party who in 1924 also ran under the banner of the Farmer-Labor and Socialist Parties; George Wallace, a former Democrat who ran in 1968 as the Conservative Party candidate in Kansas, where he faced a difficult petition drive; and John Anderson, an independent in 1980 who ran as a Liberal in New York.

"It`s not really weird," Mr. Winger said of Mr. Nader`s strategy. "LaFollette, he always said he wasn`t a Socialist."

The Reform Party was only one political organization Mr. Nader approached for help. In West Virginia, for example, he sought the support of the Mountain Party, a progressive group that shares many of his views on issues like election reform and universal health care. He was told the party was not interested. In California, Judy Barath-Black, chairman of the state Natural Law Party, which supports scientific and peaceful solutions to any conflict, told him there was no groundswell of support.

Shawn O`Hara, national chairman of the Reform Party, which was founded by Ross Perot, sought to play down differences with Mr. Nader. He insisted that Mr. Nader`s views were not entirely out of synch with the party as currently constructed, at least on some issues, like their mutual opposition to world trade agreements and the United States military role in Iraq.

"We`ve moved to the center," Mr. O`Hara said, while conceding that he once favored the execution of doctors and nurses who performed abortions but now embraced abortion rights as provided by federal law, as Mr. Nader does.

Even Mr. Buchanan said he found Mr. Nader`s union with the Reform party "not unexpected" inasmuch as many of Mr. Buchanan`s Reform Party followers left the party when he did after the last election.

"The Buchananites had very strong positions on social issues, but, by and large, they left," Mr. Buchanan said. "My guess is the platform has changed back."

Perhaps even more unusual is Mr. Nader`s apparently unwitting alliance with Republicans in states where a small shift in voting could swing the election to President Bush or Mr. Kerry. Conservative groups have already mobilized for Mr. Nader in Oregon as well as in Arizona, where 46 percent of the registered voters who signed petitions last month to get Mr. Nader on the ballot were Republicans, almost double the percentage of Democrats or Independents, according to a state Democratic Party lawyer.

In Wisconsin, a conservative group said it was preparing to follow Oregon`s example, by urging Republicans to sign petitions when Mr. Nader`s signature drive begins next month.

"We`ll definitely be spreading the word that we`d like to see Nader on the ballot," said Cameron Sholty, the Wisconsin state director for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative antitax group. "We`ll do phone trees and friends-of-friends, and those Nader events will be a great way to drive our membership to get out to sign petitions for Nader."

In the interview, Mr. Nader said he had not seen any evidence that Republicans had acted inappropriately and instead accused Democrats of "dirty tricks" to keep him off ballots. He said that while representatives of an antitax group encouraged Republicans to attend a meeting last Saturday in Portland, Ore., to help him collect 1,000 signatures, he said Democrats were "infiltrating" the same meeting merely to block other supporters from getting in.

Mr. Nader said Democrats crowded into a meeting hall, kept other people out and gave the false impression that they had signed petitions for him.

Democratic officials did not dispute Mr. Nader`s account.

"I felt it as my obligation due to the dirty tricks that the far right were doing to stack the seats at that convention," said Moses Ross, communications secretary for the Multnomah County Democratic Party. "I felt obliged to encourage our Democrats to do something about that."

Responding to charges that Democrats are intentionally blocking Mr. Nader`s efforts through lawsuits and other means, Jano Cabrera, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said: "We are aware that different state parties are challenging the validity of signatures Ralph Nader has gathered. While we support these efforts, we have not been asked to provide any resources or asked to participate by any state parties."

In an effort to blunt Mr. Nader`s support, Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential candidate, said Wednesday that he would debate Mr. Nader on July 9 on a program on National Public Radio.

And on Wednesday, a political watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, saying the two Oregon conservative groups — Citizens for a Sound Economy and the Oregon Family Council — were violating federal campaign laws with their actions on behalf of Mr. Nader, which amounted to illegal campaign donations.

The watchdog group, which also named the Nader and Bush campaigns in the complaint, said the cost of preparing a phone-bank script used by Citizens for a Sound Economy and the cost of the calls made to encourage members to attend the Nader convention in Portland amounted to illegal in-kind contributions by corporations prohibited by law from doing so. The complaint to the F.E.C. also said that the Bush campaign violated the law by allowing volunteers to make those telephone calls from their offices and that if the Nader campaign was aware of the effort, it, too, violated the law.

Officials with the Bush campaign said they had nothing to do with the efforts by conservatives to get Mr. Nader on state ballots, although they acknowledged that some campaign volunteers might have been lobbying voters to support the effort to get Mr. Nader on the ballot.

"No Bush-Cheney paid campaign staffers were making calls to encourage Republicans to help Ralph Nader," said Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign. "But the campaign certainly understands that when Republican volunteers see that there are Democratic volunteers trying to restrict the choice and keep Nader off the ballot, that they should work to expand the choice."

Russ Walker, Northwest director of Citizens for a Sound Economy, denied any wrongdoing. "We think it`s a frivolous complaint," he said. "It`s typical of what those types of organizations do. They`re set up to keep people from engaging in the process. They`re trying to intimidate us and it isn`t going to work."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Das ist doch mal ein Angebot für unsere Vertreter der gnadenlosen Marktwirtschaft: Tomaten aus Afghanistan!
`Tomatoes are selling for more than opium in Helmand Province.`
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July 1, 2004
Poppies Flood Afghanistan; Opium Tide May Yet Turn
By DAVID ROHDE

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 30 — So many farmers grew opium poppies in Afghanistan this spring that the opium market here is now flooded, causing prices for the illegal drug to drop by an average of 65 percent across the country, according to Afghan officials, Western diplomats and opium farmers.

While an overabundance of opium is a setback for the country in the short term, Afghan and Western officials say this year`s drop in prices may actually prove to be a boon in the effort to slow the explosive spread of opium here.

Afghanistan produces two-thirds of the world`s opium, but comparatively little of it is consumed domestically. Almost all of it winds up in Europe, where it is shipped after being processed into heroin in remote border areas and in neighboring Pakistan.

Because most of the heroin in the United States comes from Latin America and Southeast Asia, the glut of opium in Afghanistan is not expected to affect the price of heroin on American streets, said Bill Grant, a spokesman for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Experts say the high profit Afghan farmers make on opium is by far the largest incentive they have to grow the illegal crop. If prices tumble far enough and the government mounts a credible crackdown, farmers may decide that growing opium is no longer worth the risk, they say.

"There is a tremendous opportunity developing now," said a Western diplomat.

Afghan and Western officials consider the drug to be one of gravest threats to Afghanistan`s stability. Proceeds from the trade function as a powerful force pulling the country apart by corrupting local officials, strengthening regional warlords who defy the central government and financing an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency.

These officials say they must speed up efforts to introduce alternative crops in areas where farmers who grew opium this year fared poorly. They say a brief window exists to persuade impoverished Afghans that opium will no longer enrich them.

Even with the drop in prices, the scope of the country`s opium trade remains staggering. It appears that a record number of Afghan farmers, including vast numbers in areas where opium had not been grown before, chose to sow it this year.

Last year, an estimated 1.7 million Afghans, 7 percent of the country`s population, grew opium in 28 of the country`s 31 provinces. Opium generated an estimated $1 billion in 2003, roughly one-quarter of Afghanistan`s gross domestic product. Limited efforts by the Afghan government, the United States and Britain to use eradication and alternative crops to slow opium production have failed.

American and Afghan officials say the production boom was fueled by a surge in prices, creating an almost insurmountable temptation for farmers in one of the world`s poorest countries. For decades, opium prices remained comparatively low in the country, at roughly $30 a kilogram (2.2 pounds), according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. But after the Taliban enacted a brief ban on production in 2001, the prices soared to $750 a kilogram.
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Sayed Muhammad in his poppy field in Bagh-e-Afghan, 68 miles northwest of Kabul. Like many Afghans, he planted his first poppies this year.

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Eager to get in on this bonanza, farmers planted more and more opium in 2002 and 2003, according to the United Nations. Higher production brought prices down to roughly $350 a kilogram in 2002 and $283 in 2003.

This spring`s oversupply has driven the price down to an average of roughly $100 a kilogram, according to Western diplomats. In the southern province of Helmand, long a center of opium cultivation, tomatoes are selling for more, according to farmers and shopkeepers.

One Western diplomat said strong crops in the north flooded the opium market there. A handful of government raids on processing labs also appears to have made dealers nervous about buying large amounts of opium, he said. That, too, has driven down demand and prices.

In the south, the same thing appears to be happening. A trip last weekend to Helmand and Kandahar Province, another bastion of opium cultivation, confirmed a sharp drop in prices. In Kandahar, agricultural officials said the prices farmers got for their opium fell 50 percent from last year.

In Helmand, agricultural officials said two different obstacles for opium farmers. In northern Helmand, where a multiyear drought continues, a plant disease and a lack of water resulted in some fields` producing very small amounts of opium, with some farmers losing money on the year`s crop. In southern Helmand, the opium crop was very strong, but so many farmers grew it that the market was flooded, officials said.

The vast majority of profit from opium is believed to go to middlemen, processors and smugglers. Many impoverished Afghans grow it as sharecroppers — borrowing land, seeds or cash. Lower prices this year may increase their indebtedness.

Falling prices are also affecting other parts of Helmand`s economy. Merchants selling vanity items like satellite phones, televisions and refrigerators have seen sales fall this spring.

Ubaidullah, a satellite phone salesman in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, said his phone and international call sales plummeted from roughly $4,000 last spring to $1,000 this spring.

"All the people are depending on opium," he said. "If there was no opium, I don`t think I`d have one person coming to make a call."
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Tomatoes are selling for more than opium in Helmand Province.
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The unlikely winners in Helmand are farmers who looked like fools this winter. Sardar Muhammad, 22, could barely contain his glee last weekend as he explained why he chose to plant cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes and okra instead of poppies. "I was thinking no other people grow these things," he said. "So I thought I could make a lot of money."

He was right. So many farmers grew opium in the province this year that there is now a shortage of vegetables, according to farmers and shopkeepers. The price of tomatoes, okra and cucumbers have soared, while the price of opium has plummeted.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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June 30, 2004
Q&A: Iraqi reconstruction

From the Council on Foreign Relations, June 30, 2004

What`s the status of Iraqi reconstruction?

It`s advancing slowly. The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq can cite some progress as it tries to restore basic services and bring stability to Iraq: it has funded the repair of nearly 2,400 schools, introduced a new Iraqi currency, and trained thousands of new Iraqi police and soldiers. But the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)--the occupation government disbanded June 28 when power passed to Iraqis--fell short of its goals in key areas.

Where has it fallen short?

Electricity and clean water supplies are below prewar levels. Of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds appropriated by Congress in November 2003, just $333 million worth of work was completed before the transfer of sovereignty. A central goal of the reconstruction was to increase security. Over the 14 months of the occupation, however, the number of terror and insurgent attacks rose. And instead of winning Iraqi hearts and minds with new schools and services, Iraqi public opinion toward the occupation has grown increasingly negative, some experts say. "We failed to capture the Iraqi imagination and failed to get the catalytic result we supposed to get," says Frederick S. Barton, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Why didn`t things move faster?

Primarily because of the continued insecurity and violence. "Security is the sine qua non of reconstruction--without it you can`t get the other things off the ground," says Bathsheba N. Crocker, fellow and co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Progress has been set back by attacks against Iraqi and foreign contractors and sabotage of oil pipelines, water mains, and other infrastructure.

Bureaucratic red tape has also slowed work. The Project Management Office (PMO)--the branch of the CPA responsible for spending the $18.4 billion--didn`t award any contracts before March 2004. Once the contracts were awarded, it took contractors an average of a month to get on the ground in Iraq, says PMO spokesman Steve Susens. Now, he says, "they are actually moving very rapidly."

How much will reconstruction cost?

About $55 billion, according to World Bank and CPA estimates from last October. The total may rise because of continued sabotage of ongoing projects and rapidly rising security costs for contractors, experts say. Of the $55 billion, some $12.1 billion is needed to rebuild and improve the nation`s electrical system, $8 billion to refurbish the oil industry, and $6.84 billion for water and sanitation projects.

How much money has been spent on reconstruction so far?

It`s unclear, but some experts estimate total spending to be some $6 billion to $7 billion since May 2003. This estimate does not include regular operating expenditures for the Iraqi government ministries, which the CPA says have cost some $8.8 billion.

How is reconstruction financed?

Most of the government`s operating expenses and the largest share of reconstruction funds have come from Iraqi oil revenues, leftover cash from the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program, and assets captured from Saddam Hussein`s regime. These funds are consolidated into the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), which was controlled by the coalition until June 28 and is now run by the Interim Iraq Government. According to the CPA, $3.39 billion from the DFI has been spent so far on reconstruction projects.

The U.S. Congress has allocated a total of $21 billion for Iraqi reconstruction; $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2003, and $18.4 billion in fiscal 2004. Only about $1 billion of the $14 billion pledged by other nations at the Madrid Donors Conference in October 2003 has been deposited into the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq, which is managed by the World Bank and United Nations. The Japanese donated some $450 million of the money already sent in.

What is the status of electricity production?

CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer III promised in January that electricity production would reach 6,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity by June 1--the minimum level to meet Iraqi power needs. As of June 17, Iraq was producing 4,320 MW of power, according to a Pentagon status report. Iraq surpassed prewar electricity production of 4,400 MW per day when it generated 4,518 MW in October 2003. But sabotage has since taken a toll on the system. Baghdad now has an average of 11 hours of power a day; most areas in the western half of Iraq have fewer than eight hours.

What`s the status of oil production?

Iraq was producing just over 2 million barrels of crude oil per day between June 11 and 17, the latest period for which statistics are available. In March 2003, before the start of the war, production was 2.5 million barrels daily. The CPA briefly exceeded the prewar levels in April 2004, producing 2.6 million barrels per day. But, again, sabotage and dangerous conditions caused by the insurgency have curtailed output.

What`s the status of Iraqi security forces?

The CPA disbanded the Iraqi Army and other security forces in May 2003 and began to build new organizations. The CPA has done relatively well in terms of raw numbers: the Pentagon reports that 226,000 Iraqis were on duty or in training as of June 18, near Bremer`s goal of 260,000. But the forces` performance has been uneven, and many soldiers still lack training and equipment. Of the 83,789 Iraqi police on duty as of June 18, 56,913--or 67 percent--had received no training. The Iraqi Armed Forces, the national military, is one-third the size U.S. officials pledged it would be by now. There are 7,100 soldiers on duty, with another 2,630 in training, according to Pentagon totals. Other security forces include: 18,000 border police, 255 of which have received coalition-sponsored academy training; 37,800 members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, now renamed the Iraqi National Guard, which consists of locally organized units that fight insurgents with coalition forces; and 74,000 members of the Facilities Protection Service, who guard buildings and other key structures.

What`s the status of the education system?

The October 2003 joint U.N.-World Bank needs assessment found that of approximately 13,000 primary and secondary schools in Iraq, 80 percent--or 10,400--required significant reconstruction. Seven hundred needed to be completely rebuilt. In central and southern Iraq, around 200 schools were destroyed during the conflict, 2,753 were looted, and 197 burned, according to CPA figures.

To date, the CPA has renovated 2,356 schools. It has furnished 8.7 million revised textbooks, 159,000 student desks, and about 2.3 million school kits, which include pens, pencils, paper, and other supplies for Iraq`s 5.8 million school-aged children. It trained 860 secondary school "master teachers" to help them adjust to a post-Saddam curriculum; they in turn held training courses for 31,772 colleagues. There are some 288,700 primary and secondary school teachers in Iraq.

What`s the status of the water and sanitation systems?

Iraq`s 140 major water treatment facilities produced about 3 million cubic meters of clean water a day before the war. According to a report from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), they are now functioning at about 65 percent of that level, thanks primarily to "years of neglect, electricity shortages, and postwar looting of plant and emergency generators." Some 60 percent of Iraqis have consistent access to clean drinking water; the CPA aims to raise that total to at least 75 percent. Major water and sewage projects are under way, and some 4 million additional Iraqis should have access to potable water by the end of 2004, according to the CPA.

What`s the status of health care?

Improving. Some 240 hospitals and 1,200 preventative health clinics are now operating--about the same number as before the war. Since May 2003, UNICEF, working with the Iraqi Ministry of Health, has vaccinated some 3 million of the country`s 4.2 million children under the age of five against preventable diseases such as polio, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, and tuberculosis. USAID has provided three large shipments of emergency medicine and distributed high-protein supplementary food rations to more than 240,000 pregnant and nursing mothers and malnourished children.

What did the coalition accomplish regarding local government?

The CPA established 16 governorate (provincial) councils, 91 district councils, 194 city or sub-district councils, and 445 neighborhood councils, covering most of Iraq`s population, according to USAID. In some cases, council members were appointed by local U.S. military commanders or civilian contractors; in others, they were selected through informal local elections. Some $13.4 million in reconstruction funds were channeled through these councils for local infrastructure projects, USAID reports. The councils are supposed to continue to exist at least until elections in January 2005. However, with the transfer of sovereignty, their fate is unclear.

What changes were made to Iraq`s economy?

The CPA`s introduction of a new currency caused almost no disruption to the national economy. The CPA also reformed the tax code, created an independent central bank, and opened Iraq`s economy to foreign investment. The new Iraqi government may seek to revisit some of these changes. Bremer dropped his plan to privatize Iraq`s 192 state-owned industries. The Iraqi government continues to pay all the workers in those industries.

What`s the status of communications?

According to the CPA, there are now 442,000 cell phone subscribers in Iraq, compared to only a few thousand before the war. But there are fewer working land line telephones than before the war: 784,000 now, compared to 833,000 then. Internet use has exploded, with some 60,000 internet subscribers in Iraq now, compared to 2,000 in 2002.

What`s the status of transportation?

Umm Qasr, Iraq`s largest port, reopened in June 2003 and is receiving some 40 cargo ships per month, USAID reports. U.S.-funded dredging is deepening the port from 9 to 10 meters to 12.5 meters, which will allow the world`s largest ships to dock. The port`s main buildings have been renovated. The CPA is also working to revitalize civilian aviation. Included in the $18.4 billion grant from U.S. taxpayers is a provision that will reopen 120 airports throughout Iraq. So far, security concerns have kept air travel low. From May 31 to June 6, an average of nine civilian flights left Iraq daily--four from Baghdad, three from Mosul, and two from Basra.

How will the reconstruction mission change after June 28?

The U.S. side of the effort is not expected to change dramatically. The PMO will change its name to the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO), and it will continue to administer the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds. Some experts estimate it may take three to five years before the work is completed. Before the handover, the PMO reported to Lee Brownlee, the U.S. secretary of the army, and CPA head Bremer. Now, the renamed IRMO will answer to Brownlee and the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, Susens says.

Iraqis will take control of the DFI; its oil revenue is estimated at some $12 billion in 2004 and $18 billion in 2005. In addition, more countries may be willing to give foreign assistance to a sovereign Iraq, and the World Bank will be able to issue loans, says Curt Tarnoff, a foreign affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service, Congress`s public policy research arm.

Will reconstruction move forward faster after June 28?

Perhaps. Now that a lot of the bureaucratic red tape has been cut through, and some $4.7 billion in U.S. contracts for reconstruction work have been signed, "it`s possible, but it depends on security," Tarnoff says. Whether violence will increase or decrease after the transition remains to be seen. "So far, I`d give the reconstruction a C- to D+. But the next three months is when the mid-term grades will come in," says retired Army Major General William L. Nash, the director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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

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July 1, 2004
The Trial of Saddam Hussein

In Saddam Hussein`s Iraq, courts counted for nothing, while fear, death and vengeance were the only laws of the land. A new Iraq must be built on more solid foundations: democracy and the rule of law. One of the first challenges will be bringing Saddam Hussein to justice. His trial can be a significant step toward the rule of law — or a detour back to the rule of revenge. He should have a fair trial under an elected government applying the relevant principles of Iraqi and international law.

Mr. Hussein and 11 top associates will be formally charged today with crimes against humanity before a special tribunal established by the American occupation authorities last December and led by Salem Chalabi, a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi. Trying the accused properly will take many months — and not just because the accused need time to prepare a legal defense. These trials are an opportunity to unravel the mysteries and crimes of the Baathist era, including the secret mass graves and the true story of unconventional weapons programs, to determine where criminal responsibility rests in the chain of command.

The actual trials should not begin until an elected government takes power, a step planned for next January. Starting them sooner might produce political dividends for the appointed Iraqi interim government or the Bush re-election campaign. But it would not serve justice or help restore Iraq`s standing in the international community.

The 12 accused men are no longer prisoners of war. They are criminal defendants under the legal authority of Iraq`s interim government, although they remain in the physical custody of the American military for security reasons. That is acceptable as long as Baghdad wants it that way, and provided the defendants have the rights that go with their new legal status, including the chance to consult with their lawyers and safeguards against abusive interrogations. Commendably, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has promised that the men will be able to choose their own legal counsel and will not be compelled to testify against themselves. He has also suggested that Mr. Hussein`s trial is unlikely to get under way for at least several months. That should be the case for the other defendants as well.

When the cases do come to court, the lower-ranking defendants should be tried first. That will help clarify the chain of command and is ultimately likely to strengthen the case against Saddam Hussein himself. The composition of the special tribunal should be reviewed by the elected government. Political appointees, like Salem Chalabi, should be replaced by qualified, independent jurists. A panel of international jurists experienced in other cases involving crimes against humanity should advise the Iraqi judges.

Millions of Iraqi families persecuted by Mr. Hussein are impatient to see him pay for his terrible crimes. That is understandable. Under his rule, they grew up in an Iraq where revenge, not justice, was the only available recourse. Their children deserve to grow up in an Iraq where the rule of law applies impartially to all.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 1, 2004
A Move by the Fed

Well, it`s a start. Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board raised its important short-term interest rate by a mere quarter point, to 1.25 percent from its half-century low, 1 percent. The belated move still leaves Alan Greenspan and his colleagues with much work to do, as they are still in real danger of falling behind the inflationary curve. To be responsible, the Fed will have to disregard the calendar and keep raising rates in a presidential election season.

The remarkably cheap credit of the last few years has been a boon to American homeowners and consumers, one that helped stave off a more severe recession. But these rates are essentially an emergency stimulus, which is incompatible with the current healthy state of the economy. Economists say that a neutral rate, one at which the Fed is neither trying to stimulate the economy nor applying the brakes, would be in the range of 3 to 4 percent. Before yesterday, the Fed had cut the rate 13 times since the dot-com bubble burst, pulling it down to 1 percent from 6.5 percent.

Inflation, though mild, is making a comeback, and should be countered by a more powerful antidote than the Fed`s free money — its interest rate is still negative, in real terms. It`s hard to cheer a central bank`s move to make it cost more to borrow money, but central banks must act like stern parents who weather their children`s criticism because they know there`s good reason to impose discipline. Among the worst things that can happen is for the markets to conclude that the Fed isn`t firmly in charge and intent on keeping inflation at bay.

In a strengthening global economy, prices for raw materials are soaring, and businesses are feeling as if they can modestly raise prices. The falling value of the dollar — attribute that in part to the Bush administration`s disastrous fiscal policies — is also exerting inflationary pressure by driving up the price of imports.

The lagging recovery in the labor market helps explain Mr. Greenspan`s restraint. Employers started hiring again in earnest only recently, and wages are just starting to increase significantly. The impressive gains in productivity have mostly fueled corporate profits — up 41 percent since the recession ended more than two years ago, compared with a 6.3 percent bump for wages.

Wages tend to trail profits in the initial stages of an expansion, so the hope is that paychecks will improve further as unemployment declines. The bullish consumer sentiment in recent surveys suggests that people are counting on that. What they have to stop counting on is the Fed`s free money.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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July 1, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What a Rate Increase Can`t Hide
By STEVEN RATTNER

If history is any guide, yesterday`s interest rate increase of one-quarter percentage point by the Federal Reserve — the first rise in four years — will be just the first nudge up the incline of higher rates. The question is not whether rates will continue to go up, but how far and how fast.

Based on futures pricing, the bond market casino is betting on an additional percentage point (in Wall Street lingo, 100 basis points) over the balance of this year. But the unpredictability of factors that can affect interest rates means that no one, including Alan Greenspan, knows whether that bet will prove optimistic or pessimistic.

Some of what drives rates is beyond our reach. For example, when oil or other commodities spike, the Fed often responds with higher rates to prevent inflation from surging.

But other factors are well within our ability to control. Central to low interest rates — particularly long-term rates — is keeping down federal borrowing. All the debt that Washington incurs to finance our federal budget deficit pushes interest rates higher than they otherwise would be.

Some challenge that theory, particularly proponents of tax cuts, who have worked energetically to dismiss the link between interest rates and government borrowing. As proof, they note that interest rates have stayed low even in the face of mounting deficits.

But that argument falters when you look more closely. When adjusted for the minimal inflation of recent years, interest rates have not been as low as they were during some other periods of slow growth. And although they were low, they would have been lower still with less borrowing. It`s basic economics: When we want more of something, the price goes up. To deny that is to believe that the market for borrowing money is somehow different from all other markets.

Projected high deficits — which we certainly have now — can be as important as existing ones. A survey by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center of studies by leading academic economists found that 13 of the 18 papers had concluded that large anticipated deficits pushed interest rates higher. Four saw mixed effects and only one found no effect. Other research suggests that if the budget were balanced, long-term interest rates would be one to two percentage points lower.

Some experts suggest that in today`s global capital markets, the impact of our deficits on interest rates is muted. Still, even R. Glenn Hubbard, President Bush`s first chief economic adviser, has acknowledged in his research that a link remains.

When interest rates go up, business investment goes down, according to almost any basic economic textbook, including one written by N. Gregory Mankiw, President Bush`s chief economic adviser. And higher rates inflict damage on consumers not only by making mortgage costs higher, but also by depressing the value of important assets, including their homes.

Increased government borrowing, with its pernicious effect on interest rates, can, of course, result from either lower revenues or higher spending. By now, the enormous Bush tax cuts are familiar, but less attention has been paid to how they affect interest rates. Had the tax relief been more of an anti-recessionary, one-time nature, it would be phasing out now and increasing the likelihood of lower interest rates — in a sense, the best form of tax cut — for longer.

Still less familiar, perhaps, is the sorry record of the Bush years on spending: faster growth of discretionary outlays — a 33 percent increase even when the military is excluded — than during Clinton`s first three years, when non-military spending grew by 8 percent. To be sure, some of the new spending that President Bush has urged is in popular areas like education and domestic security. But isn`t it his job to find offsetting reductions elsewhere so that the government will live within its means?

In addition, the president has yet to veto his first bill or to publicly pressure or scold his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill for their lack of fiscal restraint. By contrast, conservative policy organizations have been pummeling the Bush administration for what the Heritage Foundation calls "a spending spree." Congress has been larding up legislation with local projects — for trails, visitors centers, marina repairs and planning grants by the dozen.

Business gets at least its share; for example, bills passed by the House and Senate to replace an export program that was ruled illegal have been slathered with provisions ranging from a $9.6 billion buyout for tobacco growers to $8 million in tax breaks for the archery industry. One House member called it "an orgy of self-indulgence."

Particularly damaging was the Bush administration`s decision to let lapse a somewhat obscure budgetary rule known as "pay as you go" or even more colloquially, "Paygo." Under that rule, (a bipartisan effort put in place by the President George H. W. Bush) tax cuts or expansions of entitlement programs had to be offset by trims in other costs or increases in revenue. (Other spending is supposed to be limited by caps that Congress has been ignoring.)

But the administration opposes reinstating the original Paygo rule, because it would effectively prevent Mr. Bush`s tax cuts from becoming permanent. Even Alan Greenspan, who has quite clearly conveyed his support for Paygo, acknowledged the likelihood that extending Paygo would force at least a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts.

Some who are relaxed about the deficit say that we will "grow into it," that a faster rate of growth will lead to more tax receipts and close the gap, thereby taking pressure off interest rates. But assuming current policies are continued, the government will need to borrow $5 trillion more over the next 10 years. Even one percentage point more in economic growth than is now expected — a hugely ambitious goal — would cut the $5 trillion only in half.

There are many reasons that we need to find a national consensus to reduce the budget deficit — bankrupting Medicare and Social Security, burdening our children with debt and the like — but now that we have entered a period of rising interest rates, a higher cost of borrowing for both business and consumers is perhaps the most immediate.

Steven Rattner is managing principal at the Quadrangle Group, a private investment firm.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 1, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dude, Where`s That Elite?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

You can call Michael Moore all kinds of things — loudmouthed, obnoxious and self-promoting, for example. The anorexic Ralph Nader, in what must be an all-time low for left-wing invective, has even called him fat. The one thing you cannot call him, though, is a member of the "liberal elite."

Sure, he`s made a ton of money from his best sellers and award-winning documentaries. But no one can miss the fact that he`s a genuine son of the U.S. working class — of a Flint autoworker, in fact — because it`s built right into his "branding," along with flannel shirts and baseball caps.

My point is not to defend Moore, who — with a platoon of bodyguards and a legal team starring Mario Cuomo — hardly needs any muscle from me. I just think it`s time to retire the "liberal elite" label, which, for the past 25 years, has been deployed to denounce anyone to the left of Colin Powell. Thus, last winter, the ultra-elite right-wing Club for Growth dismissed followers of Howard Dean as a "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." I`ve experienced it myself: speak up for the downtrodden, and someone is sure to accuse you of being a member of the class that`s doing the trodding.

The notion of a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite has been rebutted, most recently in Thomas Frank`s brilliant new book, "What`s the Matter With Kansas?," which says the aim is "to cast the Democrats as the party of a wealthy, pampered, arrogant elite that lives as far as it can from real Americans, and to represent Republicanism as the faith of the hard-working common people of the heartland, an expression of their unpretentious, all-American ways, just like country music and Nascar."

Like the notion of social class itself, the idea of a liberal elite originated on the left, among early 20th-century anarchists and Trotskyites who noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a "new class" of power-mad bureaucrats. The Trotskyites brought this theory along with them when they mutated into neocons in the 60`s, and it was perhaps their most precious contribution to the emerging American right. Backed up by the concept of a "liberal elite," right-wingers could crony around with their corporate patrons in luxuriously appointed think tanks and boardrooms — all the while purporting to represent the average overworked Joe.

Beyond that, the idea of a liberal elite nourishes the right`s perpetual delusion that it is a tiny band of patriots bravely battling an evil power structure. Note how richly the E-word embellishes the screeds of Ann Coulter, Bill O`Reilly and their co-ideologues, as in books subtitled "Rescuing American from the Media Elite," "How Elites from Hollywood, Politics and the U.N. Are Subverting America," and so on. Republican right-wingers may control the White House, both houses of Congress and a good chunk of the Supreme Court, but they still enjoy portraying themselves as Davids up against a cosmopolitan-swilling, corgi-owning Goliath.

Yes, there are some genuinely rich folks on the left — Barbra Streisand, Arianna Huffington, George Soros — and for all I know, some of them are secret consumers of French chardonnays and loathers of televised wrestling. But the left I encounter on my treks across the nation is heavy on hotel housekeepers, community college students, laid-off steelworkers and underpaid schoolteachers. Even many liberal celebrities — like Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem — hail from decidedly modest circumstances. David Cobb, the Green Party`s presidential candidate, is another proud product of poverty.

It`s true that there are plenty of working-class people — though far from a majority — who will vote for Bush and the white-tie crowd that he has affectionately referred to as his "base." But it would be redundant to speak of a "conservative elite" when the ranks of our corporate rulers are packed tight with the kind of Republicans who routinely avoid the humiliating discomforts of first class for travel by private jet.

So liberals can take comfort from the fact that our most visible spokesman is, despite his considerable girth, an invulnerable target for the customary assault weapon of the right. I meant to comment on his movie, too, but the lines at my local theater are still prohibitively long.

Barbara Ehrenreich will be a guest columnist for the Op-Ed page through July. Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave for three months.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 1, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Escape From the Green Zone
By MAUREEN DOWD

You`d think that President Bush would have learned by now to keep those snappy aphorisms to himself.

Gonna get Osama dead or alive.
Or neither.

Gonna smoke Osama out of his cave.
When exactly?

Bring `em on.
Please don`t.

Mission Accomplished.
Not.

Let freedom reign.
Couldn`t Karl Rove and his minions at least get that "ad-lib" right about freedom ringing?

Not gonna cut and run.
We can`t cut, but we certainly ran.

Paul Bremer scuttled out of Baghdad so fast, he didn`t even wait for the new ambassador, John Negroponte, to arrive so he could pass along some safety tips. Mr. Negroponte, assuming the most perilous diplomatic post in the world, is going to need all the security advice he can get if Iraq keeps slouching toward Islamic fundamentalism and rampant terrorism.

The administration went from Shock and Awe to Sneak and Shirk. Gotta run, guys — keep chins up and heads down. The Bush crowd pretended the country was free and able to stand on its own, even as the odd manner in which Mr. Bremer scooted away showed that it wasn`t. The president acted as if Iraq was in control, but our forces can`t come home because Iraq`s still out of control.

As Paul Bremer was sneaking out, Ahmad Chalabi, the swindler who has bilked America out of millions, was sneaking in. He was smiling from ear to ear at the swearing-in ceremony for the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi (a ceremony so secretive that coalition officials confiscated reporters` cellphones to enforce an embargo on the news for security reasons).

If Americans needed any more confirmation that they`re viewed as loathed occupiers, not beloved liberators, it came with the sad little spectacle of a hasty, heavily guarded hand-over that no Iraqi John Trumbell will memorialize in an oil painting of the Declaration of Iraqi Independence.

Dick Cheney and the neocons had once hoped for a grand Independence Day celebration, no doubt, where Saddam`s toppled statue once loomed, dreaming of a parade of Iraqi high school pep squads and the Iraqi Olympic bobsled team; sky boxes for Halliburton executives; grateful Iraqis, cheering and crying; President Bush making a surprise drop-in from the NATO summit meeting in nearby Turkey, with "Mission Accomplished" pen sets for the new government; Katie, Matt and Diane beaming it back to proud Americans.

Instead, there was no real transfer of power because there was no power to transfer. It was a virtual transfer, just the way the rationale for war was virtual and the shift of Saddam`s custody to Iraq is virtual. The Bush team is not going to trust Iraqi security to hang onto Saddam because it doesn`t even know yet whether Iraqi security can hang onto the country. With rumblings in Iraq that a strongman may be needed to tamp down the anarchy, what if the old Baathist crowd rushed to crown Saddam, instead of his foes storming the prison to "hack him to pieces," as Mr. Bremer speculated on the "Today" show?

Mr. Bremer`s escape from the Green Zone was uncomfortably reminiscent of the last days of Saigon. No one was hanging onto the skids of helicopters, but the mood was furtive, not festive. American troops are still trapped in Iraq and being killed there, and 5,600 ex-soldiers are being involuntarily recalled in America`s undeclared draft.

The White House pretended that the sovereignty was real. The administration that is loath to share information and presidential papers — even to help the 9/11 investigation find ways to make the country more secure — quickly turned over a photo of Mr. Bush`s handwritten "Let freedom reign!" comment on Condi Rice`s note to him announcing the transfer.

But it rings — or reigns — hollow in a week when Sandra Day O`Connor and the Supremes — except the Bush family fixer Clarence Thomas — slapped the commander in chief for torturing without a license. "A state of war is not a blank check for the president," the court ruled.

Still, Mr. Bremer put the best foot forward. Noting that the ex-proconsul was standing on the White House lawn still in the boots he wore with suits in Iraq, Charlie Gibson of ABC asked the escapee how he felt.

"Well, it`s like having a rather large weight lifted off my shoulders," he said. "I`m delighted to be back."

If only our soldiers could say the same.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Back home in India with his sister-in-law and nephew, Dharmapalan Ajayakumar says tap water treated with chlorine tablets he had to drink in Iraq made him sick.
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Underclass of Workers Created in Iraq
Many Foreign Laborers Receive Inferior Pay, Food and Shelter

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 1, 2004; Page A01

KOLLAM, India -- The war in Iraq has been a windfall for Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., the company that has a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services for U.S. troops. Its profits have come thanks to the hard work of people like Dharmapalan Ajayakumar, who until last month served as a kitchen helper at a military base.

But Ajayakumar, 29, a former carpenter`s assistant from this coastal town, was not there by choice.

He said he was tricked into going to Iraq by a recruiting agent who told him the job was in Kuwait. Moreover, he said, the company skimped on expenses by not providing him and other workers with adequate drinking water, food, health care or security for part of their time in the war zone.

"I cursed my fate -- not having a feeling my life was secure, knowing I could not go back, and being treated like a kind of animal," said Ajayakumar, who worked for less than $7 a day.

Working alongside Americans trying to rebuild Iraq are an estimated tens of thousands of foreign contractors without whom the reconstruction could not function. Many toil for wages that are one-tenth -- or less -- of what U.S. workers might demand, saving millions of taxpayer dollars.

The employees were hired through a maze of recruiters and subcontractors on several continents, making oversight and accountability of the workforce difficult.

Pakistan is looking into reports that recruiters were illegally trying to hire security personnel to go to Iraq. The Philippines is assessing protection measures for its nationals after attacks killed two military support workers. And India is conducting an investigation into the dining service workers` allegations.

The State Department said it received a request from India for assistance and has passed it along to the Defense Department. A spokeswoman for the Army, which manages the KBR contract, said the responsibility for the investigation rests with the company.

KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., came to employ Ajayakumar and other Indian workers through five levels of subcontractors and employment agents. The company, which employs 30,000 workers from 38 countries in support of the U.S. military, said it had been unaware of the workers` concerns until recently.

KBR spokeswoman Patrice Mingo said the company met with representatives of the Indian government to discuss the complaints. For now, there is "no substantiated proof on which to take action," Mingo said, but the company is open to discussing the matter further with current or former employees.

"KBR does not condone and will not tolerate any practice that unlawfully compels subcontract employees to perform work or remain in place against their will," Mingo said.

The reconstruction of Iraq has provided workers from developing countries with job opportunities they might otherwise never have had. But the vast difference in the recruiting, compensation, accommodations and protection of some foreigners versus their American counterparts is raising uncomfortable questions about how companies calculate the value of a life in Iraq.

South Korean engineers working on Iraq`s power grid have complained they did not get the flak jackets and helmets issued to U.S. co-workers. Some Filipino cleaners and other support workers have said they were given others` spoiled food to eat. And some of the Indian workers said they were brought in on buses with only gauze curtains to hide them from insurgents while many other contractors come into the country on chartered planes or in convoys with military escorts.

"They were working under threat and fear of death," said S. Sreejith, superintendent of police for Kollam, where the workers` complaints were first filed. American companies "are making money off of cheating our people."

Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said contractors` use of multiple layers of subcontracts makes it difficult for the U.S. government to ensure the fair treatment of the workers it effectively employs.

"The whole area of private military contractors is very murky in terms of accountability, chain of command and relationship to our mission," she said, "but as you get into subcontracting it gets murkier and murkier . . . and you can`t tell what`s going on."
Manpower Export Market

The Indian state of Kerala where Ajayakumar grew up is most famous for being the center of the international spice trade in the 16th century. Today, it`s known for its export of another important commodity: manpower.

Several million expatriates from Kerala, on the southern tip of the country, serve in the Persian Gulf region in jobs from doctors to gardeners. The money has transformed the state from a tropical backwater popularized in Arundhati Roy`s 1997 Booker Prize-winning novel "The God of Small Things" to a modern center of commerce.

Ajayakumar was thrilled when a recruiting agent came to him in June 2003 and offered to "sell" him a two-year work visa in Kuwait for a catering company job that would pay $200 a month -- five times what he was making at the carpenter`s shop. He gladly paid the agent`s $1,800 fee, borrowing from local loan sharks, calculating that he would still make out with significant profits.

In late July, Ajayakumar boarded a train for Mumbai along with several dozen other Indian workers who were recruited for contract work: Abdul Jaleel Shani, 24, who had worked at a wedding store; brothers Abdul Aziz Hamid, 30, and Abdul Aziz Shahjahan, 28, who were butchers; and Manzoor Haneefa Kunju, 29, and Aliyaru Kunju Faisil, 34, who had worked at local hotels.

There, at an employment agency called Subhash Vijay Associates, they signed some papers and were handed tickets to Kuwait.

In Kuwait City, the workers were put on a bus and told they were going to "the border."

It didn`t stop until they arrived at Q-West, a camp occupied by the 101st Airborne Division near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. There, the men became part of the largest civilian workforce supporting the U.S. military in history. Subhash Vijay had hired them to work for Gulf Catering Co. of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which was subcontracted to Alargan Group of Kuwait City, which was subcontracted to the Event Source of Salt Lake City, which in turn was subcontracted to KBR of Houston.

They were issued ID cards that said "Brown & Root."

In a typical U.S. government contract, there are no restrictions on the number and "tiers" of subcontractors that can be used -- creating situations like the one that Ajayakumar and the other Indian workers were in. The contractor, in this case KBR, often must report only the first tier of subcontractors, meaning that the government is often unaware of how its work gets done or by whom. The General Accounting Office over the past decade has raised concerns about the lack of visibility when multiple layers of subcontractors, especially foreign subcontractors, are involved, but the policy has not changed.
Unfriendly Surroundings

At Q-West, Ajayakumar and Shani worked the day shift scrubbing the floors, carrying boxes and doing other odd jobs for the dining facility. Hamid and Shahjahan worked nights chopping food and helping the cooks. They said they were terrified by the frequent gunfire and mortar and rocket attacks, but what really upset them was the way they were treated by others on the base.

"The attitude of the people was not friendly at all. We were doing a service for these people but they shouted at us and talked down to us," Hamid said.

While their Western managers slept in air-conditioned trailers, they were crammed into tents in 100-degree-plus temperatures. The cooks set aside some rice and curry for them but it was not enough and they had to supplement their food with whatever was left over from the soldiers` meals -- which was often nothing. They were told they could not take the filtered bottled water but instead must drink the Iraqi tap water that was poured into aluminum buckets with tablets of chlorine and chunks of ice. The workers would pick through the soldiers` trash and retrieve the empty water bottles that they would use as cups.

Ajayakumar said he threw up for weeks from the contaminated water. He was allowed to see an Iraqi doctor who gave him one pill -- without explaining what it was for and which did nothing to alleviate his symptoms.

His co-workers had other complaints: that they were assigned to do construction work they weren`t hired for, that they weren`t adequately compensated for their 12- to 16-hour days, that Hindus were served beef, that Muslims were instructed to handle pork.

The workers said they felt trapped. They didn`t want to be in Iraq, but returning home meant no more jobs, paying their own travel expenses and forfeiting the agent`s fees. Plus, their bosses were holding their passports.

Three months into the men`s stay in Iraq, there were explosions near the base and people ran out of the tents. While other contractors came out in full protective gear and jumped into their cars, the kitchen workers were told to stand outside near a tent in their pajamas.

"At that moment we realized that they are privileged people and we are nothing," Shani said.

One evening soon afterward, when they were handed a dinner of beef curry that hadn`t been fully cooked, several dozen of them went to their manager, who worked for Gulf Catering, to complain. According to the workers, the man told them they would not get any more food. "We bought you," he reportedly said. Some Indian workers were so furious they packed their bags and began walking to the gates of the base. Another manager, who worked for the Event Source, raced over to them and urged them to stay, promising changes.

Things improved somewhat after that conversation, the workers said, and they got their own food, both vegetarian and meat curry each night, bottled water and -- by January -- many had air-conditioned trailers. Still, many felt defeated by the first few difficult months. And so in May when they were offered a bus ride out of Iraq, nearly everyone accepted.
Fighting Back

As the men returned to Kerala, they began filing complaints -- about a dozen so far -- with the local police department, which has launched an investigation into how they were recruited.

The local employment agents, Subhash Vijay, Gulf Catering and Alargan did not respond to requests for comment.

Paul Morrell, president of the Event Source, whose representative was in charge of the dining facilities at Q-West, said he was surprised by the workers` allegations . He said the Event Source`s agreement with its subcontractors requires them to provide adequate food and water and flak jackets, helmets and security guards to workers when they travel to and from bases. But, he acknowledged, the company had been unable to independently verify whether the requirements had been met.

"Any time workers expressed concerns, people got involved. They made sure the workers were treated fairly," Morrell said.

Meanwhile, Ajayakumar and the others are trying to bail themselves out of debt. While they were paid their promised base salaries -- how much overtime they deserved and got is a matter of dispute -- it was not enough to make up for the agent`s fee and the interest payments many had racked up. They had assumed they would be working for two years, not nine months.

Ajayakumar has no job and no job prospects.

The only thing he has from his time in Iraq is a certificate of appreciation from KBR. It thanks him for his help in the success of the "dinning [sic] facility" at the camp. Thank you, the tribute on standard 8 ½-by-11-inch paper reads, "for your tireless effort."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Sgt. Joseph Watts, of Van Buren, Ark., clears razor wire from around a U.S. military checkpoint in Baghdad, part of an effort to scale back symbols of the U.S. occupation
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Architecture of U.S. Control Begins to Soften
On Popular Baghdad Street, Soldiers Roll Back Barriers and Barbed Wire, but Only So Far

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 1, 2004; Page A10

BAGHDAD, June 30 -- Abu Nawas Street runs alongside the Tigris River and through a thousand Iraqi memories of grilled fish dinners and twilight beers at sidewalk cafes.

Once a place for fun, the avenue has been closed for reasons of security since U.S. troops entered Baghdad 15 months ago. Across the river, the U.S.-held compound known as the Green Zone is within mortar range. Hotels on Abu Nawas Street house U.S. government contractors and journalists, prime targets for attacks by insurgents.

"We had memories, beautiful memories on Abu Nawas Street," said Abdul Naser Amar, 40, whose al-Mizan art gallery has suffered dearly during the road closure. "We want time to turn back."

On Wednesday, U.S. soldiers began to open Abu Nawas Street, using hoists and flatbed trucks as the chairman of Baghdad`s city council, Ali Haidary, and the 1st Cavalry Division`s commander, Army Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, chatted with shopkeepers. By the time work was through for the day, blast walls and concertina wire had been rolled back three blocks. But they had not disappeared.

"Those Americans think that we are stupid," said Khaleel Ibrahim, 42, who has been paying rent on his shop on Abu Nawas Street despite its being closed throughout the 15-month occupation. "They will never open it."

The grim architecture of the U.S. occupation has begun to soften two days after an interim Iraqi government assumed political power, but the physical presence of the U.S. government in the heart of Iraq will remain a formidable obstacle for some time to come.

Iraqi officials have begun demanding that the United States relinquish some of the turf it holds in the capital. U.S. military commanders, however, must still contend with an insurgency that they say has not weakened with the passing of power to the Iraqis, requiring that the most irksome everyday aspects of the occupation remain in place.

"If we hold on too tight, this becomes the same occupation in a different dress. If we let go too quickly, there could be chaos," said Army Col. John Murray, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division`s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, which is responsible for central Baghdad. "It`s a very fine line we will be walking politically."

At the center of the city -- and of the debate over the enduring U.S. presence -- is the three-square-mile cluster of national monuments, palaces and parkland known as the Green Zone, where the Coalition Provisional Authority made its headquarters behind well-guarded walls. The zone, hard against the Tigris River, is a city unto itself, with broad, tree-lined avenues that wind among apartment buildings, garish palaces and government ministries, many of them caved in more than a year ago by U.S. bombs.

The U.S. Embassy has replaced the occupation authority, which dissolved with the handover on Monday. The largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, the embassy occupies some of the same buildings as the occupation authority did, including the Republican Palace complex that will serve as offices. Two Iraqi ministries also have their offices inside the Green Zone; the rest are scattered around the city.

Some Iraqi officials have expressed dismay over U.S. plans to remain in the Green Zone, the seat of political authority in Iraq for decades. Moreover, the zone encompasses Iraq`s equivalent of the National Mall, including monuments erected by former president Saddam Hussein to glorify his wars and fallen soldiers. Iraqis used to picnic in their grassy shadows.

Iraqi officials have not officially asked the United States to roll back the zone`s boundaries, but have said they would like some of its roads opened to the public as a first step.

In the weeks leading up to the handover, Murray and his battalion commanders drew up plans to give back roughly 60 percent of the Green Zone to the Iraqi government. Murray`s plan, which has been approved by his senior officers, would turn over the Monument to the Unknown Soldier and the Crossed Sabers monument; the Baghdad Convention Center and the al-Rashid Hotel once favored by tourists and dignitaries, and apartment complexes where as many as 20,000 Iraqis have lived with U.S.-issued passes since the invasion.

Murray said he could dismantle the blast walls, bags of earth and hoops of concertina wire in two to three months. But he and his commanders said that Iraqi security forces, now being trained by U.S. troops, were not prepared to assume responsibility for the area.

"Without us doing the job, this fledgling democracy does not stand much of a hope," said Lt. Col. Robert Campbell, commander of the battalion in charge of the Green Zone`s six checkpoints. "There are huge political gains in putting this back in Iraqi control. But there`s a balance of risk involved."

The Green Zone is the hard core of Murray`s roughly 250-square-mile area of responsibility that encompasses most of downtown Baghdad. Rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, disgruntled and grateful, it is a cross-section of Iraq and its postwar confusions.

From his office in a bomb-crumbled mini-palace inside the Green Zone, Murray, 44, begins each day examining what he calls "patterns of life," indicators that help him assess the threat level. His bristly gray crew cut and grave demeanor give him a central-casting quality of a colonel. He is both amiable and mostly unsmiling.

"I don`t think there`s been a single day here that I haven`t been worried," said Murray, whose 4,800-soldier brigade officially took responsibility of the Green Zone and its surroundings on April 15.

Traffic flow, the attendance of Iraqi police at morning roll call and the volume of shoppers in markets are some of the threat indicators he evaluates. At the checkpoints, Murray`s soldiers consider a dearth of children or the cancellation of the morning ice delivery as signs of a possible attack.

Security duties, at some point, will fall to the Iraqi police and National Guard, which are rich on recruits thanks to Iraq`s high unemployment but short on equipment and confidence.

Murray`s goal, as it is with other U.S. commanders in Iraq, is to push the National Guard forward and begin pulling his own troops off the streets.

"Over the next few weeks, we`re going to be trying very hard to give the impression this is joint," Murray said as he visited the 302nd Iraqi National Guard Battalion, headquartered in the air traffic control tower of Baghdad`s old downtown airport. U.S. troops man the checkpoints outside.

The Iraqi security presence in the Green Zone will increase mostly around the perimeter, particularly at checkpoints. Inside the walls, the compound appears nearly frozen in the immediate post-invasion period.

Palaces damaged by U.S. bombs line the empty streets, shot through with sunlight. Blast walls line almost every street. Big bags of earth, set into giant wire-mesh baskets, reinforce them. The protections are there because rockets and mortars fall inside the zone an average of once every three days, and rifle fire strafes checkpoints almost daily.

Haidary, the city council chairman, is pressing hard for the reopening of the 14th of July Bridge, the southern entrance to the Green Zone. The bridge road is the most direct way from the upscale Karada shopping district to downtown, but it cuts through heart of the Green Zone.

Though opening the road would relieve traffic congestion, Murray said it would also isolate most of his troops on one side of the road and the U.S. Embassy on the other. He said the issue would be resolved "high above my level."

"They`ll make a recommendation, I`ll argue against it, and we`ll work something out," Murray said. "That`s what`s going to be interesting over these next few months, watching the way these decisions get made."

Special correspondent Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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In den Gewässern der USA verbreiten sich die Snakeheads immer mehr. Dieser gefräßige Fisch, der auch über Land laufen kann. Ursprünglich kommt der Fisch aus Asien.

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washingtonpost.com

A Saudi Opportunity



Thursday, July 1, 2004; Page A22

AFTER 13 MONTHS of battling a branch of the al Qaeda movement, Saudi Arabia`s government has all but declared victory. Authorities say they have wiped out the leadership of all five of the terrorist movement`s cells that were known to exist a year ago; the last breakthrough came 10 days ago with the slaying of four militants responsible for the beheading of American Paul M. Johnson Jr. Al Qaeda`s Saudi organization, officials say, is in shambles, which is why ruling Crown Prince Abdullah has given its surviving members one month to surrender in exchange for amnesty. This turn of events -- if that is what it is -- can only be welcomed by Arab and Western governments, which just weeks ago watched with alarm as a wave of terrorism killed scores of Saudis and Westerners. Yet the note of triumphalism now heard from Riyadh seems dangerously premature.

The Saudi royal family may have bought itself some respite with the police work -- including massive dragnets in major cities -- that led to the killing or capture of key militants. But hundreds of al Qaeda adherents remain at large in Osama bin Laden`s homeland and will probably form new cells. Saudi authorities are moving slowly, if it at all, to address the roots of the insurgency. Officials point to the extremist clerics who have been silenced or forced to recant, and the steps that have been taken to cut off the terrorists` financing. But Western observers, including a recent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, say the government has yet to take on charities suspected of bankrolling extremism domestically and abroad.

More fundamentally, the Saudi rulers have yet to acknowledge the ways in which Islamic radicals have been bred by the Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi strain of Islam and the state-financed religious establishment. Al Qaeda is frequently described by senior officials as a foreign import, brought back from Afghanistan by Saudis radicalized there. Crown Prince Abdullah himself blamed the violence on "Zionists" in one speech last month. Rather than tackle the hidebound religious establishment or promote alternatives to the strict Wahhabi creed, the government has rounded up and jailed reformers who call for religious and political liberalization.

This is a familiar response from the Saudi regime, which was founded on its alliance with Wahhabi clerics and traditionally has responded to extremist challenges by crushing rebel leaders while appeasing and co-opting their followers. But a recent public opinion poll, conducted by an independent Saudi team, showed wide support for a change in policy. Large majorities favored political and social reform; twice as many supported greater rights for women as said they liked the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden.

The United States, too, can no longer afford to support the Saudi status quo. President Bush has acknowledged as much; in a speech in Istanbul on Tuesday, he again denounced "stability at the price of liberty" in the Middle East and warned that "any nation that compromises with violent extremists only emboldens them." His administration has an opportunity to act on that rhetoric. Mr. Bush should press the Saudi leadership to follow up on its recent success against al Qaeda by introducing the kind of change that Saudi citizens -- as opposed to Wahhabi clerics -- want. The first step is straightforward: Release the advocates of peaceful reform who remain in jail.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Robert Fisk: No mention of power cuts and violence at trial of the century

The Independent

01 July 2004

Now it is time for bread and circuses. Keep the people distracted. Show them Saddam. Remind them what it used to be like. Make them grateful. Make Saddam pay. Show his face once more across the world so that his victims will think about the past, not the present. Charge him. Before the full majesty of Iraq`s new "democratic" law. And may George Bush win the next American election.

That`s pretty much how it looked from Baghdad yesterday. Forget the 12-hour power cuts and the violence and the kidnappings and the insurgency. Let`s go back again to the gruesome days of Baathist rule, let`s revisit once more the theatre of cruelty - back to all those war crimes and crimes against humanity with which the Monster will be charged. Let`s take another look at Tariq Aziz and "Chemical" Ali and the rest. Isn`t this why we came to Iraq - to rescue the Iraqis from the Beast of Baghdad?

When Saddam was "handed over" yesterday to Iraqi officials by the Americans - we don`t know how - he apparently wanted to know if he would have the right to a lawyer (never a previous concern of his where prisoners were concerned). Salem Chalabi, a close relative of the convicted fraudster and former Pentagon favourite Ahmed Chalabi, is leading the Iraqi tribunal`s work. So no surprise Saddam asked for counsel.

Saddam was freighted up from his close security prison cell in Qatar for his meeting with "Iraqi justice" - exactly what that means was not clear although most Western journalists used the phrase - and will today face an Iraqi judge who will formally accuse the ex-dictator of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The trouble is, we haven`t got the charges against Saddam quite put together yet. It will take at least a year to decide the exact details of what he`s going to be accused of.

The gassing of Halabja? Of course. The mass killings of Shia after the 1991 rising? No doubt. The torture of innocent Iraqis at Saddam`s Abu Ghraib prison? Although that might not be a place name that the tribunal - or the Americans - want to hear right now. And will the death penalty be used? Quite possibly - at least, that`s what an awful lot of Iraqis would like. It was, after all, Saddam`s favourite punishment. Could "Chemical" Ali of Halabja notoriety escape such a sentence?

Then there`s the little problem of the Iraqi tribunal whose "judges" all turn out to be lawyers without, apparently, any judicial skills. Many are Iraqis who spent years in exile - the kind with whom a growing number of Iraqis who stayed and endured Saddam`s rule are increasingly disenchanted. A judge, so we are told, will formally read a written text against Saddam. We don`t know where. We don`t even know when - today presumably. The old "occupying" power - in other words the new "occupying" power if you find the country`s new independence a bit hard to swallow - has let it be known that there may be "media access" when Saddam appears.

So one of those familiar "pools" will no doubt be created - I will put my bets on CNN and the loony right Fox News as certainties - and we`ll all be able to study Saddam at the critical moment when he begins to "face up to his crimes", or whatever cliché we produce for the occasion. For justice, read photo-opportunity.

Journalists will do their best to turn all this into a success story. Even yesterday, the BBC was telling viewers that Saddam`s appearance in court was "exactly what Iraqis have been waiting for". Alas, Iraqis have been waiting for electricity and safety and freedom from crime and elections far more than the trial of the miserable old murderer who will be paraded before us.

As an Iraqi woman financial consultant - no friend of the Baath party - put it to me yesterday: "This is a childish play, written by children for children. We have real needs and they want us to go and watch a play."

For if the handing over of "full sovereignty" to an American-chosen Iraqi government had about it an Alice in Wonderland quality, today`s interlude with Saddam will mark the appearance of the Cheshire Cat. Maybe he will smile. Maybe he will shout his defiance of the judge - and have to be restrained.

Heaven forbid he will accuse the new "interim" government of being puppets of the United States. Or, worse, remind the court of his own long relationship with US governments. But most assuredly, like the Cheshire Cat, he will fade away again, put back in his box for another 12 months until the "Trial of the Century".

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When Cheney`s mask slips, it reveals Bush

Nothing will persuade the president to drop his mentor from the team, not even an explosion of expletives
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday July 1, 2004

The Guardian
In Washington, political identities cultivated over decades can crumble in a minute. Vice President Dick Cheney presides under the constitution as president of the Senate and is addressed as "Mr President", but former representative Cheney is not a man of the Senate. (The Senate regards itself as distant from the House of Representatives as the Metropolitan Club is from the Horsefeathers saloon near the House side of Capitol Hill.)

Cheney`s executive branch credentials were as President Ford`s wunderkind chief of staff and elder Bush`s secretary of defence, but on the Hill he is remembered as the former house Republican whip during the Reagan period, his only previous elected position. In the house, the Republicans were then in the minority, and Cheney was the driver behind the scenes of the hard right, protector of obstreperous young reactionaries like Newt Gingrich, yet still presentable to the broader establishment as a respectable saturnine figure. Those who observed him operate in the house saw through his veneer, but he elevated himself by advancing the persona of the statesman.

The self-control that had served him so long broke down in public on June 22 on the floor of the Senate during a photo session. As Cheney was posing with members, Senator Patrick Leahy ambled over. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, had recently been critical, along with other Democrats, of no-bid contracts in Iraq granted to Halliburton, the company Cheney had run and in which he still holds stock options and receives deferred compensation (despite his prior claims to the contrary). "Go fuck yourself," the vice president greeted him.

Cheney`s spokesman appeared to deny that those words had been spoken: "That doesn`t sound like language the vice president would use." But Cheney raced onto Fox News to hail himself as courageous for emotional authenticity. "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it." Then he elaborated that his ejaculation was an administration policy: "I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue." Leahy`s seeming civility, he explained, was just a charade: "I didn`t like the fact that ... he wanted to act like, you know, everything`s peaches and cream."

A main source of Cheney`s effectiveness and image of competence has been his ability to avoid putting his cards on the table. But in a moment of pique, he dropped the entire deck. His game face fell and his malicious streak broke through. Cheney`s blandness had suggested he was deliberate, experienced and imperturbable. In the first Bush administration, victory in the Gulf war solidified that reputation. When the president was defeated, Cheney was not. He emerged from those ashes unscathed.

Just as the elder Bush picked someone who might have been one of his sons, younger Bush chose a version of his father. Dan Quayle was light as a feather, another scion from a wealthy Republican family, the vice president as understudy. Cheney was to be the mentor of the Bush family`s Prince Hal and widely believed to represent the old man`s realism. In 2000, he was put in charge of selecting George W Bush`s running mate, collected the private dossiers of potential candidates and chose himself. Asked who vetted Cheney`s financial records, Karen Hughes, Bush`s communications aide, replied: "Just as with other candidates, Secretary Cheney is the one who handled that."

Bush`s executive branch has been concentrated in Cheney. He has been as powerful as Quayle was irrelevant. It was Cheney who said to UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as he embarked on his mission to Iraq: "We will not hesitate to discredit you"; Cheney who personally tried to force the CIA to give credence to Ahmed Chalabi`s fabricated and false evidence on WMD; Cheney who, along with Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld (to whom he was deputy in the Nixon White House), undermined Secretary of State Colin Powell at every turn; and it is Cheney who is the neo-conservatives` godfather.

It is worth remembering that Cheney`s link to the neo-cons largely developed after the last Bush administration and was arranged by his wife, Lynne Cheney, cultural warrior on the right, former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the principal neo-con thinktank. Even before his outburst, Cheney had come to stand for special interests, secrecy and political coercion. Under the stress of Bush`s falling polls, he cracked.

Bush still strains to project optimism and cast the Democrats as demagogic pessimists. His campaign this week produced a commercial, "John Kerry`s coalition of the wild-eyed", that featured snippets of Al Gore, Howard Dean, Michael Moore and Kerry criticising Bush. Interspersed among the Democrats was a frothing and saluting Adolf Hitler. Bush`s apparent remake of the Springtime for Hitler number from Mel Brooks` The Producers is partly an attempt to counter the box office success of Michael Moore`s Fahrenheit 9/11. Running against Hitler is also an effort to transform the sober Kerry, not Cheney, into the "wild-eyed" threat.

Perhaps the grandest political gesture Bush could make would be dropping Cheney. When Cheney bursts through his mask, he reveals not only his own face, but Bush`s. "The idea of dumping Cheney is nuts, makes no sense," one of Cheney`s political advisers told me. "One of the reasons he`s there is they don`t have someone to anoint as a successor." After all, where would it leave Jeb Bush in 2008? "Dumping Cheney would be seen as a sign of weakness. Cheney is very popular in the party." The Bush campaign`s premise depends on turning out the maximum Republican vote. Bush can no more repudiate Cheney than he can repudiate himself. Cheney will never hear from Bush the words he hurled at Leahy.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and Washington bureau chief of salon.com

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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THE NATION
CIA Felt Pressure to Alter Iraq Data, Author Says
Agency analysts were repeatedly ordered to redo their studies of Al Qaeda ties to Hussein regime, a terrorism expert charges.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

July 1, 2004

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, CIA analysts were ordered repeatedly to redo intelligence assessments concluded that Al Qaeda had no operational ties to Iraq, according to a veteran CIA counter-terrorism official who has written a book that is sharply critical of the decision to go to war with Iraq.

Agency analysts never altered their conclusions, but saw the pressure to revisit their work as a clear indication that Bush administration officials were seeking a different answer regarding Iraq and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the CIA officer said in an interview with The Times.

"We on the Bin Laden side [of the agency`s analytic ranks] were required repeatedly to check, double-check and triple-check our files about a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq," said the officer, who spoke on condition that he be identified only by his first name, Mike.

Asked whether he attributed the demands to an eagerness among officials at the White House or the Pentagon to find evidence of a link, he said: "You could not help but assume that was the case. They knew the answer [they wanted] before they asked the question."

The officer is the author of a forthcoming book titled, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," published by Brassey`s Inc. of Dulles, Va. He is listed as "Anonymous" on the book, which describes him as a "senior U.S. intelligence official with nearly two decades of experience in national security issues."

The author has held a number of high-ranking agency positions, including serving from 1996 to 1999 as head of a special unit tracking Bin Laden.

The book was approved for publication by the CIA after a four-month review — creating an unusual situation in which one of the secretive agency`s senior officers was offering public criticism of administration policies and the prosecution of the war on terrorism.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow emphasized that the opinions in the book were those of the author, not the agency. He acknowledged that the book`s publication was awkward for an agency that sought to be apolitical, but that the CIA found no classified material in it, and therefore allowed its release.

Some have questioned the author`s motives, noting that he was removed as head of the Bin Laden unit in 1999 over concerns about his performance. An intelligence official who has worked with the author at the CIA said that he might have been embittered by his removal, but that "people tend to think of him as a straight shooter."

Mike said he was removed from the post because agency leaders "thought I was too myopic, too intense, too aggressive." He declined to elaborate. But he insisted that he did not write the book to settle scores.

"The important thing to me is that we`re missing the boat on this issue," he said.

The book has created a stir in intelligence and policymaking circles for its scathing critique of U.S. efforts after the Sept. 11 attacks. In the book, Mike writes that the war in Afghanistan was in many respects a failure because the United States waited nearly a month to launch the invasion — allowing Al Qaeda operatives to flee — and relied heavily on proxy Afghan forces that were not always loyal to the U.S. cause.

The book asserts that invading Iraq has inflamed anti-American sentiment to such a degree that it is minting a new generation of terrorists.

"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," he writes.

In an interview this week, Mike, who has close-cropped hair and a beard, said Monday`s transfer of authority to Iraq was likely to do little to curtail insurgent attacks.

"Iraq, with or without a transfer of power, will be a mujahedin magnet as long as whatever government is there is dependent on America`s sword," he said, adding that he thought his view was widely shared among counter-terrorism officials at the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

The stealth manner in which sovereignty was transferred this week in Iraq — in a surprise ceremony two days ahead of schedule involving L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, and the country`s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi — also sent a weak signal, he said.

"From Bin Laden`s perspective, we were afraid they were going to attack us and we left like a thief in the night, with Bremer throwing the keys to Allawi," he said. "They can only see this as a victory."

Mike`s criticism of the war in Iraq echoes that of other prominent counter-terrorism officials, including former White House aide Richard A. Clarke. But he is the first active CIA official to make the criticism publicly, albeit anonymously. Mike, however, faulted Clarke and others who served in the Clinton administration for failing to mount operations to capture or kill Bin Laden when the CIA had intelligence on his whereabouts.

He said he thought Bin Laden would have been extremely reluctant to enter a collaborative relationship with Hussein, in part because he saw Iraq`s military and spying services as inferior, incapable of protecting the security of Al Qaeda plans and operations.

Mike said that because he did not work in the agency`s Iraq section, he could not assess the accuracy of claims that analysts were pressured by the White House to tailor their assessments of Iraq`s alleged illicit weapons programs to help make the case for war. Despite being forced to redo their work several times, he said, counter-terrorism analysts never altered their conclusion that Iraq was not working with Al Qaeda.

"There was pressure to perform. But to its credit, the intelligence community as a whole said there was nothing" to suggest a collaborative relationship, he said. "The director on down insisted we call it straight."

Mike still serves in the agency`s counter-terrorism center, but acknowledges that he has been marginalized. "I get invited to speak" on counter-terrorism at the Defense Department, the FBI and the National Security Agency, he said, "but not within my own building."

He wrote an earlier book, also anonymously, on Bin Laden and Islamic terrorism that was titled, "Through Our Enemies` Eyes."



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THE NATION
Pentagon Alerted to Trouble in Ranks
Reports over a decade have warned of recruits with criminal pasts and of the violent behavior of some active-duty service members.
By Ken Silverstein
Times Staff Writer

July 1, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon was warned repeatedly going back a decade that it was accepting military recruits with criminal histories and was too lenient with those already in uniform who exhibited violent or other troubling behavior.

Six studies prepared over 10 years by an outside expert at the Pentagon`s request found that too little was being done to discipline lawbreakers in uniform or even identify problem recruits.

A 1998 study estimated that one-third of military recruits had arrest records. A 1995 report found that one out of four Army career enlisted personnel had committed one or more criminal offenses while on active duty. Yet many were allowed to reenlist or received promotions. Some received good-conduct medals or held top secret security clearances, the research found.

The 1995 study cited the case of one soldier who was promoted to sergeant despite a record of behavior that included multiple assaults, drunk and disorderly conduct, property destruction and obstruction of justice.

As recently as last year, only a month before some of the worst abuses of Iraqi detainees occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, one of the reports said some troops were in positions "where destructive acts could have the most serious consequences."

"An immediate problem faced by Defense is that there are military personnel with pre-service and in-service records that clearly establish a pattern of substandard behavior," the 2003 report said.

"These individuals constitute a high-risk group for destructive behavior and need to be identified."

The September 2003 study, titled "Reducing the Threat of Destructive Behavior by Military Personnel" and released to The Times with the Pentagon`s permission, was written by Eli S. Flyer, a former senior analyst at the Defense Department and a longtime Pentagon consultant.

It examined recruiting of active-duty troops and misconduct by uniformed personnel once they entered the armed forces. Military reservists undergo the same screening process as active-duty troops, Flyer said.

Although the Pentagon adopted some new procedures, they were not adequate, Flyer`s most recent report said. The military services have resisted improving screening procedures because that "would reduce applicant supply," the 2003 report said, alluding to problems some services have had in recent years meeting recruitment goals.

"Critically important, development of applicant screening procedures to identify individuals with behavior disorders has lagged, contributing to suitability problems and destructive acts occurring later during active duty," the report said.

Flyer`s most recent study said steps needed to be taken to reduce the "wide range of destructive acts committed by military personnel," including sabotage, serial murder and rape.

The Army recently announced that it had opened investigations into at least 91 cases of possible misconduct by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to violent crimes committed against detainees, the charges include assaults and thefts committed against civilians.

"One would hope Defense is doing a thorough investigation of their backgrounds," Flyer said.

Flyer said Bill Carr, the Pentagon`s acting deputy undersecretary for military personnel policy, requested last September`s report. Carr was not available for an interview.

Curtis Gilroy, who oversees military recruiting as director of the Pentagon`s office of accession policy, said the screening process for recruits was "pretty good" but acknowledged some shortcomings.

It is hard to "pick out all the bad apples," Gilroy said, "but we are striving to improve the system and are doing so — from recruiters to the military entrance processing stations to the initial training sites. We are taking screening very seriously and will be more vigilant at all steps of the recruiting and accession process."

One measure of the overall problem is provided by the record of a special Defense Department screening program called the Personnel Reliability Program, or PRP, which is designed to ensure that only persons of sound character were assigned to duty involving nuclear weapons. Between 1987 and 1990, three individuals approved by the PRP committed murders while on active duty.

In a 1986 case, the Navy gave a PRP clearance to a man known to be a suspect in an unsolved murder. Three years later, when the man was a fire control technician on a nuclear submarine, he was charged in the murder of an elderly couple while off duty. He was later convicted.

In an interview, Flyer said it was too early to know if the problems he found could have contributed to the situation at Abu Ghraib or to other misconduct cases that came to light in Iraq and Afghanistan, although at least two cases involved veterans with checkered backgrounds.

Most of the names of those being investigated have not been released, but in at least two high-profile cases men who are charged with committing crimes had entered the military despite previous problems.

Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., an accused ringleader in the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, served in the Gulf War in a Marine reserve unit. He reenlisted in the Army in 2001, joining a reserve unit at a time when allegations of violent behavior had been made against him in two civil court proceedings. His wife alleged in divorce proceedings in 2000 that he beat her, and she obtained three "protection of abuse" orders against him, court records show.

An inmate at a state prison where Graner worked filed a lawsuit against him and other guards in 1999 for allegedly kicking and beating him, according to court records. Graner denied abusing the prisoner. The case was dismissed in 2000 when the man, who by then had been released from prison, failed to appear in court.

Graner`s attorney in Texas, Guy Womack, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

David Passaro is accused of beating a detainee in Afghanistan so badly that the man later died. Passaro joined the Army in 1992 and later became a Ranger, after he was fired from the Hartford, Conn., Police Department for allegedly assaulting a man during an off-duty brawl, police and court records show.

At the time of the alleged incident in Afghanistan in 2003, Passaro was working as a civilian contractor for the CIA. The indictment against him charges that he beat an Afghan detainee, Abdul Wali, with his hands, feet and a large flashlight during interrogation June 19 and June 20. Wali died the next day.

Thomas McNamara, a North Carolina public defender who represents Passaro, did not return phone calls.

Flyer worked at the Pentagon for 28 years, retiring in 1979 as staff director for enlistment standards for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense. Since then, he has been hired by the Pentagon as an outside consultant to write dozens of reports.

His 1998 report estimated that about one-third of recruits had arrest records and many were not detected.

Potential recruits with a criminal record can enlist in the armed forces if they receive a moral character waiver. Flyer`s 1998 report said that of the estimated 3.5 million recruits who entered the military service between 1978 and 1989, 300,000 had enlisted with a moral character waiver, most for a criminal arrest record.

The report said that those enlisting with a moral waiver were more likely than others to get into criminal trouble or be discharged for bad behavior.

The Pentagon addressed the use of moral character waivers in a report to Congress, also issued in 1998. The report said that during the previous year, the Army approved 68% of waiver requests for felony convictions.

The report also said that during difficult recruiting periods, the services could "become inclined to enlist individuals who, under more favorable supply conditions, would have been rejected."

Flyer`s most recent study called for a number of reforms, including providing "military managers with guidelines on the behavioral signs … likely to be associated with destructive acts," and better use of computerized records to weed out people with a history of serious behavior problems.

Flyer said some of the recommendations in his reports have been adopted, and some outstanding problems were outside the Pentagon`s control, such as screeners` inability to review juvenile records that had been sealed by courts.

But he said that although there had been "significant improvements" over time, there were "still problems to be resolved."

"Building safeguards to protect military personnel from misuse of the records is no easy matter, but the costs of not using this information effectively are very high," he said.

Gilroy said criminal databases used by military screeners were imperfect and that recruits sometimes provided false names or Social Security numbers to hide past misconduct.

Gilroy said the Pentagon had made important improvements in recent years, including centralizing and creating better links between personnel databases.

He also said Pentagon pressure led Congress to pass a bill in the late 1990s that required the states to sharply reduce fees they charged the armed services for criminal background checks.



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Die Sicht von außen auf D. Das Zuwanderungsgesetz.

THE WORLD
Looking Into a Mirror, Seeing 7 Million Strangers
Germany has long been wary of its immigrant population. Sweeping legislation is set to ease entry rules, but also make deportation easier.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

July 1, 2004

BERLIN — Germany is accepting what it once loathed to ponder: It is a country of immigrants.

The nation`s cities flicker with the languages, cultures and skin tones of people who have been arriving since the end of World War II. But it is only now that the country, with its history of cultural intolerance, appears ready to pass a sweeping immigration law.

Citing shortages of engineers, scientists and computer specialists, the legislation would ease entry requirements for some and recognize the need for skilled non-Europeans in this rapidly aging population.

It also meets the demands of conservative politicians for swifter deportation of religious extremists. German courts have heard three Al Qaeda-related cases in the last year, and police have questioned dozens of alleged Islamic radicals.

The compromise bill between conservative Christian Democrats and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder`s left-leaning Social Democrats comes amid fears that foreigners are eroding Germany`s national character. A similar attitude resonates throughout Europe. The continent needs new blood to stay economically competitive, but since terrorists bombed several Madrid commuter trains in March, Europeans worry that many immigrants are espousing anti-Western values.

"People are afraid of immigration," said Olav Gutting, a conservative Christian Democrat in Parliament, who noted that 9% of Germany`s population of 83 million is foreign-born. "Germans, especially politicians, never talk about Germany as a country of immigrants, but the fact is that for 40 years we`ve been one. Yet Germany is no melting pot."

Several political parties, notably the Greens, are concerned that the legislation would give law enforcement agencies broad discretion in investigating foreigners. Many politicians are critical of the detentions of suspected militants by the U.S. Justice Department and warn against an atmosphere that jeopardizes constitutional protections. The country`s Nazi past has made Germans sensitive to targeting anyone based on race or religion.

Vural Oger knows well the subtle but deeply entrenched dividing lines in German society. A successful businessman, he moved to Germany from Turkey more than 40 years ago. He became a German citizen, was recently elected to the European Parliament and advises Schroeder on immigration matters.

"But newspapers still refer to me as a Turk with a German passport," said Oger, who owns a travel agency, hotels and other tourist ventures. "The new law was to create a modern, forward-thinking society. It was watered down. What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, directly influenced this law, and I`m worried about possible abuses to civil freedoms."

Statistics suggest that Germany might be forced to temper its uneasiness about foreigners. To sustain its current population, the country would need a net gain of about 500,000 immigrants a year, according to the Bureau of Federal Statistics. To keep the labor force stable, the statistics suggest, Germany would require about 30 million working-age immigrants by 2050.

Some estimates indicate that — with a national birthrate of 1.4 children per woman — 40% of Germans will be older than 60 by the middle of the century.

"The homogeneous society is fading, and it`s bye-bye old Germany," said Hans Fleisch, chairman of the Berlin Institute for World Population and Global Development. "Germans are frightened of this change. I just came from a conference of 80 mayors and they`re saying, `What now?` In the next 20 years, populations in cities such as Frankfurt will be 50% foreign-born."

The proposed immigration law, expected to pass Parliament as early as today, would allow Germany to be selective, admitting only highly skilled foreigners. It would extend visas and encourage employment for foreign graduates of German universities. The legislation also threatens cuts to social benefits for immigrants who don`t learn the German language and fail to quickly integrate.

Since the emergence of Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and through the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq, Germany has failed to create a seamless ethnic society. The veneer of integration has been further strained as the nation undergoes painful social and labor reforms that have created resentment toward immigrants, whom many Germans see as milking the system.

The country`s unemployment rate of nearly 11% has labor unions unconvinced of the need for importing workers. But, unlike in Asia and the United States, the German education system has not produced enough highly skilled technical professionals. Business leaders also have complained for years that thousands of young and educated Germans shun the nation`s high taxes and bureaucracy to work elsewhere.

"Germany has a lack of qualified engineers and scientists and needs new workers," said Detlef von Hellfeld, who runs a website forum for skilled immigrants. "The new law would follow the needs of our labor market. If we want to compete in getting the best minds, we have to do this."

Prasad Addepalli, a software specialist from India, is the type of immigrant Germany wants. Motivated and well educated, Addepalli began working for a computer company in Munich in 2001 under a special green card program. His time in Germany mirrors the promise and frustration that Germans and foreigners share in eliminating prejudices and building a multicultural nation.

"It is very difficult to climb the career ladder in Germany. Many firms give more preference to German natives," said Addepalli, who plans to return to India by 2008 and start his own company. He said other Indians rejected the prospect of working in Germany because of low salaries, cold weather, a troubled economy and perceived racism. Of the 20,000 green-card slots open for computer specialists three years ago, only 11,000 were filled.

"People didn`t come to Germany, because they believe racism still exists here," Addepalli said. "They went instead to the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia. I personally don`t have those perceptions, but I had a friend working in Rostock who felt racism…. Germans are not very open. You need a lot of time to make friends."

The debate over immigration began after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, as hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans and Soviet Bloc immigrants of German ancestry joined nearly 2 million Turks and other foreigners already here. A surge of skinhead violence against immigrants stunned the nation in the early 1990s. The rise of leftist politicians a few years later coincided with a more liberal shift in attitudes on German identity.

When Schroeder took office in 1998, partisan politics sidelined an immigration law, but regulations were relaxed on naturalization and other rules regarding the country`s more than 7 million foreign-born residents.

Schroeder and Christian Democratic leaders finally hammered out a compromise law last month. "It was a contentious debate," said Rainer Ohliger, an analyst with Network Migration in Europe. "But there was no more denying the reality about immigrants. Germany is saying, `As immigration numbers rise, we want to steer it.` "

The legislation is less tolerant of radicals such as Metin Kaplan, the leader of a banned Islamic organization who recently served a German prison sentence for his role in the murder of a political rival. Kaplan is fighting extradition to Turkey, where he`s wanted for treason.

His case bolstered efforts by German Interior Minister Otto Schily and conservative politicians to include provisions in the immigration bill to speed the deportation of extremists and expel suspected terrorists without trials.

The proposed law, legislator Gutting said, would not uncover terrorist cells, such as the one in Hamburg that supplied hijackers to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"But it will for the first time allow you to catch the hate preachers and fundamentalists and send them abroad," he said.

Gutting said he was troubled that immigrants in Germany had not become more integrated.

"In Europe," he said, "multiculturalism doesn`t seem possible like in the U.S. The leading culture here is the Western, Christian way of life, and we`re not willing to accept another way of life."




Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Newly Open U.S. Embassy Is Still a Work in Progress
The mission is operating out of temporary digs. It lacks equipment and a full staff, especially Iraqis and other speakers of Arabic.
By Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writer

July 1, 2004

WASHINGTON — The great seal of the United States and the American flag were in place when the temporary U.S. Embassy in Iraq opened for business earlier than expected this week, but State Department officials were still scrambling to finish staffing and equipping the mission.

Six months of round-the-clock work by teams of hundreds of State Department and Pentagon officials ensured that a barebones embassy was ready to function by the time Ambassador John D. Negroponte flew into Baghdad on Monday.

But tons of items that were meant to be in place for the opening were still sitting on a runway in the United Arab Emirates, awaiting transfer to military transport planes small enough to land on the Baghdad airport`s runway. Air delivery, although more expensive, was deemed less dangerous than trucking the supplies over Iraqi roads.

Earlier in June, highway robbers ambushed a convoy carrying armored Toyota Land Cruisers from Amman, Jordan, to the embassy in Baghdad, making off with all eight vehicles and the trucks carrying them. In a separate attack on a convoy bound for the embassy from Turkey, gunmen shot to death the driver of a truck carrying an ambulance.

The attacks underscored the hazards the State Department has faced as it has raced in the midst of a war zone to pull together one of the largest U.S. diplomatic missions, charged with overseeing the most expensive American foreign aid program.

Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters shortly after Negroponte`s arrival in Baghdad that the ambassador and his staff had "hit the ground running." But in a later interview, Ereli acknowledged that the embassy was still "a work in progress."

"We`re operating out of a temporary location with temporary facilities, and it is constantly being upgraded," Ereli said.

"What I meant was that once they started work, they were ready to go. They had the people in place, the relationships in place, the authorities they needed to do what they need to do. But sure, there is going to be stuff coming, people coming, procedures worked up for some time."

Many State Department officials say the department is eager to put its stamp on a reconstruction and democratization effort that it — and many of its supporters on Capitol Hill — thought never should have been entrusted to the Pentagon.

"Clearly, the Department of State is taking the lead now. We will be the dominant voice," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in an interview with National Public Radio this week.

But the State Department had to make compromises to give President Bush what he wanted: a functioning embassy by the time the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority was dissolved and sovereignty returned to the Iraqis this week.

Negroponte will find a severe shortage of local Iraqis willing to work for the embassy, State Department officials say. Only about 100 of the 581 Iraqis whom the State Department says it needs to drive cars, provide security, translate and do a myriad of other jobs have been hired.

"Many people showed up at our job fairs," said one State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But not many came to the interviews." They were scared off, the official said, by threats from insurgents.

At one point, said another State Department source who worked on the transition, a department official refused to go to Baghdad to interview potential Iraqi employees, arguing that to do so would be immoral because it would put the potential employees` lives at risk.

Negroponte will also find a shortage of Arabic-speaking foreign service officers in the new embassy. Although about 1,000 volunteered for about 190 positions, not nearly enough are fluent in Arabic — because the department is short of Arabic speakers and also needs them in other embassies in the Arab world.

"I don`t think they`ve encountered a more complex situation in the past 50 years," said Jeanine Jackson, the State Department`s Iraq management officer. "You just don`t know what you`re going to run into every day."

Monday`s hand-over surprised Jackson and hundreds of others at the State Department who were still preparing for the embassy`s first full day, which was expected to be today. Instead of celebrating, they fretted about tying up loose ends.

"Security," Jackson replied when asked what most worried her.

"It`s so darned dangerous and there are so many people and it is a very high priority of the U.S. government that we be there."

The loss of the eight armored cars, Jackson said, was a setback for the effort to build a fleet of about 250 armored vehicles for embassy staff.

So far, she has been able to deliver only about 150 cars — which will be used every time an embassy employee ventures out of the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad.

Jackson helped create U.S. embassies in 14 former Soviet republics in the early 1990s, after the U.S. established diplomatic ties with those new nations.

She later worked to rebuild embassies in Tanzania and Kenya gutted by terrorist bombings in 1998, and recently spent a year in Kabul, the Afghan capital, living out of a converted shipping container as she helped reopen a vastly expanded U.S. Embassy there after the ouster of the Taliban regime.

But this was the first time she had to handle both a transition from one government bureaucracy to another and put together such a large staff under such hazardous conditions.

The embassy will operate out of temporary quarters in the Green Zone for at least the next two years while the State Department negotiates with the Iraqi government over a permanent site for an embassy compound.

Embassy staffers will work from a former regime palace and live in tents and trailers. They will eat their meals together in the vast dining hall where former dictator Saddam Hussein used to entertain guests.

By year`s end, the State Department expects to have all 981 American staffers on the job in Baghdad, including hundreds of Pentagon employees and dozens of staffers on loan from 10 other government agencies for one-year stints.

One of the largest contingents is from the Justice Department — 70 employees, many of whom are assigned to help the Iraqi government put Hussein and other members of the former president`s regime on trial for war crimes.



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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
New Iraq Not Tempting to Corporations
U.S. firms monitor business environment for improvements in safety, infrastructure.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

July 1, 2004

WASHINGTON — When U.S. forces rumbled into Baghdad last year, there were widespread predictions that big U.S. companies would be close behind, pouring billions into investments that would yield a bonanza for American brands and give a vital boost to the Iraqi economy.

Fifteen months later, however, corporate America`s stampede has yet to occur. U.S. officials, businesspeople and experts know of no leading U.S. firm that has made a large-scale capital investment in Iraq.

"I don`t believe the board of a multinational company could approve a major investment in this environment," said Keith Crane, a senior economist at the Rand Corp. who worked for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq last year. "If people are shooting at each other, it`s just difficult to do business."

President Bush has made Iraq`s economic health a chief selling point for the continuing U.S. mission there. "Iraq`s economy is moving forward, markets are beginning to thrive, new businesses are opening, a stable new currency is in place," Bush said before troops in Florida on June 16.

U.S. reconstruction work and Iraqi oil sales are pouring cash into the country. But Iraq remains a country where one can`t use a credit card or an automated teller machine. It`s also expensive and difficult to arrange the multiple Internet connections on which most modern businesses depend. The security risks are astronomical — scores of foreign civilian contractors have been killed in the wave of violence that has seized Iraq in recent months.

The commercial sector also continues to be stunted by spotty public services such as electricity, the lasting effects of a centralized economy and uncertain business laws. Bank lending is limited and insurance costly, if available at all, businesspeople say.

As a result, although dozens of U.S. companies have reconstruction contracts with the U.S. government, and although Iraqi entrepreneurs and regional firms have begun businesses, major American concerns have refrained from putting their capital at risk.

Their absence clamps a sharp brake on potential growth, countering the bullish picture painted by the administration.

The president`s view "is a good bit too rosy," said an American business advisor who has spent most of the last year in Baghdad trying to arrange foreign investments.

"Where are the big U.S. companies? I don`t know of any," said the advisor, who requested anonymity because of his dealings with U.S. officials. "The safety, the services they want — they`re just not there yet."

Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble Co., for example, has formed a joint venture with five members of a prominent Iraqi business family, yet is waiting to see when it will be safe enough to get more involved. The company is concerned about physical danger as well as the uncertainty of the business climate — "the whole combination," said Randy Chinchilla, a P&G spokesman.

"None of our employees is in the country at this point," Chinchilla said. "We`re just going to monitor things."

PepsiCo Inc.`s renewed partnership with the Baghdad Bottling Co., announced in January, has been frequently cited as the flagship example of direct foreign investment in Iraq.

But Richard Detwiler, a Pepsi spokesman, said widespread reports that the company had shelled out $100 million for one-third of the bottling company were mistaken. Instead, PepsiCo gave the bottler a local franchise, which limits the risk to PepsiCo`s employees and capital.

General Electric Co. sent a group of staffers into the country this year to scout opportunities for its medical products unit. But GE began pulling its workers out in April as violence increased, a spokesman said.

Several multinationals have taken the first steps to investing by setting up joint ventures with Iraqi partners. Others distribute their products with the help of Iraqis and others in the region.

Michael Fleischer, director of the CPA`s Office of Private Sector Development, said the suppression of the Iraqi private sector under Saddam Hussein had delayed postwar development.

"The systems really aren`t in place to put together the kinds of [foreign investment] numbers you`d get in a developed country," Fleischer said. "Some of the things you might expect are still a little bit down the road."

He noted that it took four years after the fall of the Soviet Bloc for Poland to attract substantial foreign investment. "I think we are where one would expect to be at this stage in Iraq`s emergence from tyranny," Fleischer said.

He said dozens of foreign companies had investments of some size in Iraq and insisted that Iraqi entrepreneurs had begun an economic revival evident in the consumer goods trade that was popping up everywhere.

"The entrepreneurial spirit of this country springs up like wildflowers if given a chance," he said.

William H. Lash III, a U.S. assistant secretary of Commerce, said he was beginning to see plans to develop office space, shopping malls, discount stores and hotels — the kinds of projects that signify economic revitalization.

"They`re getting established with capital from Iraqis around the world, mostly in the United States," he said.

If Iraqis are demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit, it shows they are willing to face risks that frighten off foreign investors, U.S. businesspeople say. Iraqi merchants are putting up cash to truck in goods from abroad. But without insurance, they must be willing to absorb losses if shipments are hijacked or destroyed, U.S. executives say.

Entrepreneurs also must be more willing to accept the sky-high costs of doing business. Hiring security staff can eat up 20% of revenue; insurance, if it can be found, can cost 10% of revenue or more.

Borrowing in Iraq is difficult because the banking industry was crippled under Hussein and is still trying to get organized. Iraqi authorities have given banking licenses to three foreign companies, but so far none has opened a branch in the country.

Iraq`s former U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, introduced rules designed to foster a market economy and open the country to foreign investment.

The regulations permitted 100% foreign ownership of companies, except those in natural resource industries, for example. But many businesspeople remain concerned that next year`s elections may herald a return to the tighter constraints on business that are common in the Arab world.

"The CPA put in place some pretty decent reforms, but there are still a lot of things that lie in the way of reaching that vision," said Bathsheba Crocker, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The outside world is also waiting to see how Iraq deals with the fundamental challenge of reforming government-controlled industry and agriculture, which were unwieldy and inefficient in Hussein`s era.

The CPA planned to sell off lethargic nationalized industries last summer but shelved the project in the face of stiff Iraqi opposition.

Some analysts say that until Iraq reforms those sectors and jettisons food and fuel subsidies that undermine productivity, it will not have a real economy.

Employment is concentrated in "short-term aid projects, old state industries and government [and] a bubble in the service sector," Anthony Cordesman, a veteran Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote recently. "There is no momentum as yet behind the broad structural reforms vital to creating stable jobs and economic growth."

Despite the administration`s optimism, the State Department is offering a more sober assessment of business prospects. A current bulletin warns that conditions are "extremely dangerous" and cautions interested investors about antiquated infrastructure, a financial system in the process of being rebuilt and an absence of commercial aviation.

"Telecommunications are very poor," the bulletin reports. "Medical stocks and supplies are severely depleted. Medical evacuation to the U.S. may cost in excess of $50,000."

Despite formidable obstacles, a leading Iraqi American businessman said he had seen a new confidence among entrepreneurs he knew, inspired by the restoration of sovereignty and the emergence of an interim government.

"The mood is one of optimism," said Sam Kubba, who is involved in a venture with a Texas company to market low-cost homes. But he acknowledged that multinational firms remained wary.

"They`re going to wait and see," Kubba said. "They think it`s a bit too hot now."



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World
Albert Einstein: Why Socialism?
By Albert Einstein
Jun 30, 2004, 19:34

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist.

The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has�as is well known�been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature.

For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and�if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous�are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience.

I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind.

It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life.

Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.

The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society�in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence�that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished�just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change.

Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society.

Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify.

As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time�which, looking back, seems so idyllic�is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate.

All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor�not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production�that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods�may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call "workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production�although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term.

The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists` requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the "free labor contract" for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from "pure" capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an "army of unemployed" almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers` goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence.

Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm

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As war and the economy influence election, conservatives blast `liberal` media
Date: Thursday, July 01 @ 10:14:10 EDT
Topic: Conservatives And The Right

By James Kuhnhenn, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - With the presidential election likely to turn on developments in Iraq and the U.S. economy, one of the summer`s hottest political issues is whether news-media coverage of those topics is fair or biased.

Conservatives across the country decry news coverage of the war as relentlessly and unfairly negative. Last week Brent Bozell, a conservative activist, launched a $2.8 million advertising and talk-radio campaign to discredit the "liberal news media."

Such complaints are escalating - and increasingly conveyed in e-mails to journalists, letters to the editor and even in social settings with news executives - a phenomenon that appears to have been aroused in part by the Republican Party, President Bush`s campaign and leading conservatives on talk radio, the Internet and cable TV.

"The bias that`s been there is now simply out of control," said Bozell, whose conservative Media Research Center is running newspaper and billboard ads accusing the press of lying. The ads show a stern-faced Uncle Sam warning: "Don`t believe the liberal media!"



Protests about media coverage have surged as bad news from Iraq and worries about jobs here at home have driven Bush`s approval numbers to all-time lows. The president`s supporters say journalists dwell unfairly on casualties and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and ignore positive U.S. economic signs.

To be sure, this week`s hand-over of power to an Iraqi interim government selected by the United Nations gave Bush`s foreign policy a shot in the arm. NATO leaders also agreed this week to help train Iraqi security forces. Likewise, economic indicators leave no doubt that the American economy is rebounding. Growth is strong, consumer spending and personal income rose in May and consumer confidence hit a two-year high in June.

But while media critics complain that the press has overplayed the violence in Iraq, even some top U.S. officials there say lack of security is the dominant reality.

"Clearly the security situation trumps everything," James "Spike" Stephenson told Knight Ridder in late June. He heads the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq, which is leading the effort to renovate schools, construct sewer systems and otherwise rebuild the country. "Having a school that is renovated does you no good if you are afraid to send your kids because you are afraid they are going to die on the way," Stephenson said.

Moreover, the investigative arm of the Republican-led Congress - the General Accounting Office - issued a 105-page report Tuesday concluding that Iraq`s electricity grid, judicial system and security are much worse than before the war began 15 months ago, and saying that significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

Back at home, while the economy is indisputably strengthening, not all Americans sense the improvements, a perception rooted in much more than news media coverage. In a new survey by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and Republican pollster Ed Goeas, 45 percent said they knew someone who`d been out of work in the past year.

Still, conservative Republicans accuse the press of bias.

A talking-points memo to Republican senators issued last week by Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, blamed Democrats and "out-of-control media" for drawing extraordinary attention to the treatment of prisoners by American military guards at Abu Ghraib.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional committee last week: "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 added that the U.S. media "have some responsibility to try to present a balanced picture, instead of always gravitating for the sensational. And the violent is always sensational."

However, two days later, noting that 34 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the war began, Wolfowitz apologized to war correspondents and said he admired their "professionalism, dedication and, yes, courage."

Bozell complained in an interview that in media presentations, "every positive economic report is followed by, `comma, but experts say, negative, negative, negative.` "

Bearers of bad tidings have been scorned ever since Sophocles declared in the fifth century B.C. that "none love the messenger who brings bad news."

And the accusation that the news media have a liberal bias is hardly new. But the complaints now reverberate in the echo chamber of the Internet, talk radio and cable television, giving them momentum and a wider reach.

"It has been a long-standing complaint of the conservative movement," said Stephen Hess, a former aide to President Eisenhower, a co-editor of "Media and the War on Terrorism" and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center in Washington. "They have organized to make this point. They have groups that put out newsletters, that keep track of quotes from the press that they feel are biased."

Indeed, any commuter who listens to talk radio probably has heard conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh or Laura Ingraham regularly inveigh against the media. But, Hess notes, liberals have been critical, too, accusing the press of being too easy on Bush ever since Sept. 11, 2001, and bowing before complaints that critical coverage of the war isn`t patriotic.

"Both sides are quite sure that the press is against them," Hess said. "And they can find examples, because an awful lot of words are written and spoken in the media."

The press is particularly vulnerable now. High-profile scandals about fictitious stories at The New York Times and USA Today have put journalists on the defensive. Many news organizations also have been examining their coverage of the run-up to the war, wondering whether they accepted too easily unverified assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Moreover, a May poll by the Pew Research Center reinforced conservative complaints by confirming that national journalists are more liberal than the general public. According to the poll, 34 percent of national journalists describe themselves as liberal, whereas only 19 percent of the public defines itself the same way.

Another Pew poll, conducted in June, found that conservative and Republican criticism of the media has intensified as the country becomes more polarized politically. As that criticism increases, the credibility of television and print media has fallen, the poll found, as partisans divide over favored media. The most trusted source of news for Republicans is the Fox News Channel. Fox doesn`t rate in the top six sources for Democrats or independents, Pew reported. The most believable sources for Democrats are ABC News, CBS News and National Public Radio, none of which make the top tier for Republicans.

Yet some Republican press critics are reluctant to accuse journalists of ideological bias.

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative activist with close ties to the White House, said he could understand Wolfowitz`s complaint about the media, but not because he thought the press was anti-Bush. "He (Wolfowitz) gets to fly around with a bunch of soldiers guarding him; he thinks he sees things that other journalists don`t."

Some in the president`s camp share that view.

"Certainly I don`t think there is an industry-wide bias based on ideology," one senior Bush campaign official said on condition of anonymity. Instead, he said, the media make choices based on the packaging and selling of news.

"Before the jobs numbers bounced back, the economy was judged solely on whether we were creating jobs. It`s a simple number," the official said. As for the war, he said, "we almost had a morbid fixation ... on Americans killed in action. That`s not ideological bias. That`s a barometer that people can understand."

Reprinted from Knight Ridder Newspapers:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9049444.htm

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Book Reviews
Reading: An End to Evil
By Micah White
Jul 5, 2004, 15:33

January 7, 2004

A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too.

Richard Perle and David Frum
An End to Evil: How to Win
the War On Terror, pg 279

If the others let a minority conquer the state, then they must also accept the fact that we will establish a dictatorship.

Joseph Goebbels
Knowledge and Propaganda, 1928


January 7, 2004

Introduction: They Want War

A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too.

Richard Perle and David Frum, An End to Evil: How to Win the War On Terror, pg 279

If the others let a minority conquer the state, then they must also accept the fact that we will establish a dictatorship.

Joseph Goebbels, Knowledge and Propaganda, 1928

Tragically, a reoccurring characteristic of times of great upheaval, and looming mass destruction, is the failure of contemporaries to anticipate their future. Perhaps there is simply something human about the inability to fully grasp the seriousness of the situation, a naive unwillingness to trust that those who advocate total war truly want it. Likewise, it is hard to believe that when David Frum and Richard Perle advocate the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency under the control of Tom Ridge, a national identification system linked to DNA databases, an expansion of the Patriot Act along with expanded domestic monitoring, and the invasion of several more nations that they actually mean it. It is time to lay aside your skepticism, because they mean precisely what they are writing.

In 1933, John W. Wheeler-Bennett gave a talk to the Royal Institute of International Affairs about the alarming rise of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany. He drew explicit attention to the rein of violence that followed the burning of the Reichstag, Germany`s parliamentary building, and implied that the Nazi party started the fire to pass their Reichstag Fire Decree which declared, "the constitution [is] suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights to personal freedom [meaning habeas corpus], freedom of speech, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of letters, mail, telegraphs and telephones, order searches and confiscations and restrict property, even if this is not otherwise provided for by present law." The resulting repression secured Hitler`s total control.

One could imagine that the audience was alarmed by Wheeler-Bennett`s description of Nazi Germany. Clearly, an anti-democratic leader had now seized control of Germany, anything was possible, and the worst was likely. And yet, only one member of the audience was able to believe that the Nazis would actually attempt what their policy, written 13 years before, stated. At the same presentation, Mr. Israel Cohen "expressed surprise that none of the speakers had mentioned Hitler`s Mein Kampf, which contained a complete exposition of his philosophy, or referred to the twenty-five points of the Nazi programme which in 1920 the party had declared to be immutable." His fears were flippantly rejected by Wheeler-Bennett who declared he had not read Mein Kampf and "the twenty-five points of the Nazi programme were so contradictory that nobody could carry them out," further, "many parties had got into power and had then disregarded the programme on which they got into office." As we all know, it was Cohen who was right.

Now that America has invaded two countries during the course of one presidential term, perhaps the greatest challenge for those now alive is to trust that the neoconservatives mean precisely what they say. It is a difficult task, for what they are saying seems so "contradictory that nobody could carry it out". After attacking Iraq (and conceding that the attack violated international law) the neoconservative movement is once again adjusting public opinion toward accepting their continued total war. The task of writing the propaganda capable of doing this has been taken up by Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and David Frum, former speechwriter for Bush who was partly responsible for Bush`s "Axis of Evil" formulation.

Their book, An End to Evil, is blunt propaganda that Random House claims "will define the conservative point of view on foreign policy for a new generation — and shape the agenda for the 2004 presidential-election year and beyond." Having finished the 280 page book in a night of furious reading, I can only agree. An End to Evil is propaganda at its most crude, most deceptive, and most damaging. As such, this book can be read both as a masterpiece of contemporary propaganda and a policy statement with far reaching effects.

After first examining the propaganda techniques utilized by Frum and Perle, I will present a summary of the more important policy statements that they make. Do not be fooled by those who will argue that this book is not worth in-depth examination; Perle and Frum quietly deploy drastic rhetoric changes that deserve the movement`s full attention.

Techniques of Propaganda

Let us recall another effect of such propaganda on democracy: an aristocratic category of men arises which has no common bond with democracy. The propagandist is a technician and a member of an aristocracy of technicians that establishes itself above the institutions of a democracy and acts outside its norms. Besides, the employment of propaganda leads the propagandist to cynicism, disbelief in values, non-submission to the law of numbers, doubts on the value of opinions, and contempt for the propagandee and the elected representatives: he knows how public opinion is fashioned. [...] Every democracy that launches propaganda creates in and by such propaganda its own enemy, an aristocracy that may destroy it.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men`s Attitudes, pg 252

One of the most fundamental functions of propaganda is to provide the mass with a set of beliefs that they can rely on to analyze the world. In the case of Frum and Perle, the goal is to homogenize American public opinion behind Bush. In a sense, the function of propaganda is to give the largest number of people the exact same talking points. As Jacques Ellul explains in Propaganda: The Formation of Men`s Attitudes, "answers to problems are clear-cut, white and black; under such conditions, public opinion forms rapidly, breaks loose, and expresses itself with force." (pg 206) Ellul provides an illuminating quote from Goebbels, the head of Nazi propaganda, who wrote "by simplifying the thoughts of the masses and reducing them to primitive patterns, propaganda was able to present the complex process of political and economic life in the simplest terms.... We have taken matters previously available only to experts and a small number of specialists, and have carried them into the street and hammered them into the brain of the little man." (pg 206)

This explains why An End to Evil is so simplistic. I originally ordered this book in anticipation of being treated to a sustained argument in favor of the political philosophy of neoconservatism. Instead, the book functions to set the limits of the debate and provide answers without justifications. Frum and Perle are less concerned with rational argument as they are in making the most terrifying of arguments palatable to the average citizen. To accomplish this they use many textbook techniques of propaganda, the most frequent being hypothetical questions and conditional statements that allow them to dodge making statements of fact and most importantly they present information they know is false.

Using sophistry, Frum and Perle are able to sidestep making the statement that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction while constantly suggesting that he did. Thus, the reader is left with the curious page 25, when we are first asked to imagine:

Where would Saddam be in 2004, 2005, and 2006? Would he obtain nuclear material from North Korean or from the Russian mafia? To what projects would he assign his team of nuclear experts? Would he develop ballistic missiles? Bioweapons? How would he use his weapons if he got them? Directly against us? Indirectly through terrorism? Would he try again to conquer Kuwait to seize its oil wealth - and this time learn from his 1990 mistake and threaten mass casualties in the United States if we intervened to stop him? Or would he seek glory in the Arab world by attacking Israel, possibly triggering a nuclear confrontation?

After contemplating this series of nightmares, and oddly enough, acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons in violation of international law, the reader is then informed that in fact:

The critics` emphasis on stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons as the central issue seems to us seriously misplaced. As David Kay has reported, there is overwhelming evidence that Saddam had extensive chemical and biological weapons programs [...] that would have enabled him to produce such weapons in the future...

This subtle shift from considering concrete fact and current reality that can be evaluated as true or false ("Saddam has WMD") to considering future hypothesis which can not be evaluated precisely because they are judgments on future events ("maybe one day Saddam would have WMD") is utilized throughout the book. It is a crucial shift because if war can be justified on future scenarios articulated by those who want war, than there is no way to stop war. Let us not forget that this rhetorical movement is new. Americans were originally sold on concrete truth. Cheney declared:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.

Bush too placed his emphasis on stockpiles:

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands."

(Although in retrospect, it`s clear Bush`s use of the past tense was carefully chosen.)

Frum and Perle construct many of their arguments through implying what they do not state directly. Readers should be particularly aware of their use of the words may and if. For example, in presenting the reforms they`d make in the armed forces they again imply that Iraq had WMD by asking whether American soldiers will need to "raid Syria to retrieve or destroy weapons of mass destruction that may have been sent there by Saddam Hussein for safekeeping?" (pg 211) The word may allows Frum and Perle to make assertions that they will not ever have to prove. Thus, they can say that Syria is hiding Iraqi officials by linking a statement with some ideological payload: "The Syrians provided weapons of war to Iraq in the months leading up to the U.S. campaign, and may have provided refuge to fleeing officials of Saddam`s government."

Basing reasons for war on such obviously logically deceptive arguments indicates that Frum and Perle do not have rational reasons for their beliefs. The irrationality of their arguments is easy to demonstrate. For example, one could also say, using the same formulation as Frum and Perle employ, that "Uncle Bob lives in Michigan and may have given nuclear weapons to Iraq." Once I`ve tainted Uncle Bob with a claim that I don`t intend to prove I can then argue that he must be destroyed by using the rhetoric device employed above: hypothetical questions. For example, in the following argument from page 26 I`ve only replaced the word Saddam with Friendly Uncle Bob. The quote begins, "President Bush had to ask himself:"

If I remove [Friendly Uncle Bob] and learn later that he did not have weapons of mass destruction after all, how would that compare to leaving him in place - and learning only after he used them, or enabled terrorists to use them, that he did in fact possess the chemical and biological weapons that all Western intelligence organizations as well as United Nations inspectors believed him to have hidden away?

Clearly the only option is to murder Friendly Uncle Bob, for as Frum and Perle note, "where intelligence is uncertain, prudent leaders will inevitably minimize risk by erring on the side of the worst plausible assumption. And rightly so." The aggressor nation and not international consensus, of course, is the one who gets to determine what is "plausible".

The result of such arguments is that the winner will be the one most able to rouse the hatred of the population based on an imagined future event: "We must kill them now to prevent them from killing us when they are strong!" By rejecting rational argumentation, Perle and Frum are forcing their adversaries to use violence instead of intellectual debate.

Perhaps one reason Perle and Frum are so fond of such arguments is that it allows them to hold completely contradictory policies. For example, although India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons we should:

Accept the subcontinent`s nuclear weapons as an unwelcome but unalterable fact and drop all remaining sanctions against India and Pakistan. The sanctions were ill conceived from the beginning. There was never the slightest chance they would succeed in halting either the Pakistani or Indian nuclear program. Their only effect was to estrange the United States from both countries. (pg 262)

The reason? Because in their world vision Pakistan and India can be brought under the influence of America. The point is that there is no real political philosophy underlying which countries should be destroyed, and which ones should be aided, but instead a series of predictions by Perle and Frum. If they predict that a country will challenge us in the distant future, then that country will be destroyed now.

Frum and Perle frequently quote biased sources such as MEMRI and Daniel Pipes and they frequently lie as well. In fact, they lie about things that they know are completely false. For example, to offer their readers evidence of a link between al-Qa`da and Saddam they point to "the fact that Czech intelligence remains convinced that Mohammed Atta met Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague in April 2001." (pg 45) This was proven absolutely, 100% false by the New York Times over a year ago. On October 21, 2002 James Risen wrote:

The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, has quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports that Mohamed Atta, the leader in the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the attacks on New York and Washington, according to Czech officials. Mr. Havel discreetly called Washington to tell senior Bush administration officials that an initial report from the Czech domestic intelligence agency that Mr. Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, in Prague in April 2001 could not be substantiated.

Frum and Perle must have known that this story was completely false, yet they know the average America won`t. One more example should suffice, they write:

Likewise, our intelligence services could find no evidence to contradict the Iraqis when they told us after Desert Storm that they had halted their biological weapons program - until Saddam Hussein`s son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected in 1995, and we learned of Iraq`s continuing attempts to weaponize anthrax, plague, botulism, and smallpox. (pg 24)

They write this knowing that Kamel told the UN weapons inspectors:

I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.

Before moving on, I`d like to draw attention to what I found to be the most deceptive and dangerous argument used in this book. Although I haven`t heard Bush deploy it yet, if he begins to use this rhetoric then there may be no chance to avert all future wars. The argument is that it was good we attacked Iraq because it prevented Iraq from being victorious against us. In other words, it was good we attacked Iraq because we won. In Frum and Perle`s words, the third "great objective" America achieved "by toppling Saddam Hussein" was:

We denied our enemies in the Middle East the huge victory they would have won had Saddam been able to claim that he had survived and triumphed over us. (pg 33)

That Frum and Perle write this to justify war is terrifying indeed!

Intentional inaccuracies, deceptive language, and emotional arguments are the norm in this book. Unfortunately, this is what makes An End to Evil powerful. Through irrational arguments Frum and Perle are able to fan the flames of anti-Islamic feelings in the American populations, justify endless future wars and increasing domestic repression. Thus their book fulfills another characteristic of propaganda according to Ellul who wrote:

Under the influence of propaganda certain latent drives that are vague, unclear, and often without any particular objective suddenly become powerful, direct, and precise. Propaganda furnishes objectives, organizes the traits of an individual`s personality into a system, and freezes them into a mold. For example, prejudices that exist about any event become greatly reinforced and hardened by propaganda; the individual is told that he is right in harboring them; he discovers reasons and justifications for a prejudice when it is clearly shared by many and proclaimed openly. (pg 162)

It is essential that we do not dismiss this as an unimportant work - instead, it is precisely the high level of propaganda that makes this book a terrifying reminder that America is close to being dragged into the depths of neoconservative insanity. Having looked at the text as a piece of propaganda, let us now turn to the policies that it advocates and the prejudices it reinforces.

Fear Their Plans

Propaganda gives the individual the stereotypes he no longer takes the trouble to work out for himself; it furnishes these in the form of labels, slogans, ready-made judgments. It transforms ideas into slogans, and by giving the "Word," convinces the individual that he has an opinion.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men`s Attitudes, pg 163

An End to Evil is written to provide people with replies to any foreign and domestic policy question that they will likely encounter in the simplified world of mass media and public politics. As such, Frum and Perle cover a wide range of topics very superficially. The goal is not to educate the public; the goal is to give the public an opinion about the diverse issues that Bush will tackle in his next term.

Instead of arguing with Frum and Perle, an activity that is not worthwhile if your opponent is not willing to use intellectually honest arguments, I want to instead highlight some of the more blunt policy statements that they make. There is much in this book that needs to be publicized, which is why I`d encourage you to get the book, read it, and give it to a friend and tell them to pass it on. Until then, here are some of the most important quotes in this book:

On Domestic Repression

To stop terrorists before they strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country. (pg 63 - 64)

We ought to learn a lesson from the most effective anticrime program the United States has ever seen: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani`s crack down in New York. Giuliani`s core insight was this: People who break one law will break other laws. You want to catch a guy who`s skipped out on a manslaughter arrest warrant? Stop every turnstile jumper and inspect his ID. You want to find the killer who left his fingerprints on a knife that stabbed a kid to death yesterday? Scan the fingerprints of everybody you catch smoking marijuana in the park today. (pg 68)

And there is only one system that will do the job: a national identity card that registers the bearer`s name and biometric data, like fingerprints or retinal scans or DNA, and that indicates whether the bearer is a citizen, a permanent resident, or a temporary resident... (pg 70)

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused. (pg 71)

Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies. (pg 74)

We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion... (pg 74)

A free society is not an unpoliced society. A free society is a self-policed society. (pg 77)

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right. (pg 80)

New data assembly techniques can pull together inside a computer an individual`s credit history, his recent movements, his immigrations status and personal background, his age and sex, and a hundred other pieces of information and present them to the analyst - without the analyst or any other human being ever knowing the individual`s identity. (pg 82)

Noncitizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another. (pg 222)

But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between 1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without letting any one of them see a lawyer. (pg 229)

Domestic Political Reorganization

The transformation must begin with the single worst performer among those institutions: the FBI. But it must extend much farther: to the CIA, the armed forces, and, perhaps above all, the Department of State. (pg 196)

The determination of the State Department to reconcile the irreconcilable, to negotiate the unnegotiable, and to appease the unappeasable is an obstacle to victory. (pg 221)

The FBI must return to the job it does best: catching criminals. It should be fired from the counterterrorism job it has bungled, and its counterterrorism units and employees should be reassigned to a new domestic intelligence agency. This new domestic intelligence agency should report not to the attorney general, but to the secretary of homeland security. (pg 222)

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency`s culture. He has failed. He should go. (pg 223)

It may be time to bring all of these secret warriors ["CIA personnel involved in paramilitary operations"] into a single paramilitary structure ultimately answerable to the secretary of defense... (pg 224)

No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane. (pg 226)

Next, we should increase sharply the number of political appointees in the State Department and expand their role. (pg 227)

Comments on Islam and Islamic Organizations

Militant Islamic groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR]... (pg 75)

People who live next door to a storefront mosque in Brooklyn, New York, will almost certainly observe more things of interest to counterterrorism officials than will people who live next door to a Christian Science church in Brookline, Massachusetts. (pg 79)

The lax multiculturalism that urges Americans to accept the unacceptable from their fellow citizens is one of this nation`s greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror. (pg 93)

The administration`s solicitude for Muslim sensitivities might well have been interpreted by many Muslims as a vindication of bin Laden`s methods. (pg 149)

...clerics whose own minds contain nothing but medieval theology and a smattering of third world nationalist self-pity. (pg 161)

... the social and sexual frustrations of unemployment may explain much of the fury that Muslim radicals direct toward women who dress too temptingly - and it may also explain the eagerness with which they seize on emotionally intense distractions, like terrorism. (pg 177)

The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures. (pg 201)

The CIA`s reports on the Middle East today are colored by similar ideological biases - exacerbated by poor understanding of the region`s culture and a politically correct disinclination to acknowledge unflattering facts about non-Western peoples. (pg 204)

Saudi-funded religious schools drill boys to memorize the Koran in its original Arabic language, a language few of them will ever understand. They learn no trade or skills, no math, no science, no Western language - only deadening rituals and murderous prejudice. [...] By the time they "graduate," they are unemployable, deformed personalities. Meanwhile, in city slums and unelectrified villages, Saudi-funded imams preach jealousy and rage to populations baffled by their country`s backward slide and repeated military defeats. (pg 259-260)

Policy Towards "Enemies"

Iran is itself a terrorist state, the world`s worst. North Korea has committed terrorist atrocities, too [...] Both regimes are nightmarishly repressive; both regimes present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. And we don`t have much time. (pg 98)

Any new agreement with North Koreans must begin by acknowledging that North Korea cannot be trusted to honor its promises. (pg 102)

We fear that the North Korean leadership craves a nuclear arsenal even more desperately than it hungers for international approval or American aid. If those fears are correct, then the United States must ready itself for the hard possibility that our choices really shrink to two: tolerate North Korea`s attempts to go nuclear - or take decisive action to stop it. Decisive action would begin with a comprehensive air and naval blockade of North Korean, cutting it off from all sea borne traffic, all international aviation, and all intercourse with the South. (pg 103)

Next, we must accelerate the redeployment of our ground troops on the Korean peninsula so they are beyond the range of North Korean artillery and short-range rockets. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld have already begun to do this. (pg 103)

Third, as we reposition troops, we should develop detailed plans for a preemptive strike against North Korea`s nuclear facilities. (pg 103-104)

It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome. (pg 104)

In time, all of Korea will be united in liberty. (pg 104)

Iran wants a lot more than blackmail from us - and so poses a much larger danger than North Korea. (pg 105)

The mullahs are pursuing a bomb. Our idea of common sense is to stop them. (pg 110)

In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than weapons. The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons. The regime must go. (pg 110)

Above all, Iran`s dissidents need the consistent and vocal support of the United States. They need us to make clear that we regard Iran`s current government as illegitimate and intolerable and that we support the brave souls who are struggling to topple it. (pg 112)

If all our problems were as easy as Syria, the war on terror would have ended a year ago. Here is a regime that is surrounded by U.S. and allied forces; that depends for fuel on oil exports from Iraq; and whose economy is a pitiful shambles. Really, there is only one question to ask about Syria: Why have we put up with it as long as we have? (pg 114)

Libya should be regarded and treated as what it is: an implacably hostile regime. (pg 117)

National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government. (pg 120)

The reason our policy towards Saudi Arabia has been so abject for so long is not mere error. Our policy has been bought and paid for by the Saudis - or else are looking forward to the day when they will be bought and paid for. (pg 141)

In the last chapter, we argued that we should apply every possible pressure to halt Saudi Arabia`s campaign to spread its murderous version of Islam - including, if necessary, encouraging the secession of the kingdom`s oil-producing Eastern Province. (pg 152)

In the Middle East, democratization does not mean calling immediate elections and then living with whatever happens next. (pg 162)

We can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America. (pg 165)

We had come to Iraq to liberate it from Baathism. We had zero interest in delivering power to the imams. And romantic as some might find the tribal sheikhs, they were not the men to govern a nation of 70 percent whose people lived in cities. (pg 166)

Former Allies, Now Enemies

The jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists also affect many of our former cold war allies. (pg 236)

The same European governments that hesitated to confront terrorists were more than prepared to oppose us. (pg 240)

They [Europeans] resent America`s ability to be generous, and they resent their need for that generosity. (pg 245)

First, Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest. (pg 247)

We should insist that all important NATO business be conducted by NATO`s military council, on which France does not sit. (pg 249)

We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington. (pg 249)

We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally`s strategic independence from Europe. (pg 250)

Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers... (pg 268)

The UN is not an entirely useless organizations. [...] It creates employment for the less employable relatives of presidents for life. It gives smaller countries a feeling that their views count. And when the chamber is empty and touring schoolchildren walk the halls, the extravagant building can for a quiet moment seem to give substance to the age-old dream of a world without war. (pg 269-270)

..., the UN must endorse our "inherent" right to defend ourselves against new threats just as forcefully as we are entitled to defend ourselves against old threats. If not, we should formally reject the UN`s authority over our war on terror. (pg 271)

But if the UN cannot or will not revise its rules in ways that establish beyond question the legality of the measures the United States must take to protect the American people, then we should unashamedly and explicitly reject the jurisdiction of these rules. (pg 272)

Conclusion

The next four years, at least, will be a challenge for the movement. As is clear from An End to Evil the neoconservative movement is devoted to further domestic repression and continued war. Now is the time to read Frum and Perle`s book and decide whether theirs is the future you want to live in. If not, make a commitment to act against them - and soon.

http://www.why-war.com/commentary/2004/01/anendtoevil.html

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US leaves Iraq running on empty
By Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON - A barrage of binding decrees passed during the United States occupation of Iraq, combined with a lack of resources, heavy debt and the continuing presence of a massive US force, provide clear evidence that the recent handover of authority to Iraqis does not equal real control over the economy.

Just before former US administrator L Paul Bremer left Iraq on June 28, he said that one of his biggest achievements was to transform Iraq into a market-based economy, citing lower tax rates and import duties, and more liberal foreign investment laws.
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In May 2003, Bremer declared Iraq "open for business" and for the past 14 months the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) promoted major changes to the country`s regulatory and legal frameworks, entered into long-term contracts and appointed oversight committees with multi-year terms. As a result, the country`s economy looks set on a path that Iraqis will find hard - if not impossible - to alter.

A report by the Institute of Policy Studies estimated that Bremer had passed nearly 100 orders that, among other things, give US corporations "virtual free rein over the Iraqi economy while largely excluding Iraqis from a reconstruction effort which has failed to provide for their basic needs".

Iraqis have had little input into those changes imposed by the authority, the report said. Most of the benefits of the reconstruction contracts signed under the occupation also went to US companies that appear to have secured future maintenance and reconstruction contracts in massive, capital-intensive infrastructure projects.

Meanwhile, a recent report by the Open Society Institute`s (OSI) program to monitor Iraq`s reconstruction said that the US-controlled CPA was engaged in a last-minute spending spree, committing billions of dollars to "ill-conceived projects just before it dissolves", in an apparent attempt to pre-impose those deals on any future Iraqi government. The US-controlled Program Review Board, the body in charge of managing Iraq`s finances, approved the expenditure of nearly US$2 billion in Iraqi funds for reconstruction projects in just a single meeting.

"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 the Iraq Revenue Watch at the OSI, which is chaired by leading US financier George Soros. She also said as a direct result of this last-minute spending, the new government is left with far less money to spend than the CPA, including the $20 billion collected for the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), authorized by the United Nations Security Council last May to safeguard Iraq`s oil revenues and other money, already earmarked by the CPA for government salaries and reconstruction costs.

The UN Security Council`s latest resolution on Iraq, passed on June 8, requires the new government to satisfy all outstanding obligations against the DFI made before June 30, leaving the new interim Iraqi government with no choice but to honor the Program Review Board`s questionable expenditures.

"All-in-all, the fund collected $20 billion and by the time the CPA leave, there will less than $3 billion," Tsalik said prior to the handover. "Two billion dollars were spent in one meeting recently by the coalition authority. So in one important sense, the government, even though it`ll have formal control over its economy, it will have much less money to spend."

Although the new interim Iraqi government does have authority over its future oil revenues - estimated at $12 billion a year - its control is limited as a panel with members from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the UN and the World Bank will still oversee the oil revenue fund. Iraqis will exert more control over the system, but there will still be checks on what they can do. Media reports state that most of the Iraqi oil ministry`s foreign advisers, appointed by the US- led coalition, will be withdrawn. Only four advisers will remain, coordinating with remaining American troops and contractors.

Aside from oil money, the government can hope to raise revenue through collection of income and value-added taxes, as well as customs duties. Businesses and individuals will pay a flat 15% in annual income taxes.

In addition, Iraq has been left with a legacy of unaccountability. A damning new report by the British group Christian Aid, titled "Fueling Suspicion: The Coalition and Iraq`s Oil Billions", charges that for the entire year the CPA oversaw Iraq`s finances, it was impossible to determine with any accuracy precisely what it has done with the $20 billion of Iraq`s own money, including its oil revenue and funds deposited in the DFI.

According to officials with Christian Aid, the CPA is in "flagrant breach of the UN Security Council resolution that gave the CPA control over the DFI on condition that its operations be independently audited". The auditor, KPMG, sharply criticized the CPA for the way it spent more than $11 billion in oil revenues and charged that the DFI`s administration made it "open to fraudulent acts".

Meanwhile, Iraq Revenue Watch also says the occupation has left Iraqis burdened with the hundreds of US "experts and advisors" working in all of Iraq`s 29 ministries as well as other government agencies. Those advisors, who mostly hail from US market institutions, wielded enormous influence over decisions taken before the nominal handover. They are expected to maintain their influence on future economic decisions.

"Under the coalition they were indeed very powerful and most of the decision-making within the ministries came from them," Tsalik said. "We know that these advisers will remain within the ministries but I think it`s hard to say how much power they`ll have. It may not be an official power but rather an unofficial one, stemming from the fact that the US will maintain some 140,000 soldiers in Iraq."

Iraqi control over the economy will also be diluted from another quarter after the handover. International financial institutions, which have often been used by Washington as a tool to channel its policies, will start working in the country soon - a move with implications that will further tighten the already snug noose around Iraq`s financial freedom. The country`s huge debts and its plans to take out more loans for reconstruction are likely to subjugate Iraq to further conditions by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, notorious for taking ownership from borrowing nations over their economies.

The World Bank said on Tuesday it recognized Iraq`s new interim government as legitimate, a move that opens the door for new lending to the country. The World Bank`s sister institution, the IMF, has previously signaled its willingness to resume lending in the second half of this year.

"Iraq will be very dependent on international aid," said Tsalik. "It also has a lot of debt and it remains to be seen whether that will be forgiven. So in such a needy country it may not have a lot of alternatives to saying `yes` to the IMF and the World Bank."

Current estimates put Iraq`s debt at around $120 billion. Members of the Paris Club, which includes 19 of the world`s wealthiest nations, are owed roughly $40 billion - $21 billion in principal and the remainder in late interest. Non-Paris Club governments, chiefly the Arab Gulf States, and private creditors, hold the rest.

Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan, sees limited sovereignty for the Iraqis from another perspective. He says the new US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will maintain control over some $18.3 billion in US aid to Iraq.

"The caretaker government is hedged around by American power," Cole wrote on his online blog Wednesday. "Negroponte will control $18 billion in US aid to Iraq. [US Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld will go on controlling the US and coalition military. There isn`t much space left for real Iraqi sovereignty in all that."

(Inter Press Service)

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Inspiration: Cheney Pays Visit to Yankee Stadium and Gets Booed During the Seventh Inning Stretch..
Here is the definition of the Bronx Cheer, a noise made to signify derision, made by sticking out the tongue between the lips and blowing to make a sound reminiscent of flatulence.
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The resistance campaign is Iraq`s real war of liberation

The sham of this week`s handover will do nothing to end the uprising
Seumas Milne
Thursday July 1, 2004

The Guardian
The much-vaunted handover, when it came, was a secret hole-in-the-corner affair. There were no celebrations as the US proconsul Paul Bremer signed over technical authority to his green zone government of Iraqi quislings two days early to beat the expected resistance onslaught. And, humiliatingly, there could be no triumphal Bush or Blair visit, though the pair were only a plane hop away in neighbouring Turkey. Even a Karl Rove or Alastair Campbell would have struggled to convince most Iraqis that the appointment of a patsy administration, headed by a man who spent years in the pay of the British and US intelligence services, amounted to a genuine transfer of power from the occupying powers.

Before leaving the wreckage of his imperial mission, Bremer had issued a string of edicts to tie the hands of Iraqi governments for years to come, including legal immunity for foreign soldiers and contractors. Perhaps the 2% of Iraqis who, according to the Bush administration`s own polling, regard the US and Britain as liberators, are impressed. For most of the rest, a handover to a government protected by 140,000 US troops with a good deal less functional independence than the state of Alabama is a transparent sham.

You wouldn`t know that, though, from much of this week`s British and American media coverage. The post-Hutton BBC bent over backwards to give credence to the handover. "The Americans are no longer in power," one world service announcer declared, while the cowed Today programme insisted that Iraq was now "in charge of its own destiny". Such happy days are unfortunately still some way off.

The new ruler of Iraq is in real life the incoming US ambassador, John Negroponte, who oversaw the US contra terror campaign against Nicaragua in the 1980s and will now exercise ultimate power from his 3,000-strong fortified embassy inside Saddam Hussein`s former palace compounds. In all meaningful senses, the occupation will continue. The solemn pledges by Bush and Blair that they would withdraw their troops if asked to by a government of their own placemen are risible. US special forces are all that stand between the prime minister Iyad Allawi and assassination as a collaborator. A request to the US to withdraw would be a suicide note for the entire puppet administration.

Yesterday saw another handover that never was, when Saddam Hussein was transferred to Iraqi jurisdiction - while remaining in US custody. No doubt the occupation forces and their Iraqi frontmen hope that a show trial of the former dictator will provide a theatrical distraction for Iraqis from the misery around them. By recalling the crimes of the Saddam regime, perhaps they imagine they can retrieve some retrospective justification for last year`s unprovoked invasion. It is surely too late for that. In the wake of the revelations of the torture and abuse of prisoners by US and British soldiers, the last vestiges of moral authority have been stripped from the occupying forces, while domestic support for a war built on fabrication and deception is at an all-time low.

Faced with the record of over 1,200 civilians killed in Iraq in the last three months, more than 1,000 Iraqi policemen in the past year and nearly 1,000 occupying troops over the same period, Colin Powell pleaded last week that the US had "underestimated" the scale of the insurgency. The Bush solution is to put a new face on the occupation, while maintaining a strategic grip on the country from more than a dozen bases - hence the handover to a puppet administration, brought forward by a year by the intensity of the armed resistance. The idea is Iraqisation: get someone else to do the dirty work and the dying while Americans pull the strings. It has long been the way of imperial powers and was Britain`s approach when it last ruled Iraq in the 1920s. Allawi and his fellow ministers are ready to play their part, threatening to impose martial law and behead those who fight them. But whether it will be any more successful than, say, Vietnamisation in the 1970s seems unlikely.

What is not in doubt is that the resistance has decisively changed the balance of power in Iraq and beyond. The anti-occupation guerrillas are routinely damned as terrorists, Ba`athist remnants, Islamist fanatics or mindless insurgents without a political programme. In a recantation of his support for the war this week, the liberal writer Michael Ignatieff called them "hateful". But it has become ever clearer that they are in fact a classic resistance movement with widespread support waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies. Their tactics are overwhelmingly in line with those of resistance campaigns throughout modern history, targeting both the occupiers themselves and the local police and military working for them. Where that has not been the case - for example, in atrocities against civilians, such as the Karbala bombing in March - the attacks have been associated with the al-Qaida-linked group around the Jordanian Zarqawi, whose real role is the subject of much speculation among Iraqis.

The popularity of the mainstream resistance can be gauged by recent polling on the Shia rebel leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who was said to have minimal support before his Mahdi army took up arms in April and now has the backing of 67% of Iraqis. In the past year, the Iraqi resistance has succeeded in preventing the imposition of a Pax Americana on Iraq and forced the occupation troops out of Falluja, Najaf and other Iraqi cities. By tying down the most powerful military force in the world, it has revealed the limits of American power and drastically reduced the threat of a US invasion of another state. The resistance war can of course be cruel, but the innocent deaths it has been responsible for pale next to the toll inflicted by the occupiers. Its political strength lies precisely in the fact that it has no programme except the expulsion of the occupying forces. Jack Straw said this week that the resistance was "opposed to a free Iraq" - but its campaign is in fact Iraq`s real war of liberation.

That campaign is still a long way, however, from forcing the US and its allies to abandon their strategic commitment to control Iraq, close their bases and withdraw. The foreign secretary went on to compare the presence of foreign forces in Iraq with those still in Germany 60 years after the defeat of Hitler - which gives some indication of the Anglo-American perspective. Polls show most Iraqis want foreign troops out and would support parties calling for withdrawal in the elections planned for January. That perhaps explains why, even though parties can be banned from standing, Allawi this week suggested they might have to be postponed. The choice now in Iraq for the occupying states is whether to move quickly towards a negotiated withdrawal and free elections - or be drawn ever deeper into a bloody pacification war against the majority of the Iraqi people.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Was ich bis jetzt über den Inhalt des Films gehört habe, ist alles, was in diesem Film erzählt wird, nicht neu für uns hier in Europa.
Für die US-Bürger ist vieles neu und das zeigt doch wie uninformiert die Meisten dort sind.
Ich glaube nicht, dass es an der US-Presse liegt, denn in den letzten Monaten konnte man dort jede Meldung finden, die auch in Europa verbreitet wurde.
Aber sehr wenige lesen Zeitungen und die US-Fernsehsender sind in ihrer Nachrichtenauswahl sehr einseitig und wie auch die meisten Radioprogramme äußert rechtslastig.
Anders kann man diese Reaktion sich nicht erklären.

Published on Thursday, July 1, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
"Fahrenheit 9/11" Parties Turn Up the Heat
by Shepherd Bliss


Hundreds of people living in Sonoma County, Northern California, attended dozens of house parties June 28 where Michael Moore spoke via a live internet simulcast. They were among over 55,000 people to attend Moveon.org`s "Turn Up the Heat" gatherings in over 4600 locations where the film "Fahrenheit 9/11" was discussed.

"I have not been politically active before," our host Howard explained beneath towering redwoods at his Sebastopol countryside home to 30 neighbors. "My partner and I were emotionally raw after seeing the film, so we decided to open our house, even to strangers, for healing. We need to get active to save this democracy."

The evening began by people introducing themselves, why they came, and which parts of the film were most compelling. "Bush lied," one person noted. "I`m here because I do not want to be afraid anymore." Another added, "Michael Moore did it. He hit it. There was hardly anything new to me in the film, but it painted the larger picture. Now we need to register people to vote Bush out."

As we were going around the circle with the community-building introductions, the voice of Moveon.org co-founder Eli Pariser, 23, came over the computer, where we were viewing a map of house gatherings lighting up around the nation. Moveon.org is a grassroots internet group with over two and a half million members. Pariser encouraged listeners to "turn the momentum from the film into action."

People were invited to ask questions in the interactive format. Moore then responded to some of the questions. "A cross-section of Middle America came out to see the film," he observed. "Anyone on the fence fell off during the movie. People came out of the film disgusted. They left saying, `Why wasn`t I told this? Why did I not see these images?`"

Moore used devastating footage from the archives of the television networks that was excluded from the evening news. So the media is angry at him. "They are embarrassed that they were outed on the big screen. The footage does not lie. They are going to come after me." In recent days a series of stories in the mainstream media have been trying to discredit Moore and his award-winning and record-breaking documentary.

Moveon.org will follow the house parties with July 11 phone parties. Hosts and participants were recruited at the movie parties. At that national event people will bring cell phones and call non-voters in 18 swing states to encourage them to register to vote. At our Sebastopol gathering a woman invited everyone to a July 4 block party at which she and neighbors will raise funds for the main candidate opposing Bush.

The film seems to have been successful with three distinct groups: the more than 50% of Americans who do not vote, some of whom will now vote; the undecided; and those already opposed to Bush and the Iraq War. These opponents can slide into depression and become passive, but the film has activated many of them.

"The other side is well-organized," Moore noted. "These people are not going to give up the White House without a fight. Our payoff will be that the country will be back in the hands of the majority."

Following Moore`s comments, we returned to our self-introductions and film memories. "This film is a tutorial to our sleep-walking nation," our host Howard noted. "We need to break our reliance on the mainstream media."

Among the reflections on the movie were the following: "It made me speechless." "I heard a lot of sobbing in the theater." "If Bush gets re-elected, I`m out of this country." "I try hard not to be angry, but I am angry." "Arrogance and rampant violence are the hallmarks of this administration." "Grief transcends nationality." "The most political thing I have ever done is vote. Now I am scared and will become active."

Others commented as follows: "The movie was full of good information." "I`m so glad that I went to see it with a group of friends." "There are too many facts in this film to discount them all." "I was struck by all the voices of soldiers who see the folly of this war." "The film reveals how thorough and systematic Bush`s deceit has been."

In addition to the adults present, the group had the playful two year old daughter of a local candidate for City Council who entertained us with unicorn sounds. A young and articulate boy spoke on behalf of his generation about the need to get Bush out of the White House. People identified with both the American mother in "Fahrenheit" from Flint, Michigan, who lost her marine son in Iraq, and with the wailing Iraqi mother.

The group was focused for nearly two hours of listening and conversation before moving outside to the redwood deck for Sonoma County wine, local plums, cake, cheese and dips. Phone numbers and email addresses were exchanged.

In addition to this house gathering, since seeing the movie on the afternoon of its opening on June 25, this writer has attended another Sebastopol house gathering focused on discussing the film and a birthday party, house warming, and vacation send-off where the film was the main topic of conversation.

Fourteen-year-old Joshua Canning spoke to me at a salmon bake about the film`s scenes that moved him, "The US is dropping bombs on people`s houses. Kids watch as every person they have known and loved gets blown up. What have they ever done to us? Then these kids become the terrorists. I can understand how they feel. Think about it. How would you feel if a bomb landed on your house and every person you have known is all blown up. For no reason. You did nothing to them and now people are being killed everyday for nothing. How would you feel ?"

Dr. Shepherd Bliss, [e-mail], teaches Communication at the University of Hawai`i at Hilo. His recent contributions to books include an essay in "Shattered Illusions: Analyzing the War of Terrorism" and a poem in "An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11.

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The Pluck of the Irish
Thursday, Jul 01, 2004; 10:43 AM

Regular visitors to this space will recall Irish television correspondent Carole Coleman`s 10-minute interview with the president last Thursday.

He got snippy when she tried to move him along. The White House complained to the Irish Embassy that she interrupted too much and cancelled her interview with the first lady. And afterwards, she reignited a debate about the role of the White House press corps when she said she had submitted her questions in advance.

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Interview of the President by Radio and Television Ireland
The Library
June 24, 2004

4:08 P.M. EDT

Q Mr. President, you`re going to arrive in Ireland in about 24 hours` time, and no doubt you will be welcomed by our political leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of our public do not welcome your visit because they`re angry over Iraq, they`re angry over Abu Ghraib. Are you bothered by what Irish people think?

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, I hope the Irish people understand the great values of our country. And if they think that a few soldiers represents the entirety of America, they don`t really understand America then.

There have been great ties between Ireland and America, and we`ve got a lot of Irish Americans here that are very proud of their heritage and their country. But, you know, they must not understand if they`re angry over Abu Ghraib -- if they say, this is what America represents, they don`t understand our country, because we don`t represent that. We are a compassionate country. We`re a strong country, and we`ll defend ourselves -- but we help people. And we`ve helped the Irish and we`ll continue to do so. We`ve got a good relationship with Ireland.

Q And they`re angry over Iraq, as well, and particularly the continuing death toll there.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I can understand that. People don`t like war. But what they should be angry about is the fact that there was a brutal dictator there that had destroyed lives and put them in mass graves and had torture rooms. Listen, I wish they could have seen the seven men that came to see me in the Oval Office -- they had their right hands cut off by Saddam Hussein because the currency had devalued when he was the leader. And guess what happened? An American saw the fact that they had had their hands cut off and crosses -- or Xs carved in their forehead. And he flew them to America. And they came to my office with a new hand, grateful for the generosity of America, and with Saddam Hussein`s brutality in their mind.

Look, Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, against the neighborhood. He was a brutal dictator who posed a threat -- such a threat that the United Nations voted unanimously to say, Mr. Saddam Hussein --

Q Indeed, Mr. President, but you didn`t find the weapons of mass destruction.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish. Let me finish. May I finish?

He said -- the United Nations said, disarm or face serious consequences. That`s what the United Nations said. And guess what? He didn`t disarm. He didn`t disclose his arms. And, therefore, he faced serious consequences. But we have found a capacity for him to make a weapon. See, he had the capacity to make weapons. He was dangerous. And no one can argue that the world is better off with Saddam -- if Saddam Hussein were in power.

Q But, Mr. President, the world is a more dangerous place today. I don`t know whether you can see that or not.

THE PRESIDENT: Why do you say that?

Q There are terrorist bombings every single day. It`s now a daily event. It wasn`t like that two years ago.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it like September the 11th, 2001? It was a -- there was a relative calm, we --

Q But it`s your response to Iraq that`s considered --

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions and I`ll answer them, if you don`t mind.

On September the 11th, 2001, we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion. Everybody thought the world was calm. And then there have been bombings since then -- not because of my response to Iraq. There were bombings in Madrid. There were bombings in Istanbul. There were bombings in Bali. There were killings in Pakistan.

Q Indeed, Mr. President, and I think Irish people understand that. But I think there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off al Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place? I saw four of your soldiers lying dead on the television the other day, a picture of four soldiers just lying there without their flight jackets.

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, nobody cares more about the death than I do --

Q Is there a point or place --

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish, please. Please. Let me finish, and then you can follow up, if you don`t mind.

Nobody cares more about the deaths than I do. I care about it a lot. But I do believe the world is a safer place and becoming a safer place. I know that a free Iraq is going to be a necessary part of changing the world. Listen, people join terrorist organizations because there`s no hope and there`s no chance to raise their families in a peaceful world where there is not freedom. And so the idea is to promote freedom, and at the same time protect our security. And I do believe the world is becoming a better place, absolutely.

Q Mr. President, you are a man who has a great faith in God. I`ve heard you say many times that you strive to serve somebody greater than yourself.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q Do you believe that the hand of God is guiding you in this war on terror?

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, I think that God -- that my relationship with God is a very personal relationship. And I turn to the good Lord for strength. And I turn to the good Lord for guidance. I turn to the good Lord for forgiveness.

But the God I know is not one that -- the God I know is one that promotes peace and freedom. But I get great sustenance from my personal relationship. That doesn`t make me think I`m a better person than you are, by the way. Because one of the great admonitions in the Good Book is, don`t try to take a speck out of your eye if I`ve got a log in my own.

Q You`re going to meet Bertie Ahern when you arrive in Shannon Airport tomorrow. I guess he went out on a limb for you, presumably because of the great friendship between our two countries. Can you look him in the eye when you get there and say, it will be worth it, it will work out?

THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely. I wouldn`t be doing this, I wouldn`t have made the decisions I did if I didn`t think the world would be better. Of course. I`m not going to put people in harm`s way, our young, if I didn`t think the world would be better. And --

Q Why is it that others --

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish.

And so, yes, I can turn to my friend, Bertie Ahern, and say, thank you, thanks for helping, and I appreciate it very much. And there will be other challenges, by the way.

Q Why is it that others don`t understand what you`re about?

THE PRESIDENT: I don`t know. History will judge what I`m about. But I`m the kind of person, I don`t really try to chase popular polls, or popularity polls. My job is to do my job and make the decisions that I think are important for our country and for the world. And I argue strongly that the world is better off because of the decisions I have made -- along with others. America is not in this alone. One of our greatest allies of -- in the world is your neighbor, Great Britain. Tony Blair has been a strong advocate for not only battling terrorists, but promoting freedom, for which I am grateful.

Let me say one other thing about America that your viewers must know -- is that not only are we working hard to promote security and peace, we`re also working to eradicate famine and disease. There is no more generous country on the face of the earth than the United States of America, when it comes to fighting HIV/AIDS. As a matter of fact, it was my initiative --

Q Indeed, that`s understood --

THE PRESIDENT: -- my initiative, that asked Congress to spend $15 billion over five years to battle this pandemic. And we`re following through on it. And no other country in the world feeds more of the hungry than the United States. We`re a compassionate nation.

Q Mr. President, I know your time is tight, can I move you on to Europe? Are you satisfied that you are getting enough help in Iraq from European countries? You have come together, you are more friendly now -- but they`re not really stepping up to the plate with help, are they?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think, first of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq. And, really, what you`re talking about is France, isn`t it? And they didn`t agree with my decision. They did vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution that said, disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. We just had a difference of opinion about when you say something, do you mean it.

But, nevertheless, there`s no doubt in my mind President Chirac would like to see a free and democratic and whole Iraq emerge. And same in Afghanistan. They`ve been very helpful in Afghanistan. They`re willing to forgive debt in Iraq. But most European countries are very supportive and are participating in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Q And how do you see the handover going? The next few weeks are going to be crucial. Can democracy really flourish with the violence that`s going on? A hundred Iraqis dead today, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: I don`t like death, either. I mean, you keep emphasizing the death and I don`t blame you -- but all that goes to show is the nature of the enemy. These people are willing to kill innocent people. They`re willing to slaughter innocent people to stop the advance of freedom. And so the free world has to make a choice: Do we cower in the face of terror, or do we lead in the face of terror?

And I`m going to lead in the face of terror. We will not let these terrorists dash the hopes and ambitions of the people of Iraq. There`s some kind of attitude that says, oh, gosh, the terrorists attacked, let`s let the Iraqis suffer more. We`re not going to let them suffer more. We`re going to work with them. And I`m most proud of this fellow, Prime Minister Allawi. He`s strong and he`s tough. He says to me, Mr. President, don`t leave our country, help us secure our country so we can be free.

Q Indeed, Mr. President, just to get back to that. Can I just turn to the Middle East --

THE PRESIDENT: Sure.

Q -- and you will be discussing at the EU summit and the idea of bringing democracy to the broader Middle East.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q Is that something that really should start, though, with the solving of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think, first of all, you`ve got a democracy in Turkey. And you`ve got a democracy emerging in Afghanistan. You`ve got a democracy in Pakistan. In other words --

Q But shouldn`t that be on the top of the list --

THE PRESIDENT: Please. Please. Please, for a minute, okay. It`ll be better if you let me finish my answers, and then you can follow up, if you don`t mind.

What I`m telling you is democracy can emerge at the same time that a democracy can emerge in the Palestinian state. I`m the first American President to have called for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the first one to do so. Because I believe it is in the Palestinian people`s interest; I believe it`s in Israel`s interest. And, yes, we`re working. But we can do more than, you know, one thing at a time. And we are working on the road map with the Quartet, to advance the process down the road.

Like Iraq, the Palestinian and the Israeli issue is going to require good security measures. And --

Q And a bit more even-handedness from America?

THE PRESIDENT: -- and we`re working on security measures. And America -- I`m the first President to ever have called for a Palestinian state. That`s, to me, sounds like a reasonable, balanced approach. But I will not allow terrorists to determine the fate -- as best I can, determine the fate of people who want to be free.

Q Mr. President, thank you very much for talking to us.

THE PRESIDENT: You`re welcome.

END 4:19 P.M. EDT
Return to this article at:
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It was quite the topic of conversation at yesterday`s press briefing with Scott McClellan. (Here`s the full text.)

"Q Did anyone in the White House or the administration ask Irish television or its reporter, Carole Coleman, to submit questions in advance of her interview with the President last Wednesday?

"MR. McCLELLAN: Bill, a couple of things. I saw I guess some reports on that. I don`t know what every individual office -- whatever discussions that they have with reporters in terms of interviews. But obviously, the President was -- is pleased to sit down and do interviews with journalists, both from abroad, as well as here at home, and to talk about the priorities of this administration. And I think anytime that there is an interview that`s going to take place, obviously there are staff-level discussions with reporters before that interview and to --

"Q -- what are the --

"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, to talk about what issues might be on their mind, and stuff. That`s -- but, reporters --

"Q That`s not the same thing as asking for --

"MR. McCLELLAN: Let me finish. Let me finish."

[Irony alert: "Let me finish" was Bush`s frequent refrain in his Coleman interview.]

"Q -- and my question is, were questions asked for.

"MR. McCLELLAN: Let me finish. Reporters, when they meet with the President, can ask whatever questions they want. And any suggestion to the contrary is just --

"Q Right, but that doesn`t answer the question. Did somebody in the administration ask her for questions in advance, and is that your policy?

"MR. McCLELLAN: No, in terms -- you`re talking my policy?

"Q No, the administration`s policy.

"MR. McCLELLAN: I don`t know what an individual staffer may or may not have asked specifically of this reporter, but some of these interviews are set up by people outside of my direct office and control. . . . "

[More back and forth ensues.]

"Q Is it your policy to ask for questions in advance?

"MR. McCLELLAN: No, it is not my policy. In fact, if reporters would give me their questions, this press briefing would be a whole lot easier, I`m sure. But that`s not my policy.

"Q Sometimes you might answer them. (Laughter.)"
Who Called to Complain?

Susan Falvella-Garraty writes in the Irish American weekly newspaper, Irish Echo, that the White House complaint about Coleman`s interview came directly from Mary Catherine Andrews, who recently took over the White House`s Office of Global Communications from its founder, Tucker Eskew.

The Coleman interview was arranged through the Office of Global Communication (Unofficial motto: Countering propaganda and disinformation since 2002), rather than through the regular press office.

"`The White House rang Thursday evening,`" said Irish embassy spokeswoman Síghle Dougherty. `They were concerned over the number of interruptions and that they thought the president was not given an opportunity to respond to the questions.`"

Said Dougherty: "They were mostly troubled by what they said was the way the president was `talked over.` "

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Nachtrag zu ##18701. Der Bericht über das Präsidenteninterview und einen gereizten Bush stammt aus:

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Aus dem Bush-Interview mit dem irischen Fernsehen. s. #18370

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July 2, 2004
ANTI-INSURGENCY
Ex-Occupation Aide Sees No Dent in `Saddamists`
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, July 1 - More than a year of intensive efforts by the American military and the Central Intelligence Agency to destroy the insurgency in Iraq has failed to reduce the number of ``hard-core Saddamists`` seeking to destroy the interim Iraqi government, a former senior official of the just-dissolved American-led occupation authority said in an interview on Thursday.
The senior official, speaking with a small group of reporters near the White House, said he was repeatedly ``disappointed we haven`t had better insight into the command and control of the insurgents.``

The official was touching on one of the continuing mysteries of the insurgency: how has a relatively small rebel force organized, and how can it be broken? In recent days, other officials have offered varying assessments on this question. Last Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, speaking at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: ``Someone`s giving general orders, and other people are following them. I think that`s clear.``

But Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a few minutes later that ``whether it`s a central nervous system or some other form of coordination`` was an open question and that ``the intelligence community, as far as I know, will not tell you, will not give you an answer, because they can`t give me an answer.``

On Thursday, the former senior occupation official estimated that the number of insurgents had stayed constant at 4,000 to 5,000, suggesting that as soon as they are killed or captured, they have been replaced.
``I have seen no evidence that the number has changed,`` he said, adding that ``the intelligence on this stuff is not as good as it should be.``

Moreover, said the former senior official, who has spent more than a year in Iraq and had access to the highest-level intelligence, American officials had found it ``almost impossible to penetrate`` the network organized by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is believed responsible for many of the suicide bombings that have killed both American troops and Iraqis.

The official also said that over the last year, both Iran and Syria had stepped up their activity in Iraq, and that the Iranians might have been financing Moktada al-Sadr, the young radical cleric whom the Bush administration first promised to capture or kill, then decided had to be spared to avoid urban warfare in Najaf, his stronghold. The Iranians have ``become more active over time, and not helpful,`` the official said, though he said intelligence indicated that far more foreign fighters were coming over the border from Syria than from Iran.
Taken together, the description of the paucity of intelligence still available to the 138,000 American troops in Iraq and the assessment of how few inroads have been made at reducing the insurgency sounded a very different note from the optimistic-sounding messages that President Bush has been sending all week about the prospects of the new Iraqi government.

In fact, when officials speak on the record - from Baghdad to Washington to New Orleans - they describe an Iraq that is making significant political and economic progress, despite the insurgency.
A specific cause for optimism involved economic policy, in the view of former American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, who left Baghdad on Monday. He said in Washington that he was convinced that the just-disbanded occupation authority had ``accomplished quite a lot,`` and had succeeded in ``introducing the concept of a devolution of power and the balance of power`` for a new Iraqi government.

``We have tried to find ways to make sure that not all decisions are made in Baghdad, as they have been for the past thousand years,`` he said.

On Thursday in Washington, Mr. Bremer ticked off a series of economic reforms that he enacted before leaving Baghdad: balanced budgets - a contrast, he acknowledged with a grin, to the deficits run by the United States - a new currency and openness to foreign investment.

Yet the insurgency, Mr. Bremer said, ``will be very hard to root out,`` and ``stopping corruption is going to take time.`` But he concluded: ``Can they get security enough under control to hold that credible elections will be held in January? I believe they can.``

While Mr. Bremer spoke in Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a political speech at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, argued that the Clinton administration, which he never actually named, allowed a series of crises to brew, all of which, he argued, the Bush administration had to tackle after Inauguration Day in 2001.

``When we took office,`` Mr. Cheney said, Pakistan was in danger of falling to Islamic extremists, ``terrorists were also receiving support in Saudi Arabia,`` and Libya, North Korea and Iran were acquiring arms from A.Q. Khan, the former head of Pakistan`s main nuclear laboratory.
``All of these dangers were gathering,`` he said. ``In short, this was the situation when President Bush and I came to office: a world where terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity.``

The former senior occupation official, speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity at the request of the White House, described a situation in which efforts to cut off the influx of foreign terrorists entering Iraq had been only partly successful.
He said that the Syrian border ``was the most important one where foreigners were coming in, and terrorists,`` but that the number could not be reliably quantified. The captured fighters were ``mostly Syrian - there were Sudanese, Yemenis, some Saudis and then the odd Egyptian and Moroccan.`` Many of the foreign fighters had contacts both with former Hussein forces, he said, and with Mr. Zarqawi`s network, but it was unclear who was coordinating their entry, if anyone.

He appeared less concerned about the appeal of the Zarqawi fighters, who he said were reviled in much of Iraq. The Hussein insurgents are a more significant threat, he said, in part because they are supported by an outer ring of ``less hard-core`` supporters, including teenagers and others paid to shoot rocket-propelled grenades at passing American troops.

Mark Glassman contributed reporting from New Orleans for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 2, 2004
Bush and Kerry Vie for Support of Rural Voters
By ROBIN TONER

CLOQUET, Minn., July 1 — Four years ago, George W. Bush won some of his biggest and most decisive margins among rural and small-town voters.

But Democrats say economic troubles and the war in Iraq have taken a disproportionate toll on rural communities. They vow that the struggle for these voters will be — must be — far more competitive this time around. So Senator John Kerry will come on Friday to Cloquet, not far from Duluth, and kick off a three-day Independence weekend bus tour across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, trying to connect with small-town America.

The Republicans are hardly ceding this political ground. The Bush campaign fired off a rough bon voyage to Mr. Kerry on Thursday, with a news release headlined, "Top 10 Reasons Why John Kerry Is Wrong for Rural America." (No. 1 was his opposition to Mr. Bush`s tax cuts, while No. 4 was his "F" rating from the National Rifle Association.)

And Vice President Dick Cheney will embark this weekend on his own bus tour, beginning in Parma, Ohio, passing through West Virginia`s northern panhandle, ending up in western Pennsylvania, at a baseball game in Altoona.

It will be a battle of heartland imagery as Mr. Kerry tries to show a different side from the urban, liberal Northeasterner so often caricatured by his Republican opponents — to show rural voters that "he looks like them, talks like them, and cares about them," as John Norris, his national field director (who hails from Iowa), puts it.

Mr. Kerry will listen to the concerns of farmers in Bloomer, Wis.; eat barbecue with voters in Independence, Iowa; and watch the fireworks on the Mississippi River near Dubuque. He might even do some shooting, as he did during the Iowa caucus campaign last year. He will also meet with veterans and military families along the way, in a region where many have a personal connection to a soldier in Iraq.

Past elections show just how important this effort is for the Democrats. Bill Clinton held his own among rural voters in both his presidential campaigns, losing that bloc by only a few points to President George Bush in 1992 and Senator Bob Dole in 1996, according to surveys of voters leaving polling places..

But the rural vote, which amounted to 23 percent of the electorate in 2000, broke decisively, 59 percent to 37 percent, for Mr. Bush four years ago, according to those surveys, while Vice President Al Gore carried the cities and the two men split the suburbs.

Republicans say they are confident that rural voters in the end, will make the same judgment about Mr. Bush in 2004 that they made four years ago — that he understands them, shares their cultural values on issues like abortion restrictions and the rights of gun owners, and is, essentially, one of them.

Matthew Dowd, the pollster for the Bush campaign, said that, if anything, Mr. Kerry, given his background and voting record as a Massachusetts Democrat, would have an even harder time making inroads with these voters than did Mr. Gore, who had represented Tennessee in the Senate.

The Republican trend among rural voters has been building for a decade, Mr. Dowd said, in large part because "they finally decided on a variety of social and cultural issues that the Democrats don`t stand for the same things that they stand for."

That was clearly reflected in the views of Jon and Fay Haataja, a police officer and a stay-at-home mother of three from nearby Esko, heading to breakfast this morning at the Family Tradition Restaurant. Mrs. Haataja said "moral issues" were uppermost for her, and added, "We`re going to vote for the president."

Bill McInturff, another Republican pollster, said that "the notion that there`s some consensus in rural America shifting in this race seems to me to be substantially overblown." Mr. Bush may have slipped some among rural women because of Iraq and the economy, he added, but Republicans can make up that ground by election time.

But Democrats say that times have changed. The loss of manufacturing jobs, the "out-sourcing" of jobs overseas and the continued troubles in the farm economy have put the economic agenda front and center in these communities, they say. Dealing with the rising cost of health insurance, a main part of Mr. Kerry`s program, is even more important in towns with many struggling small businesses. And with the disproportionate number of retirees in many of these communities, preserving traditional Medicare and Social Security looms large, Democrats say.

At the same time, Mr. Kerry`s aides say, the campaign is not giving ground on some of the key cultural issues. "We will do things to make sure people understand that guns should not be an issue because John Kerry is a sportsman, a hunter," said Mr. Norris, who helped Mr. Kerry win the Iowa caucuses earlier this year. While Mr. Kerry has supported some "gun safety" issues like the ban on assault weapons, the Kerry campaign says, the candidate is firmly committed to protecting the Second Amendment.

His latest biography advertisement, in fact, declares, "He`s a husband and father, a pilot, a hunter, a hockey player" and shows an image of Mr. Kerry hunting.

Moreover, Kerry aides say that they will simply fight harder for rural votes this time. They are sending organizers to many rural communities, they said. "And we are going to talk to them more directly than any Democratic presidential candidate has talked to them in years," Mr. Norris said.

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who says that Mr. Bush has already suffered erosion with these voters, added, "I think Bush is still going to win rural areas, but he needs to win them at the margins he won in the past."

The most recent New York Times/CBS News showed some decline in Mr. Bush`s approval rating among rural voters this year, reflecting the national trend, but he was still, on balance, given a positive rating.

Mr. Kerry is beginning his small-town America tour in an area of Democratic strength, in Minnesota`s Eighth Congressional District. Representative James L. Oberstar, the Democrat who has represented this area since 1974, described his voters as interested in "progressive economics" — "people who belong to strong unions, want a strong wage, strong Social Security, a strong Medicare drug benefit" — but "cautious on social values" and "very, very strong for gun rights."

The war is felt heavily here, Mr. Oberstar added. "It`s the uncertainty of people being ripped out of their homes and their families," he said. "This Iraq incursion has created a great deal of disruption among the guards and reserves."

A small group of Kerry supporters who met in a tavern here Wednesday night reflected that. Mike Sundin, chairman of the Carlton County Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said that his son had just returned from Iraq the day before. State Senator Becky Lourey said her son had just returned from Fallujah. And, she added, "I`ve been to three funerals of really wonderful kids."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 2, 2004
PRISONER ABUSE
Army Report Criticizes Training and Practices at Prisons
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, July 1 — A broad new Army report concludes that serious problems in training, organization and policy regarding military detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, senior defense officials said Thursday.

The inquiry, by Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, the Army inspector general, criticizes Army policy on detainee operations as a cold-war relic better suited to dealing with Soviet military prisoners on a European battlefield than with insurgents and Islamic jihadists fighting in Iraq, officials said. It cites inadequate training for military jailers and interrogators. And it describes poor leadership, overcrowded cells and poor medical care for Iraqi prisoners.

Taken together, these and many other of the 30 major findings paint a sobering picture of conditions, policies and practices that left the Army ill prepared to hold and question thousands of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, officials said.

Earlier drafts found no systemic abuse at American-run prisons in Iraq or Afghanistan, and officials said that had not changed in the final report. The report will probably not assign blame to senior American officers in Iraq, defense officials said. That task, officials said, will be left to one or more of the half-dozen other inquiries under way.

General Mikolashek is putting the finishing touches on his report, which the acting Army secretary, Les Brownlee, is expected to make public in the next couple of weeks, officials said. Descriptions of the report`s findings were provided by defense officials familiar with its general contents, but the report has not yet been made available to Congress for an independent assessment.

"It`s going to be a tough report," said one defense official who has been briefed on the outlines of the report, which is based on a four-month review. "It will show that these various problems helped to create and contribute to an environment that left room for human error and possibly misconduct by soldiers."

The report will also make a series of recommendations that include overhauling Army policies to deal with detainee operations in counterinsurgencies. The doctrine, for instance, has yet to catch up with the need for a partnership between military police and interrogators in questioning captured insurgents in places like Iraq, officials said.

The recommendations will also urge revising the training for military police and military intelligence specialists who interrogate prisoners, and revamping medical guidelines, like the number of medics assigned to units working at prisons, officials said.

Revising the policy is significant, Army officials said, because changing policies has an important ripple effect on training, developing leadership skills, and even on fielding proper equipment.

Army officials said commanders at training facilities around the country and overseas were already beginning to change their procedures. "We are continuously collecting and rapidly applying lessons learned into our training, leader development and, as appropriate, our doctrine," one Army official said.

General Mikolashek, a former commander of land forces in the Middle East, and a team of military specialists have examined at least 16 different areas, including military intelligence and military police operations and their training, officials said.

Investigators interviewed military and civilian personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, and at Army training centers at Fort Polk, La., and Fort Irwin, Calif., officials said.

In a confidential Feb. 10 memorandum, Mr. Brownlee ordered General Mikolashek to "identify any capability shortfalls with respect to internment, enemy prisoner of war, detention operations, and interrogation procedures and recommend appropriate resolutions or changes, if required."

Many of the inspector general`s findings are consistent with a preliminary assessment that Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, described to the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19.

At that hearing, General Abizaid said the Army itself would have to share some blame for not keeping pace with the kind of combat, stability operations and nation-building duties soldiers face today.

"Our doctrine is not right," General Abizaid told senators. "There are so many things that are out there that aren`t right in the way that we operate for this war."

General Abizaid said that according to a briefing he had received, the inspector general found no "pattern of abuse" of prisoners in the Central Command`s area of responsibility.

The officer who conducted the first major inquiry of abuse at the prison, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, also identified problems that the inspector general cited. "There is a general lack of knowledge, implementation and emphasis of basic legal, regulatory, doctrinal and command requirements" in the military police at Abu Ghraib, his report said.

The emerging details about the inspector general`s report come as many of the other major inquiries are making fitful progress. The Army announced last Friday that Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, deputy commander of the Army`s Training and Doctrine Command, had been assigned to interview Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez — who led the military forces in Iraq from just after the invasion until his replacement on Thursday — as part of a far-reaching inquiry into the role of military intelligence specialists at Abu Ghraib.

Another investigation by a four-member panel, headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, has interviewed two dozen military officers and civilian defense officials in Iraq, Europe and Washington as part of its inquiry to oversee all the other reviews.

The panel, whose report is due by the end of July, has already interviewed the Pentagon`s top civilian intelligence official, Stephen A. Cambone, and General Sanchez. When it meets on July 8, members will interview General Abizaid and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the 800th Military Police Brigade commander at Abu Ghraib, an official said.

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July 2, 2004
Iraqis Joyful, or Stung, to See Ex-Ruler in Dock
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 1 — With the image of Saddam Hussein in the dock flickering on the television screen before him, Sami Hassan shook his head in disbelief, struggling against the tears that came dribbling down his cheeks.

"This is a theater," said Mr. Hassan, a 47-year-old ex-member of the Baath Party, mimicking the words of his former boss on the day that he appeared in court. "When I turned on the television I did not believe it was Saddam Hussein at first. I thought it was one of his doubles."

"But when I saw that familiar pride," Mr. Hassan said, seated in his underwear on the floor of his home, "I knew it was him."

Mr. Hassan`s reaction was part of the outpouring of emotion that coursed through the Iraqi capital on Thursday. The images of a once-omnipotent dictator charged with mass murder seemed to open up a conversation on every street and in every home.

Some Iraqis celebrated what they hoped would be Mr. Hussein`s impending punishment, even his death. Others said they felt humiliated that Mr. Hussein`s arraignment in a courtroom here had been brought about by the Americans. While some Iraqis cheered Mr. Hussein`s public humiliation, others seemed uncomfortable watching their former president being treated like a common criminal.

Across Baghdad, Iraqis sat spellbound, leaving their television sets only to test the feelings of neighbor and friend. In tea shops and living rooms, the arraignment of Mr. Hussein brought the country`s public and private realms together in a way they have not been since the former dictator was captured by the Americans seven months ago.

Conversations with Iraqis across the city Thursday revealed how powerful Mr. Hussein remains in his ability to frighten, inspire and even divide this society over his legacy.

When word spread in the afternoon that Mr. Hussein`s court appearance had begun, and that the former Iraqi president appeared to be speaking on his own behalf, Dhafar Muhammad pulled down the shutters of his small grocery in central Baghdad, dashed home and flicked on the electrical generator he had rigged to power his television for just this occasion.

By late afternoon, Mr. Muhammad was back in his store, chattering to his customers about Mr. Hussein`s arraignment. His only lament was that the video of Mr. Hussein was mostly silent, showing only the former dictator`s moving lips.

"The happiest day of my life was when they found him in that dirty hole, but this was very exciting," said Mr. Muhammad, a Shiite. "I watched the whole thing. Saddam was trying to act proud, but in his eyes he was very weak."

Like hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis, Mr. Muhammad has a personal vendetta against Mr. Hussein. In 1979, the year Mr. Hussein became president, Mr. Muhammad`s older brother, Nabil, disappeared — killed, Mr. Muhammad believes, by one of Mr. Hussein`s henchmen. After years of searching, Mr. Muhammad said, he had found no trace of his brother: no documents, no bones.

Mr. Muhammad said his father died from grief over Nabil`s disappearance and presumed death and that his mother still waits for her son to walk through the door. All those thoughts ricocheted around Mr. Muhammad`s mind as he sat watching Mr. Hussein rattle on in court.

"When they execute him, I want God to put him back on earth, so they can execute him again," Mr. Muhammad said. "Every time they execute him, I want God to bring him back to earth."

While Mr. Muhammad rhapsodized about Mr. Hussein`s death, however, two Iraqis on the sidewalk only steps away lionized the former dictator.

On a street corner in the neighborhood of Karada, Ali Nassar and Akram Hussein spun a tale of American domination and Arab humiliation, with Mr. Hussein`s persecution at its heart.

"You cannot put Saddam Hussein on trial — he is the people`s representative, the symbol of the Arab nation," said Mr. Nassar, a 56-year-old Sunni Arab, his eyes welling up. "When I saw him on the television, it hurt me so much. Right now, I want to cry."

For Mr. Nassar, the charge sheet against Mr. Hussein amounted to a catalog of exaggerations and lies. The Iraqi president never ordered the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in Halabja, he said. That was done by the Iranians. The mass graves that are said to be full of Shiites — they are filled with Iraqi soldiers, killed by American troops.

And the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the first gulf war, was justified for reasons that few people appreciated, he said.

"The Kuwaitis were insulting Iraqi women," Mr. Nassar said.

Then Mr. Nassar turned to the Americans, who, he said, were the puppet masters behind Mr. Hussein`s arraignment.

Prosecuting and eventually executing Mr. Hussein, Mr. Nassar said, would pit Iraqi against Iraqi in a potentially murderous way.

"There will be civil war here," Mr. Nassar said, "and that is just what the Americans want."
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Mr. Hussein`s arraignment spawned a bevy of conspiracy theories, many of them stemming from the decision to ban audio recordings of his voice.

Mr. Nassar, for example, ventured that if ordinary Iraqis had been able to hear Mr. Hussein`s peroration Thursday, they would have risen up to free him.

Even those who hated Mr. Hussein found his appearance full of mysteries. Farid Shakuri, a 62-year-old retired engineer, said the generous treatment afforded Mr. Hussein at his arraignment — the smart clothes, the opportunity to speak — had strengthened his conviction that Mr. Hussein and the Americans were secret allies.

"I thought the Americans gave him a status today that he didn`t deserve," Mr. Shakuri said. "Over 30 years, he never gave anyone the chance at a fair trial."

"I think it is connected to the poison gas," he said.

Still, Mr. Shakuri said he took great joy in watching Mr. Hussein`s court appearance.

For a man who surrendered to the Americans without a fight last December, he said, Mr. Hussein seemed almost comical in trying to frighten the Iraqis now.

"He was weak with the Americans, but very tough with the Iraqis," Mr. Shakuri said. "He is like a man who is very mean to his wife, but with the other women outside his home, he is like a little chicken."

For all the hardship Mr. Hussein caused here, some Iraqis said they were unable to summon any bitter feelings. In that way, they said, Mr. Hussein looms like a father over an abused son. He may be a brutal man, the Iraqis said, but he is a father still.

Haidar Abdul Azim, a 34-year-old pharmacist, spent seven years in Mr. Hussein`s jails, for reasons he did not want to discuss.

But when Mr. Hussein`s visage appeared on the television of his shop, Mr. Azim shook his head and came to the defense of his former master.

"I feel disappointed," Mr. Azim said, who then referred to the Americans. "He may have put me in jail for seven years, but still it`s not right for the enemy to sit as his judge."

While Mr. Hussein`s court appearance sparked many strong opinions, one of the most common sentiments voiced Thursday was denial, a kind of forced indifference toward the man.

When Rafa al-Dulaimi saw Mr. Hussein`s face on television, he quickly switched off the set, not because he found Mr. Hussein`s arraignment objectionable, he said, but because he felt like the past needed to be forgotten.

"The Iraqi people have a new government now, and we are trying to turn the page," Mr. Dulaimi said. "The past is going to cause too much trouble."

"Saddam?" Mr. Dulaimi said. "Send him someplace very far."

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed to this article.

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July 2, 2004
THE MIDDLE EAST
A Sense of Arab Humiliation, but a Warning to Despotic Rulers
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

KAIRO, July 1 — As Saddam Hussein faced charges in Baghdad, governments across the Middle East largely kept silent on Thursday about the extraordinary appearance of an Arab leader in the dock. In the cafes and on street corners there was a decided ambivalence.

Some people in Arab countries outside Iraq were pleased to see a dictator being arraigned, calling the event a stark warning to despots. But many others said the court appearance merely extended the sense of Arab humiliation that grew out of the American invasion. In their eyes it was a stunning example of how a leading Arab state had been recolonized, intensifying their feelings of despair and impotence.

"I was about to cry as I was watching Saddam being brought to justice in this disgraceful way," said a young Damascus taxi driver named Khaled. "I want his own honest people to try him, not those supported by the Americans. What we saw is a humiliation for all the Arabs."

Senior government officials were reluctant to take any formal position about Mr. Hussein`s day in court, where he heard the charges to be levied against him when he stands trial.

In Egypt and Jordan the foreign ministers called it an internal matter and declined to comment. "I have no comment about the trial," said Egypt`s foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, when reporters asked his opinion. "What is more important is that the Iraqi people run their own affairs and completely regain their sovereignty."

The sole official voice supporting the trial came, naturally, from Kuwait, which has long been the loudest cheerleader in the Arab world for the American invasion, deeming it revenge for Mr. Hussein`s invasion in 1990.

Mr. Hussein gave the Kuwaitis renewed ammunition on Thursday when he said Iraq had a historical right to their country and referred to Kuwaitis as dogs.

Muhammed Abulhassan, the Kuwaiti information minister, referred to the deposed president as a "war criminal who committed genocide against the Iraqi and Kuwaiti people," Agence France-Presse reported. Mr. Hussein is hardly likely to feel repentant for creating mass graves or any other of his actions, the minister said, advocating the death penalty.

A number of Arab commentators suggested that the interim government in Iraq was eager to start proceedings against Mr. Hussein to give itself some legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi public. But they suggested that doing so could prove a mistake if the trial turned into the sort of kangaroo court that had materialized after every coup in Iraq`s modern history.

"By trying him a rotten history will be put on trial, a history in whose making many took part," Abderrahman al-Rashed wrote in the daily Asharq Al Awsat, published in London. The many, he went on, include "Iraqis other than Saddam, Arabs whose names shall not be mentioned and a widespread Arab culture that defended him until his last lying moments."

For that reason, another commentator, Abdelwahab Badrakhan in the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat, emphasized, a fair trial is necessary to show that whatever government rules Iraq is a complete break from the past.

"By demonstrating true transparency and the rule of law and justice, this trial should be different from all previous `trials` in Iraq`s modern history," Mr. Badrakhan wrote. "Some of these earlier `trials` were models of savagery; others were model farces.

"This trial should not be obsessed with revenge, because most such revenge has already been taken, and the only thing that remains is the physical punishment of Saddam and his aides. Rather, this trial should focus on its historical legacy."

Others were ready to defend Mr. Hussein to the last. "Hail Saddam, the Iraqis should be proud of you," said Mostafa Bakri, a prominent pro-Hussein newspaper editor in Cairo. "We Arabs should be proud of this brave man, a lion even when he is in his cage." Mr. Bakri made his remarks on Al Jazeera television.

As is typical whenever violence in the region is discussed, there were comparisons with Israel, in this case commments that it was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who should be on trial, for frequent fatal attacks on Palestinians.

Overall, the idea of putting a head of state on trial was too much for some, especially since many saw it as an American event, and perhaps one devised to help President Bush win votes in November.

"I am against the fact that a head of state has to face trial," said Khadeejeh Awdeh, 51, a lawyer in Amman, Jordan. "This is a court of invaders; therefore the court is not legitimate. Who do the Americans think they are? The Americans themselves should face trial, because of what they did to the prisoners in Iraq."

Some Arabs said they thought Mr. Hussein and his colleagues should be put on trial, but only when Iraq has an elected government, a new constitution and clear-cut laws.

Despite the hope that the trial would prove a milestone in the Arab world, there was some sense that the proceedings indicated a terrible state of affairs in that world.

"We are still living in the era of tribes where the chieftain is the first and the final person to decide the fate of his own tribe," said Fuad, a Syrian high school teacher. "I am really disappointed in the shameful deterioration in our situation."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 2, 2004
A Vote for Control

In a recent late-evening session noted mostly for Republican grousing about Democratic senators who had attended a screening of "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Senate considered an amendment to the Pentagon budget bill that would require the president to abide by the Geneva Conventions. It was passed, with the support of five Republicans who resisted frantic arm-twisting from the administration. Now we`ll see if the House can muster the political courage to follow suit.

The amendment, by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, calls on the administration to account for all foreign prisoners who have been denied P.O.W. status. It also requires the government to "expeditiously prosecute" cases of terrorism to avoid "the indefinite detention of prisoners," to say who is in the Guantánamo Bay lockup and to account for those who are unlikely to face legal proceedings in the next six months. Finally, it requires the Pentagon to turn over to the Red Cross the reports on American military prisons it has been withholding.

The administration bombarded Republican senators with arguments that ranged from disingenuous to downright silly. Defense Department lawyers complained that the amendment did not offer clear enough standards for the treatment of prisoners — an astonishing argument for an agency that has not been able to explain exactly what standards it was following in Abu Ghraib. It also said that requiring an accounting of the handling of prisoners "inappropriately intrudes" into the president`s powers. Intrudes? Yes. Inappropriately? No.

Donald Rumsfeld`s lawyers offered a familiar argument, saying this is a law-abiding administration so it`s unnecessary to order it to obey international treaties. Sadly, the record shows otherwise. Mr. Bush has declared himself free, at times of his choosing, from the Geneva Conventions — following advice from Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose staff produced the infamous memo on how to get around laws against torture. The White House`s repudiation of that memo last week was not credible. If the president thought the man who signed it, Jay Bybee, was so out of line in his legal judgments, why did Mr. Bush then appoint him to a lifetime seat as a federal appeals judge?

In lobbying against the amendment, the Republican Policy Committee chimed in with a bizarre e-mail note to senators about "talking points." It said "an out-of-control media and widespread hysteria" had led to the release of American interrogation methods in Iraq that were too secret to be revealed to the enemy — but added that the techniques, at the same time, were completely innocuous.

Five Republicans voted for the amendment anyway: John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Hagel, Arlen Specter and Mike DeWine. It now goes to negotiations with the House — where we hope, against experience, that sober lawmakers will stop their leaders from killing it.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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uly 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Waking Up to the War
By BOB HERBERT

The public is catching on. Americans heading into the Fourth of July weekend are increasingly concerned that the war in Iraq, rather than bringing stability to the Middle East and a greater sense of safety here at home, has in fact made the world more dangerous and the U.S. more vulnerable than ever to terror attacks.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published yesterday found that a majority of Americans now believe the war has increased the threat of terrorism. A New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this week found that 47 percent of respondents believe the terror threat has increased, while only 13 percent say it has declined. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents in that poll said the war had not made a difference.

There is a sound basis for the concern. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a gift-wrapped, gilt-edged recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and its offshoots. If Osama bin Laden had personally designed a campaign to expand the ranks and spread the influence of anti-American terrorists, it`s hard to imagine him coming up with a better scenario than the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"We have created the greatest recruiting tool possible for bin Laden and his ilk," said Bob Boorstin, a national security specialist at the Center for American Progress.

His words echoed the conclusions of the senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst who is the anonymous author of "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." The author, who spent years tracking bin Laden and his followers, said, "There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq."

The fact that this war has made America more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism should be treated as a national scandal. But that is not the kind of story that has the legs of, say, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Or the O. J. Simpson saga.

We have certainly known since Sept. 11, if not before, that terrorism poses the gravest and most immediate threat to the United States. Instead of marshaling the nation`s resources and the support of our allies for a sustained, all-out campaign aimed at destroying Al Qaeda and its offshoots, President Bush launched the war in Iraq and turned that country into a breeding ground for such terrorists.

There were warnings. Recruiting by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups was already surging in early 2003 in response to the buildup for war with Iraq. On March 16, 2003, three days before the start of the war, The Times reported:

"In recent weeks, officials in the United States, Europe and Africa say they had seen evidence that militants within Muslim communities are seeking to identify and groom a new generation of terrorist operatives. An invasion of Iraq, the officials worry, is almost certain to produce a groundswell of recruitment for groups committed to attacks in the United States, Europe and Israel."

We now have nearly 140,000 troops in Iraq, with more on the way, and we`ll be bogged down there for years to come. The tremendous costs in personnel and money have drained resources needed to combat terror groups around the world and shore up defenses against terror here at home.

Now the public is tiring of the war. A majority of the respondents in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal polls said the war was not worth its cost in American lives.

But there is no sign of the war ending. The so-called hand-off of sovereignty this week was a furtive ritual that was far more symbolic than substantive. Three marines were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad on Tuesday, a day after the transfer, and another was killed yesterday in Al Anbar, west of Baghdad.

We`re holding a terrible hand. There is no exit strategy for American troops in Iraq. There is no plan in our insane tax-cut environment for paying for the war. The situation in Afghanistan, which is part of the real war against terror, has deteriorated. The U.S. military is stretched dangerously thin, lacking sufficient troops to meet its obligations around the world. Homeland security is deeply underfunded. And with the terror networks energized, the feeling among intelligence experts with regard to a strike in the U.S. is not if, but when.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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July 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Moore`s Public Service
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Since it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases. Last Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his Nascar crew to see it. The film`s appeal to working-class Americans, who are the true victims of George Bush`s policies, should give pause to its critics, especially the nervous liberals rushing to disassociate themselves from Michael Moore.

There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration`s use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

And for all its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn`t promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren`t the reason why millions of people who aren`t die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn`t. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven`t been doing their job.

For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr. Bush`s decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction.

Or consider the Bush family`s ties to the Saudis. The film suggests that Mr. Bush and his good friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador known to the family as Bandar Bush, have tried to cover up the extent of Saudi involvement in terrorism. This may or may not be true. But what shocks people, I think, is the fact that nobody told them about this side of Mr. Bush`s life.

Mr. Bush`s carefully constructed persona is that of an all-American regular guy — not like his suspiciously cosmopolitan opponent, with his patrician air. The news media have cheerfully gone along with the pretense. How many stories have you seen contrasting John Kerry`s upper-crusty vacation on Nantucket with Mr. Bush`s down-home time at the ranch?

But the reality, revealed by Mr. Moore, is that Mr. Bush has always lived in a bubble of privilege. And his family, far from consisting of regular folks with deep roots in the heartland, is deeply enmeshed, financially and personally, with foreign elites — with the Saudis in particular.

Mr. Moore`s greatest strength is a real empathy with working-class Americans that most journalists lack. Having stripped away Mr. Bush`s common-man mask, he uses his film to make the case, in a way statistics never could, that Mr. Bush`s policies favor a narrow elite at the expense of less fortunate Americans — sometimes, indeed, at the cost of their lives.

In a nation where the affluent rarely serve in the military, Mr. Moore follows Marine recruiters as they trawl the malls of depressed communities, where enlistment is the only way for young men and women to escape poverty. He shows corporate executives at a lavish conference on Iraq, nibbling on canapés and exulting over the profit opportunities, then shows the terrible price paid by the soldiers creating those opportunities.

The movie`s moral core is a harrowing portrait of a grieving mother who encouraged her children to join the military because it was the only way they could pay for their education, and who lost her son in a war whose justification she no longer understands.

Viewers may come away from Mr. Moore`s movie believing some things that probably aren`t true. For example, the film talks a lot about Unocal`s plans for a pipeline across Afghanistan, which I doubt had much impact on the course of the Afghan war. Someday, when the crisis of American democracy is over, I`ll probably find myself berating Mr. Moore, who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, for his simplistic antiglobalization views.

But not now. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.

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Former president Bill Clinton`s memoir sold more than 900,000 copies in its first six days on the shelves.
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Pop Culture and the 2004 Election
Movies and Books Could Help Choose a President

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A01

When movie theaters began playing a Hollywood-produced newsreel backing the candidacy of Republican presidential challenger Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, Harry S. Truman didn`t sit still. Threatening the studios with an investigation, the president demanded -- and got -- equal time. Voters later said they found Truman`s hastily compiled newsreel to be more persuasive than Dewey`s in the whisker-close election that fall.

Contending with the popular culture was a lot easier in those days. Now, a spate of pointedly political movies and books -- most prominently Michael Moore`s cinematic assault on President Bush, "Fahrenheit 9/11," and former president Bill Clinton`s best-selling memoir, "My Life" -- have the presidential campaigns and pundits pondering an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, question: Can the popular culture influence an election?

Moore`s and Clinton`s works, in particular, have become bona fide news events, crowding out other stories and clouding -- if only temporarily -- the campaigns` efforts to sell their daily messages. Bush`s campaign and that of his opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), are convinced the buzz is fleeting, but they acknowledge that it has become another factor to contend with.

"Fahrenheit" is striking in its popularity, tone and timing. No movie or television show with so searing a political point of view has been released to such widespread embrace so close to an election. The movie was the most popular film in America in its first five days of release, seen by almost 6 million people through Wednesday. It has also become the subject of intense media coverage, making its controversial claims about Bush a subject of chatter in workplaces, in gathering spots and at dinner tables across the country.

Apart from the dueling Dewey-Truman newsreels, the closest parallel to the Moore movie may be the 1983 release of "The Right Stuff," which came as Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the former astronaut whose exploits were depicted in the dramatic movie, was preparing to run in the presidential primaries. But that film was not nearly so partisan, and Glenn`s character was one of several in the movie. (Glenn lost badly in the primaries to Walter F. Mondale.)

Clinton`s memoir may be the publishing industry equivalent of Moore`s movie. As of Sunday, after six days in release, it was the top-selling volume in America, with sales of 935,000 copies. Its timing, too, has little precedent. John F. Kennedy`s Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles in Courage" was published four years before Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 race. Barry Goldwater`s "Conscience of a Conservative," which sold 3.5 million copies and raised Goldwater`s national profile, was published four years before he became the Republican presidential candidate in 1964.

Alongside the Clinton and Moore blockbusters are a cluster of recent or forthcoming political works, most taking a strongly anti-Bush line. Clinton`s book was preceded on the bestseller lists by volumes written by former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, journalist Bob Woodward and former Treasury secretary Paul H. O`Neill. Lesser-known documentaries critical of the administration include "Control Room," "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" and "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War." Opening in September is filmmaker John Sayles`s "Silver City," a fictional tale about a corrupt, grammatically challenged gubernatorial candidate. Another documentary, "The Hunting of the President," recounts conservative-led investigations of Clinton`s conduct in office.

Few suggest these works will turn the election, but the profusion of Bush-bashing projects may suggest something about the mood of the country, says Mandy Grunwald, a Democratic consultant who devised Clinton`s strategy of using appearances on MTV and "The Arsenio Hall Show" as a publicity tool in 1992. Grunwald recalls that the bestseller lists and talk radio were brimming with invective against Clinton before the 1994 midterm elections, which led to huge Republican gains that year. "The popular culture was reflecting where the country was at that moment," she said. "Now the culture is going the other way. I think it`s telling us that the country is moving Democratic."

Bush representatives say they have taken a purposely low profile on "Fahrenheit" and "My Life" to avoid fueling the publicity. One campaign official dismissed the idea that their popularity could hurt Bush, saying that the most likely reader or viewer is already committed to Kerry, anyway. "We don`t think people are going to be distracted from the big issues in this campaign by someone trying to sell a book or a movie," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Conservative supporters of the president have been more active. One California-based organization, Move America Forward, has urged people to avoid the movie and has asked theaters not to show it. (That effort appears to have failed; the film is to play on about 1,700 screens this weekend, about twice its current number.) In perhaps the oddest twist, Citizens United, a group based in Washington, argued before the Federal Election Commission last week that TV ads for the film would violate the McCain-Feingold law prohibiting "independent expenditures" for a candidate if the ads continue after Kerry accepts the Democratic nomination in late July.

If anything, Kerry`s campaign has been more reluctant than its rival to engage with the subject -- a hesitance that has surprised supporters who think Kerry should try to exploit the anti-Bush tone. Asked for comment, Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said: "It`s something independent of the campaign. We have nothing to say."

But one Kerry campaign source, who asked not to be identified because he is not a primary spokesman, explained that it would be risky for Kerry to associate himself with such harshly critical portrayals of his political rival. "For the faithful, [Moore] is a prophet; for the other side, he`s a lightning rod," he said. "You might influence someone in the middle, but you could also turn people off if you do it in too strong a fashion."

But it`s harder to make the case that any book or movie will persuade swing voters. Scholars who study public opinion say people form opinions and make judgments based on a complicated series of factors. Further, any message must be repeated and reinforced over and over, so any movie, book or TV show, in isolation, is unlikely to have much effect.

S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, recalled studies done in the wake of ABC`s 1983 telecast of "The Day After," a popular film about the aftermath of a nuclear war. The movie became a rallying point for nuclear-freeze groups and the subject of news-discussion programs. Yet surveys taken before and after the program aired indicated little change in public opinion about U.S. nuclear and defense policy.

"One event doesn`t change opinions," Lichter said, "particularly an event that comes several months in advance of an election."

Moore`s film has exposed millions of people to two hours of unrebutted argument -- the most persuasive kind of speech, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Although she says it`s "an open question" whether anyone has been persuaded by the film, she points out that the sheer number of people seeing the film is remarkable during a political campaign. "If millions of people came to a stadium to hear an anti-Bush speech, you`d say that was an amazing moment," she said.

The only comparable phenomenon, she said, is talk radio, which is dominated by conservative hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O`Reilly and Laura Ingraham. "In battle of one-sided communication," Jamieson said, "the right is way ahead."

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Room Left To Govern?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A15

Will either George W. Bush or John Kerry be able to govern after this election is over?

Rep. Jim Leach, a moderate Republican from Iowa, is not optimistic. "If there is a certitude about this election," says Leach, "it is that both presidential candidates are going to be attacked personally. That`s going to undercut the presidential deference that should be given to anyone who wins the next presidential election."

The intense polarization of politics, aggravated under the Bush presidency, should require Bush and Kerry to explain not only what they will do for the next four years but also how, in the current climate, they propose to get it done.

The Bush approach is already clear enough: Use very narrow congressional majorities to push through an ideological program, especially on taxes and budgets. On only one issue -- his No Child Left Behind Act -- did Bush choose to deal with the mainstream of his opposition. Even there he has reneged on the spending commitments he made to get his bill passed.

Kerry, says a top aide to a Republican senator who often votes with his party`s moderates, would have a "tremendous opportunity" to govern differently -- and he would be required to, given GOP gains in Congress since 1994. True, the bottom could fall out from under Bush, and Kerry could enter the White House with Democratic majorities in both houses. Seen as more likely now are the other scenarios: Kerry wins a close election that leaves both the House and Senate under Republican control, or that only one chamber, probably the Senate, tips Democratic.

A Republican House as currently configured could make Kerry`s life hell in a way that Tip O`Neill`s 1981 Democratic-controlled House did not for Ronald Reagan. "Reagan dealt with a Democratic majority in the House, but there wasn`t the same dynamic we have today," said the Senate Republican aide. "This House is far more partisan, far more polarized, far more bitter and far more disciplined." In addition, there were many more conservative Democrats in the 1981 Congress than there will be moderate, let alone liberal, Republicans in the new House.

In fact, says Leach, because congressional districts are increasingly drawn to guarantee victory for one party or the other, incumbents worry mostly about primary challenges from ideological hard-liners. "There is no more underrepresented group in America today than moderates in both parties," Leach says. As for the tone of politics, Leach understates the case: "People to the right and people to the left personally don`t like the other side."

One effect of a Kerry victory might be to bring out into the open Republican divisions that are already beginning to surface. Former representative Steve Gunderson, a Wisconsin Republican, speaks of "a coming civil war in the party" spurred by the efforts of conservatives to purge moderates from its ranks. This civil war over social issues is compounded by new divisions over deficits and the use of tax cuts not only to "promote growth" -- there is, says Gunderson, "nothing wrong with that" -- but also to "shut down the legitimate role of government."

Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, as close as there is in Congress to an old-time liberal Republican, believes that "there would be an acceptance from moderate Republicans for rolling back some of the upper-income tax cuts to address the deficit." Both Chafee and Leach believe that because the 2001 Bush tax cuts are set to expire by 2011, Kerry might successfully negotiate some increases in exchange for making parts of the tax cut permanent. Leach is particularly interested in reforming rather than repealing the estate tax.

Chafee also thinks a Kerry victory could concentrate the minds of even more conservative Republicans. "Some of the conservatives could start to worry themselves and might accept more than you`d expect," Chafee says. "We all have to get elected, and we all have to listen to voters."

Chafee has yet to endorse Bush for reelection. When asked if he will, Chafee replies, "I`m a Republican," which he cheerfully admits is not an answer to the question.

"The people are thirsting for someone who could forge some common ground, and a lot of President Bush`s 2000 campaign was based on that," Chafee says. "His `I`m a uniter, not a divider` resonated with a lot of people." Yet, Chafee added sadly, "Here we are again." No wonder Bush is loading up this year`s Republican National Convention speakers` list with moderates, much as he loaded up the dais four years ago with African Americans and Latinos. This year symbolism may not be enough.

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Noch ein geheilter Säufer, der dann religös wurde. Das beweist wohl eindeutig, dass der Alkohol die Gehirnzellen zerstört. damit keine Verwechslungen aufkommen, es geht um Abu Musab Zarqawi, das Phantom.
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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Zarqawi Took Familiar Route Into Terrorism
Friends remember a volatile youth whose militant turn began with a stint in Afghanistan.
By Megan K. Stack
Times Staff Writer

July 2, 2004

ZARQA, Jordan — The town that would give Abu Musab Zarqawi his notorious moniker is a hard place — treeless and tough, cinder-block apartment houses punctuated by drab mosques. They say you have to be a thug to make it in the streets here, and the young Zarqawi had all the credentials: He ran with a fast crowd, fought easily and covered his skin with tattoos.

That was back in the 1980s, before he turned to religion. Before the call to jihad rang through the Arab world, sweeping away young men who could discern no more-promising prospects. Before U.S. leaders labeled Zarqawi as the mastermind behind some of the bloodiest mayhem in postwar Iraq.

Back then, his name was Ahmed Khalayleh.

In truth, Abu Musab Zarqawi is not a name, but rather a collection of personal details: It means father of Musab, native of Zarqa. To his neighbors and friends, he is still Ahmed, a man they struggle to reconcile with the American description.

They say Zarqawi may be a troublemaker, a terrorist leader more militant than Osama bin Laden. But even his mother, before she died of cancer here a few months ago, told a visitor that her son was not smart enough to be a logistical and ideological linchpin.

One of his neighbors, a bespectacled sales clerk a few years younger than Zarqawi, who is believed to be 38, grinned at the memory of the younger, secular Ahmed. "He was so far away from religion," said the neighbor, who insisted that he`d be in danger if he gave his name.

"He went out with a gang that liked to drink," he said. "We even called him the Green Man because he had so many tattoos. He was drunk once and he had a fight with his cousin. He had a knife in his hand and he cut his cousin. After that he quit drinking, and he started praying."

Zarqawi`s tribe, the Bani Hassan, is one of the largest in Jordan, boasting members of parliament, generals and ministers. But Zarqawi`s own family was poor and pious. His father was a traditional healer and the tribal chief of his hardscrabble neighborhood. The second of five children, Zarqawi was born in an apartment that sits low over a mechanics shop, across the street from a graveyard.

A good student, Zarqawi maintained a B average until, abruptly and inexplicably, he dropped out of high school one semester shy of graduation. He married his cousin, and took a job as a maintenance man for the Zarqa municipality, but soon grew listless and quit.

By the late 1980s, the jihad in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation was in full swing. Young Muslim men from all over the world were making their way to the Afghan battlefields to seek their destiny. Zarqawi joined the wave even though, by most accounts, he still wasn`t particularly religious.

On that first trip to Afghanistan, Zarqawi seemed to be looking for himself, associates say. He huddled over the Koran at the edge of battle and by campfires at night; he drifted between fighting and writing about the battles as an aspiring war correspondent for an Islamic newspaper in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

"He spent all night reading the Koran and praying," said Saleh Ilhami, a Jordanian fighter who met Zarqawi in Afghanistan and later married his sister. "He was feeling how the Islamic nation was suffering. At that time, he could recite the Koran without reading because he was spending so much time studying."

The young men fancied themselves as figures in an epic battle etched in glory against the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Those years changed them forever, and left much of the Arab world struggling to tamp down the fevered fighters who came trooping home again.

"It was a great thing, a great life, the best thing I ever saw in my life," Ilhami said. "I felt I was born when I went there. That was the real life."

Ilhami had earned a degree in journalism from the University of Jordan; he said he traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to work as a war correspondent. A year later, he was roaming the mountains near Khowst, snapping photographs, when he stepped on a land mine. His leg was blown off, and he was taken over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar for treatment.

Zarqawi had seen his fellow Jordanian evacuated, and admired his bravery. When Ilhami had healed, Zarqawi introduced himself, and asked him to show him how to write stories. The two became friends.

When Zarqawi heard that Ilhami wanted to get married, he suggested his younger sister. Ilhami accepted, and the young woman was flown to Peshawar, where the two married in 1991. "After that, I respected him a lot and loved him a lot," Ilhami said. "He was paying tribute to me."

By 1992, the scene in Afghanistan was souring. The Soviets were long gone, and the mujahedin were beginning to turn on each other. Zarqawi went home to Jordan, worldly and a little hardened, but not yet radicalized, say those who knew him.

"This was the beginning of the troubles between Zarqawi and the regime here," said Ilhami. "You know, he who spends a lot of time in jihad, it becomes like oxygen for the human being. It becomes very hard to leave it."

Many of the returning warriors had a hard time fitting back into their homelands, he said. Zarqawi struggled with disorientation. At the same time, Jordanian intelligence agents were keeping a close watch on the Afghan veterans.

Zarqawi`s ideas hardened when he fell under the sway of a cleric named Issam Barqawi, commonly known as Abu Mohammed Maqdisi. The Palestinian figurehead of the militant Bayat al Imam network in Jordan, Maqdisi was a white-hot radical, a man described by Islamists here as too extreme for Bin Laden.

Maqdisi`s writings allegedly helped inspire the truck bombing of Saudi Arabia`s Khobar Towers in 1996 that killed 19 U.S. servicemen.

Maqdisi has spent his life in and out of prison; he remains locked up in Jordan, convicted of trying to overthrow the government to establish an Islamic caliphate.

"Ahmed had the same ideas as Maqdisi," said Mohammed Dweek, a Jordanian lawyer who defended both men in the 1990s. "Even he admitted that he was a copy of Maqdisi. But Maqdisi is dangerous 1,000 times more than Zarqawi. He has this charm, this charisma, and he can convince anybody."

Along with Maqdisi and most of his followers, Zarqawi was arrested in the early 1990s for obtaining explosives. Members of the network were put away as political prisoners in Jordan`s Swaqa prison.

It was there that a soft-spoken Islamic scholar named Youssef Rababa met Zarqawi and Maqdisi. Rababa was the head of a small cell called Ajlun Minds. Jordanian authorities had arrested the members on charges of planning a bombing.

It was the mid-1990s, and in the scrappy universe of the Jordanian prison yard, Islamist organizations functioned as a species of jailhouse gangs. They provided protection, distraction and a sense of spiritual brotherhood. The members shared religious tracts, gathered for Friday prayers and stuck together when fights broke out.

Rababa remembers Zarqawi as a hothead, saddled with a violent temper that sometimes blotted out common sense. Zarqawi earned a reputation for ferocity in the face of authority; he would unabashedly tell prison guards that they were nonbelievers. He inspired respect, if not admiration, and when he felt threatened, he`d fight.

"He was a leader with a very strong personality. The other prisoners, they were afraid of him," Rababa said. "He likes to be a leader, and he likes to have his authority between his hands."

Zarqawi took to preaching after Friday prayers, lecturing the network on the dangers of nonbelievers and the injustice of secular Arab regimes. He gained strength and gradually shed his role as Maqdisi`s eager disciple.

"The last year in prison, there was a big change in their relationship," Rababa said of Maqdisi and Zarqawi.

"It seemed they had a big disagreement. The last month in prison, Maqdisi was alone. Zarqawi took his group."

In 1999, shortly before his release, Jordanian authorities grew worried about Zarqawi`s power over other prisoners and transferred him to a smaller jail.

Even in the realm of armed Islamists, Zarqawi is a hard-line radical, Rababa said. U.S. and Jordanian officials have identified him as a member of Al Qaeda, but his acquaintances here said his relationship with the organization was ambiguous. Zarqawi knew Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but there was a doctrinal split between them, they said.

"Osama bin Laden, he`s in the middle, he`s not so fanatical. He`s against the Americans and the Jews, the foreigners on the Arabian Peninsula and the Jews in Palestine," Rababa said.

"Zarqawi," he continued, "is against anybody who`s kafir [a nonbeliever]. He is much more extreme than Bin Laden. His idea was very clear — we have Muslims, and we have kafir."

Zarqawi told Rababa that it was a duty to attack nonbelievers wherever they could be found — Europeans were fair game, and so were fellow Arabs, particularly Shiite Muslims.

Still, looking back now, searching for traces of the terrorist described in news reports from Iraq — and beyond, with anti-terror investigators linking him to plots and attacks from Western Europe to Jordan — Rababa was bemused. He didn`t believe Zarqawi had the intellectual ability to pen an oft-quoted letter intercepted by American officials, who claim it was meant for Bin Laden. In it, U.S. officials say, Zarqawi claims responsibility for 25 suicide attacks in Iraq and lays out a blueprint for plunging that country into sectarian chaos.

"I don`t believe it," Rababa said. "Even if he`s still alive in Iraq, I don`t think he`s running operations. He`s a simple man. He`s simple in his capabilities. He`s smart, but he`s not high-level."

When Jordan`s King Abdullah II took the throne in 1999, he pardoned political prisoners and Zarqawi was set free. He spent a month with his wife and children at home here, but couldn`t find work. He grew restless and returned to Pakistan on a six-month visa.

In 2000, Zarqawi`s visa expired, and, according to his brother-in-law Ilhami, the Pakistani government refused to extend it.

Zarqawi found himself adrift and isolated. Detained by Pakistan`s immigration authorities after Friday prayers, he was asked to leave the country, but he didn`t have anyplace to go. He had sworn off Jordan, where he felt penalized and harassed.

"He didn`t know where to go," Ilhami said. "He didn`t know what to do."

Zarqawi moved over the border to Afghanistan, before the U.S.-led war to topple the Taliban regime began.

His alliances there are hazy. According to U.S. and European intelligence agencies, Zarqawi set up a camp in Herat that specialized in the use of chemical and biological weapons. At least one militant has confessed to meeting Zarqawi at an Al Qaeda camp.

But Zarqawi`s relationship with Al Qaeda remained contentious, according to a source who was in Afghanistan at the time.

Al Qaeda suspected he had become a Jordanian agent while he was in prison, and many in the network kept their distance. Tensions grew so pronounced that they even shot him in the leg, the source said.

Like the man himself, Zarqawi`s leg is at the center of a tangle of conflicting reports.

There are various accounts of the injury, which may have been suffered during the 2001 war with the Americans, and may have forced him to flee Afghanistan. Some reports indicate that the leg was so mangled that it was amputated in Iraq.

What seems certain is that Zarqawi fled once again, this time moving overland through Iran, and settling into the mountains of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. He had compatriots there; Jordanians from his hometown and from prison had set up camp with members of the militant group Ansar al Islam. Zarqawi is believed to have stayed there at least until the U.S. invasion of Iraq began.

Since then, Zarqawi seems to have vanished into a whirl of conflicting reports, and potential propaganda.

Back in Jordan, where Zarqawi has been sentenced to death in absentia, his increasing notoriety is met with equanimity. His first wife, his four children and his tribesmen still live here. At some point, Zarqawi took a second wife; she went to Afghanistan with him and never came back.

The family doesn`t speak much to the media.

Some sources say Zarqawi has been in touch with them from Iraq, but his brother-in-law denied that he had heard from the fugitive.

His old acquaintances have watched while the price on his head climbed to $10 million, then to $25 million.

Many people here say the same thing: The Americans were looking for a boogeyman, for somebody to blame.

"I don`t think he`s a leader worth this money," said Dweek, the lawyer. "Anyway, if they get Zarqawi, so what? They`ll have 1,000 more Zarqawis after him."

Special correspondent Ranya Kadri contributed to this report.

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
If Iraq Asks, Jordan May Send Troops
From Associated Press

July 2, 2004

LONDON — Jordan`s King Abdullah II said Thursday that his country would be willing to send troops to Iraq, potentially becoming the first Arab state to do so.

The statement marked a major shift in Jordan`s policy toward Iraq.

In an interview on BBC`s "Newsnight" program, Abdullah said he wanted to support Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi`s interim government, which has assumed control from the U.S.-led coalition.

"I presume that if the Iraqis ask us for help directly, it would be very difficult for us to say no," he said during the interview in London. "Our message to the president or the prime minister is: `Tell us what you want. Tell us how we can help, and you have 110% support from us.` "

There was no immediate reaction to Abdullah`s comments, which probably will be welcomed by the U.S. government. It was unclear whether the Iraqis would take Abdullah up on his offer.

Abdullah said he had not discussed troops with the new Iraqi government.

"I would feel that we are not the right people," he said. "But at the end of the day, if there is something we can provide, a service to the future of Iraqis, then we`ll definitely study that proposal."

Abdullah said he was encouraged by improvements in Iraq`s security, but he acknowledged that it was still the greatest problem facing the new administration. Jordan is dependent on Iraqi oil.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Cheney Unrelenting on War Policy
The vice president repeats assertions of Hussein-Al Qaeda ties and implies that Clinton repeatedly failed to punish terrorists.
By Peter Wallsten and Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writers

July 2, 2004

NEW ORLEANS — Returning to the controversy about Saddam Hussein`s links with Al Qaeda terrorists, Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday repeated his assertion that "long-established ties" existed between the former Iraqi dictator and the terrorist network.

Speaking hours after Hussein`s appearance in a Baghdad courtroom on charges of mass killings and other crimes against humanity, Cheney offered a broad assessment of the Bush administration`s fight against terrorism, saying that President Bush had made the world safer by taking "relentless action" and launching "a broad and sustained war on terrorist networks around the globe."

Cheney, addressing Republican supporters at the National D-Day Museum, also leveled implicit criticism at Bush`s predecessor, former President Clinton.

"Consider for a moment how matters stood at the time when President Bush and I were sworn into office on Jan. 20th, 2001," he said. "Terrorists were on the offensive around the world, emboldened by many years of unanswered attacks. Repeatedly, they had struck America with little cost or consequence."

The speech underscored renewed efforts by the White House to rebuild support for its Iraq policies amid continuing violence in that country and the handover this week of sovereignty to an interim government.

Recent polls have indicated that the American public is growing increasingly concerned about U.S. casualties in Iraq and uncertain that the war was worth the cost.

In his remarks, Cheney returned to a debate over the nature of the links between Hussein`s regime and Al Qaeda.

The debate is significant because of the rationale the Bush administration laid out for attacking Iraq and forcing Hussein from power. Bush said before the war that Hussein "aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda," and that Hussein could slip catastrophic weapons to terrorists.

Two weeks ago, the staff of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks issued a report that downplayed the significance of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. Although the report cited multiple contacts between Iraqi officers and Osama bin Laden`s terrorist group, it said those contacts did not "appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."

When the report was released, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, all but certain to be the Democrats` nominee to face Bush this fall, said the president had "misled" the country and owed "the American people a fundamental explanation."

But Cheney on Thursday repeated his assertions of high-level ties between Iraq and terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. "These ties included senior-level contacts going back a decade," he said.

Cheney said Hussein had sent a brigadier general from the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan in the early 1990s to train Al Qaeda in bomb-making and document forgery.

He also said Iraq gave sanctuary to one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and, later, to terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi, whom he described as a "senior Al Qaeda associate."

Previous comments by Cheney about the brigadier general, as well as comments on other elements of the Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, prompted the chairman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission two weeks ago to urge the vice president to turn over any additional information that the panel did not have.

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, would not comment Thursday on whether the White House had provided the panel`s staff with any new information since then. But he said the staff had not reviewed any new material that had led it to revise its findings.

"We believe we have seen all the information the vice president has seen, and stand by the staff statement released at the last hearing," Felzenberg said.

A senior administration official said that much of the information Cheney discussed Thursday had been included in a letter that CIA Director George J. Tenet sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002. It was unclear whether that letter was the source of Cheney`s information about the Iraqi brigadier general.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant, and his supporters have been blamed for much violence in Iraq, including the coordinated attacks on police and security forces last week that killed more than 100 people, as well as the beheading of an American and a South Korean hostage.

Cheney said Zarqawi had taken sanctuary in Baghdad after coalition forces drove him from Afghanistan, and that "the Iraqi regime refused to turn over Zarqawi even when twice being provided with detailed information on his presence" there.

Terrorism experts have differed on whether Zarqawi is affiliated with Al Qaeda or whether he runs his own terrorist network. Some say he was far more closely tied to opposition groups in Iraq such as Ansar al Islam, a largely Kurdish radical group, than to Hussein.

Responding to Cheney`s speech, the Kerry campaign said the Bush administration had made "exaggerations" as it laid out its case for war in Iraq.

"The American people are losing confidence in the president`s handling of the war on terror, and the Bush campaign is running scared," said Phil Singer, a Kerry campaign spokesman.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
by Anonymous
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Anonymous is a senior U.S. civil servant with nearly two decades of experience in the U.S. intelligence community’s work on Afghanistan and South Asia.
[/TABLE]Das Buch ist noch nicht auf dem Markt, steht aber schon auf der Bestsellerliste von Amazon und keine US-Zeitung hat nicht mindestens einen Bericht über das Buch oder den Autor gebracht.

COMMENTARY
Seeing Islam Through a Lens of U.S. Hubris
Our national mind-set may be leading us toward defeat, a CIA expert says.
By Anonymous

July 2, 2004

On the one hand, Americans are told daily by the media, newsmakers and government officials that the West is winning the war that began on Sept. 11; that we`ve taken the fight to the terrorists and rolled back their networks, and that the majority of Al Qaeda`s leadership has been captured or killed.

But if you listen closely, you can also hear sharp disconnects. The directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI warn periodically that Al Qaeda is as dangerous now as it was in 2001. And, if you dig even deeper into the newspaper, you`ll find stories claiming these gentlemen are incorrect — Al Qaeda actually is more dangerous today than it was before what Osama bin Laden calls the "blessed attacks" of 11 September.

Periodically, the Department of Homeland Security has raised the threat-warning indicator from yellow to amber — or is it amber to yellow? — on a tacky traffic-light-looking device. Adjusting the streetlight-of-death is meant to portray the DHS judgment that the threat to U.S. interests from someone, somewhere in the world has increased. The warnings are then complemented by advice urging citizens to quickly buy a "disaster supply kit," which includes duct tape and plastic sheeting to make their homes airtight, WMD-proof fortresses.

To say the least, Americans are getting mixed and confusing messages from their leaders. Are we headed toward a victory parade, Cold War bomb shelters or simply straight to the graveyard? Do repeated warnings of an Al Qaeda-produced disaster mark a genuine threat, or have federal bureaucrats learned to cover their butts so they will not have another "failed-to-warn" à la 9/11? Are Bin Laden-related dangers downplayed to nurse the on-again, off-again economic recovery and the presidential prospects of both U.S. political parties? Are we to reach for champagne or a rosary?

I believe the answer lies in the way we see and interpret people and events outside North America, which is heavily clouded by arrogance and self-centeredness amounting to what I called "imperial hubris." This is not a genetic flaw in Americans that has been present since the Pilgrims splashed ashore at Plymouth Rock, but rather a way of thinking that America`s elites acquired after the end of World War II. It is a process of interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components.

"When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy," Lee Harris explained in the August/September 2002 issue of Policy Review, "our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us." Thus, for example, Bin Laden is a criminal whose activities are fueled by money — as opposed to a devout Muslim soldier fueled by faith — because Americans know how to beat well-heeled gangsters. We assume, moreover, that Bin Laden and the Islamists hate us for our liberty, freedoms and democracy, not because they and many millions of Muslims believe U.S. foreign policy is an attack on Islam or because the U.S. military now has a more-than-10-year record of smashing people and things in the Islamic world.

Our political leaders contend that America`s astoundingly low approval ratings in polls taken in major Islamic countries do not reflect our unquestioning support of Israel and, as such, its "targeted killings" and other lethal high jinks. Nor, they say, are the ratings due to our relentless support for tyrannical and corrupt Islamic regimes that are systematically dissipating the Islamic world`s energy resources for family fun and profit, while imprisoning, torturing and executing domestic dissenters. The low approval ratings, we are confident, have nothing to do with our refusal to apply nuclear nonproliferation rules with anything close to an even hand; a situation that makes Israeli and Indian nuclear weapons acceptable — each is a democracy, after all — while Pakistan`s weapons are intolerable, perhaps because they are held by Muslims. And surely, if we can just drive and manage an Islamic Reformation that makes Muslims secular like us, all this unfortunate talk about religious war will end.

Thus, because of the pervasive imperial hubris that dominates the minds of our political, academic, social, media and military elites, America is able and content to believe that the Islamic world fails to understand the benign intent of U.S. foreign policy. This mind-set holds that America does not need to reevaluate its policies, let alone change them; it merely needs to better explain the wholesomeness of its views and the purity of its purposes to the uncomprehending Islamic world. What could be more American in the early 21st century, after all, then to re-identify a casus belli as a communication problem, and then call on Madison Avenue to package and hawk a remedy called "Democracy-Secularism-and-Capitalism-are-good-for-Muslims" to an Islamic world that has, to date, violently refused to purchase?

This is meant neither to ridicule my countrymen`s intellectual abilities nor to be supportive of Bin Laden and his interpretation of Islam, but to say that most of the world outside North America is not, does not want to be and probably will never be just like us. And let me be clear, I am not talking about America`s political freedoms, personal liberties or respect for education and human rights; the same polls showing that Muslims hate Americans for their actions find broad support for the ideas and beliefs that make us who we are. Pew Trust polls in 2003, for instance, found that although Muslims believed it "necessary to believe in God to be moral," they also favored what were termed "democratic values."

I`m saying that when Americans — the leaders and the led — process incoming information to make it intelligible in American terms, many not only fail to clearly understand what is going on abroad but, more ominous, fail to accurately gauge the severity of the danger that these foreign events, organizations, attitudes and personalities pose to U.S. national security and our society`s welfare and lifestyle.

In order to make the decisions and allocate the resources needed to ensure U.S. security, Americans must understand the world as it is, not as we want — or worse yet, hope — it will be.

I have long experience analyzing and attacking Bin Laden and Islamists. I believe they are a growing threat to the United States — there is no greater threat — and that we are being defeated not because the evidence of the threat is unavailable but because we refuse to accept it at face value and without Americanizing the data. This must change, or our way of life will be unrecognizably altered.

*

The author is a senior counterintelligence official at the CIA who served from 1996 to 1999 as head of a special unit tracking Osama bin Laden. The CIA allowed publication of his forthcoming book, "Imperial Hubris" (Brassey`s, 2004), in which the author is identified as "Anonymous."



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Seeing ex-dictator in court turns Iraqis into lawyers
- Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004

Baghdad -- Some rejoiced, others cursed.

From street to store to workplace to home, Iraqis were transfixed by the televised specter of their former dictator under the thumb of justice.

Yet what nearly everyone seemed to agree was that Iraq`s "mother of all court appearances" should not just deliver the end -- punishment for Saddam Hussein -- but also the means: that it be arrived at fairly and justly.

As if Iraq had just reawakened as a country of courtroom critics, the talk everywhere in Baghdad Thursday afternoon was about the trial -- who, why, when and by what right?

For people such as Hussam Hassan, standards had become as exacting as in any "Law and Order" episode. "Why don`t they bring lawyers to defend Saddam Hussein into court?" he asked while stacking a new delivery of frozen pizzas in a grocery he co-owns in the middle-class Mansour district of Baghdad.

"This is his right -- anyone in court would want a lawyer," he said. "Anyone who goes to a police station should have that."

Hassan`s partner, Abbas Ali, watching from behind the counter, said he disapproved of the judge, a man in his 30s who acted with cool authority throughout yet whose youth ran counter to the Iraqi tradition that authority is commensurate with seniority.

"He is very young," Ali said, frowning. "He wants Saddam to sign accusation papers, who is so much older than him."

Interviews across Baghdad showed that Hussein`s trial offers potential pitfalls for the new Iraqi government`s public relations as well as huge possible strides for democratic culture.

"Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein committed crimes against the Iraqi people, and his hands are covered with the blood of the Shia, and we are glad that this is being revealed," said Shiite Ayatollah Imad Aldeen al-Awadi, director of the International Humanitarian Committee for Prisoners and Missing Persons, a local group of relatives of human-rights victims of the dictatorship.

Al-Awadi said he had been imprisoned for 10 years by Hussein on rebellion charges, and his brother was executed for the same cause.

However, he said, revenge takes a back seat to larger issues: "It depends on the results. What we hope is that Saddam Hussein will be judged by a court that is under an elected government. This will make it more legitimate."

By orders of the Iraqi judge -- or, as some suspected, the Americans --

the pooled television footage of the half-hour court hearing initially was released with no soundtrack. This was ostensibly because of Hussein`s rude comments to the judge. But it merely fueled speculation that he had told the court "secrets" about the Iraqi government that were too embarrassing to reveal.

But first in the silent version, and eventually when sound was added, Hussein`s performance on screen did not hurt him with Iraqis who view strength as a virtue in itself.

The circumstances of his capture last December, when he meekly submitted to arrest rather than fighting to the death as his sons had, was an embarrassment to many. This time, at least, the old soldier was showing a bit of fight.

"You see how he argues with the judges," said Abu Allah, a diner in a restaurant in Karradeh district. "For sure, I didn`t like him when he was in power -- he took my brother`s land from him once and stuck him in jail for six months. But you must remember that he was still our leader, and an Iraqi, and it is good that he shows he is not a coward."

Just as Hussein still has supporters on every corner, his victims are never far away. Fadel Hassan al-Jibouri, a former soldier in the Hussein-era Iraqi Army, says he still has nightmares of the carpet bombings that he and his colleagues suffered during the U.S.-led rout of Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

"Hundreds of my friends were killed, and my commander, a good friend, was put in prison and never seen again because he told Saddam the invasion was madness," he said. "That bastard should rot. He calls the Kuwaitis dogs. It was us he used as dogs. We ended up lying dead by the roadside like they do. Saddam should be hanged in a public square near here by the neck. I will do it myself."

Iraqi politicians say that if the trial succeeds in proving beyond all doubt that Hussein was a war criminal, it will be a major boost for the new government, which is grappling with low public esteem and a tenacious guerrilla insurgency.

But it also could give Hussein a political platform, in much the same way former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic has used his own war-crimes trial in The Hague, Netherlands.

Although the Iraqi Special Tribunal is nominally under Iraqi government control, it is financed completely by the U.S. government. Its president, Salem Chalabi, is the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, a onetime ally of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration who enjoys little public support in Iraq.

The FBI is leading the investigation for the tribunal, along with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and prosecutors from the Justice Department.

"It is essential that this trial seem to be a fair one, not one in which the verdict is guaranteed no matter what," said Wamidh Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University and the leader of a coalition of small parties that opposes the U.S. troop presence. "There is very little sympathy for Saddam, but that could change if this is mishandled."

Not far from Hassan`s grocery is a small pharmacy in Hay al-Jameaa, a working-class neighborhood. The pharmacist, who would only identify himself as Abu Mariam, answered a visiting reporter`s questions with parries of his own: Why was Hussein not sent to court when he was captured in December? Why didn`t Hussein have access to a lawyer? Why was he not allowed to speak freely in his defense?

Salem Chalabi said Thursday that the trial would not start for several months. It will not be televised, he said, to prevent Hussein from grandstanding, and the rules of evidence will be drawn strictly to keep the defendant from pulling in extraneous subjects.

It was reported in the English-language media pool, but not immediately shown on Iraqi television, that when the judge asked Abid Hamid Mahmoud, Hussein`s former chief of staff, to name a lawyer, he responded by asking for Malik Dohan al-Hassan. There was an embarrassed pause; then, Mahmoud was told that al-Hassan is the current justice minister. Because Mahmoud and all the other prisoners have been in solitary confinement for most of the past year, and thus would not have known of al-Hassan`s appointment, there was a whiff of past compromises and multiple allegiances.

"They won`t show that on TV here," said one Iraqi official who works closely with the tribunal, only half joking.

Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Colin Freeman contributed to this report.E-mail Robert Collier at [e-mail].

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/02/M…
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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My Cell Phone Induces Orgasm
Also cooks perfect eggs, IMs with Jesus, will marry your ugly cousin. How about yours?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 2, 2004

Digital cameras in cell phones? Video capability? Built-in walkie-talkies? Four hundred distinct voice mailboxes, each with customizable polyphonic ring tones and a personalized greeting and special high-definition digital screen effects that light up and pulse and spin? Whatever.

You know what? We deserve a little bit more.

We need phones with features that fulfill real desires in the human animal. Phones that don`t just claim they do it all, but actually do, and with lots of lube and laughter and excellent mortgage rates and minimal bloodletting or cleanup. Nokia, get on this. I am so not kidding.

Because cell phones today? Claim they do everything. Claim they scrub the goddamn sink. Claim they are so gloriously feature packed you couldn`t possibly add another feature or they`d burst wide open in a screaming cataclysmic blinking gurgling mess. In other words, phones today lie their beeping asses off.

It`s true. We all know cell phones are packed mostly with wild telecom hype, all beeps and chirps and bells and whistles, when the damn thing`s really only truly good for locating your lost husband in the meat aisle of Costco or ordering Thai takeout on your way home from the fetish dungeon or calling everyone in your address book from your seat in the back of the café because you`re bored and jaded and you think it makes you sound important and besides you paid for all those goddamn minutes so goddammit, you`re gonna use `em.

To which I say, big freakin` deal.

Get me a cell phone that can flip the TV on just in time for "The Simpsons." Get me the phone that will pause the porn when doorbell rings. Get me the cell phone that can store my entire music collection but will play only the song I`m in the mood to hear right at that moment even though I might not have any idea what the hell that song is, but then will switch to another tune in the middle of the song when I realize my mood isn`t what I thought it was because I`m an American, goddammit, and hard-core random-access schizophrenia isn`t just a personal choice, it`s a way of life.

Screw the video games and the 1,000-number address book. Get me the cell phone that not only screens my calls but also will tell me the psychoemotional state of the caller at the moment they call, and will also tell me, in efficient bullet-point detail, what they really think of me, and what they said about me last time at that party just after I left the room, and whether they think my new jacket is cool or just frumpy, and whether they desire, or have ever desired, to sleep with me, and why or why the hell not I mean what you don`t like my cell phone or something?

Give me the cell phone that will help me penetrate the deep miasmatic fog of existence and beam radiant light on the true nature of the meaning of it all. And also warm up my damn coffee and organize all my unread magazines.

Get me the cell phone that intuits my lover`s kaleidoscopic emotional cycles. Get me the cell phone that can tell when I`m supposed to offer constructive insights and tough-love feedback and fulfill my male role and try to fix everything in a powerful sweep of logic and sex and astounding reserves of grounded calm, and when I`m just supposed to shut the hell up and listen and nod and sigh sympathetically and give back rubs and money.

Give me the cell phone that will be so tiny it disappears inside my shirt pocket but also large enough to accessorize brilliantly with my watch and my car and my dog. Give me a cell phone that has an interactive fully automatic continuously updated map of all parking spaces in the City that will become available in the next five minutes at the destination to which I am driving and at which I will arrive in exactly four minutes and forty-seven seconds.

Internet access? Baseball scores? Real-time stock quotes? Yawn. Give me a cell that doubles as a moan-inducing vibrator and a swizzle stick and a poultry thermometer and a tire-pressure gauge and an emergency paper clip, a pocketknife and a corkscrew and a toenail clipper and a selector of the perfect cheese to go with a crisp summer Pinot Gris. And it should also have a pen. And a pack of Kleenex. And sunscreen dispenser. And coin purse. Lighter. And nose-hair trimmer. Pregnancy test. Incense burner.

This is not too much to ask. After all, they`re the ones who promise everything. They`re the ones churning out devices faster and easier and increasingly multifunctional every single goddamn day at an insane breathless breakneck technological pace no one can possibly follow much less understand or even care about.

They`re the ones inventing gizmos that contain enough raw processing power to navigate the goddamn Cassini satellite and that pack enough random multifunctionality to sufficiently hurl anyone over 30 into the black hole of depressed quasi-nostalgia, saying holy Christ I remember when I used to have to actually dial the goddamn thing and hold it all the way up to my ear and actually speak in order to communicate.

And now, of course, it`s all just infrared inter-lobe thought-triggered nanotransmitters implanted at birth into a tiny hole drilled into that tiny little bone in your inner ear. Or, rather, it will be, soon enough.

I need a phone that effortlessly and with excellent footnoting capability disproves the existence of an angry bitter homophobic money-cravin` war-lovin` born-again conservative Christian God. I need a cell that knows that spirituality and sex are inextricably linked and fused and gorgeously inseparable. I need a phone that knows full well how this nation has been blinded and bitch slapped by this sneering hate-filled war-mongering administration and is mad as hell and isn`t gonna take it anymore.

I need a phone that can not only help me reconcile the divine existence of Jenna Haze with the radiant bliss of fine scotch and the perfect feeling of a late-summer night when you know all is right with the world despite the sneering conservative demon dogs who would deign to eat out the heart of all that is joyous and moist and salt rimmed, but can also celebrate this convoluted sticky endlessly savage orgiastically beautiful mess, and do it all for about $39.99 a month with unlimited night and weekend minutes.

This is the age of miracle and wonder. This is the age of when any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is the age of everyone saying oh my God I can`t keep up with all the freakin` gizmos and hell look here I still can`t program my VCR and I don`t even own a VCR anymore because now I have a DVD.

I need a phone that can interpret all this glorious obnoxious white noise, find the rainbow through the downpour, the rose among the thorns, the cosmic car-pool lane, the cool press-on tattoos in the giant box of karmic Cracker Jacks. Plus it should play that cool Lamb song whenever my girlfriend calls and wants to have sex.


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…
©2004 SF Gate

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Mal wieder ein Artikel aus der Zeit über den `Neuanfang` im Irak. Ijad Allawi, ehemals Mitglied der Baath-Partei, später CIA-Vertrauter, jetzt der neue starke Mann in Bagdad, von dem es im State Department heißt: „Er ist unser Mann fürs Grobe.“

Auch noch einen Hinweis auf den Joffe Artikel über D `Trau keinem unter 40`

http://www.zeit.de/2004/28/01___leit_1

DIE ZEIT 01.07.2004 Nr.28

ZUM ARTIKELANFANG


Die Bewährungshelfer

Bagdads neue Regierung verdient Hilfe, auch von Deutschland und Frankreich

Von Matthias Naß

Trotz des Verzichts auf jedes Zeremoniell, trotz der von Terrorfurcht diktierten Vorverlegung der Amtsübergabe: Dieser Montag war ein guter Tag für die Iraker. Sie regieren ihr Land nun wieder selber. Präsident Bush konnte auf dem Nato-Gipfel in Istanbul sagen: „Wir haben Wort gehalten.“

Natürlich, es ist eine begrenzte Souveränität, die Amerika an die Interimsregierung von Premier Ijad Allawi übertragen hat. Die wahre Macht liegt nach wie vor bei den 140000 amerikanischen Soldaten im Irak und beim neuen US-Botschafter John Negroponte. Aber Schritt für Schritt übernehmen die Iraker Verantwortung. Je klüger sie damit umgehen, umso eher wird ihnen eines Tages die ganze Macht zufallen.

Über die Härte der Aufgabe wird sich niemand weniger Illusionen machen als Ijad Allawi, ehemals Mitglied der Baath-Partei, später CIA-Vertrauter, jetzt der neue starke Mann in Bagdad, von dem es im State Department heißt: „Er ist unser Mann fürs Grobe.“ Das Grauen der vergangenen Tage – Selbstmordanschläge, Geiselnahmen, Enthauptungen – wird mit seinem Amtsantritt kein Ende haben; Allawi selber, wie jedes einzelne Mitglied seines Kabinetts, steht auf der Todesliste der Terroristen. Schon droht er mit Notstandsgesetzen, mit nächtlicher Ausgangssperre und Demonstrationsverbot. Das wäre nicht die Demokratie, die Amerika dem Land versprochen hat.

Nur gedeiht Demokratie nirgendwo ohne Sicherheit. Die vom UN-Sicherheitsrat einstimmig verabschiedete Resolution 1546 sieht Wahlen spätestens im Januar 2005 vor. Die daraus hervorgehende Nationalversammlung soll eine Übergangsregierung bilden und eine endgültige Verfassung erarbeiten, sodass bis spätestens Ende 2005 der Irak von einer zweifelsfrei legitimierten Regierung geführt wird. Das mörderische Bündnis von Islamisten, Nationalisten, Saddam-Anhängern und Al-Qaida-Terroristen wird nichts unversucht lassen, diesen Zeitplan zu torpedieren.

Es ist wohlgemerkt der Zeitplan der Vereinten Nationen. Zugestimmt haben ihm auch die Kriegsgegner Frankreich, Deutschland, Russland und China. Mit ihrem Votum haben sie sich dem Appell angeschlossen, den Wiederaufbau des Iraks militärisch, humanitär und wirtschaftlich zu unterstützen. Wer keine Soldaten schicken will, der soll eben Techniker und Ärzte senden. Oder Wahlhelfer. Allerdings erst dann, wenn nicht jeder Ausländer im Irak um sein Leben fürchten muss.

Die Nato hat sich in Istanbul auf den Minimalkompromiss verständigt, bei der Ausbildung irakischer Soldaten zu helfen. Wenn also künftig Offiziere der Nach-Saddam-Armee an Bundeswehrhochschulen und Führungsakademien nachschlagen, was „Bürger in Uniform“ auf Arabisch heißt, dann mag das, wer will, als deutschen Beitrag zur Demokratisierung des Iraks werten. Man kann sich allerdings eine eindrucksvollere Hilfe vorstellen: großzügige Umschuldung etwa und tatkräftige Unterstützung beim wirtschaftlichen Wiederaufbau.

Mit dem Segen der UN

Zumal die politischen und diplomatischen Schlachten geschlagen sind: Die „multinationale Streitkraft“ steht mit dem Mandat der Vereinten Nationen im Zweistromland; die neue Regierung in Bagdad wurde mit Hilfe des UN-Beauftragten Brahimi installiert und stützt sich auf die Zustimmung des gesamten Sicherheitsrates.

Völkerrechtliche Legitimität ist kein geringes Gut. Endlich handelt Amerika im Einklang mit der Weltorganisation. Das sollten auch jene anerkennen, die Bush im Vorfeld des Krieges ideologische Verblendung, Unilateralismus und Täuschung der Öffentlichkeit vorgeworfen haben.

Der Weg des Iraks aus Krieg, Besatzung und Terror wird mühsam und elend lang sein. Premier Allawi muss das Kunststück gelingen, sich von der Besatzungsarmee abzusetzen und zugleich mit ihr zusammenzuarbeiten. Natürlich kann er damit scheitern – wenn er, der „Lakai Washingtons“, überhaupt im Amt überlebt.

Ohnehin wird es, wie Jeremy Greenstock sagt, Londons ehemaliger Botschafter in Bagdad, „eine Demokratie nach westlichem Muster im Irak nie geben“. Und doch: Der Weg zu halbwegs stabilen Verhältnissen hat begonnen. Die Iraker haben es verdient.

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Confused? Shadow of his old self? Hardly

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad

The Independent

02 July 2004

Bags beneath his eyes, beard greying, finger-jabbing with anger, Saddam was still the same fox, alert, cynical, defiant, abusive, proud. Yet history must record that the new "independent" government in Baghdad yesterday gave Saddam Hussein an initial trial hearing that was worthy of the brutal old dictator.

He was brought to court in chains and handcuffs. The judge insisted that his own name should be kept secret. The names of the other judges were kept secret. The location of the court was kept secret. There was no defence counsel.

For hours, the Iraqi judges managed to censor Saddam`s evidence from the soundtrack of the videotaped proceedings - so that the world should not hear the wretched man`s defence. Even CNN was forced to admit that it had been given tapes of the hearing "under very controlled circumstances".

This was the first example of "new" Iraq`s justice system at work - yet the tapes of the court appeared on CNN with the logo "Cleared by US Military". So what did the Iraqis and their American mentors want to hide?

The voice of the Beast of Baghdad as he turned - much to the young judge` s surprise - on the court itself, pointing out the investigating lawyer had no right to speak "on behalf of the so-called coalition"? Saddam`s arrogant refusal to take human responsibility for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait? Or his dismissive, chilling response to the mass gassings of Halabja? "I have heard of Halabja," he said, as if he had read about it in a newspaper article. Later, he said just that: "I`ve heard about them [the killings] through the media."

Perhaps the Americans and the Iraqis they have appointed to run the country were taken by surprise. Saddam, we were all told over the past few days, was "disorientated", "downcast", "confused", a "shadow of his former self" and other clichés. These were the very words used to describe him on the American networks from Baghdad yesterday. But the moment the mute videotape began to air, a silent movie in colour, the old combative Saddam was evidently still alive. He insisted the Americans were promoting his trial, not the Iraqis. His face became flushed and he showed visible contempt towards the judge. "This is all a theatre," he shouted. "The real criminal is Bush."

The brown eyes moved steadily around the tiny courtroom, from the judge in his black, gold-trimmed robes to the policeman with the giant paunch - we were never shown his face - with the acronym of the Iraqi Correctional Service on his uniform. "I will sign nothing - nothing until I have spoken to a lawyer," Saddam announced - correctly, in the eyes of several Iraqi lawyers who watched his performance on television.

Scornful he was, defeated he was not. And of course, watching that face yesterday, one had to ask oneself how much Saddam had reflected on the very real crimes with which he was charged: Halabja, Kuwait, the suppression of the Shia Muslim and Kurdish uprisings in 1991, the tortures and mass killings.

One looked into those big, tired, moist eyes and wondered if he understood pain and grief and sin in the way we mere mortals think we do. And then he talked and we needed to hear what he said and the question slid away; perhaps that is why he was censored. We were supposed to stare at his eyes, not listen to his words. Milosevic-like, he fought his corner. He demanded to be introduced to the judge. "I am an investigative judge," the young lawyer told him without giving his name.

In fact, he was Ra`id Juhi, a 33-year old Shia Muslim who had been a judge for 10 years under Saddam`s own regime, a point he did concede to Saddam later in the hearing without telling the world what it was like to be a judge under the dictator. He was also the same judge who accused the Shia prelate Muqtada Sadr of murder last April, an event that led to a military battle between Sadr`s militiamen and US troops in the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala. Mr Juhi, who most recently worked as a translator, was appointed - to no one `s surprise - by the former US proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer.

Already, one suspected, Saddam had sniffed out what this court represented for him: the United States. "I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq," he announced - which is exactly what he did when US Special Forces troops dragged him from his hole on the banks of the Tigris river seven months ago. "Would you identify yourself?"

When Judge Juhi said he represented the coalition, Saddam admonished him. Iraqis should judge Iraqis but not on behalf of foreign powers, he snapped. "Remember you`re a judge, don`t talk for the occupiers." Then he turned lawyer himself. "Were these laws of which I am accused written under Saddam Hussein?" Judge Juhi conceded that they were. "So what entitles you to use them against the president who signed them?"

Here was the old arrogance that we were familiar with, the president, the rais who believed he was immune from his own laws, that he was above the law, outside the law. Those big black eyebrows that used to twitch whenever he was angry, began to move threateningly, arching up and down like little drawbridges above his eyes.

The invasion of Kuwait was not an invasion, he said. "It was not an occupation." Kuwait had tried to strangle Iraq economically, "to dishonour Iraqi women who would go into the street and would be exploited for 10 dinars". Given the number of women dishonoured in Saddam`s torture chambers, these words carried their own unique and terrible isolation.

He called the Kuwaitis "dogs", a description the Iraqi authorities censored to "animals" on the tape. Dogs are, alas, one of the most cursed of creatures in the Arab world. "The president of Iraq and the head of the Iraqi armed forces went to Kuwait in an official manner," Saddam blustered.

But then, watching that face with its expressive mouth and bright white crooked teeth, the eyes glimmering, a dreadful thought occurred. Could it be this awful man - albeit given less chance to be heard than the Nazis at the first Nuremberg hearings - actually knew less than we thought? Could it be that his apparatchiks and grovelling generals, even his own sons, kept from this man the iniquities of his regime? Might it just be possible that the price of power was ignorance, the cost of guilt a mere suggestion here and there that the laws of Iraq - so immutable according to Saddam - were not adhered to as fairly as they might have been?

No, I think not. I remember how, a decade and a half ago, Saddam asked a group of Kurds whether he should hang "the spy" Farzad Bazoft and how, once the crowd had obligingly told him to execute the young freelance reporter from The Observer, he ordered his hanging. No, I think Saddam knew. I think he regarded brutality as strength, cruelty as justice, pain as mere hardship, death as something endured by others.

Of course, there was that smart, curious black jacket, more a sports blazer than a piece of formal attire, the crisply cleaned shirt, the cheap pen and the piece of folded, yellow exercise paper which he took from his jacket pocket when he wanted to take notes. "I respect the will of the people," he said at one stage. "This is not a court - it is an investigation."

The key moment came at that point. Saddam said the court was illegal because the Anglo-American war which brought it into being was illegal - it had no backing from the UN Security Council. Then Saddam crouched slightly and said with controlled irony: "Am I not supposed to meet with lawyers? Just for 10 minutes?"

And one had to have a heart of stone not to remember how many of his victims must have begged, in just the same way, for just 10 more minutes.

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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Der NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll vom 02.07.04 als PDF:

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"Last night, Dick Cheney went up to Yankee Stadium to a ball game. During like the seventh-inning stretch or something, they put him on the jumbotron...and they booed him. Everyone in the stadium boos him. As we know, Dick Cheney has a horrible temper, so he goes crazy and he grabs everybody who booed him and then ran them around naked on a leash."
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"According to interrogators, Saddam Hussein is arrogant, he`s defiant, he thinks that people are still in love with him. He thinks that he`s still very popular. He thinks that he is still president. No, wait a minute, that`s Bush."
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One thing I have noticed here on the Republican Redneck Riviera is a surprising lack of Bush-Cheney bumper stickers and a lack of flags flying in front yards. I wonder what is going on?
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Friday, July 02, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

This is how to kick Lieutenant AWOL`s ass back to Texas.

Yesterday, I went to a a matinee showing of Fahrenheit 911 at the Capitol Mall in Olympia, WA. There were about 70 people in the theater.

When I left the theater, I saw some enterprising Democrats had set up a voter registration table directly in front of the theater exit. About 10 people went directly from the theater to the voter registration table.

Later, I came back and talked to the people manning the table. There were no campaign materials on display and nothing to associate the table with the Democratic Party. The folks told me they had registered about 50 people today alone and they were sure everybody they registered planned to vote against Bush.

I grabbed a handful of voter registration forms because I know at least five people who don`t usually vote and hate Bush.

If more people across the country are taking advantage of Fahrenheit 911 to register pissed-off Americans who don`t normally vote, I think we`re going to kick some Republican ass in November.

Exploit the opportunity.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 11:42 AM
Comment (0) | Trackback (0)
Thursday, July 01, 2004
Note to Readers, July 1, 2004

No update today and tomorrow. I`m going up to Olympia to see Farenheit 911 today and tomorrow I`m going flying. Alert readers, please post links in comments.

Here`s a great article, courtesy of Democratic Veteran, on the consequences of Rumsfeld`s torture policy. "As a former POW in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival. While the Vietnamese rarely abided by the rules, the international pressure on them to do so forced them to walk a line that ensured they did not perpetrate the sort of shocking abuses at Abu Ghraib."

I`ll see you again on Saturday morning.


86-43-04. Pass it on.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 1:30 AM
Comments (30) | Trackback (0)

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US lawmakers request UN observers for November 2 presidential election
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Published on Friday, July 2, 2004 by the Boston Globe
Add `Sovereignty` to Bush`s Grand Illusions About Iraq
by H.D.S. Greenway


PRIME MINISTER Iyad Allawi and his companions in Iraq`s transitional government must be wondering what kind of used car they have bought from the Bush administration. They have a sovereignty that is so limited that they do not control their country`s air space or its ports. The security forces they do control are so limited, undertrained, and untested that Iraq`s new leaders are completely dependent on foreign soldiers even for their very lives.

They are being asked to rule a country that has been so reduced by the incompetence of the Americans that very few lights turn on at night in the capital, and security is so bad that US proconsul Paul Bremer had to creep away in a stealth handover, thus denying the Iraqis the ceremonial dignity of the raising of the flag in the full view of the Iraqi nation.

Iraq`s new leaders have legal control of Saddam Hussein, but not physical custody, which pretty much describes their situation in the country at large. And all of this comes from the Bush team that sold you weapons of mass destruction, a Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda alliance, and dreams of Iraq as a light unto nations, a US style democracy, and a friend to Israel that the mother of all crooked used car salesmen, Ahmed Chalabi, promised.

The Bush administration promised change in the Middle East, but change came in the form of a deeper hatred for the United States, and an Iraq in which only 2 percent of the people view the United States as liberators.

The stealth handover seemed to symbolize the entire back-and-forth manner with which the United States has governed Iraq. At first it was going to be retired General Jay Garner as proconsul. But then, after only a month on the job, in came Paul Bremer. At first there was going to be a permanent constitution and general elections before the handover of sovereignty. But then the administration said sovereignty first followed by a constitution and elections.

One of Bremer`s first acts was to disband the Iraqi army, putting 200,000 men out of work without pensions and unable to support their families. But then, after the damage was done, the United States changed its mind and began paying pensions and trying to reconstitute the army.

At first the Marines were going to root out those who had killed and mutilated four American contractors in Fallujah. Then that manhunt was abandoned and Fallujah turned over to a former general in Saddam Hussein`s army.

At first Moqtada al-Sadr was going to be killed or captured. Then that was dropped and al-Sadr was left at large. At first it was going to be de-Ba`athification. Then it was re-Ba`athification, and on and on. And the Bush administration accuses John Kerry of flip-flops.

Indeed the entire history of Bush`s intervention in Iraq became a series of fallback positions. When weapons of mass destruction and Saddam`s connections with Al Qaeda turned out to be bogus, it was human rights that the administration turned to for justification; an irony for right-wingers who despise using military force for social engineering as something Democrats do. Then, of course, there is the legacy of Abu Ghraib.

The problem now will be for Iraq`s interim government and its successors to get out from under the image of being American puppets -- something a succession of Saigon governments never managed to do. And they must be wondering if one day they too will be abandoned just as South Vietnam`s leaders were.

As for the Americans, the State Department now takes over from the Pentagon with the arrival of Ambassador John Negroponte, but the endless problems between civilian and military authority that also hindered America`s intervention in Vietnam will now begin.

Iraq`s new leaders are aware that the American presence itself has become the problem, not the solution. But the profound hope of the Bush administration that Iraq`s new government will now take the heat when things go wrong, at least until Nov. 2, may prove just another grand illusion.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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BAGHDAD (IWR Parody News) - Saddam Hussein made a surprise announcement at his arraignment today in Baghdad that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has agreed to testify as a character witness for the former dictator. "Rummy and me go way back to the 80`s when I used to get bags of money from the US companies that he represented," said Saddam pointing his finger.

"Saddam was always gentleman and not so well known, quite a proficient accordion player. He always treated me like a king when I ever I visited him in Iraq in the 1980`s, and Saddam promises me that he`ll keep our little meetings secret as long as I testify for him. Besides, we still haven`t any of those WMD, now have we," said Secretary Rumsfeld to Washington reporters.
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Der Artikel beschäftigt sich großenteils mit der Zukunft der Kurden.

Published on Friday, July 2, 2004 by the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Torn on the 4th of July
The United States is Under Siege. Its Reputation is being Tarnished and the Weight of Blame is falling upon its President
by Marian Wilkinson


Inside the White House, George Bush watched Saddam Hussein`s riveting court appearance on replay. But his spokesman would not say whether the President heard the former Iraqi dictator remark: "This is all theatre to help Bush, the criminal, win the election."

Right now, Bush needs all the help he can get because the bad news from Iraq is seriously undermining his support.

This weekend Americans celebrate their Independence Day holiday, July 4, with flags flying along the streets of every small town and fireworks lighting up the sky. But the celebratory mood is tempered this year by the news from Iraq. Abroad, support for the US is at a dangerously low ebb and so, too, is support for Bush. Even at home, Americans are doubting the President`s ability to handle either Iraq or the war on terrorism.

The reason is "Iraq, Iraq and Iraq", as one pollster put it. American power is under challenge throughout the greater Middle East, its reputation is tarnished by torture allegations, its troops are stretched too thinly and many voters are blaming the President.

This week`s handover of power to the new Iraqi Government was supposed to send a message to the world: "Let Freedom Reign," as Bush put it. But the handover was so dogged by security fears, the historic milestone turned into a furtive ceremony behind closed doors that left little room for celebration.

For many Americans, the 140,000 troops left behind - stuck, for the foreseeable future, fighting a bloody insurgency - is deeply troubling. Even though the US forces now report to a new commander, General George Casey, head of the multinational force in Iraq, they are not expected home any sooner.

"From the point of view of the military families, not much has changed," says Julia Pfaff, who runs a big support network for the soldiers` loved ones. "The troops are still on 12-month or 15-month rotation. They get to Kuwait, thinking they are coming home, and are turned around and told to go back."

"I become more pessimistic with every passing day," General Joseph Hoar told the Herald. A former senior commander who worked on Middle East planning, Hoar, like many US military officers who once served in the region, was deeply worried before the war about its impact in the Arab world.

"The invasion of Iraq together with no action on the Israeli-Palestinian issue has only served to inflame the Muslim population and given rise to disputation in other countries. It`s more unstable today and I think we`re in more danger today than we were before the invasion," he says.

The general`s view is now shared by the majority of Americans, who think the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism, not decreased it, and that the war has not been worth the human and financial cost.

That cost is increasingly being realized across the country. This week, women such as Pfaff, from the National Military Family Association, were organizing summer camps for the children of soldiers fighting in Iraq. Along with swimming, biking and hiking, the kids are counseled on how to deal with having a parent in the war when every night horrific images flood their TV screens.

"There is a huge need out there," said Pfaff, adding that most of the soldiers, let alone their children, were too young to remember Vietnam. With 860 Americans killed and nearly 5400 wounded, the casualty numbers are beginning to make an impact. "How do they deal with the death of, not only their own family members, but the death of the parent of their best friend?"

As the insurgency in Iraq exploded in April, the casualties rose. Then came the revelations of abuse from Abu Ghraib prison and support for Bush`s handling of the war on terrorism began to fall dramatically, eroding the huge advantage Bush held on national security over his rival, presidential candidate Senator John Kerry.

When voters were by asked by pollsters for NBC television what issue had the greatest personal effect on them, almost 60 per cent said the situation in Iraq and the hostage killings. Iraq out-polled the rise in petrol prices or Ronald Reagan`s death. Bush`s best hope is that, so far, many voters don`t think Kerry would do a better job on either Iraq or the war on terrorism. Support for the two men is now almost dead even.

Having gambled his presidency on Iraq, Bush is now hostage to events there.

Bush`s hope is that US-led forces working with the caretaker government of the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, can hold the insurgency at bay long enough to allow planning for elections in January. Those elections, backed by the UN, could produce a legitimate government that most Iraqis will support. The promise of those elections, the US hopes, will keep the majority of Iraqis from turning against the Allawi`s Government and US troops.

The dilemma is that 90 per cent of Iraqis object to US troops on their soil. Enough Iraqis may tolerate the multinational force until the election. But if the insurgency grows, fueled by the continuing presence of the US troops, this will make holding elections impossible, especially in cities like Fallujah.

Many military analysts in Washington are deeply worried that security will not improve. Hoar believes there is a growing mujahideen in Iraq, similar to the one that expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. He sees two scenarios developing.

"One is that we postpone elections and Allawi becomes our thug and we keep him in power because the alternatives are not good."

The second, he says, is the elections go ahead. "The current people, in my judgment, will be seen as collaborators, and will largely be sidelined, and people [who] have distanced themselves from the US will come to the fore."

The concern with that scenario is that it could provoke a civil war with the Kurds, says Hoar. The Shiite leaders who have distanced themselves from the US are leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the radical young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Both had objected to US plans to give the Kurds, longtime US allies in Iraq, the autonomous rights and region they are demanding in the north.

If the Kurds don`t get the federation they want, "I think the Kurds will talk about secession," says Hoar. "The Israelis are already in Kurdistan training their soldiers in commando raids. So I think it`s a very ugly situation and I don`t see much chance of it coming together successfully."

This is the nightmare scenario for the Bush Administration. The Kurds have by far the largest and most effective militia, the 75,000-strong Peshmerga. If the Kurds try to secede, taking a good slice of Iraq`s oil reserves in Kirkuk, not only will the Shiites and Sunnis react, but so will Turkey. Bush and his senior national security team have given repeated assurances to Turkey that the Kurds will not break away and Iraq will not be allowed to fragment.

Last week at the NATO summit, Bush embraced Turkey as America`s most important democratic ally in the Muslim world and insisted Iraq would remain unified. But others are not so sure. "If the Kurds decided to walk away nobody`s going to stop them", says Marina Ottaway, a security analyst with the US Carnegie Endowment. "Is Bush going to go to war with the Peshmerga? Is Bush going to try and subdue Kurdistan militarily? I believe the Kurds will play the game as long as they get their autonomy and if they don`t get it, they`ll walk."

A year after the fall of Saddam, Americans are just coming to terms with the enormous consequences of the invasion of Iraq and the instability it threatens throughout the greater Middle East. Iran is moving into the power gap left by the fall of Saddam, trying to extend its influence inside Iraq. Added to the volatile mix is the violent foreign jihadists such as Musab al-Zarqawi who, with videotaped beheadings of foreigners, want to make Iraq a terrorism magnet for the region, liking up with allies in Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

But Bush is undaunted. Speaking at the end of the NATO summit in Turkey, he insisted Iraq was on its way to becoming "the world`s newest democracy" - and just the beginning of a sweeping change in the Middle East.

"I believe that freedom is the future of the Middle East because I believe that freedom is the future of all humanity," Bush said in Istanbul. "This transformation is one of the great and difficult tasks of history. And by our own patience and hard effort, and with confidence in the peoples of the Middle East, we will finish the work that history has given up."

Bush is lauded by supporters for his optimistic vision of bringing democracy to the greater Middle East. But increasingly, critics of his Administration who argue his adventurism is fueling terrorism in the region are eroding his national security credentials.

"The signal illusion from which America has to awake in Iraq and everywhere else is that it serves God`s providence," an analyst, Michael Ignatieff, wrote. "In Iraq, America is not the maker of history but its plaything. In the region at large, America is not the hegemon but the hesitant shaper of forces it barely understands."

Copyright © 2004. The Sydney Morning Herald.

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IRAQ TRIES TO GIVE SOVEREIGNTY BACK

‘No Way,’ Says Cheney

One day after the United States transferred sovereignty to Iraq, Iraq unsuccessfully attempted to give sovereignty back to the United States.

The decision to return sovereignty to the U.S. surprised many in diplomatic circles, since most had expected the Iraqis to keep sovereignty for at least two days and possibly even longer than that.

But in an official statement to reporters today in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said that “one day of sovereignty was more than enough, thank you very much.”

Mr. Allawi said that he had been “sold a bill of goods” by former Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer III, who had led Mr. Allawi to believe that Iraq was in much better condition than it actually was.

The Iraqi said he had been persuaded by Mr. Bremer to attend a “travelogue-like” slide-show about Iraq with the promise that he would receive a new set of Samsonite luggage and a 13-inch color television in exchange for forty-five minutes of his time.

Once Mr. Allawi realized that Iraq was “nothing like” the country depicted in the slide-show, the Iraqi leader tried to return sovereignty to Mr. Bremer, but found that he had not left a forwarding address or phone number.

In Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney responded to Mr. Allawi’s request to give sovereignty back with a curt, “No way,” adding, “All I can say to Mr. Allawi is, be careful what you wish for, pal.”

Elsewhere, attendees at the NATO summit in Turkey said they would reserve judgment on President Bush’s speech there until they had time to read the English translation.

**** ANDY BOROWITZ WINS NATIONAL PRESS CLUB AWARD! ****

Andy Borowitz has received the National Press Club`s first-ever prize for humor, for The Borowitz Report. He will be honored at the National Press Club banquet on Monday, July 12 in Washington, D.C.

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Iraqi Cleric Says Occupation Has Not Ended
Sadr Calls on Followers to Resist Continued Troop Presence

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 2, 2004; 4:05 PM

BAGHDAD -- Rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr warned Friday that the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq had not ended with the recent handover of limited political powers to an interim government and called on his followers to continue resisting the large presence of foreign troops in the country.

"I want to draw your attention to the fact there was no transferring of authority," Jabir Khafaji, a top Sadr lieutenant, read from a letter during Friday prayers at a mosque in the southern city of Kufa where Sadr commonly preaches. "What has changed is the name only."

Khafaji also demanded that the new Iraqi government defer to the Shiite religious leadership based in the neighboring holy city of Najaf. He asserted that the Mahdi Army, Sadr`s black-clad militia recently decimated in two months of battle with U.S. forces, is "the army of Iraq."

"I ask the Iraqis to keep rejecting the occupation and call for independence," Khafaji said.

Sadr`s comments, echoed by another of his top aides here in Baghdad, appeared to be a step away from the conciliatory calls for unity he made last week after coordinated insurgent attacks killed more than 100 Iraqis. His words could present an early test for Iraq`s unelected government now seeking to shore up its legitimacy following Monday`s handover of limited political authority after 15 months of occupation.

Since intensive fighting between U.S. forces and Sadr`s militia in several southern cities ended in a cease-fire last month, Sadr has announced plans to form a political party and participate in national elections scheduled for January. More recently, Sadr condemned the foreign influence within Iraq`s diffuse insurgency, noting that most of the victims of urban bombings have been ordinary Iraqis.

A move now by Sadr would strain Iraq`s embryonic security forces and likely require intervention by some of the 138,000 U.S. soldiers who remain in the country as the chief guarantors of the interim government`s stability. U.S. forces are trying to maintain a lower profile in the wake of the handover, but Sadr and simmering trouble spots are testing their ability to do so.

"They are supposed to be reducing their troops," Sheik Aws Khafaji, a Sadr representative from southern Iraq, said during a sermon before 2,000 worshippers in Baghdad`s Sadr City, a Shiite neighborhood named for Moqtada Sadr`s slain father, a revered ayatollah. "We do not want to break the oars of the interim authority." Later, he called on Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi interim prime minister, to use "faithful, nationalist Iraqi oars and don`t use oars that have written on them `Made in the USA.` "

The U.S. military reported that a Marine was killed in combat Friday and a second died of wounds sustained a day earlier in a restive province west of Baghdad that contains the city of Fallujah, the target of several U.S. air strikes over the past week. On Thursday, one Marine was killed in combat in the same area.

In addition, the insurgency showed Friday morning that it will continue striking targets associated with the occupation, firing rockets at hotels used by foreign journalists and U.S. government contractors.

Shortly after 7:30 a.m., a rocket struck the Sheraton Ishtar Hotel in downtown Baghdad, sending debris clattering from the upper floors. The rocket damaged the hotel`s 10th floor, but no one was injured. A second rocket hit the nearby Baghdad Hotel, where several people reportedly were wounded.

Moments later, with city streets nearly empty on the Muslim Sabbath, a minibus exploded in flames near the hotels in Firdous Square, where U.S. troops pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003. There were conflicting reports regarding the attack. But U.S. and Iraqi officials eventually said the bus had been used to fire the rockets and tipped over by the force of the launch, detonating more weapons inside.

U.S. officials said the insurgents` target may have been the Green Zone, the site of the U.S. Embassy, across the Tigris River from the hotels. Two other rocket attacks occurred later in the day, one near another hotel used by Westerners and the other near the headquarters of an Islamic party, where a guard reportedly was wounded.

Also Friday, two Turkish civilians who had been missing for more than a month were freed by insurgents. The hostages -- an air conditioner repairman and his assistant -- were freed after their company agreed to stop doing business in Iraq. A Pakistani driver was also released, Iraqi officials said.

There was also evidence that Iraqis were coming together behind their new interim government.

At the Mother of All Villages Mosque in Baghdad, Sheik Ahmad Abdul Ghafoor called on nearly 2,000 worshippers to "close ranks and unite, because in unity there is strength and in division weakness." Ghafoor, who leads the Sunni Muslim mosque, warned that the months between now and January, when Iraqis are to elect a transitional government, will be difficult ones.

"This will be a test period," he said. "These months will end, but good deeds and patriotic fervor shall remain far longer."

Special correspondents Khalid Saffar and Hoda Lazim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Kufa contributed to this article.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Sgt. Chris Shamblin of Charleston, W. Va., patrolling near Iraq`s border with Iran, looking for smugglers. Money also flows across the border.
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July 3, 2004
Iran Is in Strong Position to Steer Iraq`s Political Future
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 2 — With the chaos of the occupation and now the loosening of American control here, Iran has moved into its best position in decades to influence the political shape of Iraq, Western and Iraqi officials say.

Already, the Iranian government has quietly strengthened its presence in Iraq by providing financial backing to a range of popular Shiite Muslim groups and by flooding the country with intelligence agents, the officials say.

Movement across the 900-mile border is much freer than under the rule of Saddam Hussein, as evidenced by the droves of Iranian pilgrims flocking to the Shiite holy cities of southern Iraq and the daily smuggling of goods and people.

Most worrisome to American officials are Iran`s close ties to powerful Shiite clerics like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who was born in Iran, and Moktada al-Sadr, who led a fierce rebellion against American forces for nearly three months this spring. American officials believe that Iran might have partly financed Mr. Sadr`s movement.

Though Shiites are a majority in both nations, Iraqis are torn between religious and national loyalties. Just how much sway Iran will exert over a new Iraq is far from clear. But some warn that Iran, the world`s dominant seat of Shiite Islam, could be the silent power broker as Iraq heads toward elections in January.

Iran`s aim, Iraqi and Western officials say, is to shape an Iraq run by religious Shiite politicians who could serve as proxies of the clerics in both countries.

"They want a failure of America in Iraq, but they hope the country will be stable enough not to destabilize Iran," said a Western diplomat in Baghdad with extensive experience in the region. "The best thing for them would be a stabilized Iraq with a friendly Shia power in Baghdad created in opposition to the occupation forces."

With the toppling of Mr. Hussein`s secular dictatorship, competition for the heart of Shiite Islam in the region has broken open. For American policy makers, one of the greatest fears has long been an Iraq ruled by Shiites vulnerable to Iranian influence. That was one reason the United States did not support a Shiite rebellion after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The White House now hopes that secular-minded Shiites like Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, will govern a democratic Iraq that will in turn transform Iran, which President Bush included in the "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea.

Since the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Western diplomat said, the Iranians "have the feeling that they`re surrounded by Americans or friends of the Americans."

Some experts say Iran`s seizure in June of three small British Navy boats on the Shatt al Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran was in part a petty but prominent way for Iran to emphasize that its interests in the region would not be ignored.

Iran has expressed both hostility toward and guarded acceptance of the interim Iraqi government, reflecting the internal battles in Iran`s own leadership. For years, the two major camps in the Iranian government — the reformers led by President Mohammad Khatami and the hard-liners who follow Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini — have pursued separate foreign policies.

But many Iraqis already suspect Iran of wielding enormous influence over the most prominent Shiite political parties here. A poll conducted in May for the Coalition Provisional Authority showed that the most popular political and religious leaders in Iraq were Shiites with strong Iranian ties.

"It seems clear that the Iranians are trying to butter both sides of the bread and all four crust edges," said Prof. Juan Cole, an expert on Shiite Islam at the University of Michigan.

The Shiite parties contend that they remain independent of the Iranian government, but also point out that Iran was the only country willing to harbor them in exile during Mr. Hussein`s rule, and so it is not surprising that their ties to Iran remain strong.

At the same time, Iranian meddling is not without its risks. As many as half a million Iraqis died in the eight-year war with Iran in the 1980`s, and the wounds and hostilities linger. When ordinary Iraqis talk about bombings and assassinations here, they often blame Iranian agents after pointing the finger at the United States and Israel.

Partly because of those sentiments, Shiite parties once exiled in Iran under Mr. Hussein — most notably the Dawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri — contend that they no longer have direct ties to their former host, despite a history of generous financial support from Iran`s government.

Officials here and in Washington say otherwise.

A senior American military official said in an e-mail message that the United States Army has observed "a large amount of U.S. currency being passed by Iran" to Sciri, which was founded in 1982 by an Iraqi ayatollah exiled in Iran. The money was exchanged for "the supposed purpose of paying salaries and maintenance of vehicles and facilities," the official said.

Humam Bakr Hamody, a senior Sciri official, played down the link. "Sciri is not related to the Iranian government and has different positions and opinions," he said.

The party had received money from sources in many Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, he added, and the funds had come from individual donors rather than governments. Money is delivered to the party over the Iranian border because there is no reliable way to wire money to Iraq, he said.

A senior Iraqi Shiite official familiar with the security situation here confirmed that financial transactions were taking place between Iran and various Shiite parties. Those include the militia led by Mr. Sadr, the 31-year-old Shiite cleric who is more popular than ever in Iraq after leading his spring rebellion against the occupation forces.

The American military, seeking to avoid street-to-street fighting in Najaf, a city held sacred by Shiites for its shrines, has backed down from its promise to kill or capture Mr. Sadr.

American soldiers seized large stashes of Iranian currency during arrests of Mr. Sadr`s aides, an American military official said. But it was unclear whether that indicated direct involvement by the Iranian government in the insurgency.

In May, when anti-American fighting peaked in the city of Kufa, the main mosque there, a Sadr stronghold, broadcast pleas for blood donations in both Arabic and Persian, the language of Iran. At the time, Iranian pilgrimages to the city had dried up, and the calls for aid in Persian fueled suspicions that Iranian fighters had joined Mr. Sadr`s militia.

A resident of Kufa said in an interview at the time of the uprisings that he opened his door one day to find two Persian-speaking militiamen setting up a mortar outside.

Mr. Sadr has been open about his allegiance to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran`s 1979 Islamic revolution. Last month, a Sadr aide said in a sermon at the Kufa mosque that Mr. Sadr "promises God and Muslim countries" that he will "keep following Khomeini" as long as he lives. One of the most zealous units of Mr. Sadr`s militia is named after Ayatollah Khomeini.

Mr. Sadr`s fealty to the late ayatollah stems from long family ties across the border and a history of adversity under Mr. Hussein`s rule.

His patron, Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, still lives in the Iranian city of Qum, arguably the foremost seat of Shiite theocratic learning. The offices of both clerics in Najaf acknowledged that Mr. Sadr operated as his patron`s spiritual representative in Iraq and that substantial money flowed between them.

Mr. Sadr`s deceased uncle, Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, one of the last century`s most respected Shiite thinkers, was close friends with Ayatollah Khomeini and took an active role in Iraqi politics by opposing the ruling Baath Party. Mr. Hussein had him killed in 1980.

Mr. Hussein also ordered the killing of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Moktada, who before his death in 1999 named as his successor Ayatollah Haeri. The ayatollah`s office in Qum has organized donations for Moktada al-Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army.

Despite indications of Iranian support for Mr. Sadr, prominent Iranians appeared wary when he led his followers to open rebellion, with its potential of destabilizing Iraq. In late April, as Mr. Sadr was urging the militia on in its attacks against the Americans, Ayatollah Haeri issued a statement saying he did not support the actions.

In mid-April, Iran sent envoys to Najaf in what it said was an attempt to negotiate an end to Mr. Sadr`s insurgency, possibly because the fighting was jeopardizing American plans eventually to hand power to Shiite parties. An Iranian diplomat was assassinated in Baghdad at the time, and senior American officials said they did not want Iran interfering in Iraq.

Iran said the "iron fist policy" of the United States had led to the delegation`s failure. At a recent sermon in the golden-domed Shrine of Ali in Najaf, a leader of Sciri, Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi, criticized the Iranian government for not reining in the mercurial Mr. Sadr.

The single most powerful cleric in Iraq remains Ayatollah Sistani, a 73-year-old Iranian who moved to Najaf in his early 20`s. In the 1990`s, his organization began making substantial financial contributions to clerics in Iran, which brought him closer to the top religious leaders there.

But Ayatollah Sistani`s relationship with Iran`s mullahs is not necessarily one of subservience or even ideological allegiance. The pipeline of money flows both ways, and associates say the ayatollah receives donations gathered by his Qum office.

Ayatollah Sistani`s mentor in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qassim al-Khoei, promoted the "quietist" school of Shiite Islam, which advocated that religious leaders remove themselves from direct involvement in politics — a view that ran counter to that of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Close associates of Ayatollah Sistani have said he is intent on transforming Najaf into a Shiite power center to rival Qum, which was strengthened in the 1980`s by an influx of clerics fleeing Najaf during Mr. Hussein`s rule.

Iran`s influence can be felt even beyond its direct ties to Iraq`s clerics, religious parties and the strongly Shiite south.

Iran is suspected of having close ties to Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile and secular Shiite politician once backed by the Pentagon.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened an investigation into charges by American intelligence officials that Mr. Chalabi told Iranian officials that the Americans had broken a code used by Iran. Mr. Chalabi has denied the charges.

In northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste, commander of the First Infantry Division, said, "There has definitely been an effect from Iran since we`ve been here." The general declined to provide details. Another senior American military official said Iranian intelligence agents were operating in the division`s command area, which is slightly larger than West Virginia and shares a long border with Iran.

In February, before Iranian pilgrims flooded into Iraq for the Shiite festival of Ashura, American military officials said they were monitoring Iranian intelligence agents working out of central Baghdad.

"Iran is the regional hegemon," the senior military official said. "They`re trying to set the stage for the Shia to take power."

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 3, 2004
As Terror Attacks Return, Reasons Haunt Pakistanis
By DAVID ROHDE and ZULFIQAR SHAH

KARACHI, Pakistan - This spring, militancy again seduced Muhammad Akbar Niazi. How is the question that haunts this city.

Over the last three years, according to his brother, someone twice persuaded Mr. Niazi, whom his neighbors recall as such a friendly young man that he always hugged them, to journey to Afghanistan and fight with the Taliban. His middle-class family fought back, once dispatching an uncle and an elder brother to the Afghan border, where they contacted him and brought him home.

In 2001, the family persuaded Mr. Niazi to get married, and described him as blissful at the birth of his first child, a son, last year. The strapping 25-year-old was on the verge of completing a one-year training program to become a police officer in Karachi.

But on May 7, Mr. Niazi strapped a bomb to his body, put on his police trainee uniform, and walked into a Shiite Muslim mosque in a historic school in Karachi`s financial district. As Shiite worshipers prostrated themselves before God, he detonated the bomb, killing 25 people in an attack that marked the beginning of six weeks of religious and political violence in Karachi, Pakistan`s economic engine and largest city.

That unleashed a chain of attacks that has left 70 people dead, 200 wounded, and Karachi destabilized. Mr. Niazi`s 18-month respite from militancy roughly coincided with an 18-month respite from violence that Karachi, and the rest of Pakistan, had enjoyed. Now, that respite appears to be over.
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Police officials in Karachi, Pakistan, inspected the debris on May 7 after a suspected suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shiite Muslim mosque.

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The new wave of attacks has raised questions about the effectiveness of the government of President Pervez Musharraf, the number of young Pakistanis joining militant groups, and the possible infiltration of Pakistan`s army and police forces.

Mr. Niazi was not alone. The police and members of the armed forces have been implicated in three major attacks in the last six months, including a failed attempt to kill General Musharraf in December. Five other Army officers are in military detention, apparently for having possible ties to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former head of Al Qaeda operations who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003.

Mr. Niazi`s case is disturbing because no one knows exactly why he reverted to militancy, or even if he ever left the cause. The most troublesome question is whether he acted as a "sleeper," a militant told to act normally, to infiltrate the police, and wait.

Understanding what is happening in Karachi and countering it is crucial for General Musharraf`s government. Unrest in the city has repeatedly led to the toppling of past Pakistani governments, political analysts say. The city is a microcosm of the political, ethnic and religious rivalries that have beset Pakistan since it won independence from Britain in 1947.

So far this year, 102 people have died in terrorist attacks in the city, the highest rate of terrorist killings in six years. General lawlessness has also increased, with the number of kidnappings in the city surging to 33 last year, the most in 12 years.

The recent attacks have followed no clear pattern. Some have been directed at the American and Pakistani governments, including the attempted assassination of the city`s top general and a twin car bombing near the house of the American consul general.

Other attacks have continued a long pattern of sectarian violence in the country, including two suicide bombings of minority Shiite Muslim mosques and the assassination of a cleric from the country`s Sunni Muslim majority who had close ties to the Taliban.

In an attack that fit none of the earlier categories, a provincial leader of a political party that opposes General Musharraf`s role, the Pakistan People`s Party of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, was shot dead.

Pakistani security analysts believe that the attacks may involve various groups carrying out copycat attacks. They said all of the groups appear to be taking advantage of the weakness of the city government.

The neighborhood where Mr. Niazi grew up, Layari, is an example of what plagues Karachi: poor to nonexistent government services for the city`s 14 million people. It is notorious for gang wars, drug dealings and other crimes. Coupled with roads overflowing with sewage, power failures, narrow lanes and weak policing, it is a breeding ground for disillusionment.

Yet the neighborhood, until now, had not been known for producing militancy. In a sign that militants may be spreading their recruiting, men believed to have been involved in at least three of the recent terrorist attacks come from Layari, according to interviews with relatives of the men and police officials.

Relatives in Layari of two brothers, both doctors, said the two had been detained for questioning in the June 10 assassination attempt on the city`s top military official, known as a corps commander. Ten people died in the attack in the center of the city, which involved gunmen in two vans who sprayed the corps commander`s convoy with bullets during morning rush-hour traffic.

Relatives said the two were arrested because one of the doctors, Dr. Akmal Waheed, a 40-year-old heart surgeon, had traveled to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and to Chechnya to perform relief work.

"Yes, he has been to Afghanistan and Chechnya,`` said his older brother, Ajmal. "But all that for relief work and with the permission of government."

Akmal and his 28-year-old brother, Dr. Arshad Waheed, are from comparatively wealthy families in Layari and are members of the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association, a religiously conservative professional group. Ajmal, their older brother, is a local leader of Jamaat-Islami, one of an alliance of hard-line Islamic parties that advocates the establishment of an Islamic government through democratic means.

In a separate interview, Mohammed Ali Rizvi, an official at the second Shiite mosque that was bombed, said the police allowed him to speak with Gul Hasan, a man accused of driving the suicide bomber to Mr. Rizvi`s mosque.

Mr. Rizvi said Mr. Hasan told him that 25 youths were recruited from Layari and sent to Afghanistan. He said half of them are now back and are followers of Sepah-e-Sehaba, a Sunni sectarian group with a history of attacking Shiites.

Mr. Hasan`s claims could not be confirmed, nor could it be learned whether Mr. Niazi was one of the recruits

Mr. Niazi`s 28-year-old elder brother, Mohammad Afzal Khan, said the family suspects that Qari Amanullah, a cleric from a neighborhood mosque, recruited his brother and other local young men. Which militant group the cleric is tied to was not clear.

A senior police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said militancy is growing in Karachi because the city has continued not to provide basic services. Police reform, in particular, has stalled.

"Administratively, we are very weak," the senior police official said. "We have laws, but we don`t implement them."

Critics of continued military rule trace the problem back to General Musharraf. After national elections in 2002, he blocked the party that had received the most votes, the Pakistan People`s Party, from forming a provincial government.

The head of the party, Ms. Bhutto, is one of General Musharraf`s greatest political rivals. In Sindh, the province where Karachi is located, General Musharraf created a coalition provincial government between a pro-Musharraf party and a smaller local party with a history of political violence in the city, the Mohajir National Movement, best known by its Urdu language acronym, the MQM.

Opponents of General Musharraf say the two parties spend much of their time feuding and jockeying for patronage and position. They say that little time is spent on trying to reform the city`s derelict civil service and infrastructure.

Mr. Niazi`s family, meanwhile, is left wondering how they lost out to the cleric. The police trainee left no note behind and gave his family no warning.

He also appears to have been deeply determined. The bomb he wore that day snapped a two-inch-thick steel pole in the mosque. The young man was identified when searchers found a two- to three-pound piece of human remains with a police belt buckle underneath it. The number on the buckle was Mr. Niazi`s.

The police trainee`s older brother bitterly accused the neighborhood cleric, who is now missing, of brainwashing his brother.

"Why didn`t Qari Amanullah use his own brother?" he asked. "Why my brother? God will punish him."

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Über den Ansporn haben wir sehr viel in den letzten Wochen gelesen.

July 3, 2004
INTELLIGENCE
Capture of Hussein Aides Spurred U.S. Interrogators
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

WASHINGTON — Within days after Saddam Hussein`s capture last December, the American military jailers at Abu Ghraib prison received an important new batch of prisoners: bodyguards and other loyalists who tended to Mr. Hussein in his final weeks on the run, passing messages to his confederates and shuttling him to safe houses and secret meetings in battered taxis.

According to military intelligence officers and soldiers at the prison, the capture of the bodyguards led to an all-out push for information about close supporters of Mr. Hussein who were suspected of plotting against the American occupation of Iraq.

It would be a race against time before those supporters found other hiding places, so a group of interrogators was given greater latitude to use tactics on the new prisoners that had previously required the signed approval of senior officers, said military intelligence soldiers who asked to remain unidentified for fear of harming their careers.

They said the tactics included sleep and food deprivation, extended isolation and the use of menacing dogs. "It was `Do whatever you have to do, find out where they are and let`s get `em fast,` " said a military intelligence analyst. "We needed to get them before they got away."

While it is not clear whether the intensified intelligence gathering led to mistreatment of prisoners, the disclosure about the loosening of rules after Mr. Hussein`s capture adds a new element to the evolving picture of abuses in Abu Ghraib prison.

It also shows the role of a previously unreported military intelligence unit at the prison, known as the special projects team, which was assembled to interrogate Mr. Hussein`s loyalists, sometimes for 10 hours at a time.

The Army`s top intelligence officer in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, met with the team several times to get updates, according to a military officer and soldiers interviewed.

Military officials in Baghdad did not comment on the special projects team. But they acknowledge that the arrival of the new prisoners set off an urgent interrogation effort.

"After Saddam`s capture, we worked quickly to find others who were part of his network," said Col. Jill E. Morgenthaler, chief of public affairs at military headquarters in Baghdad. "We prioritized the interrogation of these personnel in order to gain insights on the reinstitution of the regime or development of an alternative organization and the personalities associated with such an effort."

As a result, senior officers pressed analysts to produce more intelligence reports, interrogations became more intense and a greater number of high-level Iraqis were captured, according to interviews with senior military officers, officials and military intelligence soldiers.

The worst known abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred in October and November, before Mr. Hussein`s capture, and involved members of the military police who have said their actions were encouraged by officials at the prison.

But the mistreatment of prisoners continued into December, according to Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba of the Army, who investigated abuses at the prison. Several other inquiries are under way to determine the extent of mistreatment and how it occurred at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American military commander in Iraq at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, has testified that he alone had the authority to approve harsh interrogation tactics at Abu Ghraib, and that he authorized the isolation of only 25 prisoners for extended periods.

But military intelligence soldiers who were recruited for the special projects team shortly after Mr. Hussein`s capture said they were no longer required to get General Sanchez`s approval to use harsh tactics.

While one officer and an interrogator said they did not recall a loosening of the rules, others said Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the prison`s chief intelligence officer, had told them that they had his advance approval to use those tactics and no longer needed to submit interrogation plans for him to sign.

"He said: `We want this info. Do what you have to do to get it,` " said one analyst who worked on the team and is now back in the United States. "He had a lot of pressure on him, so he put a lot of pressure on us."

Others recalled that they were still required to obtain signed approval, but that it could come from sergeants in the prison`s military intelligence operation instead of the colonel, which shortened the approval process. "It made things a little bit quicker," said one analyst.

Through a spokeswoman, Colonel Pappas declined a request for an interview. General Taguba`s report blamed the colonel, who has returned to Germany with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, for allowing conditions that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Last week, Capt. Donald Reese, a company commander of the military police soldiers charged with abusing detainees at the prison, testified that Colonel Pappas was in the cellblock the night a prisoner died during an interrogation last November. Captain Reese`s testimony, at a hearing in Baghdad, suggested that Colonel Pappas had been aware of efforts to conceal the prisoner`s death.

As the American occupation came under increasing attack by insurgents in 2003, the interrogations at Abu Ghraib had produced, at best, infrequent bursts of useful information, members of military intelligence said. But in the days immediately after Mr. Hussein`s arrest on Dec. 13, things changed.

"There was the prison before the capture and the prison after," a military intelligence analyst said.

More than a dozen Iraqis were captured with Mr. Hussein on a farm near Tikrit, in the province of his tribal homeland.

These prisoners had shepherded Mr. Hussein through as many as 40 different hide-outs. They included a family of fishermen who owned some homes where he stayed, bodyguards — known as himaya, or protection — and other helpers, who did everything from cooking and installing air conditioning in his rooms to carrying messages from him, according to military intelligence officers.

While Mr. Hussein was handed over to C.I.A. officers, the helpers went directly to Abu Ghraib. Only the soldiers who had captured the prisoners spoke to them before they arrived at the prison, according to a military officer.

That meant that interrogators would get a rare first crack at talking to prisoners of high intelligence value — the kind that did not usually land at Abu Ghraib unless they had been interrogated elsewhere.

The prison`s military officers responded to the challenge by forming a group of some 20 interrogators, analysts and linguists.

"As soon as we became `special projects,` the heat was turned up," said a soldier who worked with the unit. "It was do what you needed to do to get the information. Usually we just did our own thing."

In some instances, the team used harsh interrogation tactics like feeding prisoners only one meal a day, allowing them only four hours of sleep a day, placing them in isolation cells for 30 days and using military dogs during interrogations, several soldiers said in interviews.

"Just having the dog in the room worked pretty effectively," said one intelligence analyst.

One officer said the team had felt immense pressure to perform well, partly because senior officers had expressed keen interest in the results of the interrogations. General Fast met directly with the low-ranking interrogators at least twice in December and asked for information about each detainee, the officer and a soldier said in interviews.

The new prisoners produced good leads, which resulted in more raids and arrests of other high-level prisoners, including former Iraqi generals, senior Baath Party officials and tribal leaders who were aligned with Mr. Hussein, a military officer said.

Most helpful were the bodyguards, at least two of whom drove Mr. Hussein to meetings with former Baath party officials. "They knew where he went," said one analyst who assisted in interrogating the prisoners. "We got lots of names. We were on the tails of other big people."

The analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, belonged to the Fusion Analyst Cell, a unit in the prison that produced reports on information gleaned from interrogations. Some of the best intelligence in the reports resulted from interrogations with the himaya detainees, several members of the military said.

The reports were sent to interrogators and officers within the prison starting in October and eventually were shared with the C.I.A., the State Department, the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Defense Department officials, military personnel and officials said.

The reports were usually about insurgency groups, terrorist organizations or "attack cells" — groups that carried out attacks on American and allied forces — according to several military intelligence people interviewed.

The unit`s analysts became experts on hundreds of those groups, including Ansar al-Islam, which was active in Kurdish areas of northeastern Iraq, and the fedayeen, former members of Iraqi paramilitary units who attacked American forces during the initial assault on Baghdad.

Eric Schmitt and Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 3, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Al Jazeera: Out-Foxing Fox
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

If President Bush wants to rescue his Iraqi adventure, here`s a suggestion: Spend less time with C.I.A. sycophants like George Tenet and more time watching Al Jazeera television.

The Bush administration`s central intelligence failure was not that it failed to tap enough telephones. Rather, it didn`t bother to understand the mind-set in Iraq or the larger Arab world — and it still doesn`t.

The transfer of sovereignty is a useful moment to look back at what went so wrong in Iraq. As I see it, the root problem was hubris born in a Washington echo chamber, and a resulting conviction that Iraqis would welcome us with flowers.

When I visited Iraq in the run-up to the war, I met another foreigner by the pool of the Rasheed Hotel, where we hoped our conversation couldn`t be bugged, and we spoke of our bafflement. Senior U.S. officials seemed genuinely convinced that our invading troops would be hailed as heroes, while ordinary Iraqis often talked about fighting U.S. troops with guns, grenades and suicide bombs. Iraqis typically hated Saddam, but also hated the idea of an invasion.

But the neocons refused to hear it. From their Washington and New York cocoons, they insisted that ordinary Iraqis welcomed an invasion. Ahmad Chalabi had told them so. Or they read it in The Weekly Standard.

They even mangled the country`s name — Mr. Bush called it Eye-rack — yet they bet American lives that all would go well. That`s "the arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright termed it when Democrats made similar blunders in Vietnam. (An excerpt is at www.nytimes.com /kristofresponds, Posting 505.)

Such arrogance has a long and sad lineage. The Wolfowitz of World War I was Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander who launched an offensive that cost the British 420,000 casualties. "It naturally pleased Haig to have carefully chosen and nicely cooked little tidbits of `intelligence` about broken German divisions, heavy German casualties and diminishing German morale served up to him every day and all day," Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote. "He beamed satisfaction and confidence. His great plan was prospering. The whole atmosphere of this secluded little community reeked of that sycophantic optimism."

Sound familiar?

"We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again," Don Rumsfeld complained during the war. "What they do is, when there`s a bomb that goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children. . . . We are dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case — and to the extent people lie, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility."

Good point.

The gulf between the American and Arab realities is the subject of "Control Room," a powerful documentary by Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American. She looks at Al Jazeera`s coverage of the war, offering a sobering reminder that there are multiple ways of perceiving the same events.

President Bush`s narrative for the war was: "Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple evil dictator and establish democracy and human rights." The Arab narrative was: "The same Yankees who pay for Israelis to blow up Palestinians are now seizing Iraqi oil fields and maiming Iraqi women and children."

I`m not a big fan of Al Jazeera, which tends to be emotional and nationalistic. As U.S. Lt. Josh Rushing astutely notes in "Control Room," Al Jazeera is the Arab version of the Fox News Channel: "It benefits Al Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism because that`s their audience, just like Fox plays to American patriotism, for the exact same reason — American nationalism — because that`s their demographic audience and that`s what they want to see."

If the Arab world is going to break out of its self-pitying self-absorption, it`s going to have to understand American attitudes — and it could do worse than switching its televisions from Al Jazeera to Fox. And if the Bush administration is going to turn Iraq around and engage the Arab world effectively, then it must try harder to escape the echo chamber and understand the Arabs — and it could do worse than switching from the reassuring euphony of Fox to Al Jazeera.

Mr. Bush might even pledge that from now on, he won`t invade a country before learning how to pronounce its name.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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"So that`s -- what -- there`s some ideas. And the -- it`s -- my job is to like think beyond the immediate."
[/TABLE]George W. Bush, 4-21-04

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Die Homepage mit Musik und einigen flotten Sprüchen:
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Noch ein Wort zu dem Strip: Das Thema eines Soldaten, der sein Bein verloren hat, hat zu heftigen Reaktionen in den Staaten geführt bis zu Boykottdrohungen und Weigerung einiger Zeitungen diese Folgen abzudrucken.
Hier der Blowback:
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2. korregiertes Posting

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	Mr. Brando as Paul and Maria Schneider as Jeanne in Bernardo Bertolucci`s 1972 film "Last Tango in Paris."
Marlon Brando played a rebellious motorcycle gang member in the 1954 film "The Wild One."
	Mr. Brando as the mythic Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather," the 1972 film adaption of the best-selling novel by Mario Puzo, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Mr. Brando in Francis Ford Coppola`s 1979 film "Apocalypse Now."
	Mr. Brando as a longshoreman in a scene from "On the Waterfront," the 1954 film directed by Elia Kazan, with screenplay by Budd Schulberg, adapted from Mr. Schulberg`s novel.

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Nachdem Nader offensichtlich in manchen Staaten Unterstützung von konservativen Gruppen bekommt, wird der Widerstand gegen ihn immer härter.

washingtonpost.com

Nader Won`t Be on the Ballot in Arizona

By Paul Davenport
Associated Press
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A05

PHOENIX, July 2 -- Supporters of Ralph Nader on Friday abandoned their effort to place the independent candidate on the presidential ballot in Arizona after Democrats challenged thousands of signatures.

Nader`s campaign had submitted more than 22,000 signatures to Arizona election officials June 9, far more than the 14,694 valid signatures required by state law to compete against President Bush and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry on Nov. 2.

In a suit last week, two Democratic voters, backed by the state party, questioned the validity of Nader`s petitions and other documents. The Democrats said more than 70 percent of the signatures were invalid.

As a Maricopa County Superior Court judge prepared to hear arguments, Nader campaign attorney Richard K. Mahrle conceded there were "technical errors" in the petition and said Nader would not contest the suit.

Judge Mark Armstrong ordered that Nader be kept off the state ballot.

Nader spokesman Kevin Zeese said a review by the secretary of state`s office found that the campaign fell short of the required number of valid signatures. He said the campaign does not have the resources to fight an aggressive legal challenge and accused Democrats of harassment. "There`s no question that deep-pocketed Democrats don`t have much of a sense of fair play," he said.

In their lawsuit, the Democrats alleged Nader`s petitions were signed by thousands of unregistered voters, that some of those collecting signatures were convicted felons and that other collectors did not meet residency requirements.

Nader appeared on Arizona`s ballot in November 2000 and received 45,000 votes.

He suffered a setback last week when the Green Party, which has ballot lines in 22 states and the District of Columbia, declined to endorse him. He has been endorsed by the Reform Party, which has ballot lines in at least seven states.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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The Left Doesn`t Need a Limbaugh

By Ellen Goodman

Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A27

BOSTON -- Maybe it was because the man on my left was doing a play-by-play when any member of the Bush team came on the screen. Maybe it was because the movie theater was within pitching range of Fenway Park.

But halfway through "Fahrenheit 9/11," I realized this wasn`t an audience, it was a fan club. They weren`t watching the movie, they were rooting for it.

I saw this movie in a sold-out theater on a Monday night surrounded by people in their twenties. You go, Michael. If "Fahrenheit 9/11" preaches to the choir, you could find me in the alto section.

More to the point -- or Moore to the point -- I agreed with the filmmaker that Bush didn`t exactly win the 2000 election, that we were misled into Iraq and that the White House has used the terrorism alerts as a political toy. So add my review to the marquee: I laughed! I cried!

But at some point, I also began to feel just a touch out of harmony. Not even this alto believes that the Iraq war was brought to us courtesy of the Bush-Saudi oil-money connection. Not even the rosiest pair of my retro-spectacles sees prewar Iraq as a happy valley where little children flew kites.

There were a few too many cheap shots among the direct hits, conspiracy theories among the solid facts, and tidbits of propaganda in the documentary. Going for the jugular, he sometimes went over the top.

The simple fact that George Bush the First called Moore a "slimeball" makes me itch to call him a "genius." But that`s the problem. If the right is after him, does the choir have to sing the filmmaker`s praises as our own cuddly and amusing pit bull?

Michael Moore has been called the left-wing answer to Rush Limbaugh. Rush without the OxyContin. But is it heresy to ask whether the left actually wants its own Rush?

More than a decade ago, talk radio became talk right. Then Fox News took out a trademark on "fair and balanced." The right wing tried to take possession of "patriotism" the way they took over "family."

After years as a punching bag, is it any wonder that the left wants its own punching machines? But the result is that we`ve hardened further into "us and them."

Politics isn`t polarized between ideas as much as it is divided between teams in an endless color war. The famous geopolitical map of 2000 painted the states red and blue. Now we have added red and blue talkmeisters, red and blue books, red and blue movies.

If the reds have Bill O`Reilly, the blues now have Al Franken. If red people read "Treason," blue people read "Thieves in High Places." Log on to Amazon.com and a few clicks take you to the literary red team, a few more to the blue team.

There was even an unseemly competition when political sportscasters pitted the TV ratings for the funeral of Ronald (the Red) Reagan against the literary resurrection of Bill (the Blue) Clinton.

Now we are getting our own space in the cineplex. When "Fahrenheit 9/11" hit $23.9 million the first weekend, box office receipts were read like political tea leaves. Moore was also cast as the left`s Mel Gibson. Whose "passion" was more powerful?

One letter writer in the New York Times described the "fun" of watching "conservatives throw up their hands in horror and dismay as the one-man liberal attack machine scores points against them." He called it a "taste of their own medicine."

Well, I am happy to write prescriptions for this medicine. After all, those who attack Moore`s ad hominem attacks on the president do so with ad hominem attacks on Michael Moore. But it`s getting awfully rare to see anyone trying to write or speak across the political color line.

Moore described his movie as an "op-ed piece," not a documentary. Well, I know something about op-ed pieces. Over the long run, you don`t get anywhere just whacking your audience upside the head; you try to change the mind within it. You don`t just go for the gut. You try, gulp, reason.

I actually agree with P.J. O`Rourke, a conservative who writes in the Atlantic that he tunes out Rush because there`s no room for measured debate: "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives." But now liberals are trudging purposefully down the same low road.

In the election between Bush and Anybody But Bush, reason and civility are now designated for wimps. But what happens to the country when the left only meets the right at the American jugular?

The name of Moore`s production company, you may recall, is Dog Eat Dog.

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THE NATION
Army Takes Its War Effort to Task
Report says U.S. forces prevailed in Iraq despite deep supply shortages and bad intelligence.
By David Zucchino
Times Staff Writer

July 3, 2004

FT. LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — American soldiers who defeated the Iraqi regime 15 months ago received virtually none of the critical spare parts they needed to keep their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles running. They ran chronically short of food, water and ammunition. Their radios often failed them. Their medics had to forage for medical supplies, artillery gunners had to cannibalize parts from captured Iraqi guns and intelligence units provided little useful information about the enemy.

These revelations come not from embedded reporters or congressional committees but from the Army itself. In the first internal assessment of the war in Iraq, an exhaustive Army study has concluded that American forces prevailed despite supply and logistical failures, poor intelligence, communication breakdowns and futile attempts at psychological warfare.

The 542-page study, declassified last month, praises commanders and soldiers for displaying resourcefulness and resiliency under trying conditions, and for taking advantage of superior firepower, training and technology.

But the report also describes a broken supply system that left crucial spare parts and lubricants on warehouse shelves in Kuwait while tankers outside Baghdad ripped parts from broken-down tanks and raided Iraqi supplies of oil and lubricants.

"No one had anything good to say about parts delivery, from the privates at the front to the generals" at the U.S. command center in Kuwait, the study`s authors concluded after conducting 2,300 interviews and studying 119,000 documents.

Among other highlights, the report revealed that the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad before cheering Iraqis was the brainchild of a U.S. Marine colonel, with help from a psychological operations unit. The report also credited a U.S. Army colonel with shortening the war by "weeks, if not months" with his dramatic "thunder run" into Baghdad.

Portions of an early draft of the report were described by the New York Times in an article in February. The study has since been revised and refined, but the overall conclusions in the final, unclassified report have not changed significantly.

Within the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized), which spearheaded the U.S. assault on Baghdad, "literally every maneuver battalion commander asserted that he could not have continued offensive operations for another two weeks without some spare parts," the study said.

The study, titled "On Point" and aimed at "lessons learned," is at odds with the public perception of a technologically superior invasion force that easily drove Hussein from power. In fact, as the authors point out in their battle-by-battle narrative, there were many precarious moments when U.S. units were critically short of fuel and ammunition, with little understanding of the forces arrayed against them.

The report, by the Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group at Ft. Leavenworth, called ammunition resupply "problematic" and said the medical supply system "failed to work." Engineers desperate for explosives foraged for Iraqi explosives and tore apart mine-clearing charges to use the explosives to blow up captured Iraqi equipment.

Many soldiers plunged into combat not knowing whether they had enough food or water to sustain themselves in punishing heat and blinding sandstorms. "Stocks of food barely met demand," the study said. "There were times when the supply system was incapable of providing sufficient MREs for the soldiers fighting Iraqi forces."

Military intelligence provided little useful information about the deployment or intentions of Iraqi forces, the study concluded. A Third Infantry tank commander whose company was attacked by Iraqi fighters hidden in an elaborate bunker and trench system in Baghdad on April 8 told The Times that he later learned from a French journalist that newspapers had reported details of the bunker network. Yet his own intelligence officers had told him nothing.

Most significantly, military planners did not anticipate the effectiveness or ferocity of paramilitary forces that disrupted supply columns and mounted suicide charges against 70-ton Abrams tanks. Some of those same forces, using tactics refined during the invasion, are part of the current insurgency.

The study, which covers events in Kuwait and Iraq until President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, 2003, does not address the insurgency, which has killed far more Americans than were killed during the so-called combat phase. Nor does the study discuss the Pentagon`s failure to anticipate or control the looting and chaos following the collapse of the Iraqi regime in April 2003.

But the report does say that the military`s "running start" — the strategy of launching the invasion before all support units had arrived — made it difficult for commanders to quickly adjust from major combat to postwar challenges. Because combat units outraced supply and support units, combat commanders were caught unprepared when Hussein`s regime collapsed after three weeks.

"Local commanders were torn between their fights and providing resources — soldiers, time and logistics — to meet the civilian needs," the report said. "Partially due to the scarce resources as a result of the running start, there simply was not enough to do both missions."

The report does not address the Bush administration`s stated reasons for the invasion — Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction, purported operational links between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, and atrocities committed under Hussein`s dictatorship. Instead, the study critiques the Army`s combat performance with an eye toward future wars.

The principal authors — retired Col. Gregory Fontenot, Lt. Col. E.J. Degen and Lt. Col. David Tohn — warned that Iraqi forces could have created significant problems if they had attacked relatively undefended U.S. units staging in Kuwait in the winter of 2002-03. Those units arrived without significant firepower or reinforcements and were vulnerable to a surprise attack.

The authors also said Iraqis could have extended the battle for Baghdad for weeks if they had destroyed or blocked approaches to the capital, or had forced American troops to fight a drawn-out battle in dense urban areas. (Former Republican Guard commanders interviewed by The Times in Baghdad said Hussein left the highways to Baghdad open because he thought his own forces would need them once they blocked the American invasion south of the capital.)

In an interview Friday, Fontenot said the Army excelled at "joint operations," integrating infantry, armor, artillery and air power to great effect during the war. "Arguably, the integration of joint warfare reached a level we had not seen at least since the Korean War," he said.

He also praised the effective use of Special Forces, the successful "pre-positioning" of vast quantities of materiel in the Middle East, and the quality of Army training. Fontenot, a tank battalion commander during the first Gulf War, said officers and men at the tactical level were better prepared last year than 13 years ago.

"I thought I was a pretty good tank commander, but the quality of these battalions is far better than we were," he said. "I was really impressed by the quality of the tactical leadership."

Fontenot said the narrative study, ordered by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, was not intended as the "seminal work" on the war. Rather, he said, "it`s a first look."

The study credits a relatively junior commander — Col. David Perkins of the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division — with shortening the war with a bold armored strike into the heart of Baghdad on April 7. Perkins` "thunder run" surprised Baghdad`s defenders with its speed and firepower, collapsing the regime from within before Iraqi forces could draw the Americans into a protracted urban war.

The authors said Perkins "made the single decision that arguably shortened the siege by weeks, if not months."

The Pentagon`s plan for Baghdad had envisioned a series of attacks to slowly chip away at the regime. But the authors said Perkins` decision to suddenly revise the plan under fire and stay in downtown Baghdad was a prime example of flexibility and innovation by both the Pentagon brass and commanders in the field.

They "rapidly adapted and fought the enemy they found rather than the one they planned on," the study said.

U.S. forces prevailed despite seriously underestimating paramilitary forces, especially Saddam Fedayeen, Baath Party militiamen, al Quds local militiamen and Muslim jihadists from Syria, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries, the study said. Those fighters harassed U.S. supply columns and nearly overran Col. Perkins` forces along Highway 8 south of Baghdad on April 7.

"The intelligence and operations communities had never anticipated how ferocious, tenacious and fanatical they would be," the authors said. By dressing in civilian clothes and firing from civilian neighborhoods, paramilitaries were able to "hide with some success from the incredible array of technical intelligence" available to U.S. forces.

Efforts by psychological operations units to persuade Iraqi forces to surrender largely failed, the study concluded.

Despite success in minimizing damage to oil fields, the psychological units "produced much less than expected and perhaps less than claimed," the authors said. Some leaflets baffled Iraqi forces, while others were outdated, forcing units to resort to loudspeaker broadcasts, the report said.

Poor U.S. intelligence efforts were compounded by ground commanders` decisions — because of the dangers involved — not to send scouts and other reconnaissance troops ahead to report on enemy positions.

In addition, long-range surveillance units flying in lightly equipped helicopters "did not produce great effect for the investment of talent and the risk to those involved," the report said.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Das der Sturz der Statue von den USA geplant wurde und auch mit Hilfe von Chalabi-Anhängern und Marines durchgeführt wurden ist nichts Neues. Die Bilder habe ich schon vor über einem Jahr hier eingestellt.
Nun wird das auch von einem Army-Report bestätigt.



THE NATION
Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue
David Zucchino

July 3, 2004

The Army`s internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.
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After the colonel — who was not named in the report — selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to an account by a unit member.

But Marines had draped an American flag over the statue`s face.

"God bless them, but we were thinking … that this was just bad news," the member of the psychological unit said. "We didn`t want to look like an occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, `No, we want an Iraqi flag!` "

Someone produced an Iraqi flag, and a sergeant in the psychological operations unit quickly replaced the American flag.

Ultimately, a Marine recovery vehicle toppled the statue with a chain, but the effort appeared to be Iraqi-inspired because the psychological team had managed to pack the vehicle with cheering Iraqi children.

— David Zucchino

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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US military tried to censor coverage of Saddam hearing

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad

The Independent

03 July 2004

A team of US military officers acted as censors over all coverage of the hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on Thursday, destroying videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

A US network cameraman who demanded the return of his tapes, which contained audios of the hearings, said he was told by a US officer: "No. They belong to us now. And anyway, we don`t trust you guys."

According to American journalists present at the 30-minute hearing of Saddam and 11 former ministers at Baghdad airport, an American admiral in civilian clothes told camera crews that the judge had demanded that there should be no sound recording of the initial hearing. He ordered crews to unplug their sound wires. Several of the six crews present pretended to obey the instruction. "We learnt later," one of them said, "that the judge didn`t order us to turn off our sound. The Americans lied - it was they who wanted no sound. The judge wanted sound and pictures."

Initially, crews were told that a US Department of Defence camera crew would provide the sound for their silent tapes. But when CNN and CBS crews went to the former occupation authority headquarters - now the US embassy - they found that three US officers ordered the censorship of tape which showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a chain round his waist which was connected to handcuffs round his wrists. The Americans gave no reason for this censorship.

"They were rude and they didn`t care," another American television crew member said. "They were running the show. The Americans decided what the world could and could not see of this trial - and it was meant to be an Iraqi trial. There was a British official in the courtroom whom we were not allowed to take pictures of. The other men were US troops who had been ordered to wear ordinary clothes so that they were `civilians` in the court."

Three US officers viewed the tapes taken by two CNN cameras, `Al-Djezaira` (a local, American-funded Iraqi channel), and the US government. "Fortunately, they were lazy and they didn`t check all the tapes properly so we got our `audio` through in the satellite to London," one of the crew members told The Independent yesterday. "I had pretended to unplug the sound from the camera but the man who claimed he was a US admiral didn`t understand cameras and we were able to record sound. The American censors at the embassy were inattentive - that`s how we got the sound out."

The only thing the Americans managed to censor from most of the tapes was Saddam`s comment that "this is theatre - Bush is the real criminal."

Television stations throughout the world were astonished yesterday when the first tapes of Saddam`s trial arrived without sound and have still not been informed that the Americans censored the material. "What can we do when an American official tells us the judge doesn`t want sound - and then we find out that they lied and the judge does want the sound?" an American camera operator asked.

Video showed the face - and audiotape revealed the voice - of Judge Raid Juhi, whose name was widely reported in the Arab press yesterday. According to the camera crews, Judge Juhi wanted the world to hear Saddam`s voice. Nevertheless the Americans erased the entire audiotape of the hearings of the 11 former Saddam ministers, including that of Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, and "Chemical" Ali, Saddam`s cousin accused of gassing the Kurds at Halabja. The US Department of Defence tape of their hearings has been taken by the US authorities so there is now no technical record of the words of these 11 men, save for the notebooks of "pool" reporters - four Americans and two Iraqis - who were present.

Judge Juhi said not long ago that "I have no secrets - a judge must not be ashamed of the decisions he takes."

The Americans apparently think differently.

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Pakistan in a squeeze over Iraq
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - After meeting with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf this week, comments by General John Abizaid, Chief of the US Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East and other regions, were typically diplomatic: "We discussed matters of mutual interest, the geostrategic environment, the security situation and ways and means to further enhance the existing ties between the armed forces of the two countries."

Behind the broad statements, though, one can expect that the US, which is actively ensuring that Pakistani troops do their job in hunting down foreign and Afghan resistance fighters sheltering in Pakistani territory, had more specific requests of Musharraf, whose government thrives on the support given to it by Washington.

"Pakistan is likely to send its troops to Iraq well before the next general elections in that country [scheduled for early next year]," says former director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, in a telephone interview with Asia Times Online.

"Pakistan is the specific domain of the US Central Command, like India falls under the Pacific Command, and the visit of General John Abizaid means there is an exclusive agenda in the region with marked priorities, which include operations in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal areas and forcing Pakistan to support its war in Iraq, where the US now has realized that its troop operations are a failure and only Muslim armies can play a role," said Gul, who was a part of Pakistan`s ruling oligarchy until Islamabad did an about-turn on Afghanistan and support of the Taliban in late 2001, and gradually sidelined those who supported jihadi movements. Gul is the architect of Pakistan`s jihadi movement, which played an active role in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Gul strongly believes that by giving Pakistan "major non-NATO ally" (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) status, the US has already struck a deal under which it bargained military cooperation in return for the support of Musharraf`s regime. "The US establishment has already accepted Musharraf`s non-democratic rule in return for his support to help them crush anti-US movements which the US has branded as terror outfits," said Gul.

US President George W Bush gave Pakistan "major non-NATO ally" status several months ago, saying that the designation would boost security cooperation between the two allies.

"Sixteen countries enjoy the status of non-NATO allies. Each one has a US base and each and every one actively participates in US operations everywhere in the world, " Gul maintained. "As per my information, the US asked Musharraf to spare 50,000 troops for different US operations, and most of them will be used in Iraq. At the same time, they have specifically marked areas in Pakistan where the US needs to establish its presence to control the Afghan resistance movement.

"The areas where the US need its presence [bases] is along the 2,240-kilometer border with Afghanistan. However, after South Waziristan [tribal area] the next target will be Drosh, near Chitral [North West Frontier Province] where US intelligence has pointed to some foreign presence.

"After so many operations in South Waziristan [by the Pakistani army to track foreigners], the US is still unsatisfied and its ambassador to Afghanistan [Zalmay Khalilzad] has once again raised a hue and cry that whatever has been done in Wana [principal city in South Waziristan] is not enough."

Gul maintains that the way the situation is developing in the region, the US will establish its physical presence to tighten the noose around the Afghan resistance in Pakistani areas such as Qila Saifullah, Shila Bagh, Dal Bandin, (Balochistan) Khyber, Tal and Razmak, as well as increase its presence in Afghanistan.

Gul, who is acknowledged to have his ear close to the corridors of power, although not a part of the new oligarchy, maintains that Pakistan has been waiting for a United Nations role before sending its troops to Iraq, and now that the UN Security Council has unanimously passed Resolution 1546, legitimizing the presence of the US-led multinational force in post-occupation Iraq, Pakistan has the justification and it is likely that it will send its forces before general elections in Iraq.

The elections are scheduled to take place by January 31, however, newly appointed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said recently that they could be delayed for two months.

"Actually, elections are the main problems for the US in both Afghanistan [due in September] and Iraq, and all efforts to launch operations in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal belt and sending reinforcements to Iraq from Muslim countries are just a prelude to the elections. However, this is wishful thinking, that armies from Muslim countries will control the resistance movement over there [Iraq]. Resistance fighters will not spare even the soldiers of the Pakistan army if they go there to serve the US`s agenda. The irony of this US program is that it has decided to silently reduce its political and strategic presence, yet enjoy control through its puppet government and armies from Muslim countries, who will just become cannon fodder," observed Gul.

(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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Saturday, July 03, 2004
War News for July 2 and 3, 2004 draft

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine dies of wounds in al-Anbar province.

Bring ‘em on: One US Marine killed in action near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Two insurgents killed in fighting near Beiji.

Bring ‘em on: Three central Baghdad hotels rocketed.

Bring ‘em on: Car bomb factory discovered in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded by roadside bomb near Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqis killed by roadside bomb near Baghdad airport.

Bring ‘em on: Rocket attacks reported on Indonesian embassy and Islamic Party offices in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Finance ministry official assassinated in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline sabotaged near Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Five ICDC members killed, five wounded in insurgent attack near Mahmudiyah.

Hawaii National Guard infantry brigade mobilized for duty in Iraq.

Rumsfeld approved torture. “Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the head of detention operations at Abu Ghraib, told the Santa Clarita Signal that there are memos showing Rumsfeld approved tactics at the prison that were similar to those used at Guantanamo Bay -- including the use of military dogs, stripping and sensory deprivation. ‘I did not see it personally (at the time), but since all of this has come out, I have not only seen, but I`ve been asked about some of those documents, that he signed and agreed to,’ Karpinski told the newspaper, which published the article Friday. The Pentagon has denied Karpinski`s assertions. Last week, officials released documents that showed Rumsfeld had approved the use of such techniques in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, where the administration has said the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners do not apply.

US military families evacuated from Bahrain due to increased terrorist threat.

Individual Ready Reserve mobilization begins Tuesday. This summer`s IRR mobilization is not a one-time event, the Army officials said - the mobilizations will continue as the Army continues to rotate troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘We expect to call some more’ not only for OIF4 and OEF7, but also some call-ups in addition to the 5,600 for OIF3, Smiley said. Pressed on how many additional IRR mobilizations the future might hold, Smiley said, ‘We simply don`t know.’ When asked if numbers could be in the thousands, he replied, ‘Yes.’”

Yemen will send troops to Iraq only after US forces leave.

Army releases initial after-action review of Iraqi ground campaign. “But the report does say that the military`s ‘running start’ — the strategy of launching the invasion before all support units had arrived — made it difficult for commanders to quickly adjust from major combat to postwar challenges. Because combat units outraced supply and support units, combat commanders were caught unprepared when Hussein`s regime collapsed after three weeks.” “Running start” was Rummy’s hare-brained idea, not Army doctrine. The uniforms were very pissed off about crossing the line of departure without adequate logistical support and rear-area security units in place.

Psyops. “As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.”(LATimes-Bericht s.auch #18439)

Support the troops. “The Defense Department has not yet implemented a special pay allowance for military service members who are frequently deployed for short periods of time, according to a new General Accounting Office report. The allowance, approved in the fiscal 2004 defense authorization law (P.L. 108-136), is designed to cover service members who do not receive a family separation allowance when they are deployed because they are gone for less than 30 days at a time. However, Defense has not yet identified frequent short-term deployments as an issue that might require a special allowance, the report states… Defense officials agreed with the need to set a timeline and establish criteria. But they said they have not implemented the allowance because they believe it to be a peacetime authority. In wartime, they said, it is more difficult to control deployments and therefore officials have elected to use other methods to provide pay allowances. Defense, the officials said, will reassess the use of the high deployment allowance ‘at some point in the future.’” Army Times has a reader poll on this issue. The troops ain’t happy.

Commentary

Editorial: “The Bush administration`s response to charges that it has tolerated, if not approved, torture to extract information from prisoners captured in combat was to make public a 258-page stack of documents that portray President Bush as rejecting the use of harsh tactics against prisoners captured in Afghanistan. But that`s not nearly enough.”

Opinion: “All day, television showed Steinberg`s arrival on Riverside Drive. So many people were watching with anger that precedes a person settling into celebrity. The anger was misdirected. Steinberg killed one person, 17 years ago. And we have a president who has people getting killed almost every day, young people who went into a war we should never have started and there are, what? almost 1,000 dead, and the blood is on George Bush`s hands. Bush is the worst president the country has had. He has the most limited mind of anybody we`ve had. Compare his stuttering to Bill Clinton`s 953-page book. It is a book by a man with an endless curiosity, with no subject out of his reach. Bush has the imagination of a stuffed chair. If you put all the things in which he has an interest into a book, it would be as thin as a slice of white bread.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Illinois soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Maryland Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Louisiana soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: New Jersey Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania Marine killed in Iraq.

Local story: Wisconsin soldier dies of wounds received in Iraq.

Local story: New Jersey Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Mississippi soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Colorado soldier injured in Iraq.

Local story: Washington State Guardsman wounded in Iraq.



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Es wurde schon immer behauptet. Der Sturz der Saddam Statue wurde von der Army inzeniert. Ich habe den Artikel, der auf einem Army-Bericht zurückgeht heute morgen schon einmal eingestellt. Hier noch einmal der Link und die Bilder mit den jubelden Irakern. Chalibis Leute stellten die paar Jubeliraker für das Fernsehen.
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April 9th: One of the "most memorable images of the war" is created when U.S. troops pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square. Oddly enough... a photograph is taken of a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of Chalabi`s militia members... he is near Fardus Square to greet the Marines. How many members of the pro-American Free Iraqi Forces were in and around Fardus Square as the statue of Saddam came tumbling down?

The up close action video of the statue being destroyed is broadcast around the world as proof of a massive uprising. Still photos grabbed off of Reuters show a long-shot view of Fardus Square... it`s empty save for the U.S. Marines, the International Press, and a small handful of Iraqis. There are no more than 200 people in the square at best. The Marines have the square sealed off and guarded by tanks. A U.S. mechanized vehicle is used to pull the statue of Saddam from it`s base. The entire event is being hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling... but even a quick glance of the long-shot photo shows something more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras.
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America has sown the seeds of civil war in Iraq

It`s not religious rivalry but the puppet regime that threatens stability
Sami Ramadani
Saturday July 3, 2004

The Guardian
They get their dead in neat caskets draped with a flag; we have to gather and scrape our dead off of the floors and hope the American shrapnel and bullets left enough to make a definite identification." So wrote the author of the weblog Baghdad Burning, as she tried to draw attention to the tragic reality of life in occupied Baghdad.

It is this bereavement and anger among Iraqis - some of it expressed in mortars and homemade bombs - that has forced Bush and Blair to abandon any fanfare and hand over "sovereignty" in a secret bunker guarded by tanks. Not one signal of popular joy greeted the historic event.

In a parallel but equally deceptive move, the US handed over Saddam`s legal file but the tyrant is still in US custody. Saddam`s defiance in court largely stems from the fact that many of his accusers - including Prime Minister Allawi, a former cadre of Saddam`s Ba`ath party, and some of the non-Ba`athist forces represented in the transitional government - were allies of his regime. Many Iraqis feel that the US-appointed transitional government has no moral authority over the man in the dock, both because of their past association with his regime and because they came, in the words of a now common Iraqi saying, "on the backs of American tanks". As one Iraqi observed: "If they give Saddam a fair trial, they will all end up with him in the dock - Kissinger, Reagan, Thatcher, Blair, the two Bushes and Allawi."

The trial might succeed in serving short-term propaganda purposes in the west, but it will not hide the fact that in installing a protege government, the US has taken the most dangerous step on the road to civil war in Iraq.

The seeds of the Vietnam war were sown by the US installing a client regime in Saigon. And unless Bush and Blair are stopped by the American and British peoples, a similar catastrophe is in the making in Iraq and the wider Middle East. But it will not be a war of Arabs against Kurds, Sunnis against Shia or Muslims against Christians, but an equally devastating war between a US-backed minority (of all religions, sects and nationalities) against a similarly composed overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people. The killing fields of this war could eventually stretch from Afghanistan to Palestine.

Just like Iraq today, South Vietnam was seen by Washington as the line that must be held at all costs. But as the Vietnamese people`s rejection of the client regime grew stronger, the US bunkered behind its creation in Saigon, and one million Vietnamese troops backed by half a million US soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and tortured; the total Vietnamese death toll topped 3 million, and 55,000 US soldiers were killed in action.

The US terror tactics in Vietnam (and more recently in Nicaragua and Honduras) are being gradually introduced into Iraq. US assassination squads and Mossad, for example, must be already active in Iraq, following the training of special US forces teams of "hitmen", with the help of Israeli experts, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Israel several months ago - as reported by the distinguished American journalist Seymour Hirsh, a story which the Pentagon did not deny.

Thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the "end" of the war, adding to the uncounted thousands killed as collateral damage during it. And the occupation has blocked the democratic gains that Iraqis might have enjoyed after the collapse of Saddam`s regime. For the US has long realised that the Iraqi people, if given the choice, would elect forces hostile to US policies.

Elections for deans in Iraq`s universities were won by anti-occupation candidates, prompting the US to scrap elections for city mayors and oppose calls for early nationwide elections. The Union of the Unemployed quickly emerged as an effective campaigning force and the Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions resurfaced. In response, the US proconsul, Paul Bremer, resurrected the 1984 Saddam law banning all strikes in the public sector and ordered the arrest of the union`s leaders. Meanwhile, the "democratic" institutions that Bremer tried to establish have all failed to strike a chord with the people. With the exception of limited free speech, which excludes "incitement" against occupation, there is nothing to show for so much death and destruction.

It has become fashionable to criticise the US for "having no plans" for Iraq after the fall of Saddam. The truth is that tens of policy committees drafted numerous plans. I know many Iraqi exiles who were well-paid to join these committees, which worked in the US before the invasion. All these plans crashed after colliding with the rock of the Iraqi people`s opposition. Had most of the people been even mildly supportive of the invasion, these plans would have been implemented, and Bush and Blair might now be holding regular press conferences in downtown Baghdad. The Iraqi people`s resistance has, for a period at least, thwarted US plans to attack Iran, Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and North Korea.

Though varied in political and social outlook, the opposition to the US-led presence, and the armed resistance (as distinct from terrorism), have been supported by most Iraqis and by the mosques.

Short of banning prayer itself, the mosque was one institution that Saddam couldn`t crush, which explains their central role in opposing both Saddam`s tyranny and the occupation. But the role of religion in Iraq is politically and socially contradictory. While the anti-occupation secular forces are concerned about the influence of Iraq`s religious leaders, the latter are not all cut from the same cloth. Many are supportive of working with secular forces, holding democratic elections and protecting women`s rights and those of the Kurdish people.

Some Shia and Sunni religious leaders formed an anti-sectarian front, the Muslim Scholars Committee. The MSC has organised demonstrations in Baghdad and other cities encouraging Muslims to unite and pray at each others` mosques, where secularpeople are also welcome. The committee invited over 30 secular and Christian organisations to attend the First Founding Iraqi Conference Against the US Occupation. This significant development attracted little media coverage, as it contradicts the notion that Iraqis are incapable of working collectively.

The western media predicted that civil war was imminent after explosions at Shia mosques killed hundreds of people in March. But instead, these explosions generated a massive show of unity across Iraq. People blamed the US (and Israel) for planning the atrocities or turning a blind eye to the perpetrators.

Bush and Blair continue to peddle the myth, beloved of old colonialists, that Iraqis will start a civil war if the "benevolent" presence of the occupation forces is removed. But there is nothing benevolent about their troops or their stooges. Allawi is not only a former Saddam operative and CIA "asset", but also the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, an organisation composed of former Saddamist officers. His appointment, and the torture at Abu Ghraib, are part of a systematic US policy of building new Saddamist-style state structures.

It is the US-led presence itself which is dividing Iraqis now. The US is deepening a split between a minority for and an overwhelming majority against the US-led forces. The immediate withdrawal of the US-led forces from Iraq is the only way to stop the impending "civil" war, in which the US will back a "sovereign" Iraqi government to crush the people and their aspirations for liberation and democracy.

· Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University and was a political exile from Saddam`s regime

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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July 4, 2004
Militant Iraqi Group Says It Beheaded a Kidnapped American Marine
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 3 — A militant Iraqi group posted a message on the Internet on Saturday saying it had beheaded an American marine who had been abducted from the area around the volatile city of Falluja.

The message, which appeared on at least two Islamic Web sites, was written by Ansar al-Sunna and stated that the group had killed Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, a marine of Lebanese descent who has been missing since late last month.

"We tell your leadership that we beheaded the marine of Lebanese origin, Hassoun, and you will see the film with your own eyes soon," the message said. Ansar al-Sunna, an offshoot of a radical group operating out of northern Iraq called Ansar al-Islam, did not immediately post a video, and there was no independent confirmation of its claim.

Groups involved in similar killings have posted announcements of the killings on the Internet or given video evidence to Arab television network. So far, such claims have generally turned out to be true. Corporal Hassoun`s beheading would be the third such killing in Iraq, following the decapitation of an American businessman in May and one of a South Korean interpreter last month.

On Tuesday, the Arab network Al Jazeera showed video of what looked to be an American soldier being shot in the head. The network said captors had delivered the tape and said the soldier was Specialist Keith Matthew Maupin, who was kidnapped when a convoy was attacked near Abu Ghraib prison on April 9. Military officials have said they cannot confirm that the man killed in the tape was Mr. Maupin.

Mr. Hassoun`s captivity became public on the night of June 27, when his captors released a videotape of the 24-year-old marine blindfolded and with someone holding a large sword over his head. The group that released the video said its name was the 20th Revolution Regiment.

It is unclear whether the 20th Revolution Regiment is tied to Ansar al-Sunna. Many insurgent cells work together in the Falluja area but remain independent of each other. Abductees are often handed over from one group to another.

Also on Saturday, the American military said a marine had been killed in action west of Baghdad.

At a news conference that afternoon, a senior military official said American soldiers are prepared to help the Iraqi interim government enforce a state of emergency once it is declared, including policing streets during curfews, operating checkpoints and enforcing anti-looting laws.

The official said the military was examining what contribution troops can make, but also what "red lines" exist. Those are acts soldiers might not be able to help with because of rules of engagement or rules governing the use of force, the official said.

The interim government is expected to put into effect in the next several days what it calls a public or national safety act. That would allow it to execute emergency rules, such as curfews, in parts of the country that it deems to be security risks. Civil rights advocates have raised concerns about whether civil liberties will be curtailed under such laws.

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is trying to come up with new ways of undermining the insurgency, which is still raging against American and Iraqi forces despite the surprise transfer of formal sovereignty to Iraq last Monday.

Mr. Allawi said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos for the ABC News program "This Week" that he was considering granting amnesty to Iraqis who had been fighting American soldiers before the transfer of formal sovereignty, as long as such Iraqis put down their weapons. That included the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has led a nearly three-month rebellion against American forces, Dr. Allawi said.

Broad amnesty for Iraqis could help separate Iraqi insurgents from foreign fighters, who are thought to be hard-line jihadists and would presumably carry on the war against American soldiers and their Iraqi allies under any circumstances.

Attacks have flared up across the country in the last week, but there have been no car bombs of the kind that have marked the most violent days of this war.

On Saturday morning, insurgents in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, attacked a checkpoint operated by members of the Iraqi National Guard, killing seven people and wounding two others, the American military official said. It was unclear whether all the casualties were guardsmen, he added.

The guardsmen were posted near an oil storage area, and the insurgents might have been trying to attack the oil infrastructure rather than the guards themselves.

Mahmudiya and its environs remain one of the most anti-American areas in Iraq. The First Calvary Division said Saturday that its soldiers had raided a production site that built car bombs in the region. The soldiers found four car bombs in various stages of construction, 12 million Iraqi dinars, or the equivalent of $8,600, and documents and ledgers, the division said in a written statement.

Soldiers detained three people at the site. They also found various weapons at other locations and detained dozens more people in what was a two-day operation, the division said.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Moscow for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 4, 2004
Officials Detail a Detainee Deal by 3 Countries
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and TIM GOLDEN

LONDON, July 3 — American officials agreed to return five terrorism suspects to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, last year as part of a secret three-way deal intended to satisfy important allies in the invasion of Iraq, according to senior American and British officials.

Under the arrangement, Saudi officials later released five Britons and two others who had been convicted of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, the officials said. British diplomats said they believed that the men had been tortured by Saudi security police officers into confessing falsely.

Officials involved in the deliberations said the transfer of the Saudis from Guantánamo initially met with objections from officials at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. Those officials questioned whether some detainees were too dangerous to send back and whether the United States could trust Saudi promises to keep the men imprisoned.

"To get people to take a chance on detainees who posed a threat was a new endeavor, so everyone moved cautiously," said one senior American official who supported the releases. "It was the first time we were doing this, and people did not want to do it."

The Saudi prisoners were transferred to Riyadh, the capital, in May 2003. The five Britons and two others were freed three months later, in August.

The releases were public-relations coups for the Saudi and British governments, which had been facing domestic criticism for their roles in the Iraq war.

At the time there was no indication the releases were related. But an American official with knowledge of the negotiations said, "There is a link," adding, "This was two courses that converged and had a mutual attractiveness to them."

On Friday, a spokesman for the National Security Council denied that the Saudi detainees had been transferred in exchange for the British prisoners. "There is no recollection here of any linkage between these two actions," said the spokesman, Sean McCormick. He described the return of the Saudis as "part of the normal policy of transferring detainees from Guantánamo for prosecution or continued detention."

But American officials involved in the Saudi case described it as highly unusual and said the backgrounds of those detainees raised greater concerns than those of others. Some officials also said the case showed how considerations other than security and intelligence could influence releases of prisoners.

Current and former American, British and Saudi officials would speak about the trade only on the condition of anonymity.

As part of the arrangement, the United States initially authorized the outright release of one of the Saudi detainees. But a senior American official said the man was kept in custody by the Saudis after a terrorist attack in the kingdom raised concerns about militants` activities.

Saudi officials gave contradictory accounts of the current whereabouts of the five men, saying at first that one or two of them had been released, then denying that any had been freed. The officials also gave contradictory accounts of the suspects` legal status, first saying they had been tried and convicted of seeking to join Taliban forces in Afghanistan, but later saying prosecutions were still pending.

Neither American nor Saudi officials would identify the five, or describe in detail the evidence on which they had been held at Guantánamo. One American official, however, said two of the former detainees had attended Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.

A Debate: Whose Interest?

Several officials involved in the negotiations defended the bargain as being in the interest of all three countries.

"We acted in our national interest to reduce the Guantánamo population at a time when we were able to conclude that we had no further need to detain these individuals," said the American with knowledge of the negotiations. "It happened to serve a beneficial diplomatic purpose both with the Saudis and the Brits. But we would never have released these people if we had a further need to detain them in the first place."

But several current and former Defense Department officials challenged that assertion, saying no Saudis had even been under consideration for release prior to the arrangement`s being struck.

"It didn`t seem right," said one military official who was involved in the process. "The green light had not appeared on these guys in the way that it had on others" who were released. "It was clear that there was a quid pro quo to the deal that we were not aware of."

A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain declined to comment. An official in the British Foreign Office said: "We were extremely relieved to get the guys out of Saudi. We worked ceaselessly to get them out."

The exchange occurred at a time of widespread mistrust among intelligence and law enforcement officials in Washington about the Saudi government`s commitment to fight Islamic terrorism. One Defense Department official said a basic question hanging over the discussions was, "Why are we doing this for these guys when we haven`t done this for other, better allies?" The official added, "We were just told to do it."

The Saudi government was eager to bring home even a few detainees from Guantánamo. Although Saudi leaders opposed a war with Iraq, they allowed the United States to use several military bases to launch air attacks into Iraq and as a staging ground for American troops.

"This was something that the Saudis desperately wanted, as a way to show their people that they could get something from the Americans, and that it was not just a one-way street," an American official said.

But at the time, such a transfer was unheard of. Prior to the Saudi case, the Defense Department had freed 35 Afghan detainees, including several elderly men, after concluding they posed no further threat. None had been transferred to a foreign government for continued detention or prosecution.

Since the transfer of the Saudis, the Bush administration has sent other Guantánamo detainees to their home countries, including a Spaniard, a Dane and five Britons. As in the Saudi case, the administration`s decision to transfer the men was based partly on the fact that the governments involved had supported the Iraq war, according to the American official involved in talks.

The Saudis` View

The diplomatic initiative that led to the transfers began in July 2002, when a delegation of Saudi officials visited the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the eastern tip of Cuba. According to several people familiar with the negotiations, the proposal was discussed at the highest levels of the American and British governments.

The Saudi officials briefly interviewed each of the roughly 130 Saudi detainees at Guantánamo, officials said. Senior Saudi officials, including Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, had been arguing with American diplomats for several months that many of the men at Guantánamo were innocent and had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In an interview, a Saudi official described many of the men as "low-level foot soldiers or even groupies, who were working for charities and who posed no threat." But American officials characterized the Saudis as more dangerous, saying that some had clear Al Qaeda connections and that nearly all of them had been uncooperative with interrogators.

As the Saudis were urging the Americans to release the detainees, Mr. Blair was having his own prisoner problems. In the summer of 2002, the British press was criticizing him over the fate of the five British men who, with a Canadian and a Belgian, were accused of carrying out several attacks against Western targets in Riyadh. One attack, in November 2000, killed a British engineer. Two of the Britons were sentenced to death.

British diplomats said privately that some of the men were tortured, an allegation the Saudi authorities denied. The men later retracted their confessions.

The Saudis said the men had attacked rivals in a turf war for control of the lucrative bootlegging business in Saudi Arabia, where alcohol consumption is illegal. British diplomats said the attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda operatives. Mr. Blair was so intent on winning the Britons` release that he or his top aides pressed the Saudis every month for pardons, officials said. Even Prince Charles personally lobbied Crown Prince Abdullah.

While the United States also sought to use its influence with the Saudi government to press the British case, a State Department official said, "The Saudis kept making the excuse about us having the Saudi detainees at Guantánamo."

In August 2002, officials said, a diplomatic proposal was put forth by the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan, who had served as a personal lawyer for President Bush. Officials said Mr. Jordan first suggested the swap to senior State Department officials, but when Pentagon officials learned of the proposal, several objected, including the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Jim Turner, a Pentagon spokesman, said he would not discuss the deliberations of Mr. Rumsfeld or other Pentagon officials related to detainees.

The Saudis initially refused to make a deal. But in February 2003, an agreement was reached in principle, people familiar with the discussions said. Prince Saud, the foreign minister, agreed to arrange pardons and release the five Britons and the two others if the United States would send home a handful of Saudi prisoners from Guantánamo, the American official with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Misgivings in Washington

One American official said the Saudi authorities put forward a list of about 15 candidates for release, which the Americans ultimately disregarded. Instead, Pentagon officials instructed military intelligence officers at Guantánamo to assemble their own list.

But even the Saudi list became the subject of controversy at an interagency meeting at the Pentagon in April 2003. Officials from the C.I.A., the Justice Department and the Defense Department — which had produced the list — all raised objections to different detainees, officials involved in the meeting said.

Although senior American foreign policy officials were eager to quicken the pace of prisoner releases from Guantánamo and entertain possible transfers to foreign governments, the Saudi case represented a departure that made many officials uncomfortable, "so everyone moved cautiously," one official said. "The problem was finding a group of people who could get through the interagency process."

Eventually, officials said, the Defense Department assistant secretary running the meeting, Marshall S. Billingslea, and the senior State Department representative, Pierre Richard Prosper, brokered a consensus among the agencies on five detainees.

For months, American negotiators had directly linked the transfer of the Saudis to the release of the British prisoners. But once the detainees were chosen, American diplomats were instructed by the State Department to avoid explicitly stating the quid pro quo in their final talks with the Saudi authorities, officials involved in the discussions said.

"We did not want to make it a clear quid pro quo swap, so we put a distance between them," one of the officials said. Referring to the Saudis` promised release of the British prisoners, he added, "We did obviously say we expected that to be resolved."

The same official said, "Everyone knew what the environment was, but diplomatically this was not a swap."

Throughout the negotiations, Defense Department officials expressed qualms, officials said. At one point, the department asked that the Saudis sign a promise to return the five prisoners if the United States ever requested it. Saudi officials immediately objected, and the request was later dropped.

"It was absurd," one person involved in the discussions said. "This was a 125-piece jigsaw puzzle. The Saudis wanted all the pieces, and the Pentagon did not want to let even a single one of those pieces loose."

In March 2003, just a few days before the American-led coalition invaded Iraq, King Fahd granted clemency to the seven Western prisoners, but did not release them. On May 14, the five Saudis from Guantánamo were flown to Riyadh — coincidentally just two days after three Western housing compounds were hit by car bombs in Riyadh, killing 35 people, including eight Americans.

Throughout the summer, the Saudis "dragged their feet" on releasing the Britons, one American said. Finally, in early August, the Britons, the Canadian and the Belgian flew out of Saudi Arabia.

"This presented itself as a way for the United States to help its friends, both the Brits and the Saudis," said the American with knowledge of the discussions. "It`s what diplomacy is all about."

Don Van Natta Jr. reported from London for this article, and Tim Golden from New York.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Die Zinserhöhungen, die in den USA erwartet werden, bringen viele Gefahren für die privaten Haushalte.
Besonders stechen mir dann bei dererlei Berichten die Meldungen ins Auge, dass besonders ältere Menschen ihre Kredite für medizinische Leistungen aufgenommen haben.
Das ist ein krasser Gegensatz zu unserer weinerlichen Diskussion über 10 € Paxisgebühr.

July 3, 2004
As Bills Mount, Debts on Homes Rise for Elderly
By JENNIFER BAYOT

As Americans have rushed to borrow at historically low interest rates, an unlikely group has led the charge: the elderly.

As a result, the cushion that could provide financial security for older people — their homes — is no longer so secure. People reaching retirement age are now less likely to own their homes free and clear than their predecessors, according to an analysis of government housing and Census data.

One in four families headed by someone 65 or older still had a mortgage to pay in 2001, the most recent data available. In 1989, just one in six still had house payments to make.

For many aging Americans, lingering expenses from their peak earning years, like car payments and college tuition for their children, have made it difficult to rip up their mortgages. Others have taken out fresh loans on their homes to pay off other debts, help their children and cover medical expenses.

Some brush off concerns, saying they expect to live longer and to work longer. Why not take out a 30-year home loan at age 65 to raise cash now? At low enough interest rates, the monthly housing payments could remain manageable.

But as older borrowers try to stretch what are often fixed incomes to cover the payments, they are increasingly putting their homes at risk, running into financial trouble, turning to their adult children for help and even filing for bankruptcy protection, policy groups and bankruptcy lawyers say. Many are forgoing retirement and taking on part-time work.

As a group, people over 65 have the distinction of having not only the fastest-growing home debt, but also the fastest-growing share of personal bankruptcy filings and the biggest growth in demand for credit counseling.

At 71 and 77 years old, respectively, James and Doris Stevenson of Espanola, N.M., have 29 years left on their mortgage, which they recently refinanced for a lower interest rate.

They live in their dream home, Mr. Stevenson said - a pueblo-style house overlooking the Rio Grande. The couple, retired teachers, bought it six years ago by using two-thirds of Mr. Stevenson`s retirement fund for a $35,000 down payment.

To chip away at the remaining $75,000 or so, he occasionally coaches high school teams and serves as a church pastor, and both work at local polls during elections.

At one point, the mortgage costs made it difficult to meet their credit card payments, so they sought credit counseling and entered a two-year repayment plan, which they have since completed.

Mr. Stevenson says that battling their debt has already taken too much of a toll. He even believes it contributed to a heart attack he had in late 2002. "I was told it had to do with stress," Mr. Stevenson said.

Mortgage debt owed by older households nearly quadrupled between 1989 and 2001, even after accounting for inflation, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Zhu Xiao Di, a research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 2001, the typical household headed by someone 65 or older had $44,000 in mortgage debt, compared with $12,000 in 1989, Mr. Zhu says in a forthcoming paper. The mortgage debts of younger homeowners, though still considerably larger at $75,000 on average, grew barely a fifth as quickly.

Although much of the increase is doubtless a result of homeowners tapping rising home values, borrowers must still find the money to make the payments while living on limited incomes.

"All the indicators would suggest that there is increasing debt being assumed by older Americans," said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director for the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. "It used to be the notion that when you were old, you wanted to extinguish your mortgage. Increasingly, people don`t look at it that way. They look at their home as liquid; it`s a way to substitute cheaper debt for higher debt."

While home loans are usually their biggest payment, the elderly have been rapidly accumulating other debt as well. Credit card bills - to cover everything from minor emergencies to ongoing essentials - have risen sharply. All told, the debt burdens of borrowers between the ages of 65 and 74 doubled between 1992 and 2001, compared with an increase of 83 percent for the general population, the Federal Reserve says.

Even as interest rates have fallen, private surveys make clear that the debt burden for the elderly is still rising, although it remains far below what younger Americans owe. Of course, low interest rates have encouraged just about everyone to take on more debt, but other age groups have years of earnings ahead of them to pay off the debt.

Whether such debts are of little concern depends on how much wealth and income older borrowers have on hand. While Fed data show that, as a group, older Americans possessed more assets in 2001 than a decade ago, those assets grew only half as quickly as their debts. Census data show that their incomes over the same period remained flat.

More and more of the elderly are in outright financial distress. One in seven households headed by someone 65 or older was considered heavily indebted in 2001 - devoting at least 40 percent of their incomes to debt payments, according to the Federal Reserve`s Survey of Consumer Finances. That compared with one in 10 among all households with debt.

To Mary Caspermeyer, even 40 percent sounds bearable. Her mortgage and car payments, she said, now consume almost all her income, which includes a small pension, Social Security and hourly wages from working as a medical technician.

Mrs. Caspermeyer, who is 67 and lives in O`Fallon, Mo., explains that she and her husband had paid off credit card debts and helped their children with expenses by refinancing their mortgage and taking out a second one. But after her husband died last year, his monthly Social Security check of $1,400 stopped coming. Now, she is unsure what to do.

"I don`t want to file for bankruptcy," she said. "I don`t know if I can work the rest of my life. And I don`t think anybody wants to be a burden to their kids."

Credit counselors are where many turn for help. Money Management International, which is based in Houston and is one of the country`s largest credit counselors, says its overall client base has grown by a modest 3 percent in the past year, but almost 40 percent among people who are 65 or older. One in 10 of its current clients is of retirement age.

Those in the worst shape file for bankruptcy protection. From 1997 to 2001, bankruptcies among the elderly tripled to 82,000, says the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a consortium of university researchers. The number of people 65 or older grew only 3 percent during that time.

Why is this happening, given that over all the elderly are financially better off today than in any previous generation? In various consumer surveys and bankruptcy studies, heavy health care expenses are consistently cited. "It`s always medical bills - and credit cards to pay for medical bills," said Barbara May, a consumer bankruptcy lawyer in Arden Hills, Minn., and a board member of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys.

She described one of her current cases, involving an elderly couple who have amassed $44,000 in credit card debt largely for medications to treat heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, among other ailments. Ms. May described the couple`s adult son weeping in her office.

"Before, I would have one of these horror stories a year," she said. "Now I`m getting two a month."

But bankruptcy lawyers say another reason for distress is that more of their elderly clients are also helping out their adult children.

In studying bankruptcy filings in 2001 as a member of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School, found the trend startling: "I was very surprised to see the number of older people who explained their bankruptcies in terms of their children`s failed marriages, their children`s drug addictions, their children`s lack of health insurance. The impulse to take care of one`s children never goes away."

For Ruth Gibson, 70, having two of her adult sons living in her four-bedroom Chicago home assuages loneliness. But paying for much of their medical and living expenses as they look for steady work helped push her into bankruptcy proceedings in 2001, shortly after her husband of 51 years died, and has since threatened her with foreclosure.

"I always pictured it as some place that my kids would have to come to," she said.

Advocacy groups accuse some lenders of seeking business from vulnerable older people with little regard for their ability to pay.

Many banks seem to issue credit cards indiscriminately, they said, while mortgage lenders offer people payment terms they cannot possibly meet, made even worse by wrapping other debts into the loan.

Lenders, for their part, point out that a few bad apples do not represent the industry and that they are careful to extend the same offers to people no matter their age to avoid accusations of discrimination.

Timothy Williams of Chauvin, La., says that a credit card stranded his mother, Eula Williams. At 85, Ms. Williams owes $8,000 on the card, which was offered to her by telephone marketers and mailed to her without even an application form.

"They called and asked me all kind of stuff, and I don`t hear too good," Ms. Williams said. Living on Social Security payments of $600 a month, she received a card with a $7,000 limit. She used it to buy Christmas presents and groceries.

Mr. Williams said he was giving her some spending money each month - but by the time he found out about the credit card, the balance had grown to $6,000 and a collection agency was calling.

After trying unsuccessfully to negotiate with his mother`s creditor, Mr. Williams advised his mother to ignore the debt.

"I`m 85 years old; I can`t live forever," said Ms. Williams, who still receives offers for credit cards.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Ein Wort zum 4.07. Unabhängigkeitstag.

July 4, 2004
About Independence

People too often get the impression that the only people who use the nation`s civil liberties protections are lawbreakers who were not quite guilty of the exact felony they were charged with. Perhaps we should thank the Bush administration for providing so many situations that demonstrate how an unfettered law enforcement system, even one pursuing worthy ends, can destroy the lives of the innocent out of hubris or carelessness.

There was, for instance, Purna Raj Bajracharya, who was videotaping the sights of New York City for his family back in Nepal when he inadvertently included an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was taken into custody, where officials found he had overstayed his tourist visa, a violation punishable by deportation. Instead, Mr. Bajracharya wound up in solitary confinement in a federal detention center for three months, weeping constantly, in a 6-by-9 cell where the lights were never turned off. As a recent article by Nina Bernstein in The Times recounted, Mr. Bajracharya, who speaks little English, might have been in there much longer if an F.B.I. agent had not finally taken it upon himself to summon legal help.

Mr. Bajracharya ran afoul of a Justice Department ruling after the 2001 terrorist attacks that ordered immigration judges to hold secret hearings in closed courtrooms for immigration cases of "special interest." The subjects of these hearings could be kept in custody until the F.B.I. made sure they were not terrorists. That rule might have seemed prudent after the horror of 9/11. But since it is almost always impossible to prove a negative, any decision to let a person once suspected of terrorism free constitutes at least a political risk. If officials have no particular prod for action, they will generally prefer to play it safe and do nothing. The unfortunate Nepalese was finally released only because of James Wynne, the F.B.I. agent who originally sent him to detention. Mr. Wynne`s investigation quickly cleared Mr. Bajracharya of suspicion, but no one approved the paperwork necessary to get him out of prison. Eventually, Mr. Wynne called Legal Aid, which otherwise would have had no way of knowing he was even in custody.

When law enforcement officials make mistakes, there is an all-too-human temptation to press on rather than admit an error. Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon, was arrested in connection with the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid, even though he had never been to Spain. Spanish authorities had taken a fingerprint from a plastic bag discovered at the scene and F.B.I. officials thought it matched Mr. Mayfield`s prints, which were among the many from discharged soldiers in the enormous federal database.

The American investigators must have felt they hit pay dirt when they discovered that Mr. Mayfield was a convert to Islam, that his wife had been born in Egypt and that he had once represented a terrorism defendant in a child custody case. The fact that there was no indication he had been out of the country in a decade did not sway them. Neither did the fact that Spanish authorities were telling them that the fingerprints did not actually match. Mr. Mayfield was held for two weeks, even though the only other connections between him and terrorism were things like the fact, as the F.B.I. pointed out, that his law firm advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory" whose publisher had once had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden`s former personal secretary.

When the Spaniards linked the fingerprint to an Algerian man in May, Mr. Mayfield`s case was dismissed and the F.B.I. did apologize. But the ordeal could have dragged on much longer if the investigation had not involved another nation, whose police were not invested in the idea that the Oregon lawyer was the culprit. And it could have been endless if Mr. Mayfield had been an undocumented worker being held in post-9/11 secrecy, or if he had been picked up in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and held incommunicado at Guantánamo.

For more than two years now, about 600 men have been kept in American custody in Cuba, and the odds are that some — perhaps most — were merely hapless Afghan foot soldiers or bystanders swept up in the confusion of the American invasion. But it took the Supreme Court to tell the Bush administration they could not be kept there forever without giving them a chance to contest their imprisonment.

Anyone who needs another demonstration of how difficult it is for law enforcement authorities to acknowledge error can always look to the case of Capt. James Yee. A Muslim convert, Captain Yee was a chaplain at Guantánamo until he was taken into custody on suspicion of espionage. He was held in solitary confinement for nearly three months, during which time authorities realized that the case against him was nonexistent. Rather than simply let him go, they charged him with mishandling classified material. The charges seemed to have much less to do with security concerns than official face-saving. And to repay Captain Yee for its self-inflicted embarrassment, the military went at great lengths in court to prove he was having an affair with a female officer. While that had nothing to do with security either, it did humiliate the defendant in public, as well as his wife and child, who were present at the trial.

Virtually every time the Bush administration feels cornered, it falls back on the argument that the president and his officials are honorable men and women. This is an invitation to turn what should be a debate about policy into a referendum on the hearts of the people making it. But this nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Es klafft eine große Lücke zwischen dem, was die USA ist und was sie sein will. Um ein gewisses Recht auf seine hohen moralischen Forderungen zurückzugewinnen, muß erst einmal dieser unsäglich schlechte Präsident verschwinden und mit ihm sämtliche Verantwortlichen.
Erst dann ist wieder möglich über amerikanische Werte zu diskutieren.

July 4, 2004
The Spirit of the Fourth

Some years, the Fourth of July seems like a brief oasis in the midst of summer — a certain languor about the day, hot weather, a picnic supper perhaps, and fireworks in the evening. Those kinds of Fourths, and that means most of them, have always felt like a celebration of just what this country is. They allow us to repose on the solid fact of America. We drift for a day, afloat on the substance of our freedom and prosperity. We try, by honoring our independence, not to take for granted what everything about the smooth current of our lives tells us we can take for granted.

But this is not one of those years. With a controversial war in progress and a pivotal presidential election in the offing, this Fourth of July brings us squarely around to the matter of what America should be, not merely what it is. There has always been a tension between those two versions of the United States. This nation was founded upon a statement of principles, the Declaration of Independence, that represents a striving after philosophical perfection, a standard of freedom that our lives and institutions can rarely live up to. Against that lofty standard, our actual history all too often looks like a sprawling, brawling free-for-all that uses the high language of our principles as a kind of camouflage for what the market will bear.

A nation cannot dictate its own perfection. It can barely adjure its people to pursue it. No single branch of government, no one institution actually embodies the principles that Jefferson outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Those principles can only be embodied by the American people themselves and by the lives we choose to make, lives that are, ideally, rooted in our commitment to each other. We sometimes confuse the geographical breadth of America with its historical destiny. The declaration was not written and signed with an entire blank continent in view, a world where any man, any woman, could strike out for new territory. It was written from the heart of a set of small communities and was authorized, as Jefferson says, by "the good People of these Colonies."

We are those same good people. The continent has been more than settled. Our government is now among the oldest in the world. But nothing in our history has annulled the revolutionary principles of the Declaration of Independence itself. The declaration is a historical document; it is also an open one, even now. The same is true of our history. As a nation, we have often acted ignobly, selfishly, willfully, yet that does not mean that we are doomed to go on doing so. Nor are we bound to go on acting nobly, selflessly or courageously, simply because we have often done so in the past. Neither our history nor our principles are self-determining, self-fulfilling. They depend entirely upon the choices we make.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Documents signed by Lincoln are among the items Daniel R. Weinberg has for sale at the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. The signature of Button Gwinnett is considerably rarer than Lincoln`s.
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Immer noch ein Aufreger. Das Interview von Frau Coleman vom irischen Fernsehen mit Bush. Da kann man sehen wie runtergekommen die US-Presse ist, dass diese seit über drei Jahren es nicht geschafft haben, ein kritischen Interview mit Bush zu Stande zu bringen. Man streut Asche auf das eigene Haupt.
Das ganze Interview und Transcript stehtin #18370 (11,30min)

July 4, 2004
When Irish Eyes Stop Smiling

The planners of President Bush`s recent European summit trip may have envisioned a pleasant inning of softball questions when they penciled in a brief interview with RTE, the state television of Ireland, first stop on his tour. What they got was the intrepid Carole Coleman, RTE`s Washington correspondent, firing follow-up questions about death and destruction in Iraq, even as Mr. Bush protested being cut off from fully answering. "You ask the questions and I`ll answer them," Mr. Bush finally told Ms. Coleman, a veteran correspondent who served up her next question as he complained.

The White House later protested to the Irish Embassy, but her employers gave Ms. Coleman a well-done, and so do we. The colloquy, as the Irish say, was a sight for sore eyes — an American president who seldom holds a White House news conference unexpectedly subjected to some muscular European perspective. "Do you not see the world is a more dangerous place?" Ms. Coleman asked, her tone more curious than deferential.

Mr. Bush gave as good as he got, once his Irish was up. But Ms. Coleman remained resolute. It may have cost her a follow-up interview with Laura Bush. But the griping and debate about the interview was a sad reminder to Americans that the White House seldom welcomes robust questioning, especially when it is most needed.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Jeden Sonntag diese Kolumne von Frank Rich in der NYTimes.Meist absolut lesenwert.

July 4, 2004
FRANK RICH
Sex, Lies and No Chalabi


O sooner did the epic Ronald Reagan funeral finally sputter out, leaving about as much residual trace on the national memory as the last "Matrix" sequel, than it was Bill Clinton`s turn for the saturation resurrection tour. Like its immediate predecessor, the Clinton mediathon quickly proved too much of a muchness.

For me, toxic shock started to set in before "My Life" officially went on sale. When Mr. Clinton and Dan Rather jointly donned rustic wear for an Arkansas summit on "60 Minutes," they seemed as authentic as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie slumming in red-state America on the Fox reality show "The Simple Life 2." On publication day 36 hours later, Mr. Clinton did "Oprah," this time in an income-appropriate power suit, set off by a natty pink tie that once again matched his interviewer`s ensemble. The hour began with two separate standing ovations — one each for the host and the author. It concluded with her giving him two thumbs up. In between, the mutually assured narcissism never quit. The closest the conversation got to testy was when Oprah asked why her status as a White House visitor did not propel her onto any of the book`s 957 pages. The author blamed his editor — a vast Alfred A. Knopf conspiracy.

As with the Reagan farewell, pundits obsessively ask of the Clinton rollout: how will it affect the election? This is a recipe for infinite bloviation, since there is no answer. Voting day is four long months away. The more realistic question is what the re-emergence of these past presidents tells us about the country that will make that choice. The comeback kid`s current comeback, even more dramatically than the weeklong siege of Reagan redux, gives us a snapshot of an America eager to wallow in any past, even the silt of Whitewater, to escape the world we live in now. It`s a mood that feels less like the sunny nostalgia we imbibe on the Fourth of July than high anxiety. Better a clear-cut evil empire than an axis of evil whose members can`t always be distinguished from our "allies." Better lying under oath about oral sex than dissembling with impunity about gathering "mushroom clouds" to justify the wholesale shipping of American troops into a shooting gallery.

This isn`t to say that the spirit of Kenneth Starr has been exorcised from public life. But it`s now mutated into a parody of itself, a reliable form of national comic relief just when we need it. Even as Americans gorge on porn, Washington`s Keystone sex Kops remain on the march. On June 22, the same day that "My Life" hit the shelves with its promise of a fresh slice of Monica, the Senate voted almost unanimously, in a rare bipartisan gesture, to increase by more than $240,000 the penalty on broadcasters who trade in "indecency." Like an outrageous coincidence in a bedroom farce, the day of this historic vote was also the one on which Vice President Cheney, visiting the Senate floor for a photo session, used a four-letter word to tell a Democratic Senator, Patrick Leahy, what he could do to himself.

Mr. Cheney didn`t seem to realize he had chosen the very word that had helped spur the Congressional smut crackdown in the first place — the one Bono had used at the Golden Globes last year. Has the vice president no sense of indecency? Had C-Span only caught his transgression on camera, we might have seen Brian Lamb placed under house arrest and fined on the spot. Later Mr. Cheney said he "felt better after I had done it," and of all commentators, only Jon Stewart had a theory as to why. The vice president`s demand that Senator Leahy commit an act of auto-eroticism, he reasoned, may be a signal that the Republicans are belatedly endorsing the gay-friendly ethos of the Clinton administration. "I think it`s them opening up their hearts to a different lifestyle," Mr. Stewart said to Larry King.

In its account of the Cheney incident, The Washington Post ran the expletive verbatim — another throwback to the Clinton era. It was the first time the paper had printed this epithet since publishing the unexpurgated Starr Report in 1998. The White House didn`t seem to mind. Though Andrew Card, the president`s chief of staff, condemned John Kerry for using this same word in a Rolling Stone interview in December — "I`m very disappointed that he would use that kind of language," the sorrowful Mr. Card had said — this time the transgression was given a pass. We`re all moral relativists now.

Surely the moral clarity promised by Mr. Clinton`s successors is long gone. Much as Democrats helped push for the television V-chip while looking the other way at their president`s private life, so the party of Kenneth Starr now tosses worthless family-friendly initiatives to religious conservatives while countenancing Clinton-style behavior among its own if holding on to power is at stake. You could see this dynamic in action, conveniently enough, during the same week of the "My Life" publication. President Bush was in the swing state of Ohio promoting a "healthy marriage" program to a cheering crowd just as fellow Republicans were rallying around a rumored swing voter of another sort, Jack Ryan, the party`s scandal-beset senatorial candidate in Illinois.

For those who missed this delightful bit of hard-core politics, here are the good parts: unsealed court documents from Mr. Ryan`s custody battle with his former wife, the TV starlet Jeri Ryan ("Star Trek: Voyager"), included accusations that he had tried to coerce her into joining him in public sex at a New York club equipped with "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling." Mr. Ryan, whose denomination of religiosity extends to opposing legal abortion and gay civil rights, defended himself, saying, "There`s no breaking of the Ten Commandments anywhere." On The Chicago Sun-Times`s Web site, coverage of this scandal carried banners touting Mr. Clinton`s "My Life" as a "related advertising link."

George F. Will, who wrote a column last fall extolling Mr. Ryan for his daily attendance at mass and an overall beneficence that makes "the rest of us seem like moral slackers," did not raise his voice in condemnation now. Nor did any major Republican leader, including Mr. Cheney, who had just appeared at a Ryan fund-raiser. "Jack Ryan, unlike Bill Clinton, did not commit adultery and did not lie," was how the columnist Robert Novak stood up for his man, sounding very much like Arnold Schwarzenegger`s conservative apologists of last summer. Mr. Ryan, who had been regularly praised by Mr. Will and other admirers for being "Hollywood handsome," dropped out of the race anyway last week but only because he lacked Mr. Schwarzenegger`s big-screen bravura (and poll numbers) to tough it out.

Mr. Ryan`s demise was the cue for another sex sleuth minted in the Clinton years, Matt Drudge, to seek tit for tat by trying to gin up a new Clinton-style scandal about a Democrat. A banner story on his site, unsullied by any evidence, suggested that "media outlets" might soon go to court to unseal John Kerry`s divorce records just as Mr. Ryan`s had been. Even if this titillating possibility hadn`t been posted just as an American marine was taken hostage in Iraq, it`s hard to imagine it creating the stir in 2004 it would have six years ago. An earlier attempt by Drudge to pin an intern on Mr. Kerry had also flopped, despite the efforts of the former Bush speechwriter David Frum to keep the rumor alive on The National Review`s Web site until it was proved false.

Such prurient fun and games, Washington style, seem like innocent escapism post-9/11. Not even Mr. Clinton`s renewed omnipresence can help us revive the apocalyptic hysteria that attended the Lewinsky revelations. History is supposed to play out first as tragedy, then as farce. But this time you have to wonder if the farce, though once taken as tragedy, came first. Mr. Clinton`s claim that he had "never had sexual relations with that woman" just doesn`t seem as compelling as Mr. Bush`s replay of the same script last month when disowning his administration`s soured affair with Ahmad Chalabi. Asked if Mr. Chalabi had fed us some of the false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that took us to war in Iraq, the president said he had never "had any extensive conversations" with that man and knew him from greeting him on a rope line (more shades of Monica!). To buy that, you have to believe that Mr. Chalabi`s appearance with Laura Bush as a guest of honor at January`s State of the Union is as irrelevant to this president`s assertion of innocence as the stained dress was to his predecessor`s.

Two days after Mr. Clinton`s appearance on "Oprah," Mr. Bush aped him again — becoming the first sitting president to be questioned by prosecutors at the White House since Mr. Starr was in his Whitewater heyday. Ah, Whitewater! I wonder if any of its sleazy particulars are as vivid in the public mind as the alleged crime that led the new special prosecutor to question Mr. Bush 10 days ago: the leaking of the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer (to the ubiquitous Mr. Novak) by an administration official as payback for the agent`s husband`s criticism of Mr. Bush. Somehow wartime scandals that threaten national security, putting American lives in jeopardy, trump those of money and real estate just as they do sex.

Many of Mr. Clinton`s old antagonists, as we`re learning since "My Life" was published, are starting to realize exactly that. "The Monica Lewinsky stuff now really seems so last century," said the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Fox as book buyers lined up for Mr. Clinton. "I mean, it just seems so old and tired and nothing new." Thus the new tactic is to update the brief to include 9/11. When Mr. Clinton appeared on "60 Minutes," the same anti-Clinton group that led the Whitewater charge a decade ago took out ads implying that it`s entirely the former president`s fault that al Qaeda wasn`t stopped.

Actually, there`s more than enough blame to go around — Osama bin Laden has now gotten away during two presidencies. How the current president used semantic tricks to conflate Saddam with bin Laden, allowing him to escape yet again, is something we`d rather not think about just now. No doubt the Clinton revival will be as short-lived as Reagan`s. But for the moment it takes us back to that halcyon time when we could despise a president for falsifying the meaning of a word as free of terror as "is."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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`Vor Gericht und auf See sind wir alle in Gottes Hand`. Der folgende Bericht versucht die Urteile der US-Gerichte der letzten Tage einzuordnen.

July 4, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Smallest Court in the Land
By CASS R. SUNSTEIN

CHICAGO — In controversial cases, some judges are minimalists. They say no more than necessary. When they are asked to resolve the largest issues of the day, they try to do so as narrowly as possible.

Above all, minimalists insist on procedures that are lawful, proper and fair. Their credo was set out by Justice Felix Frankfurter some 60 years ago, in a case involving three men who were detained for 14 hours and questioned over two days before confessing to the murder of a federal officer. In reversing their conviction because they were deprived of their rights to be brought before judicial authorities, Justice Frankfurter wrote: "The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards."

In the term just ended at the Supreme Court, minimalism emerged triumphant. It was the defining theme of the court`s most eagerly anticipated cases. In two of those cases, the court refused to reach the merits. The court invoked procedural principles to rule that Michael Newdow could not challenge the use of the words "under God" in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at his daughter`s school. Recognizing that Mr. Newdow, a divorced father, wanted the court to assess "the propriety of a widespread national ritual," the court emphasized that when fundamental issues are at stake, it must attend carefully to limits on its own authority. Because state law allowed Mr. Newdow`s daughter`s mother, and not Mr. Newdow, to control his daughter`s education, the court refused to evaluate his objection.

The court also insisted on procedural constraints in refusing to rule on Jose Padilla`s claim that the president could not lawfully detain him. Mr. Padilla, an American citizen arrested in Chicago on suspicion of being a terrorist, sought to challenge his imprisonment and so filed a habeas corpus petition in New York against Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. The court noted that Mr. Padilla`s custodian is not Mr. Rumsfeld but Cmdr. Melanie Marr, who oversees the South Carolina prison in which he is being held. Mr. Padilla could bring suit only against Commander Marr in South Carolina, not against Secretary Rumsfeld in New York.

In three cases in which the court did reach the merits, it did so in the narrowest possible fashion. Insisting on procedural safeguards, the court decided that federal courts are entitled to hear the legal objections of foreigners being held at Guantánamo Bay. But the court pointedly declined to specify the nature of the hearing — to say, for example, whether foreigners have a right to a lawyer. And though the court rejected the Bush administration`s claim that fair procedures are not required, it refused to say what fair procedures include.

The court followed a remarkably similar path in its inconclusive decision involving the Child Online Protection Act, which criminalizes the commercial posting of sexually explicit material that is "harmful to minors." The court upheld a lower court`s temporary injunction against the act, but only on the narrow ground that less restrictive methods, like filtering software, might protect children more effectively than a criminal ban. Postponing a final resolution of the issue, the court asked for a full trial, offering the government an opportunity to prove its claim that the act is the only realistic method of achieving Congress`s goal.

In a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney`s energy task force, the court again proceeded cautiously. After interest groups sued the vice president to disclose members of his task force, he asked the Supreme Court to halt the lower-court proceeding on the ground that it would violate the separation of powers. The Supreme Court refused to do that, but it did require the lower courts to take account of the vice president`s need for confidentiality.

The court`s most expansive ruling came in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In that case the court ruled that under the due process clause, an American citizen detained as an "enemy combatant" on American soil has a constitutional right to a hearing to contest the legal basis for his detention. Unlike the ruling in the Guantánamo Bay case, this decision offered important details about the ingredients of that right. At a minimum, Americans have a right to notice of the charges against them, to an opportunity to rebut those charges, and to appear before a truly neutral authority.

But even under Hamdi, a number of key issues remain undecided. The court left open the possibility that a military tribunal could try Americans. It did not say that enemy combatants, American or otherwise, would always have a right to counsel. And it pointedly declined to offer an exegesis, invited by the Bush administration, on the president`s powers as commander in chief of the armed forces. In Hamdi, the court said a great deal about fair procedures, but its opinion has strong minimalist features.

Does minimalism count as a form of judicial activism? The answer depends on how activism is defined. If judges are activists whenever they invalidate decisions of Congress or the president, then minimalists can certainly be activists. But minimalists favor narrow rulings; they seek a restrained judicial role. And with its insistent focus on procedural safeguards, minimalism has real attractions, perhaps above all in a period in which judges are forced to reconcile the demands of national security with the commitment to liberty.

Of the many thousands of sentences in the Supreme Court`s decisions this term, the most telling came from Justice John Paul Stevens: "Even more important than the method of selecting the people`s rulers and their successors is the character of the constraints imposed on the executive by the rule of law."

Add "and the judiciary" after the words "on the executive." The resulting statement would be a good description of the central theme of the Supreme Court`s remarkable year.

Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of "The Second Bill of Rights: F.D.R.`s Unfinished Revolution."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 4, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Not Feeling Groovy
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — I didn`t appreciate the 60`s in high school.

I spurned the unisex style of dirty jeans. I was more under the influence of nuns than bongs. And I was frightened of the cost of free love.

But as other decades passed — the bland, polyester 70`s; the greedy, padded-shoulder 80`s; the materialistic, designer 90`s; the bullying, Botox 00`s — I`ve become nostalgic for the idealistic passion of the 60`s.

It`s amazing, given how far we`ve come from the spirit of the 60`s — with Bob Dylan hawking Victoria`s Secret and Hillary Clinton a hawk — how obsessed conservatives still are with pulverizing that decade.

Their disgust with the 60`s spurs oxymoronic — and moronic — behavior, as anti-big-government types conjure up audacious social engineering schemes to turn back the clock.

The day after his re-election to the House in 1994, the future speaker, Newt Gingrich, jubilantly told me he intended to bury any remnants of the "Great Society, counterculture, McGovernik" legacy represented by the morally lax Clintons and return America to a more black-and-white view of right and wrong.

He said America had slid into "a situation-ethics morality, in which your immediate concern about your personal needs outweighs any obligation to others."

A decade later, after it came out that Mr. Gingrich had his own affair with a young Washington political aide, and he divorced and embarked on his third marriage, he would be a top adviser to Donald Rumsfeld when Rummy and Dick Cheney decided they wanted to bring back a black-and-white view of right and wrong. The old cold warriors thought they could improve the national character by invading Iraq — in that way banishing post-Vietnam ambivalence about using force and toughening up what they saw as the Clintonesque 60`s mentality — a weak, pinprick-bombing, if-it-feels-good-do-it attitude. Their new motto was: If it makes someone else feel bad, do it.

W., who had tuned out during the 60`s, preferring frat parties to war moratoriums and civil rights marches, and George Jones to "psychedelic" Beatles albums, was on board with his regents` retro concerns, like Star Wars and Saddam, and outdated cold-war assumptions, like the idea that terrorists could thrive only if sponsored by a state.

In his book tour, Bill Clinton has been defending the 60`s, noting that the polarization of American politics began with the civil rights, women`s rights, gay rights and abortion rights struggles of the 60`s and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. "If you look back on the 60`s and on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you`re probably a Democrat," he told a Chicago audience. "If you think there was more harm than good, you`re probably a Republican."

Mr. Clinton told another audience that Republicans had had success portraying Democrats as "weak elitists who couldn`t be trusted to defend their country, couldn`t be trusted with tax money, didn`t believe in work, wanted to give all the money to poor people and people of color."

He said the "antigovernment, values crowd" wanted to make sure "the right people were in power."

Once they returned to power, the Bush II team, dripping with contempt for Bill Clinton and oozing with "we know best" cockiness, thought they could use the sacking of Saddam to change the way Americans saw themselves and the way America was seen in the world.

Their swaggering determination to expunge the ghosts of Vietnam and embark on a post-cold-war triumphalism has backfired, leaving the military depleted and drawn into a de facto draft, and once more leaving America bogged down halfway around the world in a hostile nation.

The Bushes and Republicans recoiled at Mr. Clinton`s moral relativism about Monica, but this administration indulged in a far more dangerous relativism when it misled the American public about Iraq`s W.M.D., and links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Instead of Americans` changing their view of themselves, many have changed their view of Mr. Bush — fearing, with the sanctioning of pre-emptive invasions, torture and restricting civil liberties, he has gone too far in distorting the principles the country was founded on.

The president did end up changing America`s image in the world. Just not for the better.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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July 4, 2004
The Chinese Century
By TED C. FISHMAN

China used to be far away, the country at the bottom of the world. Certainly that must be how it seemed just 20 years ago in a place like Pekin, Ill., a city of 34,000 residents on the Illinois River that took its name from the Chinese capital in the 1820`s. According to local legend, Pekin is directly opposite Beijing on the globe. The high-school teams there were still called the Chinks until 1981, when they were renamed the Dragons. A smart and forward-looking decision, it turns out: as is happening throughout the United States, the Pekinese have in their own local ways grown inextricably linked to the Chinese of today. They are now connected not by an imaginary hole through the earth but by the world`s shipping lanes, financial markets, telecommunications networks and, above all, the globalization of appetites.

Follow the corn, for example. Trade deals struck between the U.S. and China in April will, farmers around Pekin hope, lead China to lower its import barriers and buy half a million metric tons of American corn this year. Illinois corn farmers get higher-than-usual prices for their exports because they have ready access to river transportation and in turn to big ports. Pekin is also home to the plant of Aventine Renewable Energy, the nation`s second-largest producer of ethanol, a fuel derived from corn. (Ten percent of the American corn crop is converted to fuel.) China recently passed Japan as the world`s second-largest consumer of petroleum, and growing Chinese demand has lately been pushing up oil prices worldwide. That makes ethanol an increasingly attractive alternative. And, indeed, ethanol prices climbed 40 cents a gallon this spring, dragging up U.S. corn prices as a result, a boon to Pekin`s farmers and industry.

Then there`s Excel Foundry and Machine, a local factory that makes parts for machinery used in heavy construction and mining operations. Doug Parsons, the current head of this family-owned business, has already relocated 12 percent of the company`s production to China in order to hold onto business that would otherwise be lost to China`s huge, cheap foundries; during the next decade he may well have to move much more of his production offshore. Parsons has China on his mind for other reasons too: over the past few months, the prices of copper and iron, like those of oil, have skyrocketed in response to Chinese demand, driving up Excel`s costs as a result. At the same time, however, his international mining customers have been buying more Excel products in order to feed that same Chinese appetite for commodities. And Parsons himself recently started a new company that he says will build and service advanced rock-crushing machines -- in part to take advantage of the frenzied construction boom under way in China. (One measure of just how big this boom is: China currently has more than 15,000 highway projects in the works, which will add 162,000 kilometers of road to the country, enough to circle the planet at the equator four times.)
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Shift change at a shoe factory in the Guangdong Province.
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Even something as all-American as Pekin`s new Wal-Mart Supercenter spreads China`s influence around town. Because 12 percent of China`s exports to the U.S. end up on Wal-Mart`s shelves, and because Wal-Mart`s trade with China accounts for 1 percent of that country`s gross domestic product, the company exerts tremendous downward pressure on prices. Its buying power enables it to dictate, in effect, what a Chinese manufacturer will get for producing goods that American consumers want. By selling Chinese-made portable DVD players with seven-inch L.C.D. screens for less than $200, for instance, Wal-Mart helped to cut the price of these trendy devices in half over the last year. Competitors have to match the chain`s prices or go under. Nearly every shopper in Pekin will therefore save money by shopping at Wal-Mart -- which is to say he or she will profit from the retailer`s China connection. Of course, this very connection may also contribute to Wal-Mart`s ability to drive other Pekin-area stores out of business.

In short, Pekin, Ill., is not so different from lots of American places. China is everywhere these days, influencing our lives as consumers, providers, citizens. It has by far the world`s most rapidly changing large economy, and our reactions to it shift just as quickly. China is at one moment our greatest threat, the next our friend. It siphons off American jobs; it is essential to our competitive edge. China is the world`s factory floor, and it is the world`s greatest market opportunity. China`s industrial might steals opportunities from the developing world, even as its booming economy pulls poorer countries up (lately it has been getting credit for helping Japan out of its slump too). China exports deflation; it stokes soaring prices. China will boom; it will bust. Or perhaps the country`s economy is feeling its way right now to the soft landing that will prevent another Asian economic crash, and all the recent record numbers on trade, industrial output, consumer spending and debt are simply now in scale with China`s size. The truth about China is that, like all big countries, it is full of real contradictions.

Another truth is that the current feelings about China do not fully reflect today`s reality. The U.S. economy is about eight times the size of China`s. Our manufacturing sector is bigger than the entire Chinese economy. Americans, per capita, earn 36 times what the Chinese do. And there is no shortage of potential roadblocks in China`s path, either. Its banks may collapse. Its poor and its minorities may rebel. Uppity Taiwan and lunatic North Korea may push China to war. The U.S. could slap taxes on everything China ships to us.

Still, barring Mao`s resurrection or nuclear cataclysm, nothing is likely to keep China down for long. Since 1978, its gross domestic product has risen fourfold; in straight dollar terms, China`s economy is the world`s sixth-largest, with a G.D.P. of around $1.4 trillion. It has gone from being virtually absent in international trade to the world`s third-most-active trading nation, behind the U.S. and Germany and ahead of Japan. Tom Saler, a financial journalist, has pointed out that 21 recessions, a depression, two stock-market crashes and two world wars were not able to stop the U.S. economy`s growth, over the last century, from $18 billion ($367 billion in 2000 dollars) to $10 trillion. In constant dollars, that is a 27-fold increase.

China is poised for similar growth in this century. Even if China`s people do not, on average, have the wealth Americans do, and even if the United States continues to play a strong economic game and to lead in technology, China will still be an ever more formidable competitor. If any country is going to supplant the U.S. in the world marketplace, China is it.

Mao as Proto-Capitalist

Mornings at Wanfeng automotive factory outside Shanghai begin with a neat line of employees doing calisthenics to martial music broadcast over a P.A. system. The blue-uniformed workers, nearly all of them young men, make for a clean-cut, well-pressed company line. The Japanese introduced courtyard exercises and company songs to the world back in the 70`s, when that nation appeared to have the world`s best industrial jobs. Today, Japan is just stumbling out of a long malaise, and its dwindling pool of young laborers seem to lack the compulsion to work like hell.

But the striving Japan of old still sets a good example for would-be worldbeaters, as Wanfeng`s management knows -- only the Chinese manufacturer goes one better. Its employees regularly have their spirits revved at company boot camps run by People`s Liberation Army drillmasters who inculcate the twin virtues of patriotism and hard work. The results are impressive. Ten years ago, Wanfeng was hammering out motorcycle wheels by hand in a Chinese garage; a few years later it was the No. l seller of aluminum-alloy motorcycle wheels, first in China and now in Asia. The company soon became a top national and global seller in alloy automobile wheels too.

Wanfeng may have received some breaks on the way up: the company-produced video that describes its rapid ascent does not identify the early contracts that enabled Wanfeng to grow so fast, nor whether Wanfeng had insider connections to state-run companies in the motorcycle and car businesses. There is nothing in the company literature about how the private company secured its financing, either. Nonetheless, Wanfeng today is still scrappy, aggressive and capable. It now turns out about 60,000 vehicles a year that, if you squint just a little, appear to be remarkably like Jeep Grand Cherokees. They look great, come with every modern luxury, including leather seats and DVD video systems, and purr when driven.

Yet Wanfeng`s factory itself is a bare-bones machine. Most tellingly -- this goes a long way toward accounting for China`s current status as an economic juggernaut -- there is not a single robot in sight. Instead, there are hundreds of young men, newly arrived from China`s expanding technical schools, manning the assembly lines with little more than large electric drills, wrenches and rubber mallets. Engines and body panels that would, in a Western, Korean or Japanese factory, move from station to station on automatic conveyors are hauled by hand and hand truck here. This is why Wanfeng can sell its hand-made luxury versions of the Jeep (to buyers in the Middle East, mostly) for $8,000 to $10,000. The company isn`t spending money on multimillion-dollar machines to build cars; it`s using highly skilled workers who cost at most a few hundred dollars a month -- whose yearly pay, in other words, is less than the monthly pay of new hires in Detroit. Factory wages in the country`s booming east coast cities can be $120 to $160 a month and half that inland, according to Merrill Weingrod of China Strategies, an affiliate of Kurt Salmon Associates, a consulting firm.

Wanfeng is hardly the first to mobilize Chinese labor as a stand-in for machinery. Mao Zedong believed that China could leapfrog other developing countries by employing an effectively unlimited supply of human labor. Chinese peasants and urban laborers would take the place of the expensive machines that the Western industrial powers had spent 100 years developing; China`s wealth, Mao reasoned, lay in its abundant population.

He was right, though China failed disastrously to execute his Great Leap Forward in the late 50`s. Most famously, Mao exhorted the Chinese to build backyard furnaces to melt down their iron implements, all in service of his goal to have China outproduce Great Britain in steel and to surpass the British economy in size in 15 years. Instead, the people were left without the few tools, pots and pans they had started with. And they starved: the Great Leap Forward was the direct cause of the famine that killed 30 million people, among the deadliest man-made disasters in history.
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A workers` domitory in Dongguan District Gaobu Town, China.
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But even as the Communists pauperized the nation and continued to exercise complete control over the deployment of labor -- determining, for example, who would be moved out of the countryside and into the cities -- they also primed China for the capitalist successes to come. Prasenjit Duara, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Chicago, acknowledges the paradox: ``The Communists made the work force docile and organized labor to be a managed entity that could be continuously mobilized,`` he says. ``A Marxist might see China under Mao as producing the conditions of capitalism.`` (Duara adds that the institutions created by the Communists to provide housing, education and medical care later saved capitalists the price of developing the work force.) An obedient labor force keeps management costs down too. Despite the enormous numbers of workers in Chinese factories, the ranks of managers who supervise them are remarkably thin by Western standards. Depending on the work, you might see 15 managers for 5,000 workers, an indication of how incredibly well self-managed they are.

``There is a reason why the world is so impressed by Chinese workers,`` Weingrod says. ``Culturally, the Chinese put a very high premium on not losing face. In manufacturing, that translates into not making mistakes on the production line. Their self-discipline and their ability to adapt are key factors driving Chinese competitiveness.`` And for every worker disinclined or unable to apply himself with energy and concentration, there is always another poor Chinese worker waiting to escape the farm or adrift in the so-called floating population of the underemployed, willing to take his place.

Still, it`s not only cheap labor that drives China`s economy. ``If you look just at low wages, you overlook the talents of Chinese manufacturers to drive their costs down,`` Weingrod says. The best operations are as efficient and as responsive as the world`s elite manufacturers.

China`s miracle economy can come at you in a lot of ways. By now most of us know that China is the factory floor of choice for the world`s low-road manufacturing: it assembles more toys, stitches more shoes and sews more garments than any other nation in the world. But moving up the technological ladder, China has also become the world`s largest maker of consumer electronics, like TV`s, DVD players and cellphones. And more recently, China is climbing even higher still, moving into biotech and high-tech computer manufacturing. No country has ever made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. Behind China`s rapid economic ascendancy over the last 25 (and especially last 10) years is the basic fact of China`s huge population. China is home to close to 1.5 billion people, probably, which would make the official census count of 1.3 billion too low by an amount equal to roughly the population of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. China has 100 cities of more than a million people. Since economic liberalization began in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese have started tens of millions of businesses. The number of Chinese who have left farms and now trawl the cities for work probably exceeds the entire work force of the United States.

China is not home to the cheapest work force in the world. Even at 25 cents an hour, Chinese workers cost more than laborers in the poorer countries of Southeast Asia or Africa. In the world`s miserable corners, children carry rifles and walk mine fields for less than a dollar a day. China is the world`s workshop because it sits in a relatively stable region and offers manufacturers a reliable, pliant and capable industrial work force, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline.

The other great contributing factor is the migration of hundreds of millions of peasants from the countryside now that the government makes it easier for them to leave. Indeed, the country`s embrace of market capitalism over the last decade and the government`s insistence that farmers fend for themselves are combining forces to all but evict peasants from the land. The plots allotted to farm families are on average 1.2 acres but can be as small as an eighth of acre; in hundreds of millions of cases these farms fail to generate enough money for a family. Average city incomes, according to the Chinese government, are $1,000 a year, which is three times what they are in the countryside. That disparity has set in motion the largest human migration in history. By 2010, nearly half of all China`s people will live in urban areas.

What these numbers mean is that China`s people must be regarded as the critical mass in a new world order. The productive might of China`s vast low-cost manufacturing machine, along with the swelling appetites of its billion-plus consumers, have turned China`s people into probably the greatest natural resource on the planet. How the Chinese (and the rest of the world) use that resource will shape our economy (and every other economy in the world) as powerfully as American industrialization and expansion has over the last hundred years.

We Have Created a Monster

In the political debate over trade and jobs, China is the place where the world`s companies choose to exploit low-cost manufacturing. The framing of this debate implies that American consumers and businesses have strong choices in the market; in fact, China, supplying ever more goods as it does, in ever more varieties and at ever better prices, is straitjacketing the choices of American businesses. China`s size does not merely enable low-cost manufacturing; it forces it. Increasingly, it is what Chinese businesses and consumers choose for themselves that determines how the American economy operates. The American political debate on China`s economic threat overlooks this dynamic entirely.

The experience of Motorola, the U.S. telecommunications giant, offers a lesson in how China`s size changes the rules of competition and consumption there and everywhere else.

Every month, five million new subscribers sign up for mobile-phone service in China. The country`s 300 million mobile-phone users make China by far the largest such market in the world (and hundreds of millions more accounts are up for grabs). Hence the world`s makers of handsets need to be in China. It gives them a chance to grow at a time when the big European and U.S. markets are saturated. Not that it`s a seller`s market: for equipment makers, China is also the most competitive and protean environment in the world. New manufacturers appear out of nowhere; new phones materialize daily at big-city stores. There are 800 current handset models to choose from. Young urban consumers change phones on average after only eight months -- they sell them to someone else or pass them to family members. Mobile phones in the hands of migrant construction workers, whose annual wages might not cover the cost of a phone, are a common sight in Shanghai and Beijing.
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Shanghai, where high-rises can`t rise fast enough.
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And this mobile-phone market in China is one that Motorola invented.

For Robert Galvin, the company`s former and longtime chief executive, China in the early- to mid-80`s promised a market that could more than make up for Motorola`s having been foiled in Japan for years. But first the company had to develop a top-drawer telecommunications infrastructure. In an unscripted bold stroke at a dreary state ceremony during a tour of the country, Galvin turned to the minister of railroads and asked him whether he wanted to do a good job as minister and be done with it or whether he wanted to create a world-class society. In doing so, Galvin tapped a thick vein of economic patriotism.

Motorola`s company archives on its move into China are deep and open. They show that Galvin and his team knew that eventually the transfer of technology to China would sow formidable Chinese competitors. Nevertheless, Motorola decided its best strategy was to get into China early. Before long, Motorola`s reports to China`s political leaders -- infused with the same missionary vocabulary on industrial quality that had made the company a model for American manufacturers -- were soon parroted by China`s leadership. Galvin also brought Motorola`s best technology to China. The proof today is in the size and efficacy of the country`s mobile communications network: calls get through to phones in high-rises, subway cars and distant hamlets -- connections that would stymie mobile phones in the U.S.

What no one at Motorola saw was that the Chinese market would become the most competitive one of all. Nokia and Motorola now battle for market share in the Chinese handset business. German, Korean and Taiwanese makers figure strongly. And all these foreign brands are now facing intense competition from indigenous Chinese phone makers. ``Competition goes through a cycle in China,`` says Zirui Tian, a researcher at Insead, the French business school. ``At first the foreigners can make things at much lower cost than the Chinese. But as local companies come along to supply the multinational companies, the supply network expands very fast. Then local Chinese manufacturers can start to source their parts in China and drive the prices of their products far lower than the multinationals.``

One of Motorola`s most important suppliers is the battery maker BYD Company Ltd., based in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. In only a decade, the private company has gone from virtual invisibility to owning more than 50 percent of the global market in mobile-phone batteries. Before BYD, phone batteries were made in highly automated plants, like those run by Sanyo and Sony in Japan. But BYD, like Wanfeng, stripped robots and other machines out of the manufacturing process and replaced them with an army of workers. By paying for Chinese salaries, and not for million-dollar American, German or Japanese machines, BYD slashed the price of batteries. Initially the company could not meet Motorola`s quality demands, but the American company sent a team of engineers to work with the upstarts, and six months later BYD earned a Six Sigma certification, a universally recognized badge of quality (which Motorola itself invented). The fact that in China machines can be replaced by people for huge cost savings and without sacrifice in quality changes the competitive landscape of the global marketplace. When Motorola and Nokia were pressed to lower their prices by Chinese competitors, they turned to BYD.

One of the biggest challenges facing Motorola and other global manufacturers is that Chinese suppliers are getting too good. Their quality, low-priced parts have helped create new, homegrown and extremely aggressive competitors. More than 40 percent of the Chinese domestic handset market now belongs to local companies like Ningbo Bird, Nanjing Panda Electronics, Haier and TCL Mobile. Ningbo Bird will produce 20 million handsets in 2004 and is likely soon to nudge its way into the ranks of the top 10 mobile phone makers in the world. Yet Motorola can`t exactly exit the Chinese market. If it did, says Jim Gradoville, Motorola`s vice president of Asia Pacific government relations, the Chinese companies that emerged from the crucible of their market would be the leanest and most aggressive in the world, and a company like his would have no idea what hit it. So Motorola stays. Already the largest foreign investor in China`s electronics industry, Motorola plans to triple its stake there to more than $10 billion by 2006.

More Power to the Chinese Consumers

Generalizing about Chinese business always raises exceptions. The country`s crazy quilt of state-owned, village-owned, private and hybrid businesses was stitched together over 25 years of rocky reforms. Peasant entrepreneurs, opportunistic officials, government planners, new urban sophisticates and foreign investors all created operations that best fit the moment they stepped into the evolving market economy. And yet, looking at the marketplace from the broadest perspective, one overwhelming fact stands out. Ninety percent of everything made in China is in oversupply; in other words, nearly every manufacturing industry has surplus capacity. And instead of using cheap labor to push their profit margins higher, Chinese companies use cheap labor to drive down prices to the sweet spots for the great mass of Chinese consumers.

A Chinese family can live a life comfortably close to that of the American middle class for a fraction of the cost. Though China claims urban per-capita income is $1,000, ``the government numbers on incomes don`t tell nearly the whole story on the consumer class, especially not in the eastern cities,`` says Merrill Weingrod of China Strategies. Weingrod, working with Linsun Cheng of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, surveyed incomes in Shanghai and several other cities in industrial centers. ``People tend to have two and three jobs, with many taking in short-term assignments here and there,`` he says. ``Real income in Shanghai, for instance, is close to $2,500 per capita, $5,000 per household.`` The Chinese can, on average, buy nearly five times in goods and services per dollar what an American can with the same dollar in the U.S. ``If you multiply income against China`s purchasing power parity,`` Weingrod says, ``Chinese urban incomes approach the buying power of Americans making $12,500 a year. For working couples, that`s the equal of $25,000. Do the math, and you can understand why Shanghai looks as prosperous as it does and why it seems like everyone is out shopping all the time.``

According to Weingrod`s and Cheng`s research, China now has 100 million people who are comfortably middle class. They buy (in reduced measure) what the American middle class buys. The allure of China`s market is obvious: the huge volumes of potential sales mean even products with the most modest of margins can earn lots of money.

Wilf Corrigan, the chairman and C.E.O. of LSI Logic, an American company in the Chinese video player market, says that Chinese manufacturers have short-circuited one of the most predictable trends in consumer electronic manufacturing. ``Typically,`` he says, ``a new technology would be released at $1,000 in Japan, and it would take two years to drop below $1,000 and make it to the U.S. and Europe, and it would take a total of five to seven years for it to make it into the mass market.`` As features were added, prices rose. Now China`s low-cost labor and the vastness of its consumer population are combining to bring bargain electronics into homes in record time. Chinese companies build sophisticated goods with components produced locally and rush them by the millions into their huge domestic market. New companies arise. Competition shrinks the time it takes for new products to appear. New features are added while prices are likely to drop. Anything to pump sales.

Corrigan`s company is now supplying Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers with the chip sets they need to make digital video recorders, machines that record DVD`s and that are displacing VCR`s on retail shelves. Currently, the Japanese and Korean brand-name giants have consumers` attention. Corrigan, however, sees no reason DVR`s won`t go the way of DVD players, plummeting in price as the Chinese enter the competition. Expect the recorders to be on sale for $100 within the next two years.

Collective I.Q.

Look, China is the most exciting place in the world right now to be a manufacturer,`` says Mark Wall, president of the greater China region for G.E. Plastics. His operation sells the plastic pellets used to make everything from DVD`s to building materials. Within two years G.E. will sell $1 billion in advanced materials, including plastics, in China. Wall, who came to China from G.E. Plastics, Brazil, describes a country in love with manufacturing like no other, where engineers come in excited and readily work long days. Where university students clamor to get into engineering and applied sciences. Like many American manufacturing executives in China, Wall talks about working in China with the delight that young computer whizzes felt when they found cool in Silicon Valley. There`s no going to a cocktail party and then trying to talk around the fact that you make things in factories. Wall says he feels at home. He loves it. G.E. has every plan to capitalize on the local zeal for manufacturing. It recently opened a giant industrial research center in Shanghai, and by next year will it employ 1,200 people in its Chinese labs. The company has also set up scholarship programs at leading Chinese technical universities. It will have no shortage of good candidates.

The government is pouring resources into creating the world`s largest army of industrialists. China has 17 million university and advanced vocational students (up more than threefold in five years), the majority of whom are in science and engineering. China will produce 325,000 engineers this year. That`s five times as many as in the U.S., where the number of engineering graduates has been declining since the early 1980`s. It is hard to imagine Americans` enthusiasm for engineering sinking lower. Forty percent of all students who enter universities on the engineering track change their minds.

The case for the ability of American industry to stay ahead of its international competition rests on the national gifts and resources that the U.S. devotes to innovation. Certainly, the confidence of big American companies like Motorola, General Motors and Intel, all of which have billion-dollar-plus stakes in China, is based on the brainpower they have at home. The research gap between the U.S. and China remains vast. In December, Washington authorized $3.7 billion to finance nanotechnology research, a sum the Chinese government cannot easily match within a scientific infrastructure that would itself take many more billions (and years) to build. Yet, when it comes to more mainstream, applied industrial development and innovation, the separation among Chinese, American and other multinational firms is beginning to narrow.

Last year, China spent $60 billion on research and development. The only countries that spent more were the U.S and Japan, which spent $282 billion and $104 billion respectively. But again, China forces you to do the math: China`s engineers and scientists usually make between one-sixth and one-tenth what Americans do, which means that the wide gaps in financing do not necessarily result in equally wide gaps in manpower or results. The U.S. spent nearly five times what China did, but had less than two times as many researchers (1.3 million to 743,000).

For now, the emphasis in Chinese labs is weighted overwhelmingly toward the ``D`` side -- meaning training for technical employees and managers. Nevertheless, foreign companies are quickly moving to integrate their China-based labs into their global research operations. Motorola has 19 research labs in China that develop technology for both the local and global markets. Several of the company`s most innovative recent phones were developed there for the Chinese market.

Motorola`s newest research center is located 40 minutes from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, a province in southwestern China. Sichuan is slightly larger than California, but three times as populous. There are around 90 million people in the province, 43 universities and 1.2 million scientists and engineers. Sichuan`s fragmented transportation system prevents Chengdu from rivaling the eastern powerhouses as a manufacturing center, but the city is promoting the advantage of its plentiful, relatively low-cost brain pool with its new research corridor, the West High-Tech Zone. And Motorola regards its building -- subsidized generously by the development zone -- as a world center for software engineering. The company now employs more than 150 developers there and has plans to add hundreds more. That will pit it against a growing number of the world`s top research-driven enterprises taking advantage of Chengdu`s largess: Intel, Ericsson, D-Link, Siemens, Alcatel, Mitsui & Company and Fuji Heavy Industries of Japan and more than 200 other firms in one of the area`s special tech districts.

In all, foreign companies have been involved in establishing between 200 and 400 of their own research centers in China since 1990. China`s People`s Daily has reported that 400 of the world`s transnational corporations have set up research and development projects in China. In part, tax incentives attract such financing. But the biggest incentive of all, of course, is access to China`s consumers. The Chinese government knows that foreign tech companies can be coaxed into sharing technology and training in exchange for easier access to the Chinese marketplace. The World Trade Organization forbids formal bargains that demand international tech transfers, but it does not police winks and nudges.

The likely outcome of all this R.&D. investment in China? Even more overcapacity. Just as China`s abundant unskilled workers feed the world more shoes and more gadgets than it needs -- or at least more than it can absorb without forcing prices down -- China`s abundance of newly skilled industrialists threatens to swamp the world`s most highly prized, high-tech markets. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that in the past three years foreign investors have invested or pledged $15 billion to build 19 new semiconductor factories. China imports 80 percent of the semiconductor chips it needs, $19 billion worth, and the government has made it a point of national pride to end the country`s dependence on foreigners. Industry observers seem to agree that China will be able to compete with the world`s leading semiconductor makers in a decade, but even before that it may exert strong downward pressure on chip prices. Will there be a 2005 recession in the chip market? Morris Chang, the influential founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world`s largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry, asked an industry gathering last September. ``Yes, I think there will be,`` he said. And who will cause it? China, thanks to all the capacity it`s building.

The China Price

China now offers the world a labor supply with depth unlike anything ever seen. In a recent policy brief for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sandra Polaski, a former State Department special representative for international labor affairs, writes that to put things in perspective, ``if all U.S. jobs were moved to China, there would still be surplus labor in China.`` That fact highlights what is most sobering about China`s booming economy: it can force down the value of work in any job that is at all transferable.

In American business this is called the ``China price.`` It is the price American suppliers to other American businesses have to match to keep their customers. It is the price at which Chinese manufacturers can deliver the same goods and services. Last November, the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank noted the complaints that ``automakers have reportedly been asking suppliers for the `China price` on their purchases.`` It also observed that U.S. suppliers had been asked by their big customers to relocate production to China, or to find subcontractors there.

The bellwether of American industry may very well be its foundries. Casting is one of those unsexy industries that rarely get top mention in personal ads. But no amount of buzz could overstate its importance. Without metal casting, the United States would boast hardly any industry at all. The U.S. Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy notes that more than 90 percent of all manufactured goods and capital equipment use metal castings, or are made with equipment that uses them.

The American casting industry is the world`s largest, with more than $25 billion in annual sales. Nearly 3,000 foundries are spread across the country, and are especially concentrated in the Midwest. Most are small businesses, with fewer than 100 employees who, on average, outearn their counterparts everywhere else in the world. The metal-casting industry once had generous trade surpluses with the rest of the world, but imported castings have increased their share of the American market by 50 percent since the mid-1990`s; they now have 15 percent of the market. Imports from China are growing at between 7 and 10 percent a year, and worldwide by volume China is now the top producer of castings. The effect has been severe pressure on American foundries, 140 of which closed their doors in 2002, the last year for which the American Foundry Society has figures.

Bob Schuemann is executive vice president and part owner of Signicast Corporation, a privately held casting business located at the edge of Hartford, Wis. Hartford is one of the state`s many midsize towns whose roads are shared by farm tractors and semitrailer trucks making their way to the loading docks of manufacturers that since the 1970`s have stayed competitive by migrating out of the urban Midwest and into the more economical countryside. Schuemann, like many, now lives under the sword of the China price. His company owns proprietary technology for producing metal machine parts with extremely high precision. Yet the network effect means that the company`s fate is tied in part to the economic vitality of its business community. Wisconsin lost roughly 90,000 of the 2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs that disappeared over the last four years. Signicast survived with automation. Robots fill its factory, moving everything from thumb-size precision parts to the boxes in the warehouse. Workers are scarce. Walking through the plant is a lesson in how the hardware business has become a software business. The whole plant seems to be run by smart ghosts.

Even so, the company feels the gravity of China`s growing influence in manufacturing. Schuemann says some of his corporate customers also want the company to make the move to China and have offered to help cover the costs of doing so. The company won`t move. Schuemann fears the Chinese will usurp Signicast`s processes and thus its strength. Schuemann knows too that his company`s selling points evaporate quickly when overseas investment casters drastically undercut the price of its parts. ``We don`t need to match the China price dollar for dollar,`` he says. ``If we stay within 20 percent of their price, our customers will stay with us.`` It`s getting harder to keep them anyway, however. The company used to have livelier business with a big local power tool maker, but the customer moved production to China and found jerry-built substitutes for Signicast`s high-quality parts. ``Our part was one sturdy piece, and their new one is two inferior pieces,`` Schuemann says. ``Theirs will break more easily, but it`s a lot cheaper.``

The business cards of executives at Milwaukee Valve Company Ltd., located in Wuxi, a city of more than four million outside Shanghai, list the company`s address at ``End of Guangrui Road.`` By the outward appearance of the trio of decades-old, corrugated-tin roofed industrial buildings that make up the small factory, ``end of the road`` might seem an apt description. Along the interior of a wall at the back of the factory yard is a pile of wooden kindling that is used to stoke the factory`s large furnace when the local electric grid is out of power, which lately has been often. Inside one of the barns, the furnace`s orange glow heats and dimly lights a shop that looks little different than that of a foundry early in the last century. Sandboxes with molten brass are assembled manually and set end to end in the black earth floor to cool.

While the method looks primitive -- the Chinese have been making castings for 2,500 years -- workers in Wuxi manage to produce quality castings comparable to those made in spiffier factories in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Milwaukee Valve is a family-owned company whose manufacturing is still anchored in the United States. Its management entered China 20 years ago, soon after economic liberalization began. The company`s valves are critical components in pipelines used in many industries. A faulty valve produced by one of the company`s Chinese suppliers several years ago nearly ended the relationship with China. But that mistake, according to the company`s management, is what made this Chinese manufacturer a ``world-class operation.`` Engineers from both countries redesigned the valve and changed the production process. Since then, Milwaukee Valve has stationed five Chinese quality-control engineers as roving inspectors at all of its factories in China. Apply this learning-curve experience at the Wuxi plant to China`s manufacturing economy generally, and you get a sense of how the country is moving up the manufacturing feeding chain so quickly. (Of course, no one would be interested in seeing the Chinese improve if the cost of high quality were not still a bargain.)

Out in front of the valve factory is another telling symbol of China`s competitiveness. It is a small $2,000 truck, a circus car of a truck, and one of many quaint but operable models still turned out by China`s state-owned vehicle factories. In the U.S., cheap trucks prone to failure and always in need of new parts would wreck production and delivery schedules by causing down time and burden bottom lines with $50-an-hour mechanic bills. But in China, mechanics can tend such cheap trucks the way pit crews tend Indy cars -- and for less than a dollar an hour. Chinese factories can take advantage of all sorts of machinery that is one, two or three generations past its usefulness in more expensive economies, because the Chinese can afford to run them and fix them. Thus China wrings further cost savings from the manufacturing process, and American companies are forced to go there to get them.

``First there was the wholesale price, then the retail price and now there is the China price, and it is very real,`` says Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. Big manufacturers, Shenkar says, come into their American suppliers with the China price in hand and present ultimatums, often veiled, that the price be met.

The China Savings

No politician declares it. There is no Association of Big Box Store Customers beating the drum. But, as nearly any shopping trip in America will teach you, China saves American consumers enormous amounts of money.

The worry that Chinese producers are hurting American businesses and eliminating American jobs misrepresents the problem -- at least geographically. While the U.S. trade deficit with China is growing, most of the goods from China, between 60 and 75 percent of them, simply would have been imported in past years from other countries. Still, because the China price forces manufacturers the world over to drop their own prices, the jobs that have not moved have been shaken up all the same, in the U.S. and in other countries. In Mexico, for example, which has lost nearly half a million manufacturing jobs and 500 maquiladora manufacturers, workers earn four times what their Chinese counterparts do. So for Mexican factories to stay competitive, they must get by with fewer hands or smaller profits.

Americans who would demonize China also have a local problem: the China price is a boon to American consumers. Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, has done some rough math that shows how. ``From time immemorial,`` Hufbauer says, ``most American and Japanese businesses have been reluctant to move their manufacturing to new locales unless they can save at least 10 to 20 percent with the move.`` For the $152 billion worth of goods coming in from China last year, those savings have already been realized.

The multiplier effect on the rest of the world`s manufacturers, however, dwarfs the savings that come directly from China. Hufbauer figures some $500 billion in goods come from countries that are China`s low-wage competitors, and another $450 billion in goods come from China`s American and Japanese competitors. That means savings on nearly a trillion dollars of goods. If the savings on that non-Chinese trillion dollars` worth of trade are just 3 to 5 percent, rather than the 20 percent the Chinese can deliver, Hufbauer calculates further savings starting at $500 for the average American household. And people who spend more, get more back. Have a drawer full of $3 T-shirts, a DVD player in every room, a Christmas tree annually encircled with piles of toys? You probably have tons more stuff -- and additional savings -- thanks to the China price.

This inexorable downward pressure on prices now shows up even when the prices of raw materials rise, costs that in the past were hurriedly passed on to consumers. The Chinese industrial boom has, for example, pushed up the cost of copper, aluminum, nickel, plastics and nearly every other important industrial commodity. Chinese demand has caused the price of steel to rise 20 percent this past spring. (China is now the world`s top steel producer, by the way, while the U.K. has dropped out of the top 10.) Nevertheless, the price of cars, which reflect nearly the entire commodity index, has been weak. In April, cotton climbed to its highest price at this time of year in seven seasons, but the price of clothing declined.

American firms can find it hard to compete. ``China hits domestic U.S. manufacturers twice,`` Oded Shenkar says. ``They drive down the price of goods, but they drive up the price of raw materials. It`s a wholly different environment.`` And yet it`s a good one for Americans too.

The efficiencies forced on the market by Chinese factories also hold U.S. inflation in check. Lower inflation means the Federal Reserve can keep interest rates low, making money more freely available for investment in new and stronger industries. Chinese competition forces American businesses -- Signicast, for example -- to use capital as efficiently as possible. And to run their plants full tilt. And to find ways to save on labor costs. The Americans who lost manufacturing jobs over the last three years, and the millions more who are expected to see their white-collar jobs migrate overseas, may have not only China to blame, but also the very economic benefits that China has provided for them.

And that`s to say nothing of what happens once the Chinese countryside, thinned of its oversupply of farmers, turns into efficient farms. Already the Chinese have their eyes on cash crops. Though it has only recently begun exporting apple juice, China already produces seven times as many apples as the U.S., enough to cause a depression in the price of apple juice worldwide. Whole apples for exports are individually wrapped by hand in a foam sock. Given the country`s wealth of manual labor, it can assert dominance in crops that must be tended by hand.


In a stable China, where its great resource, its people, are allowed to work and spend money in a reasonably well functioning market economy, the growing place of China in a global economy cannot be legislated away with tariffs, quotas or tax incentives for struggling industries. China`s strengths cannot be altered by changes in the value of its currency or by restricting the flow of foreign investment into the country. By having changed itself, China is changing the world.

That doesn`t necessarily mean things will be worse for Americans as the century -- the Chinese century -- unfolds. Following World War II, the nations of Western Europe, Japan and the so-called tiger countries of Asia rose from the ruins, aided, not thwarted, by the strength of the American economy. In turn, those economic booms fed our own.

So perhaps we will be as Europe is to us today, and China will be our America.

Imagine Pekin, Ill., a few decades from now. It may, like innumerable small Chinese cities today, be accustomed to a stream of foreign business managers. Perhaps the regional boss for a Wanfeng Automotive dealership is there to be host of a ``dig to China contest``: the team that gets closest in 40 minutes might win one of the company`s hot new red-and-gold Lucky 8 hybrid sports coupes, worth $4,000. As a promotion, Wal-Mart`s new World Store is rolling prices back to 2004 levels for the day -- shoppers are grabbing the steaks and fish, whose prices Chinese consumers have driven up fourfold since then. Wal-Mart might have competition, however, perhaps from a new giant outpost of Homeworld, a Chinese retail giant that has learned to exploit its proximity to Chinese suppliers and beat Wal-Mart on price. A big event scheduled for the evening might get knowing smiles from the town`s old-timers. The Foreign Devils, a high-school basketball team from Manhattan, a new suburb of Beijing, is due in for an exhibition game. Provided its flight, on an all new Chinese jumbo jet, arrives on time.

Ted C. Fishman, a contributing editor for Harper`s Magazine, is writing a book about China`s place in the world. This is his first cover article for The Times Magazine.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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U.S. Funds for Iraq Are Largely Unspent

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 4, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, July 3 -- The U.S. government has spent 2 percent of an $18.4 billion aid package that Congress approved in October last year after the Bush administration called for a quick infusion of cash into Iraq to finance reconstruction, according to figures released Friday by the White House.

The U.S.-led occupation authorities were much quicker to channel Iraq`s own money, expending or earmarking nearly all of $20 billion in a special development fund fed by the country`s oil sales, a congressional investigator said.

Only $366 million of the $18.4 billion U.S. aid package had been spent as of June 22, the White House budget office told Congress in a report that offers the first detailed accounting of the massive reconstruction package.

Thus far, according to the report, nothing from the package has been spent on construction, health care, sanitation and water projects. More money has been spent on administration than all projects related to education, human rights, democracy and governance.

Of $3.2 billion earmarked for security and law enforcement, a key U.S. goal in Iraq, only $194 million has been spent. Another central objective of the aid program was to reduce the 30 percent unemployment rate, but money has been spent to hire only about 15,000 Iraqis, despite U.S. promises that 250,000 jobs would be created by now, U.S. officials familiar with the aid program said.

U.S. officials involved in the reconstruction blame security concerns and bureaucratic infighting between the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House for delays in the allocation of funds. By the time the Pentagon`s contracting office in Baghdad began awarding contracts, the risk of kidnapping and other attacks aimed at foreign workers was so dire that many projects never began. Several Western firms that won contracts have summarily withdrawn their employees from Iraq.

Fewer than 140 of the 2,300 reconstruction projects that were to be funded with the U.S. aid package are underway, the officials said.

Officials with the contracting office contend the amount of money actually spent does not reflect the full scope of work being performed. A more accurate figure, they said, is the amount of money allocated for reconstruction work. Just over $5.2 billion had been allocated as of June 22, according to the White House budget report.

"The money that is disbursed is typically not disbursed until the work is completed, so it doesn`t give the best picture of what`s going on," said John Proctor, a spokesman for the contracting office. "Some of our projects take months, or even years, to complete."

Proctor said actual spending had increased to $400 million since the figures were provided to the White House on June 22.

Spending patterns have been different with the Iraqi money. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the now-dissolved U.S.-led occupation administration, spent or locked in for future programs more than $19 billion from the $20 billion Development Fund for Iraq, which was established by the U.N. Security Council to manage Iraq`s oil revenue, said Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the General Accounting Office, the watchdog arm of Congress.

Christoff said in a telephone interview on Saturday that all but $900 million of the fund had been spent or allocated by the time the United States transferred political authority to an interim Iraqi government last Monday.

Some Iraqi officials have criticized the contrasting spending practices. The occupation authorities "came here and spent a lot of our money but very little of theirs," said a senior Iraqi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity on the ground that criticism could affect his relationship with the new U.S. Embassy here.

The official did not contest the CPA`s decision to use the development fund money to pay the expenses of running Iraq`s government during the occupation, but he condemned spending on what he called "less essential projects that should have been left up to the Iraqis to decide."

"They wanted to do things their way before they left," the official said.

The CPA appears to have earmarked more than $6 billion of the Iraqi funds over the past two months alone, as it prepared to hand over political authority -- and control over the development fund -- to the interim Iraqi government. As of May 6, the CPA had earmarked only $13 billion from the fund, according to a GAO report released this week.

Allocations and disbursements from the development fund were made by the 12-member Program Review Board, a committee composed of Americans representing the CPA, Iraqis from the U.S.-appointed government and officials from the governments of Britain and Australia. Most of the voting members were non-Iraqis.

"It was a CPA-run thing," the senior Iraqi official said. "There was lots of talk about taking input from the Iraqis, but in the end, they made all the decisions."

At a meeting on May 15, the board allocated $2 billion, according to minutes of the session posted on the CPA`s Web site. Among the commitments were $500 million for Iraqi security forces, $315 million for electricity repairs, $460 million to rehabilitate the oil industry and $180 million to fund a property-claims commission.

It was not clear what specific projects would be funded in the security, electricity and oil sectors. The CPA had already earmarked $3.2 billion for security, $5.5 billion for electricity and $1.7 billion for the oil industry from the $18.4 billion aid package, although little of that money has been spent.

The development fund, at least until May 6, was used largely to bankroll day-to-day Iraqi government operations. More than $7.5 billion was withdrawn to pay for operational expenses -- principally employee salaries -- at ministries and government agencies.

From July 2003 to May 2004, the CPA allocated about $4.8 billion from the development fund for relief and reconstruction projects and services. But as with the U.S.-funded aid package, the CPA had trouble actually spending money to address those needs, disbursing only about $1.8 billion of the $4.8 billion.

Of the $972 million allocated for repairs to electric-power infrastructure before May 6, only $157 million was disbursed, according to the GAO report. Of the $842 million allocated to address increased security needs, only $2 million was spent, the GAO said.

One of the principal beneficiaries of the development fund money was Halliburton Co., which was paid hundreds of millions of dollars to truck gasoline and other fuels into Iraq -- a country with the world`s second-largest oil reserves -- because of problems with Iraq`s refineries.

According to the GAO report, $1.1 billion of the $1.9 billion allocated for fuel imports was disbursed. Although it is not clear how much went to Halliburton, a firm formerly chaired by Vice President Cheney, U.S. officials familiar with spending patterns said a majority of those funds went to Halliburton and other non-Iraqi firms.

The Defense Department has been investigating a Halliburton subsidiary for allegedly overcharging for imported fuels.

Two former CPA officials involved in contracting issues said the CPA spent money from the development fund faster because it was not governed by the same rules requiring competitive bidding as the money from Congress was. The CPA has not identified how many noncompetitive contracts were awarded.

U.S. officials have said that Halliburton was among the firms to receive no-bid contracts from the Program Review Board.

Although the Security Council created a monitoring board composed of representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development to oversee the CPA`s spending, its efforts to audit the process were stymied by the CPA, according to other officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The monitoring board has not received many documents it has sought from the CPA pertaining to uncompetitive contracts. "Transactions worth billions of dollars in Iraqi funds have not been independently reviewed," the GAO wrote in its report.

The slow rate of spending of the U.S. aid package has dismayed several members of Congress who worked to speed passage of the White House`s supplemental budget request last year.

"It`s unacceptable for this to have taken so long," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden, who recently returned from Iraq, said he had "learned from our military commanders that these projects have a direct bearing on their ability to defeat the insurgency."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Im Sport wird heute bei der WaPost ganz groß mit der neuen Tennisfee aufgemacht, im Printteil wird auch über Fußball berichtet und das im Bereich Weltnachrichten.
Gewinnt Otto oder die Griechen? Fürs ZDF scheint nichts peinlich genug zu sein. Ein schönes Spiel ohne Ton und einen Sieg für Griechenland.

washingtonpost.com

Europe Unites Over a Passion for Soccer
Nationalistic Fervor on Display in Extraordinary Countdown to Euro 2004 Finals

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 4, 2004; Page A17

LONDON, July 3 -- Last Thursday night at the Sun Deck bar in Berlin about 50 German soccer fans gathered before a wide-screen television to drink lager and cheer on their favorite team in the Euro 2004 tournament in Lisbon.

It was a scene repeated in pubs all over Germany that evening. But what made it so surprising was that Germany had been eliminated two weeks earlier; these fans were rooting for Greece in its match against the Czech Republic, in part because of Germany`s traditional disdain of the Czechs but also because the Greek team has a German coach.

Greece, which went on to a surprise 1-0 victory, plays Portugal Sunday evening in the finals. It will mark the end of an extraordinary month of soccer that has captivated the continent, reigniting nationalistic fervor while reminding Europeans that they do have something in common: their passion for the sport.
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Portuguese fans saw their team advance to the Euro 2004 finals for the first time with its victory over the Netherlands on Wednesday. The Portuguese team plays Greece on Sunday.
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On game nights, pubs have been full across Europe, and many public squares have featured billboard-sized television screens. Buses, balconies, cars, pubs and shop windows have sprouted national flags -- unusual for a continent that tends to shy away from displays of patriotic swagger. And even after their national teams have gone down to defeat, crowds throughout Europe keep coming back for more.

All of this comes at a time when the dream of Europe as a united federation is under a cloud. The new constitution negotiated two weeks ago by leaders meeting in Brussels has triggered little public enthusiasm. Polls indicate that people throughout the continent feel alienated from the Eurocratic bureaucracy. Voter turnout in recent elections to the European Parliament dipped below 30 percent in some areas.

"The European elections didn`t bring people together," said Charles Grant, director of the London-based Center for European Reform. "But football does."

The European Union seeks to smother national differences and tribal conflicts in a thick cocoon of rules and regulations. But Euro 2004 is all about celebrating those conflicts on the playing field. It is atavistic, blustery, alcohol-enhanced, occasionally nasty -- but ultimately a lot less bloody than the way European nations used to settle their differences.

Author Franklin Foer notes a similar paradox in his new book "How Soccer Explains the World."

"During the nineties, Basque teams, under the stewardship of Welsh coaches, stocked up on Dutch and Turkish players. . . . Everywhere you looked, it suddenly seemed, national borders and national identities had been swept into the dustbin of soccer history." But as he got deeper into the subject, he concluded that soccer globalization often "failed to diminish the game`s local cultures, local blood feuds and even local corruption."

In the tournament this year, the underdog is triumphing: Small Europe has humbled Big Europe and new members of the E.U. have defeated old ones. The two finalists, Portugal and Greece, did not enter the union until the 1980s.

Sunday night`s match marks the first time the Portuguese have made it to the finals. The country seemed far more enthralled by this prospect than by the news earlier in the week that its prime minister, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, had been tapped as the new president of the European Commission.

The bigger European states -- Germany, France, Italy and Spain -- all bowed out early from the tournament, with the Germans humiliated by the Czech Republic`s second stringers. English fans, who when it comes to soccer seem to possess the fatalistic mentality of Chicago Cubs fans, saw their team limp through to the second round before falling victim to its usual demons.

This being Europe, even nationalistic taunting can show a certain sophistication. When Dutch spectators realized last week that their arch rival Germany would fail to make the tournament`s second round, they chanted "Too bad, Germany, it`s all over!" -- in perfect German.

But sometimes the bad feelings are less benign. Urs Meier, a Swiss referee who disallowed a goal that would have given England victory over Portugal last week, had to be placed under police protection after receiving 16,000 e-mails, some of them containing death threats, from irate English fans. The tabloid newspaper the Sun had published his personal e-mail address.

A Swiss radio DJ and a local newspaper retaliated by publishing the Sun`s phone number. Then the Sun published the DJ`s phone number and e-mail address, triggering several thousand nasty messages. Besides using obscene language, DJ Roman Kilschperger told a Swiss newspaper, the messages "usually also mention cuckoo clocks and cheese."

British commentator Rod Liddle says the games allow sports buffs to wallow harmlessly in their deepest national stereotypes: "You see ancient enmities and ancient alliances dating back hundreds of years suddenly reappearing."

Writing in London`s Times newspaper, Liddle said, "My enjoyment of Euro 2004 will reach a zenith when I can truly loathe the opposition for their real or imagined character traits of arrogance, deviousness, sexual rapacity, cowardice and duplicity." He went on to attack the French for beignets, haute cuisine, "the unconscionable act of eating horses and garden mollusks [and] the paranoid way in which they attempt to preserve their own ludicrous and doomed language."

The French, in turn, denigrate English fans as "roast beefs" for their unconscionable food preferences and their skin color when exposed to sunlight.

Some 3,000 English fans identified from previous tournaments as potential troublemakers were barred from traveling to Lisbon for this year`s event. But a few hundred fans who did go managed to drink themselves into a state of aggression after England narrowly lost to France two weeks ago.

Early the next morning they ran amok in the resort town of Albufeira, a mile-long strip of bars, chanting "Eng-er-land!" and hurling plastic chairs, beer cans and glasses at Portuguese police. Fifty-three were arrested, and many were processed, fined and shipped home within 24 hours.

But even in the new integrated Europe, the process has not always been smooth. When Barry Mann, the reputed riot leader, was sent back to England to serve a two-year sentence, the authorities let him go on a technicality.

As usual for England, the tournament ended in tears. The team jumped out to a quick one-goal lead in its crucial match against Portugal last week. Then 18-year-old wunderkind Wayne Rooney had to leave after 17 minutes of play with an injured foot and slowly but surely England`s spirit withered. Portugal triumphed after David Beckham, perhaps the continent`s highest paid sports celebrity, missed an easy shot in a penalty shootout at the end of a regulation time.

"Somewhere in the soul of England, closer to the surface than we might like to accept, is the absolute conviction that we are natural born losers," lamented Matthew Norman in the Evening Standard newspaper.

Other nations seemed less haunted. As the Czech Republic`s scrappy squad battled its way to the semifinals, fans back home celebrated each triumph. But when the team lost to Greece Thursday, the mood remained friendly. "Believe it or not there`s a fairly sizeable Greek community in Prague and a lot of Czech fans went into the Greek pubs and congratulated them on winning," said Michal Rezanka, a Web site designer in Prague. "A lot of people cried, but sometimes losing with dignity is more important than winning."

Special correspondents Shannon Smiley in Berlin and Kimiko de Freytas in Paris contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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