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Tenet Says He Didn`t Know About Claim


By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 17, 2003; Page A01


CIA Director George J. Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee yesterday that his staff did not bring to his attention a questionable statement about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address.

But Tenet told the senators during a nearly five-hour session behind closed doors that he takes responsibility for the now-famous 16-word sentence in the speech because an agency official had approved it after negotiations with the White House, according to congressional and administration sources who attended the session.

"Members were stunned," one Democratic senator in the meeting said, "because he said he basically wasn`t aware of the sentence until recently."

At issue was Bush`s claim in the Jan. 28 State of the Union address that the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The claim was subsequently determined to be based largely on forged documents, sparking a new furor over the uses of intelligence leading up to the Iraq war. The White House now says the claim should not have been made in the speech.

Yesterday, the Democratic senator said Tenet was repeatedly asked why the CIA permitted the allegation in the address, especially since Tenet had interceded with the White House to remove a more detailed reference to the claim from a Bush speech on Oct. 7.

"There was mixed reaction to his answers as to why they compromised after he told us how dubious and incredible the intelligence was," said the senator, who insisted on anonymity.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the committee chairman, told reporters afterward that allowing the president to refer to Iraq`s alleged attempt to buy uranium in Africa shows "the process was broken" and illustrates "sloppy coordination between [the] State [Department] and CIA and the NSC [National Security Council] and the White House."

Roberts also said the inquiry into Iraq intelligence and the president`s speeches would continue, and the panel "would follow the trail wherever it leads." Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the panel, hinted that other witnesses would probably include White House personnel.

Rockefeller told reporters that while Tenet took the blame for his agency, "it remains to be seen whether that is where it stops. I think others in the administration knew about it." He said the committee would look into whether the Niger reference "was an isolated incident or part of a pattern of misleading by the administration."

Another Democrat on the committee said, "The real question is why someone was so insistent that they wanted this information in."

Before the hearing, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said he wanted to know why nobody had come forward since January "if in fact the information was not correct." Asked if others would be called, Chambliss said on CNN that the issue started "in the intelligence gathering community" but "if it`s necessary to bring [Defense] Secretary [Donald H.] Rumsfeld or [national security adviser] Condoleezza Rice up, then we will."

Yesterday`s session was originally scheduled to permit Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) to pursue with the CIA director whether the agency had supplied U.N. weapons inspectors adequate information about possible weapons sites in Iraq; those questions took up nearly one hour of the meeting, congressional sources said. Levin has said that the number of key sites listed in CIA documents far exceeded the number given to chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, though Tenet has publicly testified that all the major ones had been given.

Some Republicans have privately said that Bush should replace Tenet. Asked after yesterday`s session whether Tenet should resign, Roberts said, "That`s not my call."

Democrats were not so reticent. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), appearing in South Carolina as part of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, said: "If I was president and I was put in a position to make a statement in a State of the Union to the American people that was not truthful, and the CIA director came forward and accepted responsibility, I`d ask him to leave."

Lieberman also said Bush should accept some responsibility, adding, "This president seems to be saying, `The buck never stops here.` "

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, another Democratic presidential contender, said in an interview that Tenet was not the most serious problem under scrutiny but that he should resign because he helped cover up for the White House. "He knew very well that the intelligence was false," Dean said, "and for him to take the blame means he was participating in an attempt to avoid finding out what really happened."

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the former chairman of the Senate intelligence panel and also a presidential candidate, said, "We do not have a George Tenet problem; we have a George Bush problem." He said current congressional investigations should be independent and focus not only on the intelligence that led to the Iraq war, but also on what "Rice and the White House did with information and what kind of pressure was put on intelligence analysts during this process."

At the White House, Scott McClellan, Bush`s new press secretary, said, "I recognize there are a number of Democratic candidates trying to gain an advantage in an election. But the bottom line is, America is safer, more secure and better prepared than we were on September 11, 2001."

On Tuesday, the two senior members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence spoke in support of Tenet. Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the panel and a former CIA case officer, said at a news conference, "I have complete confidence in [Tenet`s] ability to lead the agency and run the intelligence community." Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat, said Tenet had "restored morale in an agency that was badly shattered," and although he serves at the president`s pleasure, she agreed with Goss`s view.

Staff writers Dan Balz and Helen Dewar contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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An Army reservist is treated for injuries after his convoy was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades on a road west of Baghdad. One soldier was killed.
washingtonpost.com
Iraq`s Highway of Constant Hazard
Attackers Leave Trail of Casualties on Baghdad Airport Road

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 17, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, July 16 -- The palm-lined road to Baghdad`s international airport is six miles long, six lanes wide and one of the most critical commercial and military arteries in this crippled city. It also has emerged as a shooting gallery for attackers trying to kill U.S. soldiers.

There have been dozens of shootings, bombings and land mine explosions in recent weeks on or near the airport road; two soldiers were severely injured there today when their Humvee hit a mine. At least four U.S. soldiers have been killed along the road in the last six weeks, including one Monday in a rocket-propelled grenade attack that wounded 10 others.

"It`s a nightmare," said Sgt. Leonard Gorley, guarding the Humvee that was wrecked today.

The casualties along the airport road have occurred during a string of attacks that have killed 34 U.S. soldiers in Iraq since May 1. A soldier was killed today when his convoy was hit by rocket-propelled grenades on a highway just west of here.

Also today, Mohammed Nayil Jurayfi, the mayor of the western city of Hadithah who had been cooperating with U.S. forces, was shot to death along with his son as they drove through the city, officials said. In west Baghdad, an 8-year-old Iraqi was killed and a U.S. soldier was wounded when an attacker threw a grenade into a military vehicle guarding a bank. And in the southern city of Hilla, a U.S. Marine died when he fell from the roof of a building he was guarding.

Meanwhile, a surface-to-air missile was fired at a C-130 military transport plane landing at Baghdad`s airport, military officials said.

A military spokesman, Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, said the missile attack was the second such incident at the airport. "We had an incident last week where two missiles were fired at a similar aircraft," Fitzgibbons told Reuters Television, "and in this instance as well, no missiles hit the aircraft."

The airport, closed to commercial traffic since the war, houses the offices of the U.S. military`s top commanders, who often travel down the road to Baghdad for meetings with the U.S. civilians overseeing the occupation of Iraq. When the airport reopens to commercial flights, the road will be a vital link in the rebuilding of Iraq; its safety will be crucial for merchants, contractors, diplomats, humanitarian relief officials and others.

A senior military official said U.S. forces were "paying special attention" to the road because of its significance and had sharply increased security there. "It`s a very important route," he said. "Given the amount of military traffic on the road, it`s an obvious target."

The task of securing the road has fallen to the 1457th Engineer Battalion, a National Guard unit based in American Fork, Utah. Four companies of engineers and heavy equipment -- bulldozers, front-end loaders and dump trucks -- arrived here at the end of May.

They have worked to secure the roadsides and the median strip, which are both wide and thick with trees and bushes. They have filled in trenches, destroyed abandoned guardhouses, cleared and burned thick brush and removed unexploded ordnance and land mines -- some newly planted to kill U.S. forces, some dating back decades.

This morning, a few minutes before the Humvee blast, soldiers from the 1457th were removing debris from a Saddam Hussein-era guardhouse they had just demolished. During Hussein`s rule, the road was heavily guarded by soldiers in numerous cinder-block posts set among the palms in the median strip.

Staff Sgt. Joseph Christensen, who in civilian life works as a loan officer for a mortgage company, said the battalion`s top priority was knocking down those guard shacks and using bulldozers to fill in trenches that could be used by snipers.

As he spoke, the vulnerability of his position was obvious. In the area where he and the others were working, the highway is separated from a residential area by a high wall perhaps 100 yards from the roadside.

Snipers have fired AK-47 assault rifles from behind such walls or from rooftops, then disappeared into neighborhoods. Others have detonated remote-controlled bombs from similar vantage points. Three of the soldiers killed on the road recently were the victims of such attacks.

"You can stress out all day about it, or you can just do what you have to do," Christensen said. "A lot of it is just the luck of the draw, and if the people doing the attacking are crazy enough to shoot at you. Every day it`s something new out here. You`ve just got to do your job and trust that guys have got your back."

About 30 minutes later, Lt. Eric Taylor of the 1457th was escorting a dump truck carrying a load of guard shack debris about a mile down the road when he heard a boom. A few seconds later, he came upon the smashed Humvee, which had struck a mine off the side of the road.

Taylor said no one knew for sure whether the mine was planted to kill U.S. soldiers or left over from Iraq`s decades of war and dictatorship. But he said it was a reminder to all soldiers working on the airport road.

"It`s hit or miss," he said. "You work out here every day and nothing happens to you, and it`s easy to get complacent. But this is a dangerous stretch of road."

Asked how the U.S. military hoped to bring security to all of Iraq when it had been unable to secure a six-mile stretch of highway, Taylor said the answer might be found in bulldozers and dump trucks.

He said Army engineers had been clearing debris and cleaning up war damage not just along the highway, but in many Baghdad neighborhoods. "We have been improving things to gain the support of the common folk," he said. "And that will solidify our relationship with the Iraqi people."

Sgt. James Thomas was more skeptical. At the site of Monday`s fatal rocket-propelled grenade attack on a road leading to the airport road, Thomas, of the 82nd Airborne Division, stood guard in a uniform still stained with a wounded soldier`s blood.

Thomas said he and other soldiers had been fired upon by snipers on the roof of a house, in what he called a coordinated attack with those who fired the grenades.

A group of neighborhood residents standing nearby said that was impossible, because people sleep on the rooftops and would have seen any snipers and stopped them.

Thomas shook his head. He said they were lying. He said things are just like that in Baghdad -- murky and confused and deceptive -- which makes the security situation all the more devilish at places like the airport road.

"Unless you put a tank every 10 feet," he said, "there`s nothing you can do."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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More Cover for Peacekeeping Nations Debated


By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 17, 2003; Page A12


UNITED NATIONS, July 16 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today that he has begun discussions with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and some of his foreign counterparts on whether to seek a new U.N. Security Council mandate that would provide additional cover to states considering participation in peacekeeping in Iraq.

The initiative comes as the United States is facing the likelihood of a long and costly stay in Iraq and confronting mounting difficulty in securing commitments from foreign governments to share the burden of policing Iraq. France, Germany and India have indicated that they would reject any U.S. appeals to send peacekeepers to Iraq unless they have an explicit U.N. mandate.

Powell said that a Security Council resolution adopted on May 22 to recognize the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq provides "sufficient authority" for countries to participate in a peacekeeping mission. "But there are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations, and I am in conversations with some ministers about this, as well as with the secretary general of the United Nations," Powell said during a news conference in Washington with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

Fischer ruled out any role for German troops but said his country is prepared to help alleviate the humanitarian situation in Iraq. "The responsibility on the ground is in the hands of the coalition. We are not part of the coalition," he said.

Fischer was ambivalent about the extent of German involvement in Iraq`s reconstruction, suggesting that Berlin`s participation may depend on whether there is a role for German businesses in Iraq. France and Germany have previously insisted that the United States open Iraq to competitive bidding in exchange for their commitment to dole out foreign aid. "Our business community is ready to play its role in the reconstruction, if it is wanted," he said.

Annan said he discussed the possibility of an expanded U.N. role in talks with Powell on Monday in Washington.

He said that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and other members of Congress expressed the need to broaden international participation in the U.S.-led effort to restore stability to Iraq. He also said that Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov phoned him today to promote efforts "to broaden the U.N. mandate and internationalize the operations."

Annan said that his special envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, would brief the 15-nation council Tuesday on the U.N. activities in Iraq and on "what we think we can do in the future." Annan said some governments are considering further Security Council action that "expands U.N. activities and perhaps appeals to member states to make more troops, policemen and other resources available for the stabilization of Iraq."

But he said it is up to the Security Council to decide whether to strengthen the U.N. role in Iraq.

U.N. diplomats said a delegation of Iraqis appointed by the United States to the Governing Council may officially appeal to the Security Council next week to back a broader peacekeeping role for U.N. members who are not serving under the command of the United States and its military allies in Iraq. The delegation, which is made up of former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, former Iraqi diplomat Adnan Pachachi, and Akila Hashimi, the former government`s liaison with the United Nations, is expected to address the council Tuesday, Annan said.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Flap Over Iraq Charge Shows Bush Vulnerability


By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 17, 2003; Page A15


With surprising swiftness, an esoteric debate over 16 words in this year`s State of the Union address has changed the national political scene in recent days.

Once-lifeless Democratic presidential candidates, buoyed by declining support for President Bush and his Iraq policy, talk of a full-blown scandal. They say the sentence in Bush`s speech declaring Saddam Hussein sought nuclear material in Africa -- a charge the White House now admits was wrong or insufficiently documented -- is symbolic of a president who misled a nation into a costlier-than-expected war by distorting intelligence.

The White House has been uncharacteristically flat-footed, responding with defensive and often contradictory explanations. "It is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on CNN on Sunday.

Political strategists say the controversy ultimately depends on events far away -- in the streets and fields of Iraq. If Hussein is killed or captured, illegal weapons are found in Iraq and the near-daily attacks on U.S. soldiers subside, Democrats and Republicans agree the intelligence flap will be largely forgotten. If, however, Congress returns from its summer break in September with Hussein still at large, no discovery of weapons of mass destruction and continued attacks on U.S. troops, the issue will almost surely become the subject of congressional hearings and fodder for the presidential campaign.

"People are waiting for the other shoe to drop," said Bill Knapp, a Democratic strategist. "If we get [Hussein], a lot of sins could be forgiven. If we don`t get the guy, people will want answers."

A senior Senate GOP aide expressed a similar view about the intelligence controversy. "This is a canary in the coal mine for what the administration could face if these other problems aren`t resolved," he said. "If we go through a bad August, there will be immense pressure to have hearings up here in September."

At present, developments in Iraq are discouraging. Another American was killed yesterday, by a rocket-propelled grenade, making him the 33rd U.S. soldier killed since Bush declared major combat over and the seventh since Bush two weeks ago said "bring `em on" to Iraqi militants. In addition, the pro-American mayor of Hadithah was assassinated yesterday, an Iraqi boy was killed in another attack on U.S. troops, and a missile was fired at a military plane.

ABC`s "Good Morning America" showed soldiers from the Third Infantry Division in Iraq criticizing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and questioning their mission. Minnesota Public Radio this week quoted Mary Kewatt, the aunt of a soldier killed in Iraq, saying: "President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said `bring it on.` Well, they brought it on, and now my nephew is dead."

This has hurt Bush`s standing. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last week showed that support for Bush had dipped 9 percentage points in about two weeks, to 59 percent, mirroring a decline in support for his handling of the Iraq situation. A small majority for the first time found the level of casualties in Iraq unacceptable, while half thought the administration intentionally exaggerated evidence of Iraq`s weapons programs. Another poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 23 percent of Americans thought the military effort in Iraq was going very well, down from 61 percent in mid-April.

Fueling the controversy is the awakening of Democrats, who have a lot of pent-up frustration because they have not believed they could challenge Bush on foreign affairs since the Sept. 11 attacks. "President Bush should tell the truth -- and get out of the way and let us find the truth -- about the intelligence gap," Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, said yesterday.

Some Democrats think the damage to Bush could go well beyond the Iraq issue. One of Bush`s most valuable attributes has been his reputation for honesty and straight talking."This is most dangerous for Bush in that it erodes two of his very real and durable political strengths: his perceived competence as commander- in- chief and his perceived honesty," said Jim Jordan, Kerry`s campaign manager.



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. . . Unshakable Faith


By Richard Cohen

Thursday, July 17, 2003; Page A21



Late last month the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that George W. Bush had told the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, that he had gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq on instructions from God. The White House promptly and vociferously denied the account, but I`d like to believe it anyway. I have to. The purported instructions from God remain about the only explanation for some of what Bush has done -- not only overseas but at home as well. Repeatedly, the Bush administration has merely asserted something to be true, neglecting either to prove it or even to make much of a case for it. Iraq is a perfect example.

At the moment, the brouhaha is over Bush`s assertion in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought to import weapons-grade uranium from Africa. That turns out not to be true -- or at least not provable. It is also probably not true that Iraq was importing aluminum tubing for its purported nuclear weapons program. In fact, it may well be that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program. At least none has been found.

That`s not the mystery. By the advent of the war, it was already clear that Iraq was not a nuclear power. It was also clear that it had no verifiable links to Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the events of Sept. 11. In the intelligence community, both here and abroad, there was no question, however, that Saddam had both chemical and biological weapons. The rest -- a nuclear program, links to terrorism -- was a different matter. No one much believed it.

But Bush, it is now clear, did. He believed -- virtually without evidence -- that Saddam and bin Laden were in cahoots. Why? It`s hard to say, but probably because they were both evil. Evil leaders do evil things and they do them together. The evidence for this is lacking, to be sure, but you have to take it as a matter of faith. Bush did.

Similarly, it was a matter of faith that once the United States invaded Iraq, it would crumble. That was a given. This explains why an insufficient number of troops were on hand when the war started. It explains further why, once the war was won, an insufficient number of troops were available to control the country. The result has been a catastrophe -- the constant loss of American lives and an occupation that is costing about $4 billion a month.

Faith -- or whatever you want to call it -- is about the only explanation, too, for the rush to go to war in the first place. An argument could be made for war with Saddam -- and I and others made it. But since the threat from him was never imminent and was limited in any case to biological and chemical weapons, there was no need to rush. The French, the Germans, the Russians -- indeed, much of the world -- pleaded for more time. Bush, though, was acting as if he had received urgent instructions.

It is the same domestically. The White House this week projected a $455 billion deficit for the current fiscal year. This is a tad off the original mark -- a projected surplus of $334 billion. In the near future, the deficit is expected to grow even more until, suddenly, it will decrease.

Why? Because that`s what Bush insists. Somehow, if taxes are cut even further, the economy will do something in some way that will erase the deficit, make the desert bloom and bring happiness to boys and girls everywhere. Economists may scoff, but they -- as you know -- are men and women of little faith. As Bush knows, just because the numbers don`t add up doesn`t mean they don`t, well, add up.

Alas, they don`t. The Clinton administration produced four straight years of budget surpluses -- and the economy boomed. Maybe the vigorous economy was unrelated to the surplus and maybe a little deficit spending is in order. But Bush has gone on a bender -- cutting taxes, increasing spending and putting the government deeper and deeper in debt. By 2008, it will be $8.6 trillion in the hole.

The favorite Bush grammatical construction is the tautology: Something is bad because it`s bad. A synaptic leap is made in which a certain cause will have a certain effect -- never mind why. Things are stated with certainty, but the proof of them is not apparent. This may explain why Bush seems so sanguine about presenting evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program that later turned out to be not true. It doesn`t matter. Because it ought to be, it is.



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Inconvenient Facts . . .


By Harold Meyerson

Thursday, July 17, 2003; Page A21



There are no stubborn facts in the Bush White House, just stubborn men. This is an administration that will not be cowed by the truth.

After all, it`s not as if the president`s baseless assertion in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought to acquire "yellowcake" uranium from Niger was the last we heard of this claim. To be sure, Colin Powell consciously excised it from the bill of indictment he delivered to the U.N. Security Council in early February. (It had been included in the first draft of his speech, which was prepared, according to U.S. News and World Report, by the National Security Council and Vice President Cheney`s office.) But it popped up again as late as March 16, when Cheney himself appeared on "Meet The Press" to make one more case for going to war.

By then, the International Atomic Energy Agency had publicly reported that the documents purportedly recording the Iraq-Niger transaction were forgeries -- a conclusion, we now know, that the CIA and the State Department shared. Indeed, when the State Department turned over the documents to the IAEA on Feb. 4, it sent along a note stating, "We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims."

But when "Meet The Press" host Tim Russert asked the vice president about the IAEA`s conclusions, Cheney bulled ahead with a certitude born of -- well, of the political necessity for certitude. He disagreed with the IAEA, he said, adding, wrongly, "You`ll find that the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community disagree."

As for Saddam, he said, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. [Mohamed] ElBaradei [the IAEA director], frankly, is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency [on] this kind of issue, especially where Iraq`s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing."

The point is not that an apology is in order, though it plainly is. The point is that even after the IAEA`s revelation that the forged agreement had been "signed" by a Niger government official who in fact had been out of office for the better part of a decade, the vice president dismissed this information out of hand and disparaged its source. He did not, however, refute it. Refutations plunge you into the realm of facts, where this administration is exquisitely uncomfortable.

Just how uncomfortable becomes clear by a close reading of the cover story in the July-August issue of Foreign Policy -- Newt Gingrich`s attack on the State Department for its refusal to implement George W. Bush`s foreign policy. Gingrich`s screed has been widely condemned for its bizarre allegations of Foggy Bottom disloyalty. But its most stunning passage -- an attack on the very idea of unbiased intelligence -- has been overlooked.

Gingrich notes that on April 28, Bush told a group of Iraqi Americans in Dearborn, Mich., "I have confidence in the future of a free Iraq. The Iraqi people are fully capable of self-government." Then the Newtster continues:

"Contrast that vision with a recent classified report by the State Department`s Bureau of Intelligence and Research titled `Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes,` which was leaked in March 2003 to the Los Angeles Times. As reported by that newspaper, the document stated that `liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve [in Iraq]. . . . Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.` " Gingrich goes on to list other Foggy Bottom low points, and concludes: "Can anyone imagine a State Department more out of sync with Bush`s views and objectives?"

It`s okay if you want to go back and read that again. Gingrich has just criticized an intelligence assessment of what Iraq is for being out of sync with Bush`s views on what Iraq should be. Those of us who`ve called for investigations of whether the administration slanted its intelligence should be abashed. What`s to investigate? Here`s a member of the administration`s Defense Policy Board who argues in print that the very purpose of intelligence is to confirm the president`s vision of a proper planet. In the mind of Newt Gingrich, where synapses must misfire at close to the speed of light, the descriptive and the normative are as one.

It`s fashionable to dismiss Gingrich today as a kind of crazy uncle with whom the Republicans are saddled. But no one made Don Rumsfeld appoint to his policy board a guy who doesn`t understand the most rudimentary premise of intelligence. And the appointment does help explain why Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence assessment office inside the Pentagon in the very image of Gingrich`s intelligence cookery.

My friends on the left fear the administration`s budding imperialism. I`m more concerned by its raging anti-empiricism.

The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect.




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`The Devil`s Dictionary` Revisited

By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
July 14, 2003

The Webster`s Dictionary tells us that a cynic used to refer to "a member of an ancient Greek philosophical sect who believed virtue to be the only good and practice of self-control to be the only way of achieving virtue."


But Webster`s second definition more aptly describes what is meant by the word today, by which a cynic is "one who believes all people are motivated by selfishness." (In my book that`s also the definition of an economist, especially those "dismal science" practitioners in the Ayn Rand fan club).


It is one of the many tragi-comic ironies of our time that those public servants who speak the loudest about virtue have shown very little self-control in their rush to wage (literal and cultural) war on anyone opposed to a global order based on the cynical proposition: "All people are motivated by selfishness."


So, given the planetary pathogen of propaganda we all feel oozing through the body politic, coupled with the rise of the cynical citizen, today I honor the memory of Ambrose Bierce, author of "The Devil`s Dictionary."


Bierce gave us such classics as: "Air, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor." (The global trend toward privatization of the world`s water supply makes this definition more and more true with each passing day).


A collection of 998 definitions, Bierce`s dictionary is designed to challenge cherished hypocrisies linguistically. It has been nearly 100 years since it was first published. Here, I offer some additions.


Credible, adj. In politics, the ability to completely and sincerely deny an obvious contradiction of reality that relies on an obedient news media and the "patriotic" tendency to justify preemption after the fact i.e. Who cares if Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, even though the apparent absence means one of two things: Either our intelligence community is incredibly incompetent or, more likely, the Bush administration is made up of ideologues who only listen to those with whom they agree.


Foreign aid, n. Charitable theft.


Mara Vanderslice, program director for the Jubilee USA Network, says of President Bush`s recent trip to Africa: "one of the single most pressing issues to the people of Africa (did) not (get) addressed on his tour – Africa`s debilitating foreign debts. Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa pay out $14.5 billion every year in debt service. This is more than the continent receives in foreign aid...and more than is needed to stem the tide of AIDS, estimated at $10 billion annually".


Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, adds: "The balance of payments for Sub-Saharan Africa shows an annual net drain of more than $12 billion out of the region. This is about 4.4 percent of the region`s income, one of the highest such transfers from South to North in the world."


Opinion Poll, n. A propaganda device used to conform public opinion into the shape elite opinion leaders see fit; a survey in which many respondents side with the ready-made opinion they think the pollster wants to hear.


Weapons of Mass Destruction, n. tools of violent coercion that are a benign deterrent in the hands of "us;" but evidence of maniacal evil in the possession of "others."


United States, pl.n. America Inc., whose "elected" president serves as CEO of the Big Business Party. Or in the words of America Inc. former CEO, Calvin Coolidge, "the business of America is business."


The Associated Press reported last week that some companies like Verizon Communications, AT&T Wireless, Barnes & Noble booksellers and Dole Food Co. were "mistakenly" classified by the government as small businesses"


"The mistaken designations...mean the government has overstated the contract dollars that are going to small business at a time when the Bush administration has been pressing to give smaller firms as much federal work as possible."


And, "once a company`s status is mischaracterized, it stays that way through the life of a contract – which can be 20 years. That means smaller firms that the administration intended to help may be frozen out from fresh business by the bigger companies with the incorrect designations."


Care to offer any devilish definitions of your own?

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16393
Sean Gonsalves is a syndicated columnist.

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Rumsfeld Announces Discovery of Spears of Mass Destruction
July 12, 2003
Satire by David Albrecht

WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced today at a Pentagon press conference that coalition forces had discovered a huge cache of spears, arrows and similar projectile weapon systems, believed to be of Iraqi origin, buried deep in an archaeological site high on the slopes of Turkey`s Mount Ararat.

"Our weapons analysis teams have confirmed a large number of both spears and arrows, which showed substantial traces of biological toxins on their points and edges, at the site in question", he said. Pentagon insiders, speaking off the record, noted that although the spears and arrows were fairly primitive by 21st Century standards, the addition of modern propulsion technology could have rendered them far more dangerous to US and other coalition troops. The toxins, possibly derived from animal dung or other natural substance, could have posed "a serious threat of infection and irritation to soldiers in the field", according to Secretary Rumsfeld.

That the Iraqi weapons cache was discovered high on a mountain in Turkey has led many military experts and Middle East policy specialists to conclude that an arrangement existed at some point between the Turkish government and that of Saddam Hussein. However, in the absence of any comment from Turkish authorities, and without confirmatory records in Baghdad, the nature of this alliance remains a topic of speculation and rumor.

The site in question, according to Rumsfeld, lies within the hold of an "unusually large naval asset", described by weapons researchers in foreign press reports as being "hundreds of feet" in length. Some local residents, who have worked as laborers during the excavation of the cache, have painted a picture of an enormous vessel, mired tens of meters deep in glacial ice, with the weapons stored in special compartments low in the bow and stern sections. How the enormous Iraqi ship came to be located buried in a glacier high atop a Turkish mountain remains unknown. However, Rumsfeld said that the location of the weapons site shows that "we were wise not to underestimate the power and determination of Hussein`s regime to hide these dangerous implements."

Further evidence of the nature of the site has surfaced in the form of bones - thousands of them. Zoologists have identified dozens of species not native to Turkey, including elephants, rhinos, gorillas, spider monkeys (a New World species) and kangaroos. General Tommy Franks, who recently retired as head of US Central Command, stated on Fox News that the bones show that Saddam "left no stone unturned in his search for simple, effective and possibly devastating dung-based, iron-tipped bio-weapons. This was a long-term and thoroughly researched program." Officials in the office of Paul Bremer, Iraq`s civilian administrator, are now poring over zoo records in search of evidence of animal purchases and transfers. In addition, large mounds of hay, grain and other animal foodstuffs, preserved by the glacial deep-freeze, gave evidence that this was a long-term operation for test animal upkeep.

A final link between the ship and Iraq came in the form of documents discovered on board. These parchments and clay tablets, written in an early style of cuneiform common in the Baghdad region thousands of years ago, may well be treasures from Iraq`s rich archeological past, hidden for safekeeping. Document analysis teams are working 24-hour shifts to recover the information they contain. Among their findings so far: a description of the ship itself, which oddly sketches the vessel`s length, height and beam using the obsolete measure of the cubit; and veterinary records. These records, which describe the acquisition of breeding pairs of almost every animal species known, "show", in Rumsfeld`s words, "that Saddam Hussein was engaged in a very long-term plan to improve his weapons systems. This was a clear threat, and President Bush made the right decision when he chose to stop it."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/07/12_spear…

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BILL GATES: KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND P.R. -- MR. BUSH`S BOGUS AIDS OFFER

Monday July 14, 2003

Bring back Jayson Blair! The New York Times has eliminated the scourge of plagiarized journalism by eliminating journalism altogether from its front page. Check this Sunday’s edition: “Bill Gates is no ordinary philanthropist,” gushes a Times reporter named Stephanie Strom, re-writing one of the digital diva’s self-loving press releases. Gates has saved 100,000 lives by providing vaccines to Africans, gushes Stephanie, according to someone on the payroll of … Bill Gates. And he’s making access to drugs for Africans, especially for AIDS victims, “cheaper and easier.” Stephanie knows because she asked Bill Gates himself!


Then we get to the real point of this journalistic Lewinsky: “Those who think of Mr. Gates as a ruthless billionaire monopolist … may find it hard to reconcile that image with one of a humorously self-deprecating philanthropist.”

Actually, that’s not hard at all.

Stephanie, let me let you in on a little secret about Bill and Melinda Gates so-called “Foundation.” Gate’s demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called “TRIPS” – the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him the kind of monopoly the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices.

Example: in June 2000, at the urging of Big Pharma, Bill Clinton threatened trade sanctions against Argentina for that nation’s daring to offer low-cost drugs to Southern Africa.

Gates knows darn well that “intellectual property rights” laws such as TRIPS – which keep him and Melinda richer than Saddam and the Mafia combined – are under attack by Nelson Mandela and front-line doctors trying to get cut-rate drugs to the 23 million Africans sick with the AIDS virus. Gate’s brilliant and self-serving solution: he’s spending an itsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates’ foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. The bully billionaire’s “philanthropic” organization is currently working paw-in-claw with the big pharmaceutical companies in support of the blockade on cheap drug shipments.

Gates’ game is given away by the fact that his Foundation has invested $200 million in the very drug companies stopping the shipment of low-cost AIDS drugs to Africa.

Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade. Another way to read it: he’s locking in a trade system that will effectively block the delivery of medicine to over 20 million.

The computer magnate’s scheme has a powerful ally. “The president could have been reading from a script prepared by Mr. Gates,” enthuses the Times’ cub reporter, referring to Mr. Bush’s AIDS plan offered up this week to skeptical Africans. The US press does not understand why Africans don’t jump for Bush’s generous handout. None note that the money held out to the continent’s desperate nations has strings attached or, more accurately, chains and manacles. The billions offered are mostly loans at full interest which may be used only to buy patent drugs from US companies at a price several times that available from other nations. What Africans want, an end to the devastating tyranny of TRIPS and other trade rules, is dismissed by the Liberator of Baghdad.

We are all serfs on Microsoft’s and Big Pharma’s ‘intellectual property.’ If Gates’ fake philanthropy eviscerates the movement to free Africans from the tyranny of TRIPS, then Bill and Melinda’s donations could have the effect of killing more Africans than then even their PR agents claim they have saved. And for our own Republic, we can only hope that when the bully-boy billionaire injects his next wad of loot into the Bush political campaign, he uses a condom.
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=232&row=0

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Strong Opposition to Media Cross-Ownership Emerges
Public Wants Neutrality and Pro-American Point of View

Released: July 13, 2003

Navigate this report
Summary of Findings
About this Survey
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Summary of Findings

Opposition to a Federal Communications Commission decision to loosen media cross-ownership restrictions has increased sharply since February, as more Americans have learned about the plan. Overall, half say the FCC decision would have a negative impact on the country, up from 34% in February. Just 10% believe the effect of the rules change will be positive, largely unchanged from February.

Public awareness of the new media ownership rules, which are currently being challenged in Congress, has grown significantly. Nearly half of Americans (48%) say they have heard a lot (12%) or a little (36%) about the issue. In February, only about a quarter of the public (26%) knew even a little about the plan.



http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=188
Full Report. PDF-Datei
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/188.pdf

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-… a

U.S. May Seek U.N. Assistance in Volatile Iraq
The White House says it is talking with foreign leaders about widening the organization`s role. General calls conflict a `guerrilla-type war.`
By Paul Richter and Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writers

July 17, 2003

WASHINGTON — Faced with mounting casualties and costs, the Bush administration said Wednesday that it was talking with foreign leaders about broadening U.N. authority in Iraq, even as a key commander said the Pentagon would extend the tours of war-weary U.S. troops to a full year to fight what has become a guerrilla war.

Until now, the administration has sought to limit U.N. activities in Iraq to humanitarian relief and has sought assistance from other countries on a nation-by-nation basis. A U.S. decision to go back to the United Nations would mark a fundamental shift in an approach that now gives the United States full control — and blame — for whatever happens in the volatile country.

But the Bush administration may have little choice. With the new chief of the Central Command saying Wednesday that U.S. forces were now battling a "classic" guerrilla war, coordinated on a regional level in Iraq, the need for a substantial troop presence was likely to continue for some time. The U.S. has had a hard time getting other nations to commit significant numbers of troops to supplement its forces in Iraq. Some governments have said they would only contribute troops or police after a clear U.N. mandate.

Speaking during an appearance with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that U.S. talks with other governments and U.N. officials were still preliminary.

But there is mounting pressure on the administration from Congress to find ways to share the costs — and risks.

Congress also kept up its questions about the prewar intelligence on Iraq. Democratic and Republican senators weighed expanding their probe after spending nearly five hours pressing CIA Director George J. Tenet to account for claims regarding Baghdad`s nuclear program and the broader failure to find banned weapons.

Democrats said they would like to hear from White House officials next, and even a key Republican, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the intelligence committee, indicated that administration officials could be asked to testify.

Gen. John Abizaid`s announcement of an extension of soldiers` tours is likely to send shock waves through the ranks. Abizaid made his comments during a Pentagon briefing, his first as chief of the Central Command, which oversees U.S. military activities in the Middle East and Central Asia. Tours associated with major combat operations have been no longer than four months since the Vietnam War.

Abizaid also acknowledged for the first time that U.S. forces were facing a "classic guerrilla-type war situation" throughout the country — an assertion that appears to contradict earlier statements by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has sought to play down the guerrilla threat.

Abizaid said that in addition to guerrilla-style resistance to U.S. forces from former mid- and upper-level Iraqi officials, troops in Iraq also faced increasing threats from foreign terrorist groups that have established or reestablished bases in the country. He said those groups probably include Al Qaeda.

"There are those that would sympathize with [Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden] that have moved into Iraq and are trying to kill us," Abizaid said.

Guerrilla warfare is usually defined as organized campaigns by irregular soldiers who hide in the wilderness or among civilians and spring surprise attacks on a dominant conventional force.

Before the Iraq war, many U.S. analysts and defense officials had dismissed the threat of a postwar guerrilla insurgency, arguing that Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party did not have enough support from ordinary Iraqis to mount a serious campaign. But Iraqis have carried out assassinations of U.S. allies, sabotaged infrastructure and attacked troops on an almost daily basis.

Bush administration officials have sought to limit the influence of other countries in the Iraq reconstruction, fearing that shared power could interfere with their effort to build a free-market, democratic state at the center of a new Middle East. But without the United Nations imprimatur, it has been difficult for some countries to build domestic support for the idea of contributing police and troops to the U.S.-led rebuilding effort.

On Monday, India said it would not, without a U.N. role, contribute the more than 17,000 peacekeepers requested by the United States. France and Germany, prominent opponents of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, have made similar statements.

Diplomats said the U.N. discussions would probably focus on the idea of a new Security Council resolution much like the one that gave the organization`s blessing to the International Security Assistance Force now patrolling Afghanistan, under U.S. leadership.

The December 2001 resolution authorized creation of the force, urged members to contribute troops, but kept the force under national, rather than U.N., leadership. Diplomats said no country was urging creation of a blue-helmeted United Nations peacekeeping force. Such forces are less well-suited for dangerous combat situations such as the one in Iraq; the Pentagon would probably also oppose such a move because it would split the military authority, diplomats noted.

About-Face Predicted

Some U.S. lawmakers and foreign policy experts have been predicting that the challenges of the mission would lead the United States to make an about-face, and grant the United Nations a greater role.

The United States military is now spending about $3.9 billion a month in Iraq, and more than $800 million a month in Afghanistan. If casualty rates continue, the U.S. will soon have lost more soldiers since major military operations ended May 1 than it did in the period before.

"I think this ultimately will end up with peacekeeping forces out there under a United Nations mandate, which will necessitate a larger U.N. role in the political process too," said Nancy Soderberg, a vice president of the consulting firm International Crisis Group in New York and a former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration.

One senior Senate aide said the proposal to draw in the United Nations certainly had support within the State Department and might also have some support from Pentagon officials who might "be looking for an exit strategy" from Iraq.

Democratic lawmakers have been making ever-louder demands that the administration turn to the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for help in the rebuilding effort.

Even so, one senior U.S. official urged caution.

It is doubtful, the official said, that the French or Germans would agree to contribute troops, even with U.N. blessing. He said the existing U.N. resolution on postwar Iraq, No. 1483, already provides a sufficient basis for countries that wish to send troops.

"We haven`t adopted this as our strategy because it`s not clear what it`s going to give anybody," the official said. "But if there`s some momentum on the council, I`m sure we`ll look at it."

U.N. Mandate

In his remarks, Powell said that "there are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations, and I am in conversations with some ministers about this."

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in an appearance in New York, said the question was "not just an issue for Germany and France. Other nations are grappling with the issue, and the question has been posed as to whether or not Security Council action could improve the situation."

At the Pentagon, Abizaid painted a stark picture of the situation on the ground in Iraq.

The most significant problem for U.S. forces, he said, were mid-level Baath Party officials trying to bring Hussein back to power. Their attacks were growing in sophistication and coordination, with fighters employing rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles against U.S. forces, he said.

"The resistance is getting more organized, and it is learning," Abizaid said. "It is adapting. It is adapting to our tactics, techniques and procedures."

On Wednesday, suspected insurgents fired a surface-to-air missile at a C-130 cargo plane as it landed at Baghdad`s international airport. The missile, which missed its target, was at least the second in as many weeks in Iraq, Abizaid said. He said he was recently riding in a C-130 that swerved and dropped flares to avoid a possible missile attack.

Abizaid said that although he intended to pull the 3rd Infantry Division, which had led the charge into Baghdad, out of Iraq "by September," troops serving there should expect to serve 12-month tours.

Not since the Vietnam War have troops been asked routinely to serve so long in a combat environment.

Troops sent home would be replaced with reinforcements from bases in the U.S. and abroad, to maintain the level of forces in Iraq at about six divisions — or about 150,000 coalition troops, at least until mid-September, Abizaid said.

He said reinforcements could be drawn from the Marine Corps or from allied countries, as well as from the Army, which has borne the brunt of the fighting since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations May 1.

Abizaid`s statement was the first public acknowledgment by a defense official that additional Marines could be sent back to Iraq. Marines are ordinarily used only for combat operations, not peacekeeping.

Addressing the question of morale, Abizaid said he would ask commanders to tell troops going into Iraq up front when they will be going home.

"We understand these things. We are professional soldiers," Abizaid said.

Abizaid said if the security situation worsens, "I won`t hesitate to ask for more."

But he insisted that only better intelligence, not more troops, would alleviate the threats against U.S. forces.

"It`s not a matter of boots per square meter. Everybody wants to think that, but that`s just not so," Abizaid said. "If I could do one thing as a commander right now, I would focus my intelligence like a laser on where the problem is, which is mid-level Baathist leaders."



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-tene…
THE WORLD

Senate May Widen Its Inquiry Into Prewar Intelligence
After questioning CIA chief, some panel members say administration officials could be called next.
By Greg Miller and Mark Z. Barabak
Times Staff Writers

July 17, 2003

WASHINGTON — Democratic and Republican senators weighed expanding their probe of the prewar intelligence on Iraq on Wednesday after spending nearly five hours pressing CIA Director George J. Tenet to account for questionable claims regarding Baghdad`s nuclear program and the broader failure to find banned weapons.

The closed-door hearing marked Tenet`s first appearance before lawmakers since an eruption of finger-pointing last week between the White House and the CIA over who was to blame for President Bush`s ill-founded allegation in the State of the Union address that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Africa. Democrats said they would like to hear from White House officials next, and even a key Republican, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the intelligence committee, indicated that administration officials could be asked to testify.

Tenet issued an extraordinary statement Friday accepting blame for not striking the uranium language from the speech, though he also made it clear that the agency had expressed concern and had let it stand only when White House officials proposed attributing it to British intelligence.

Tenet did not comment to reporters after Wednesday`s hearing. Sources who took part in the session said Tenet told lawmakers that he did not read the State of the Union speech before it was delivered and that agency staffers involved in vetting the text did not call the uranium language to his attention.

A U.S. official said this was in contrast to an earlier case, in October, when agency officials alerted Tenet to a similar reference in a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati. Tenet intervened in that case to have the language removed.

Roberts said that Tenet, during his testimony, reiterated his responsibility for the uranium claim.

Roberts credited the CIA chief with being "forthright" in responding to questions but said that Tenet would probably be called to testify before the committee again — perhaps in open session in September. The senator indicated that White House officials could be called to appear before the committee.

Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the committee, described the questioning of Tenet as "very vigorous." He was among a number of Democrats to emerge from the session suggesting that the committee should next be calling on White House officials to testify.

"Director Tenet took the blame," Rockefeller said. "There remains in my mind the question of whether in fact that`s where it should stop." Rockefeller said he and Roberts were discussing how to manage the expansion of an inquiry that started as a review of prewar intelligence documents but has now become "a very large project."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) praised Tenet for forthright answers and characterized his statement last week accepting blame as "overgenerous."

"My view is that there are others who should step up to the plate as well," Feinstein said. "We`ll see if that happens."

Rockefeller and others have singled out national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, believing that her staff pressed to have the uranium language included in Bush`s speech despite widespread doubts about its reliability. Rice, in recent days, has denied any pressure.

Bush delivered the State of the Union speech on Jan. 28, at a time when he was still struggling to win international support for confronting Iraq by force.

"It is my belief there were some [in the White House] who were pushing, pushing, pushing" the intelligence on Iraq to make the case for war more compelling, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), a member of the committee, told CNN.

Bayh was among a number of members, both Democrat and Republican, who emerged from the session voicing support for Tenet and saying they do not believe he should resign.

Bush`s allegation in the State of the Union was based largely on documents purporting to show that Iraq had sought to acquire uranium from the African nation of Niger. Those documents, obtained by Italian authorities, were shared with the United States last October. But it wasn`t until March — when the documents were examined by U.N. inspectors — that they were shown to be forgeries.

The CIA`s record on its handling of the uranium allegation is mixed. It included the allegation in a key prewar assessment of Iraq`s weapons programs but voiced skepticism about the claim in other settings. Tenet intervened personally in October, for instance, urging White House officials to drop the Niger allegation from the speech Bush gave in Cincinnati.

The issue has become a significant problem for the White House. Wednesday`s hearing was attended by a throng of cameras and news crews that was larger than the media turnout for key hearings last year on the Sept. 11 attacks.

Democratic presidential hopefuls have seized on the uranium claim and have become far more aggressive in their criticism of the Bush administration`s case for war and handling of its aftermath.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Wednesday challenged the truthfulness of Bush and suggested that the country was no safer now than it was before the Sept. 11 attacks, a broadside that reflected the new eagerness of Democrats to challenge the administration`s war on terrorism.

"With each passing day, Americans are learning we face an intelligence gap," Kerry said in a speech in New York City. "Americans should be able to trust that what the president tells them is true — especially when it comes to the life-and-death decisions of war and peace."

For months, the leading Democratic presidential candidates had muted their criticisms of Bush and his foreign policy, as polls showed overwhelming public support for the war in Iraq.

The major exception was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who used his antiwar stance to launch himself into the top tier of contenders.

But lately other Democrats — including those, such as Kerry, who voted to support the war — have joined in the criticism, as the aftermath of the U.S. invasion grows messier and the administration fends off accusations that it used dubious intelligence to justify war.

The only presidential candidate on the intelligence committee, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), said Wednesday that Bush was ultimately to blame for any misinformation he gave the American people.

"The responsibility is not the CIA`s, it`s not anyone else`s," Edwards told reporters. "It is the president`s responsibility."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-deficit17jul17,1,7949666.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
EDITORIAL
a
Deep Debt, Deeper Trouble

July 17, 2003

The White House announcement of a record $455-billion deficit this year and $475 billion next year isn`t as bad as it seems. It`s worse. The administration figures do not include the costs of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which are now estimated at almost $4 billion a month, or the rebuilding of Afghanistan.

These glaring omissions indicate the White House recognizes that at a certain point, growing deficits threaten economic growth. In less than two years, the Office of Management and Budget has gone from predicting a surplus of $334 billion to anticipating a deficit of $455 billion in 2003.

Of this year`s deficit, $375 billion has been created by tax cuts alone. Overall, the administration is poised to put the country into a likely debt of $4.1 trillion over 10 years.

When the government goes that deeply into debt, interest payments alone gobble up money that should be used by companies for capital investments in equipment. It`s the same situation as a father who needs a new commuter car but is paying $200 a month in interest charges on his maxed-out credit card.

To attract the funds to cover the debt, the government drives up the price of borrowing for everyone. It`s no accident that yields on 10-year U.S. Treasuries have gone up in July from 3.1% to almost 4%, which puts sharp upward pressure on mortgage rates.

Eventually, the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates as well to attract domestic and foreign funds to pay for the deficit.

Of the members of the Bush economic team, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow is the only one to depart from the administration script, which declares that deficits are only a minor nuisance. Speaking in London on Wednesday, Snow called the deficit "worrisome" and expressed concern about the federal government borrowing so much money that it will crowd out private investment.

Still, Snow, like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, is predicting growth. But despite massive cuts in interest rates, it hasn`t happened so far, and the deficit isn`t helping. President Bush`s main argument for tax cuts was that they would stimulate the economy and create jobs.

With the unemployment rate at a nine-year high of 6.4% and the deficit burgeoning, tax cuts are having the opposite effect. As the cuts continue to phase in, even a thundering economic recovery won`t be able to prevent large deficits.

There are small-government hard-liners inside and outside of Congress who make no secret of hoping that the huge tax cuts will force substantial reductions in federal entitlement programs.

The biggest targets for shrinkage are Social Security and Medicare. Any move in this direction would deliver the exact opposite of the vibrant economy that Bush promised the tax cuts would bring.

The administration can undo some damage by delaying all or part of the phase-in of income-tax rate cuts and dividend tax reductions. The longer the White House resists reality, the more it risks smothering economic recovery.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dobbins…
COMMENTARY


We`ve Been Down This Road Before
Past interventions show we must share the burden of rebuilding Iraq.
By James Dobbins

July 17, 2003

Nation-building in Iraq is a massively complex and demanding task. It requires consistency of purpose and unity of command, but it also cannot succeed unless the United States shares the burdens and responsibilities of reconstruction with Iraqis and the rest of the world.

The effort in Iraq represents our most ambitious nation-building mission since World War II, and it has been tempting to look at what happened in Germany and Japan for inspiration. But the analogy doesn`t fit. The Axis powers were thoroughly defeated, and the Germans and Japanese proved ready to collaborate fully with American leadership. In contrast, our victory in Iraq was incomplete and, for most Iraqis, relatively painless. Perversely, its very speed has made the process of stabilization and reconstruction more demanding.

Additionally, in 1945, the U.S. produced more than 50% of the world`s wealth; there was no alternative to the U.S. tackling reconstruction more or less single-handedly. Today, we produce just 22% of global wealth — burden-sharing is not only more feasible, it`s necessary.

The focus on lessons of the post-World War II experience seems to have caused more recent and relevant lessons to be overlooked. Throughout the last decade in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and most recently Afghanistan, the United States established, through an often painful process of trial and error, what works and what doesn`t work when it comes to modern nation-building.

In Somalia, we confronted local warlords but failed to put in place an alternative source of power or legitimacy. In Haiti, we restored a freely elected but weak regime and then didn`t stay around long enough to establish enduring democratic reforms. In Bosnia, we rushed to hold national elections, only to find that the balloting entrenched the extremists who had sparked ethnic conflict in the first place. In Kosovo, we intervened to protect Kosovar Albanians from Serbs only to find we had to protect the remaining Serbs from vengeful Albanians. And, most recently in Afghanistan, we wisely accommodated rather than confronted local warlords and successfully installed a broad-based, moderate regime in Kabul, but then moved too slowly to build its authority.

In all of these cases, we relied heavily on the rest of the international community as we worked to reestablish local control.

In Somalia and Haiti, leadership responsibility was shared chronologically. The U.S. took charge for six months, then turned over authority to the United Nations. In the Balkans, we devised a better model — a functional division of responsibility. NATO took charge of all military operations. The U.N. (in Kosovo) and an ad hoc international council (in Bosnia) assumed civil oversight. This allowed the U.S. to reduce its share of the military and economic burdens to a sustainable 22% of the global total in Bosnia and 16% in Kosovo, while maintaining adequate unity of command and leadership.

In Iraq, we have begun the crucial process of associating Iraqis with their country`s transformation. The creation of the Iraqi governing council represents an important first step. Already we have advanced further in Iraq than we managed to get a decade ago in Somalia. We now need to heed the chief lesson of Haiti, that power should not be turned over fully until fundamental democratic reforms are in place; of Bosnia, that elections can come too soon as well as too late; of Kosovo, that having liberated Kurds and Shiites from Sunnis, we now must protect the latter from the former; and of Afghanistan, that a moderate, representative regime will require time to cement its authority.

But as for the equally crucial process of associating the rest of the world with Iraq`s reconstruction — it has hardly begun. On Wednesday, the Bush administration said it was discussing an increased United Nations role in Iraq, but at present the U.S. is providing more than 90% of the military manpower and money required for the reconstruction. This will change only if the U.S. proves ready to share power, as we did in Kosovo, Bosnia and even Afghanistan. We must yield enough authority to NATO, the World Bank and the U.N. to give other nations a stake in the reconstruction that is commensurate with their contributions, while preserving enough American influence to keep the mission on course.

The arrangements that met these competing needs in Bosnia and Kosovo were not perfect, and they will not exactly fit the situation in Iraq, but they are the best models we have developed so far, and they merit careful consideration.


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James Dobbins was the Clinton administration`s special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo and the Bush administration`s first envoy for Afghanistan. He directs the Rand Corp.`s International Security and Defense Policy Center.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Aftermath of War
The next West Bank?
David J. Andrus
Thursday, July 17, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/17/ED51…


At the end of June, I returned from 15 days in Iraq. What I saw is this: The country is on the verge of a firestorm, one that could engulf the entire Middle East.

Traveling with a group of academics, journalists and church representatives hosted by Christian Peacemaker Teams (an organization based in Chicago that provides human-shielding and intermediary services to populations suffering conflict), I met U.S. soldiers, ordinary Iraqi citizens, Iraqi Christian bishops, Islamic leaders and some of the small number of popularly appointed Iraqi leaders.

All the Iraqis told a similar story. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has brought the worst form of freedom: anarchy.

The regime of Saddam Hussein was swept aside but no political or civil structure has been put in its place. Iraq went from tight control to chaos in one fell swoop. In fact, Iraqis of all socioeconomic strata, from one end of the country to the other, told us that life is worse now.

I was in Iraq in 1999 as a member of a humanitarian assessment delegation sponsored by the Red Crescent. I can attest that, while conditions were miserable under Hussein`s rule, today the social fabric is in tatters.

What happens when a society is torn to shreds? Recall when Americans have been hit with disaster: Florida after Hurricane Andrew, for example. Floridians were outraged at the lack of medical care, food and law and order. They feared roving bandits. To protect family and property, they resorted to guns.

The people of Iraq are in a situation similar to the Floridians`. They have none of the following: police to protect them, medical care, potable water, dependable electricity, telephone service and jobs. All have been destroyed by the recent invasion and there appears to be no urgency on the part of the coalition forces to restore them.

Iraq with no law and order, no employment and no life-sustaining infrastructure is not free.

Granted, as President Bush has said, "The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time." Yet criticisms from his own staff, such as Timothy Carney, former ambassador to South African and Haiti, indicate a lack of both an understanding and sufficient money to reestablish basic humanitarian needs in Iraq.

Whether through inability or unwillingness, U.S. failure to restore security and dignity to Iraqis is creating an explosive situation. "The solution to rising Iraqi frustration, fear and anger is speedy restoration of basic security, in all its forms," Fallujah governor Taha Hamid Al Alawi said to me.

Catholic Bishop Warduni of Baghdad believes there is "no plan to rebuild what they destroyed." Archbishop Kessab of Basra expressed similar feelings, and both bishops echoed the sentiments of Islamic clerics we met.

If we don`t produce a plan soon or step aside entirely and allow self-rule, I see occupied Iraq becoming the U.S. version of the Palestinian conflict. Like Israeli troops occupying the West Bank, U.S. troops reflect a dangerous mix of fear and ignorance. They can`t understand why fear-filled and starving Iraqis, who now find themselves in a Wild West type of anarchy, with bandits and all, are not grateful for being liberated. So, when Iraqis express rage, the troops react according to their training. They shoot first and ask questions later.

We are at the start of a cycle of violence: Each side feels justified in its behavior. Anger and retaliation increases. And hatred grows until the future is threatened.

The United States has experience as a military occupying force. Perhaps the most successful was the U.S. occupation of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur. His thoughts on the task warrant repeating: "If any occupation lasts too long, or is not carefully watched from the start, one party becomes slaves and the other masters," MacArthur wrote in his "Reminiscences." "History teaches, too, that almost every military occupation breeds new wars of the future."

David J. Andrus ([e-mail]) is director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Southern California School of International Relations.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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Deeper in red, but who cares?

Thursday, July 17, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/17/ED26…


THE CREDIBILITY of the Bush administration is being tested by more than its muddled use of intelligence findings to justify the invasion of Iraq. The president and his top aides are also pushing the limits of public trustfulness by acting as if the sudden appearance of a $455 billion deficit in the waning fiscal year (ending Sept. 30) is no problem.

The quantity of red ink gushing in fiscal 2003 is now discovered to be 50 percent more than was projected only five months ago, when the deficit for the year was expected to be $304 billion.

This darkening of the fiscal outlook is truly dramatic when one thinks back to the Bush White House`s prediction in 2001 of a $334 billion surplus for this fiscal year. That means the swing toward deficit spending has been a dizzying $789 billion. The final accounting could show it to be more.

The reasons for the mushrooming deficit, of course, are not all in President Bush`s control. The downturn of the economy, sapping hitherto flourishing federal revenue sources, is blamed by federal budgeters for 53 percent of the swing from black to red ink. Another 24 percent is linked to higher spending for new programs including the war and domestic security measures adopted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But 23 percent of the deficit swing is traceable to three large tax cuts pushed by the president through Congress since 2001.

Is this tax relief wise or foolish as fiscal policy? And should the arrival of spectacularly large federal deficits (swelling to $475 billion next fiscal year) be treated so off-handedly by Bush and company? In a strange pose for an administration supposedly guided by GOP devotion to fiscal prudence, Budget Director Joshua Bolten chooses to point to presently low interest rates (a symptom of bad times) as indicating the deficit has not hurt the economy.

The most serious potential damage to the economy and to the American people,

from the scale of deficit spending, should be looked for years from now when the Bush administration is history and a new generation is paying the bills. For instance, deficits projected between 2002 and 2011 will add another $3.6 trillion to the overall national debt (now $6.7 trillion), to be borne indefinitely by the nation`s taxpayers. House Budget Committee Democrats calculate that over the same period, Bush`s tax cuts will have cost $3.7 trillion. That money could have reduced the burdensome debt.

The president justifies his tax-cut policy as the way to spur economic growth and create more jobs for American workers. Tax breaks mainly benefiting the wealthy, however, are not an efficient economic stimulus. Bush seems impervious to concerns about more red ink, as he promotes a Medicare prescription drug plan that could cost another $400 billion over 10 years.

Our only salvation is an unlooked-for resurgence of economic growth to offset the doleful trend of Washington decision-making.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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Wolfowitz Committee Instructed White House To Use Iraq/Uranium Ref In Pres Speech

By Jason Leopold

07/16/03: (Information Clearing House) WASHINGTON, D.C--A Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, advised President Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz’s committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate’s intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue.



The Senators and the CIA official said they could be forced out of government and brought up on criminal charges for leaking the information to this reporter and as a result requested anonymity. The Senators said they plan to question CIA Director George Tenet Wednesday morning in a closed-door hearing to find out whether Wolfowitz and members of a committee he headed misled Bush and if the President knew about the erroneous information prior to his State of the Union address.



Spokespeople for Wolfowitz and Tenet vehemently denied the accusations. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, would not return repeated calls for comment.



The revelations by the CIA official and the senators, if true, would prove that Tenet, who last week said he erred by allowing the uranium reference to be included in the State of the Union address, took the blame for an intelligence failure that he was not responsible for. The lawmakers said it could also lead to a widespread probe of prewar intelligence.



At issue is a secret committee set up in 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the Office of Special Plans, which was headed by Wolfowitz, Abrum Shulsky and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, to probe allegations links between Iraq and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and whether the country was stockpiling a cache of weapons of mass destruction. The Special Plans committee disbanded in March after the start of the war in Iraq.



The committee’s job, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover and present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi, who has provided the White House with reams of intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs that has been disputed. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.



The Office of Special Plans, according to the CIA official and the senators, routinely provided Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat, much of which was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney and some of which was called into question by the CIA.



In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program, evidence that would have helped the White House build a solid case for war in Iraq.



In an article in the New York Times last October, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the Office of Special Plans to “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the CIA.



The CIA official and the senators said that’s when Wolfowitz and his committee instructed the White House to have Bush use the now disputed line about Iraq’s attempts to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger in a speech the President was set to give in Cincinnati. But Tenet quickly intervened and informed Stephen Hadley, an aide to National Security Adviser Rice, that the information was unreliable.





Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine in May that the Office of Special Plans “started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the President. It’s not intelligence. It’s political propaganda.”



Lang said the CIA and Office of Special Plans often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Wolfowitz.



Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the author of a May New Yorker story on the Office of Special Plans, reported, “former CIA officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the CIA director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.” Because the CIA’s analysts are now on the defensive, “they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”



“They see themselves as outsiders, ” a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people, told Hersh. He added, “There’s a high degree of paranoia. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.”



By last fall, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, which failed to find any evidence of Iraq’s weapons programs, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans



Hersh reported that the Special Plans Office “developed a close working relationship with the (Iraqi National Congress), and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.”


In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special Plans co-director Douglas Feith, said the committee was not an “intelligence project,” but rather an group of 18 people that looked at intelligence information from a different point of view.



Feith said when the group had new “thoughts” on intelligence information it was given; they shared it with CIA director Tenet.



“It was a matter of digesting other people`s intelligence,” Feith said of the main duties of his group. “Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policy makers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism.”

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article4123.htm

[Joerver]

So langsam werden die neuen Opfer ausgerichtet. Bolton erzählt der Presse, dass Syrein eine große Gefahr ist, weil sie WMD entwickeln, Iran hat eine Rakete mit 800 Meilen Reichweite( das gibt wieder schöne Beispiele für Seps Rechenkunst) bis Berlin oder bis Moskau. Dann entwickeln sie Atomwaffen. Dann natürlich Nordkorea, aber da wollen sie nicht so richtig ran, vielleicht hat man auch eine Allergie gegen SOAsien. Mein Tip Syrien, ist am einfachsten, bringt dadurch die besten Ratings.


John Chuckman: `Enron-style management in a dangerously complex world`
Posted on Thursday, July 17 @ 10:03:08 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By John Chuckman

At least North Korea won`t have Bush droning about fake documents for the sale of uranium from Niger. He`s already played that role, and it wasn`t well received. Besides, North Korea reprocesses spent nuclear-reactor fuel to extract plutonium, and they now politely inform us they have enough to build six nuclear devices. Former Defense Secretary Perry, normally a man of soft words and low blood pressure, says the US will be at war with North Korea before very long.

Iran tests a missile that can travel 800 miles, its eighth test, making it ready for military service. It is almost certain that the Iranians are working to create nuclear weapons, and who can blame them? It is so clear that nuclear weapons make a difference about the way you are treated in the world.

Israel is very concerned over what is happening in Iran. After all, it does not want to lose its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.



Meanwhile, Israel arrested a man said to be from the Real IRA working with Palestinian terrorists, only it turns out he was someone else altogether who happened to have the same name as one supplied by British security services. Do you think this kind of sloppy work might have helped Blair`s idiotic Iraqi claims? Or is this just an elaborate intelligence stunt to take pressure off Tony?

Speaking of Blair, he does appear to be in serious political trouble, fighting members of his own party, former ministers, members of the opposition, and the BBC. I`ve always regarded the British as among the world`s most decent, sound, and sensible people. They`re proving it once again, holding Blair accountable for the dirty, lying mess in Iraq.

Things tend to go a little more slowly in the US where Bush remains popular. Lincoln`s line about fooling some or all the people has been boiled down by marketing consultants to fooling enough of them long enough to do what you want, knowing most will loose interest in anything that happened more than a week ago.

Afghanistan remains pretty much a chaotic, murderous patchwork of government by warlords, some financed by a huge expansion of drug production. The situation bears an uncanny resemblance to what we find in many "inner-urban" areas of America. Somehow, I doubt we`ll see any time soon a Congressional program, like the one pushed on South American countries, to spray poison over growing fields. Meanwhile, the US, wanting to limit the risks to its boys, badgers every country in the Western world to police the chaos they`ve created there.

The CIA advises that concern over Syria having "weapons of mass destruction" has been overblown. The good ol` boys in Langley spend about $30 billion dollars a year to come up with cream puffs like this. So Bush`s war on the Syrian front, at least for now, appears postponed. Anyway, all the stories on Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction probably have passed their best-consumed-by date-stamp and can safely be dumped.

US soldiers are ambushed and killed almost each day in Iraq. The Pentagon and the press serving its interests keep calling the attackers "militants loyal to the former regime," although how they could possibly know that is impossible to say.

Little is said in the American press of the daily misery in which Iraqis must live, a situation that just might motivate many otherwise decent people to attack Americans. The morale of American soldiers is reported to be falling in the face of so much hatred against occupation.

A fair part of America`s militarily-active forces - as opposed to that part dealing with worldwide beer shipments, hot showers, appearances by aspiring starlets, and selecting new fabrics for future uniforms - is tied up in Iraq while Bush prays for guidance over which one of a half dozen countries to attack next in his sacred mission to bring the forces of evil to heel finally and forever.

Pressure reached a very high level for the US to intervene in Liberia`s bloody mess. Bush has felt the pressure and hopes a token, much-publicized military inspection will dampen it. America`s loony-right crowd has busied itself with articles about why the US should not become involved in Africa, wrapping itself in a cloak of higher ideals, but it is painfully clear what lurks just beneath the rhetoric for many of them.

Can any rational person imagine America`s right wing supporting Americans dying for blacks in Africa? Does anyone remember Republican Tom DeLay`s racist-tinged comments on President Clinton`s trip to Africa? Look at the rest of the cast of characters including Trent Lott.

Situations like Liberia are authentic calls for help. There are no geopolitical considerations of weight, just people suffering under a terrible situation. The US, of course, is not in the business of genuine humanitarian or toss-the-tyrant interventions, despite all the comic-book-hero nonsense about Iraq and Afghanistan and a dozen other smashed-up places. America`s establishment uses force where foreigners stand in its way. All the rest of Washington`s foreign-policy words serve only to keep "folks back home" putting up tax dollars and sons for the job.

The world is becoming a very complex place. Just as free markets are messier and more complex than state-run ones for individual countries, all the elements of globalization contribute to vastly increasing complexity for the entire world. One feels sometimes almost a twinge of nostalgia for the Cold War`s simple verities.

The more complex the world becomes, the more we need transparency and honest regulatory mechanisms in international relations. Greater complexity also increases the need for intelligent, educated, and accountable leadership. Old cliches and pat formulas that may have once served, especially on the part of the world`s leading nation, become daily less useful and more dangerous for everyone. The Enron-style management we see in the White House is a formula for eventual catastrophe.

America, are you listening?

[Joerver]

The Coalition of the Rational
07/16/2003 @ 4:03pm
E-mail this Post

Here`s a modest proposal. Let`s start a Coalition of the Rational to take back our country from this radical rightwing Administration. After all, these are times when true conservatives are as concerned as liberal Democrats about the damage being done to our democracy and international credibility as a result of manipulated intelligence, preemptive war policy and arrogant unilateralism.



The coalition could bring together a broad, transpartisan group of concerned citizens--from Goldwater-style conservatives, Rockefeller Republicans and former State Department and intelligence officials, to progressive Democrats and religious, labor and student leaders--to mobilize Americans in informed opposition to the Bush Administration`s undermining of US security in our name.



Here are some nominations for charter members of the Coalition of the Rational:



*The dozens of active intelligence officials who are coming forward--mostly through leaks in the press--to describe how Administration officials pressured them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and deceive the country.



*Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity, a national organization of retired CIA, military and NSA intelligence officers who called into question the Administration`s rationale for war and is now up in arms over the Bush Team`s manipulation of intelligence. Check out the group`s statement released last May, which noted in part: "In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin--cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done with respect to Iraq....[N]ever before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war." The group`s recent statement powerfully indicts the vice president and "strongly recommends Dick Cheney`s immediate resignation" for his role in deceiving the public, the media and other policy-makers regarding the true threat Iraq actually posed to the United States.



*Rand Beers, a National Security Council adviser to five administrations, including those of Reagan and Bush 41, who recently resigned as Bush`s special counterrorism assistant. As he stepped down, Beers blasted the Administration`s handling of the war on terror as "making us less secure, not more secure."



*Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Carter, who cautions that "our single-minded and...demagogic fixation with Iraq is undermining the credibility as well as the legitimacy of US leadership."



*Joseph Wilson, the highest-ranking American diplomat in Baghdad immediately before the Gulf War, who argues that the "underlying objective of this war [Iraq] is the imposition of a Pax Americana on the region," and that "the projection of influence and power through the use of force will breed resistance in the Arab world that will sorely test our political will and stamina."



*James W. Ziglar, Sr., Bush`s former Immigration commissioner and a self-described "conservative in the Barry Goldwater mold," recently warned that the Administration`s increasingly aggressive antiterrorism tactics may be violating citizens` basic constitutional rights.



*Greg Thielmann, the former head of the State Department`s Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, and a career foreign service officer who served under three Republican and two Democratic Presidents, recently went public with his anger and disgust at the Bush Administration for completely misrepresenting Iraq as an imminent threat to US security by knowingly distorting intelligence information. "This Administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude," Thielmann has said. "We know the answers--give us the intelligence to support those answers."



*John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat for nearly twenty years, who resigned last February in protest against the Administration`s drive to war. In his resignation letter, he warned that "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America`s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson." When asked if his views were widely shared among his diplomatic colleagues, Kiesling replied: "Not one of my colleagues is comfortable with our policy." Several other career foreign service officials resigned in the weeks after Kiesling stepped down.



*George Kennan, the chief architect of the containment and deterrence policies that shaped American foreign policy for more than fifty years, attacked the Administration`s national security doctrine as "a great mistake in principle." He also denounced dishonest efforts by the White House to link Al-Qaeda terrorists with Saddam Hussein.



*Ray McGovern, who worked for the CIA at high levels for twenty-seven years, and regularly briefed Bush`s father in the 1980s, and who recently quit his post in protest at the Bush Administration`s misuse of intelligence briefings.



*Arthur Schlesinger, presidential special assistant and author, who argues that "the Bush Doctrine converts us into the world`s judge, jury and executioner--a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership," and who warns that because of Bush, the "global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism."



*Ted Sorensen, former chief speechwriter to a muscular Democrat--President John Kennedy--who laments that the "long uneasiness with bloodletting and battle that followed Vietnam has been replaced by a new infatuation for war, a preference for invasion over persuasion."



And there are scores of others inside and outside the Administration; in Establishment circles; in military and business organizations, who are alarmed by the White House`s radical extremism. At off-the-record meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, prominent figures regularly express shock (and no awe) at how this Administration is undermining America`s security--and reputation in the world.



The Coalition of the Rational could launch nationwide public hearings and town hall meetings to expose the dangers posed by the Bush Administration. Members could propose sane, alternative foreign and security policies. Its key members could speak out on TV, radio and on op-ed pages, and its institutions could join forces with internet-based networks such as MoveOn and TrueMajority to create a broad-based coalition sufficiently powerful to take back this country from the extremists now running our government.

http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=822

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
The Contortions of the Pro-War Democrats


By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, July 17, 2003; 9:48 AM


Are some of the Democratic presidential candidates trying to have it both ways on Iraq?

In recent days, Democrats have escalated their criticism of the Bush administration`s pre-war claims about the threat posed by Iraq. Four of the major candidates who voted for the war resolution last year are now raising serious questions about the administration`s handling of the Iraq situation, while maintaining that they did the right thing by supporting the march to war.

Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), and John Edwards (N.C.) and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) have all stepped up their rhetoric about either Bush`s pre-war claims or his post-war planning or both.

Kerry, for instance, has been very forceful in criticizing the way the administration has handled its post-war planning, saying that essentially the administration had no plan for securing the peace after the war ended.

"I hope they [the administration] have a strategy," Kerry told Washington Post reporters and editors in a luncheon meeting last week. "It seems to me that having been as intent as they obviously were on taking down Saddam Hussein, they would have had a more extensive plan for winning the peace and yeah, I`m actually, I`m really shocked and I am angry about the sort of arrogant absence of any major international effort to do what`s really needed here to protect our troops and to guarantee a victory."

Asked if he was still comfortable with his vote authorizing the president to use force, Kerry did not hesitate.

"I have no question about the decision I made," he said. "Even Hans Blix said they weren`t in compliance."

Then there was Kerry again on CNN Wednesday morning, criticizing not only the administration`s post-war planning, but also raising questions about the administration`s handling of intelligence, particularly the claim that Hussein was seeking the material for nuclear weapons in Africa.

When asked by Soledad O`Brien if he were "backtracking to some degree" now, Kerry responded: "It`s not just the 16 words, it`s all of our intelligence. I mean, we were told they had weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes. We were told they had unmanned vehicles that had the ability to deliver. I mean, there are a series of things here. Colin Powell came to the Foreign Relations Committee and told us, in answer to one of my questions, the only reason to go to war were weapons of mass destruction. So I voted to give the president the power to go to the U.N. in order -- and to have the threat of force -- in order to hold Saddam Hussein accountable."

So now Kerry is saying his vote was based on faulty intelligence from the administration while still maintaining that he has absolutely no question about the validity of his vote. But if the intelligence was faulty, doesn`t that call into question a vote based on it? Not in Kerry`s view.

While raising questions about the administration`s credibility, Edwards has not gone as far as Kerry, choosing to focus primarily on the administration`s post-war failures.

"And unfortunately, this failure has been a long time coming," Edwards, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said recently. "Long before the war began I warned the administration that planning for the reconstruction of Iraq was as important as winning the war. They failed to learn that lesson in Afghanistan and they are failing again in Iraq."

So was Edwards comfortable with the administration`s plan for post-war reconstruction when he cast his vote authorizing the administration to go to war?

"Did he assume that the administration would fail in post-war Iraq?" replied Edwards`s spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri. "No. But they are [failing]. He`s always been concerned, and he started talking about it in September. The best you can do is point out people`s errors from the past and hope they learn from their mistakes. But in this case, they didn`t."

Talking to reporters outside Wednesday`s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Edwards turned up the heat on Bush: "When the president speaks, he speaks on behalf of the American people. George Tenet has accepted his responsibility, and that`s good, but at the end of the day the president, when he speaks, has to take responsibility for what he says. The responsibility is not the CIA`s, it`s not anyone else`s, it is the president`s responsibility. And those 16 words were spoken by the president, and he has to take responsibility for them."

Gephardt has called for a congressional investigation of the president`s prewar claims that Iraq was seeking nuclear arms. At the same time, he has said that the nuclear arguments did not play a role in his decision to support the war. Technically this might not be a contradiction. But it does raise the question, if the point was irrelevant, why call for a congressional investigation?

"President Bush`s factual lapse in his State of the Union address cannot be simply dismissed as an intelligence failure," Gephardt said recently. "This president has a pattern of using excessive language in his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks. This continued recklessness represents a failure of presidential leadership."

Gephardt was referring to the same president he proudly stood beside in November to tout his vote for the war resolution.

Gephardt spokesman Erik Smith explained his boss`s position: "Whether or not the [nuclear] assertion was a factor [in Gephardt`s pro-war vote], it shouldn`t have happened."

Even Lieberman, who has been the most consistently vocal supporter of the president`s on the war, has gotten in on the act. Accusing the president of failing to accept "any responsibility whatsoever for this serious mistake by his administration," Lieberman has also called for a congressional investigation.

"There`s just one way to make this right," Lieberman said in a statement on Monday. "Rather than having revelations come out one-by-one in a series of trickles - as they have with the events leading up to 9/11 - it`s time for a full, forthright, and bipartisan inquiry into the intelligence failures regarding Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction. Why is the administration still resisting such an inquiry?"

On Wednesday, Lieberman went even further, calling for CIA Director George Tenet`s resignation.

Yet Lieberman harbors not the slightest doubt that he had all the information he needed to make an informed decision to go to war in Iraq. Lieberman spokesman Jano Cabrera explained it this way: "Just because Democrats supported changing the regime in Iraq and saw this as a just cause, that doesn`t mean they support the way the president went about accomplishing that goal nor the various and changing justifications he has put forth."

It`s the Politics, Stupid!
Rhetoric aside, the position of these four Democratic candidates is not that far from Bush`s: That is, that the world is a safer place with Hussein gone, and even absent the nuclear threat, the war was justified.

So what`s going on here?

Simply put, with anger among the party`s base off the charts about the basis for going to war, the pro-war candidates can`t afford to not challenge the president.

Many grass-roots Democrats were questioning the administration`s assertions about the threat posed by Iraq long before the White House acknowledged last week that it should not have included the Iraq nuclear assertion in the president`s State of the Union speech. War opponents questioned the administration`s claims about Hussein`s links to al Qaeda, Iraq`s ability to launch a quick strike against U.S. allies in the region and the Iraqi government`s alleged attempts to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to be used as centrifuges for enrich uranium. (See The Post`s story, Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid.

But the pro-war Democrats can`t backtrack too far. In choosing to support Bush last fall, the four candidates decided to accept the administration`s reasoning over the doubts of many in the party. To switch gears now would be to acknowledge that they should not have done so.

With Vermont Gov. Howard Dean surging, it`s clear that he is being rewarded at least in part for his consistent stance against the war. In forums in Iowa and New Hampshire, the war issue has become an even hotter topic in recent weeks, with voters pressing some of the pro-war candidates to reconcile the growing doubts about a key reason for going to war with their votes on the matter.

The pro-war candidates may be able to mollify some of the base by stepping up the anti-Bush war rhetoric. And there`s still a lot of time left before the primaries begin. Any number of scenarios could still play out, including the possibility that weapons of mass destruction may be found in Iraq, although that`s looking less and less likely.

For now, the four pro-war Democrats will have to face the question of whether they are trying to have it both ways.

Addendum
Earlier this week, a prominent politician went on national television raising questions about the Bush administration`s policy in Iraq.

Here are parts of what he said:

"Did, in fact, individuals high up in the administration shape and mold this analysis of intelligence to serve their own purposes? I don`t know. . . . We need to get the facts out, because this is in the interests of this administration. There`s a cloud hanging over this administration."

He continued: "We can`t shoulder this burden alone. We are stretched so thin in so many areas that we just can`t carry it. That`s why we need the United Nations. We need NATO. We need our friends in this. It`s serious. We didn`t think through this very well before we got into it and we`re now dealing with the consequences of not thinking through this."

Who was this politician? Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)? Dean perhaps?

No, it was Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) recipient of two Purple Hearts earned during his tour in Vietnam.

Hagel is known for his independent streak, particular on issues of foreign policy, where he occasionally breaks with his party. But he is neither a lefty nor a renegade, voting with his party nearly 95 percent of the time and earning strong ratings from conservative groups.

Hagel`s comments were almost indistinguishable from some of the things Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Kennedy have said in recent days.

Who would have guessed even three months ago that foreign policy might be as big, if not a bigger campaign issue than the economy for the president? But that`s where we are today: A nation wondering if it was misled on the most serious of matters, and a White House in a defensive fighter`s stance, trying to avoid a knockout punch.


© 2003 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 11:09 a.m. EDT July 17, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

A new audiotape purported to be of Saddam Hussein urges his followers to wage a holy war against U.S. and British forces. In the recording aired on an Arab TV channel, a speaker denounces the newly formed Iraqi governing council as a tool of occupying forces. And he accuses President Bush and British leader Tony Blair of tricking their own people to justify the war on Iraq.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush are likely to discuss Iraq intelligence failures as Blair visits the White House on Thursday. Blair will also speak to a joint meeting of Congress.
A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee says CIA Director George Tenet has told the panel a White House official insisted that questionable information on Iraq`s nuclear intentions be included in the president`s State of the Union speech. The White House disputes Sen. Dick Durban`s account, calling it "nonsense."
U.S. Central Command says American forces found a cache of about military explosives in central Iraq Thursday that included 54 crates of C-4 and 250,000 blasting caps. A senior Pentagon official says troops found the stash about 30 miles southwest of Baghdad after being tipped by Iraqis.
U.S. forces are on the lookout for new trouble on a major anniversary of Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party, after a day that saw the killings of another American soldier and an Iraqi mayor who had cooperated with coalition forces.
The Pentagon`s second-in-command is in Iraq to assess the progress in rebuilding the country. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was meeting with the top American administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, and the senior U.S. commander of coalition forces.
The decision to extend the stay of the U.S. Army`s 3rd Infantry Division is being met with anger, sadness and longing for home by the division`s 9,000 soldiers. They`ve been deployed for eight months. The Pentagon says it may get them home by September if the security situation allows.
There`s high-level talk of a U.N. resolution authorizing other countries to help with peacekeeping in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell says the U.S. is discussing the idea with other nations and with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
A top Russian diplomat says Moscow is prepared to consider a U.S. proposal for a U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at bringing more international troops to Iraq and would weigh sending its own peacekeepers there under a U.N. mandate.
U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill says India`s refusal to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq will not have any impact on New Delhi`s relations with Washington. Earlier this week, the Indian government rejected a U.S. request for troops to participate in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
Many Iraqi women are staying indoors -- away from their jobs and their lives -- because they fear being raped. A female inmate from a mental hospital ventured outside when looters broke into her facility. She was raped and when she returned to Al Rashad hospital, she discovered she was pregnant.
Jordanian officials have told the head of the United Nations refugee agency that they will work to resolve the cases of more than 12-hundred refugees stranded in a no man`s land on the border of Jordan and Iraq. Jordan is home to up to 300-thousand Iraqis. Several thousand are believed to have returned home since the end of the war in Iraq.

DEATH TOLL


The Pentagon said that as of Monday, 144 U.S. personnel had been killed in combat since the start of the Iraq war. At least two U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraqi attacks since then, bringing the total just short of the 147 killed in combat during the 1991 Gulf War.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Bush plans to take truth for long ride

http://www.azcentral.com/news/opinions/columns/articles/0715…


O. Ricardo

Pimentel
Republic

columnist
Jul. 15, 2003 12:00 AM


The president says he was bamboozled by the CIA into including false information in his State of the Union address.

Agency Director George Tenet is officially the fall guy.

OK, but the CIA wasn`t the only agency to know that Iraq didn`t try to buy uranium from Niger, a suspect factoid the president worked into his address to prove Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program.

The State Department knew the intelligence to be faulty. Its African bureau was briefed on the findings of the former State Department official sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate.

The CIA, the official says, instigated the investigation because of an inquiry from the vice president`s office. Are we now to believe that the vice president didn`t get his answer?

And are we to believe that the 2003 State of the Union address wasn`t vetted with either the State Department or vice president?

Of course it was. So why haven`t Colin Powell and Dick Cheney also fallen on their swords?

In the speech, the president said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In the CIA`s mind, citing the information was OK because the British were indeed saying it, though we knew their information likely to be false.

Tenet, whose agency failed to detect or act on intelligence leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and is reportedly dragging its feet on providing information to the commission investigating the tragedy, now says this was a mistake.

Despite the CIA mea culpa, there should be some healthy skepticism about whether the president or his senior advisers were told before the address that this was false. But assume the CIA-as-culprit version is entirely correct.

There is a far more likely reason why the agency allowed false information into the president`s speech. That would be because the president had let it be known that he was interested only in information that allowed him to do what he wanted to do. We call this political manipulation of intelligence.

But, hey, doing this in pursuit of a goal is no big deal apparently.

Yes it is. A boss who demands to hear only what he wants to hear cannot be trusted to make good decisions or to give the folks he serves good information.

Tenet is taking the blame, but we shouldn`t forget these other folks who knew the truth. Mostly we shouldn`t forget the boss who could not be disputed and preferred truth-sounding statements to whole truths.

Tenet`s loyalty is now beyond question. Bush`s isn`t. Even if he hasn`t fired Tenet, Bush is expressing confidence in him and the administration returns to the we-were-just-quoting-the-British argument. Expect this confidence in Tenet to change if the issue does not subside.

In the Bush administration, Tenet`s taking the blame - and saving his job in the short-term - is called accountability. The CIA fooled the president. This would have been called skullduggery in the Clinton administration, with all the machinations thought to be courtesy of Clinton himself.

Now, however, calling the president on his prevarications that led to war is, Republicans say, politically motivated and a "tempest in a teapot." How convenient.

The fact is the Bush administration would still be trying to dance around or bury the Iraq-Niger falsehood had the former State Department officials who determined the information as false hadn`t stepped forward. The lie had longevity because the administration needed it to be true. It was just too juicy to let go.

OK, let`s say Bush and everyone else from Cheney to Powell were CIA pawns in this matter.

The uranium story was only one lie. The president has yet to make a case for the "imminent threat" that he said made war necessary but which the war has so far proven illusory. Was President Bush fooled on all of this? By multiple agencies?

No, a far more likely explanation is that we have a president who prefers to ignore the complexities generally dished up by truth and that his underlings act on such expectations.

It has now been amply demonstrated that this is Bush`s management style. On taxes. On the economy. On Iraq.

Serving up a scapegoat this early in presidential campaigning makes the administration hopeful that the issue of whether the president lied will simply go away by `04.

Not hardly. Honesty and credibility are the campaign issues.



Reach Pimentel at [e-mail] or [phone]. His column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.

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PUBLIC DOUBT GROWING QUICKLY AS BUSH`S WAR STORIES UNRAVEL
By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT -- The lies and calculated deceptions George W. Bush used to make his case for war with Iraq are unraveling. At long last, more Americans are realizing how intelligence information was shaped and warped to support the case for an attack on Iraq to protect us from the "imminent threat" of Saddam`s phantom weapons.

Nearly every day now, American soldiers die and the resistance to the occupation of Iraq grows stronger and more organized. In a chilling interview with Newsday, a leader of Saddam Hussein`s Fedayeen militia describes the strategy that will challenge the new American empire.

The militia fighter, living on the run and known as Khaled, described the secret leadership structure and how the insurgents operate in five- and six-member cells. He says they are in it for the long run.

"We have many more people and we`re a lot better organized than the Americans realize. We have been preparing for this kind of guerrilla war for a long time, and we are much more patient than the Americans. We have nowhere else to go."

American forces are living in a shooting gallery, and it`s likely to get worse as the insurgents exploit the growing hostility toward the occupying troops.

Patience is not one of our distinguished national virtues and, given the dangers and the price tag of $4 billion a month for occupation, twice the original estimates, polls show American confidence in the ignoble experiment in Iraq is waning rapidly.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush said, with resounding, unequivocal certainty, that Iraq was seeking nuclear material from Africa. That assertion was based on a British intelligence report that was actually built on forged documents.

CIA Director George Tenet has fallen on his sword and is taking the rap for the president`s propagation of fraud to buttress support for war. The speech never should have included the Iraq-Niger uranium allegations, Tenet said in a prepared statement. "This was a mistake," he said. The Bush presidents always surrounded themselves with dutiful butlers willing to clean up their messes.

What`s hilarious now is listening to the Clintonian parsing the "straight-talking" Bush and his minions are using to justify the deception.

Let`s see. We were just quoting the British. The information showing the fraudulent documents never made it to the White House. It was only 16 words in a long speech. We know Saddam`s a bad guy and if he wasn`t shopping for uranium then, he would be sometime. At the time it was said, it was believed to be true.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times notes, "More and more with Bush administration pronouncements about the Iraq war, it depends on what the meaning of the word `is` is."

Rather than pledge to find out what really happened, King George says with sublime arrogance that, since Tenet took the fall, the matter is over. Ari "I`ll say anything" Fleischer says, "The president has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well."

What they`re really saying is that they don`t want to get straight answers about how in God`s name the President of the United States could possibly foist such a colossal lie on the world and what role top manipulators in the White House played in pouncing on the bogus information the CIA had already had serious doubts over.

Field Marshall Rumsfeld says he became aware of the fraud in March, and you have to assume the president was aware of the truth also. Why then did they wait until July to confess?

The president is really unrepentant about using the phony Iraq-Niger claim. He just brushed it off, saying, "There is no doubt Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace."

Let`s remember the context of all this. The Bush administration was always willing to inflate and exaggerate the threat Saddam posed whenever possible. They consistently leaned on the side of pumping up whatever evil intentions he had.

What`s worse than the now-admitted "mistake" -- and you can bet there are many others -- is the deliberate rhetorical connection repeatedly made to tie Saddam and Iraq to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That is the biggest lie of all, but it worked so well in convincing the Congress and the American people that the two were inseparable partners in terror that Bush and company will never admit to that whopper.

As they scramble to cover up the deceptions for war with Iraq, the Bush people are doing a marvelous job in covering up the truth about intelligence information the government possessed before Sept. 11.

Note this very well. George W. Bush never wanted an independent commission to investigate the events leading up to the worst terrorist attack in American history. He fought its creation and now he`s doing everything he can to scuttle its work.

The Sept. 11 commission leaders -- chairman Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, former Democratic member of the House from Indiana -- know the White House is stalling in providing documents and testimony needed for the commission to do its work.

The Pentagon and the Defense Department are not cooperating quickly or fully, and both agencies want to have witnesses interviewed in the presence of government colleagues from the departments -- a situation the commission considers "intimidation."

The delays and the witness "minding" seriously impair the commission`s ability to present a full report to the nation by its deadline next May.

In an editorial, The New York Times warns we should all heed Kean and Hamilton`s warning. "When these seasoned, mild-mannered men start complaining that the administration is trying to intimidate the commission, the country had better take notice."

The Bush administration scoffed when UN weapons inspectors interviewed Iraqi scientists, with Saddam`s agents present, and were required to have "minders`" as they toured suspected weapons sites. How could the scientists possibly be candid and tell the truth under those circumstances, Bush operatives wondered.

Now the administration wants its own "minders." The Times points to the dangers. "Acting more like the Soviet Kremlin than the American government, the administration has insisted that monitors from various agencies attend debriefings of key officials by investigators. ... This is a thinly veiled attempt at intimidation."

The president is already nervous about the release of a report on the Joint House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Sept. 11.

Explosive areas are expected to be mistakes and gaps in systems that ignored evidence that al-Qaeda planned a significant assault using hijacked airplanes, and new information that links members of the Saudi royal family to funding the Sept. 11 attacks.

Those are not matters the president wants to give a full public airing. As has become the predictable pattern for George W. Bush and company, they will use an avalanche of lies to try to keep the truth from the American people.

But since the people are smarter than the politicians and the corporate media propagandists who`ve aided and abetted the lies, the time has arrived when the public appetite for truth is growing.

That threatens George. W. Bush.

http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher124.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is [e-mail].
Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com July 15 2003

[Joerver]

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`History will forgive us`
Nicholas Watt and Julian Borger in Washington
Friday July 18, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair last night used the rare opportunity of a historic address to the US Congress to declare that history would "forgive" him even if no weapons of mass destruction are uncovered in Iraq.

In a significant softening of Downing Street`s stance on Iraq`s banned weapons, the prime minister stood before hundreds of members of Congress to admit that he may eventually be proved wrong.

"Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together?" the prime minister asked his audience of Republicans and Democrats, who are beginning to voice doubts about whether Saddam Hussein still possessed banned weapons in his final months in power.

Mr Blair then made a rare admission of fallibility: "Let us say one thing. If we are wrong we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive."

The prime minister`s remarks, as he became the fourth British prime minister to address a joint meeting of Congress, will be seen as another watering down of Downing Street`s previously tough stance on weapons.

Weeks after telling doubters in the Commons that they would have to eat their words, the prime minister signalled his change of heart last week when he declared that Britain and the US may only uncover a weapons programme, rather than actual weapons themselves.

With critics likely to seize on his admission, Mr Blair insisted that he still believed he would be proved right. "If our critics are wrong, if we are right as I believe with every fibre of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership; that is something history will not forgive."

The prime minister`s address came as it emerged that the US has begun talks with other countries about establishing a new United Nations mandate for an international stabilisation force in Iraq. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said he had held talks with some foreign ministers about "whether or not it would be appropriate to start discussions about a UN resolution".

The almost daily deaths of American soldiers in guerrilla attacks and the waning of popular enthusiasm for the conflict has prompted the US to try to persuade other countries to share the burden of policing Iraq, but several nations are insisting on more explicit UN authority before they send troops.

US diplomats said that they had no plans to put forward a proposal of their own, but said that Washington was prepared to listen to ideas for a new UN resolution on a stabilisation force from other capitals.

US administrator Paul Bremer said last night that Iraq could hold its first free elections as early as next year. The exact timetable for elections would depend on how fast the new Iraqi governing council could write and ratify a new constitution.

Mr Blair`s prediction that he would be forgiven by history was the highlight of a lengthy address to Congress. Aides are said to have "sweated blood" on the speech, which Mr Blair regards as one of the most important he has ever made overseas.

And Congress loved it. The prime minister received 19 standing ovations during his 32-minute speech. After the first ovation, he joked: "This is more than I deserve and more than I`m used too, frankly."

Watched by a roll call of America`s great and good, Mr Blair received the strongest applause when he praised America for upholding freedom.

But a cross-party delegation of British parliamentarians struggled to join in the applause. Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor, found it most difficult to join the standing ovation.

The prime minister praised the US as a "light of liberty" in the world. But he used his platform to deliver an uncompromising message to both Europe and the US : that it is a two-way relationship in which both sides must be prepared to give ground.

He declared: "To be a serious partner, Europe must take on and defeat the anti-Americanism that sometimes passes for its political discourse. What America must do is to show that this is a partnership built on persuasion, not command." America must show that it is even-handed in the two areas of the Middle East peace process and the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Praising President George Bush for his efforts in the Middle East, Mr Blair said: "I want to be very plain. Terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine."

On the Kyoto protocol, Mr Blair attempted to woo the president to the cause of the environment by making an economic case. He said: "Climate change, deforestation and the voracious drain on natural resources cannot be ignored ... If this seems a long way from the threat of terror and WMD, it is only to say again that the world`s security cannot be protected without the world`s heart being won. So, America must listen as well as lead, but don`t ever apologise for your values."

Mr Blair`s toughest message was for the French president, Jacques Chirac, who he hinted wanted to turn Europe into a rival power to the US. He said: "There is no more dangerous theory in international politics today than that we need to balance the power of America with other competitive powers, different poles around which nations gather."

Mr Bush later lavished praise on Tony Blair for his "fabulous" speech. Speaking at a joint press conference at the White House, he said: "The prime minister once again showed the qualities that have marked his entire career. Tony Blair is a leader of conviction, of passion and of moral clarity. He is a true friend of the American people."

But Mr Bush spoke in more confident terms about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, declaring that they would be uncovered.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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The US needs allies - but is too proud to pay the price
Bush has ambitious plans for Iraq, but lacks money and manpower

Martin Woollacott
Friday July 18, 2003
The Guardian

The US is in danger of moving from a unilateralism it freely chose to an isolation it neither desired nor expected. As the costs and difficulties of reconstructing Iraq come home to Washington, it looks as if America is going to be left to bear the burden without the major aid from its friends and allies, other than Britain, that it now desperately wants.

An over-confident administration had at first assumed it would not need much help from others in Iraq. They then concluded they did need it but that it would not be too difficult to drum up. Now they are realising they are unlikely, at least in the near future, to get soldiers and financial help from other countries in anything like the quantities they had hoped.

Nor is it clear that an American agreement to expand the role of the UN in Iraq, if it should be forthcoming, would necessarily open the aid gates. Some of the countries explaining their reluctance to contribute on the grounds that the UN is not sufficiently involved, may be doing so in the expectation that the Bush administration will never go far enough in that direction, and that their UN bluff, as it were, will never be called.

Some opponents of the war and critics of the US presence in Iraq may feel that the motto of this story is "serves them right", but the consequences could be bad for all concerned, including Iraqis. It could increase the chances of America making the wrong choices in Iraq, denying that country the genuine new start it deserves, while adding a new dimension of bitterness to American attitudes to the rest of the world.

Americans are already disposed to see themselves as doing far more than their share of the work of keeping international order. Where others see empire or at least the pursuit of interest, many Americans see their efforts abroad as either selfless or senseless, or sometimes both.

The disconnection between the American view of reality and that of other countries can be amazing. Reports speak of "calls" from congressional committees - shocked by rising estimates of occupation - for "more international sharing" of those costs. Such calls are made as if international help was available on tap whenever the US should choose to turn the faucet. There seems to be scant understanding, despite everything, of the way in which American resistance to cooperation with others, not only on Iraq, might induce in them a reluctance to cooperate with America. Senator Edward Kennedy would not make this mistake, and yet even he can speak of the "best trained troops in the world" tied down in policing in Iraq as if it was self-evident, first, that they are in fact well trained, and, second, that others, not so well trained and more disposable, should take their place. As for Donald Rumsfeld, he is reduced to bizarre musings that the US, which recently closed its peacekeeping centre, might take the lead in training and gathering together an international corps of peacekeepers for use in emergencies.

The Indian government`s decision not to send an army division to Iraq, while not absolutely final, is a big blow to the Pentagon, since India and Pakistan represented its main hope for large contingents of well-trained soldiers that would be relatively cheap to maintain in Iraq.

The possibility that Nato might be involved as an organisation, beyond its support for the small Polish contingent, now seems even more remote, and Russia, France and Germany have made it clear they will not contribute troops unless there is a UN mandate.

Pakistan may well follow India in deciding not to send troops unless there is a UN or other international mandate, because the Iraq war was even more unpopular there than it was in India. If so, the attempt to internationalise the occupation force will continue as a comedy involving a cast of tiny contingents requiring so much American and British logistical and other help as to be hardly worth having. They may provide some politically useful diversity, but what the US thinks it needs now is not political cover but a lot of the military heavy-lifting to be done by others, so that some of their own men can go home. There are only about a dozen armies in the world which can provide such help and, at the moment, none of them are coming to the party.

What is true militarily is also true financially. Chris Patten, the EU commissioner for external affairs, said this week in Washington that Europe was ready to contribute toward Iraq`s reconstruction, but only if the funds it might provide were administered by the UN or the World Bank.

Arrangements of that kind might be made, but the sums so far mentioned by the EU are small, a drop in the bucket when the US is now looking at estimated monthly costs of $3.9bn. The US wants an international donors` conference for Iraq in the autumn, but even if new arrangements are in place by then, the reluctance to commit funds which might in effect simply subsidise what would still be an American-dominated Iraq project is unlikely to be wholly dispelled. The possibility of a new UN mandate, enlarging the very marginal UN role in Iraq, is being investigated in New York, and will presumably be discussed by Tony Blair and George Bush.

Such a new mandate would presumably aim at facilitating both military and financial contributions. But the fine line between raising the UN profile beyond the point at which it would not be acceptable to the US administration, and giving the world body a role which would assuage the doubts of countries who do not wish to be seen as just propping up the Americans, will be a difficult one to tread.

American difficulties in Iraq are not only a consequence of the attacks they are suffering in the central part of the country. They also arise from the fact that elements of the extremely ambitious and radical plan for physical and political reconstruction of Iraq, involving years of full American control - which the administration decided on before the war - co-exist uneasily with the less ambitious but still problematic scheme for a quicker handover to Iraqis that it stumbled into after taking the over country.

Add to that the contradiction represented by an administration which now very much wants international help but finds it humiliating to pay any serious political price for it. And add to that the reluctance of many countries to get involved even if the US was to make real changes.

The chances remain high that Iraqi reconstruction will in time turn the corner, but probably without much help from others. In that case, America and Britain and the new Iraq will be alone with their success, but it would be better for all if such a success were a more general achievement.

[e-mail]


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US confused by Iraq`s quiet war
The battle may be over, but Americans are still dying. Is this the birth of an Islamist resistance or a thieves` rebellion?

Jonathan Steele and Michael Howard in Baghdad
Friday July 18, 2003
The Guardian

As armed attacks on US troops in Iraq increase and the Pentagon announces that the crack troops of its most experienced infantry division will stay in the country "indefinitely", the one certainty about the groups carrying out the assaults is the effect they are having: confusion

"We`re facing a combination of Ba`athists, fedayeen and ex-intelligence services operating without central control on a loose basis," the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told reporters this week.

"None of the people detained by coalition forces for carrying out attacks on US soldiers said they were motivated by religion or money," the former counter-terrorism expert added. "The attacks are conducted by professionals. I have confidence that we shall impose our will on these renegades."

John Abizaid, the new head of US central command, called it "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" and said: "I believe there`s mid-level Ba`athist, Iraqi intelligence service people, Special Security Organisation people, Special Republican Guard people that have organised at the regional level in cellular structure. It`s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it`s war, however you describe it."

These assertive analyses bear surprisingly little resemblance to the views of other sources, including US army commanders in the field, leading some to speculate that there is more spin than substance to them.

Colonel Eric Wesley, executive officer of the 3rd Infantry Division`s 2nd Brigade, believes most of the attackers are motivated by current grievances rather than lost privilege. Many are hired guns, working for profit.

"They are disaffected people from various parts of society," he said at his base near Falluja. "They may be impoverished, or somehow afflicted by the war and the coalition, wanting revenge for the loss of a family member. They may be people who`ve been taught their whole life to hate the west and have extremist views."

Whatever the case, he believes them to be "ignorant of [US] intentions in Iraq" and thus an "exploitable group".

"The question is: who`s paying them, funding them, exploiting them?" he said. "It could be third-country nationals who want to see Iraq destabilised. We`ve had indications of Islamic fundamentalism, both foreign and domestic. It could be people from the former regime who stand to lose a lot from democracy. I deliberately avoid the term `Ba`athist` because I`m not convinced there`s opposition across the whole of Iraq."

Col Wesley disagrees with Mr Bremer`s view that these are professional attackers, citing the relatively few soldiers hit compared to the number of attacks. "Our indications are that the majority are not well trained. Their tactics are relatively crude and elementary. Their marksmanship is poor. The incidence of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47s being [on target] is rare."

Troops in the brigade agree that the ambushes on convoys are usually hasty and disorganised. Staff Sergeant Anthony Joseph said: "They pop up with an RPG and fire. They know that if they take time to aim, we will spot them and shoot."

Since May 1, when President Bush declared the war over, the attackers have killed 33 American soldiers. There are currently about 12 attacks a day, nearly all of them on US convoys.

Three soldiers have been shot point blank in operations which have the hallmarks of professionalism, according to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US ground forces in Iraq. One soldier was killed by a sniper. There have been no suicide attacks, but several remote-controlled bombs.

Ramadi, about 20 miles west of Falluja, is one of the tensest towns in Iraq. The 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment`s base, in Saddam Hussein`s former palace by the Euphrates river, has been mortared frequently, as has the mayor`s office on the main street.

US officers report attacks showing some sophistication. One was a daytime strike on the mayor`s office involving three separate elements: first small-arms and Kalashnikovs fire, then a grenade thrown by a man passing on a motorcycle, then a mortar.

Crimes of opportunity


But many attacks are what Captain Michael Calvert, the regiment`s press officer, called "crimes of opportunity". "A man behind a wall sees a convoy coming, fires a shot and runs," he said.

The regiment`s executive officer, Major Antonio Aguto, gives an analysis that is more like Mr Bremer`s, but said that many of the attackers were paid. The regiment had detained and questioned scores of people, including 20 or 30 foreigners, on suspicion of involvement in the attacks.

"Some were motivated. Some were doing it for money. There`s evidence that Ba`athists are hiring local thugs."

But none of those detained had pointed conclusively to a paymaster the coalition could arrest and charge. "There`s a lot of finger-pointing, some good, some bad. No big fish has been caught yet," he said.

He could not confirm that any of the detainees was linked to al-Qaida.

One undisputed fact is that at least 80% of the attacks have taken place in the so-called `Sunni triangle` between Tikrit, Baghdad, and Ramadi. Attacks are rare in the mainly Shia south and the Kurdish north. But even in the Sunni triangle the truth is more complex than the simple stereotype that the area has long been pro-Saddam.

Ramadi is a case in point. One of its largest tribes, the Alawani, turned against Saddam in 1995 after he jailed and executed a prominent hero from the war against Iran, Air Force General Mohammed Madhlum. Three hundred people dared to march in the streets after his death, and scores were arrested.

"My brother was arrested by the mukhabarat [the secret police] and spent three months in prison. He then fled abroad," said Ahmed Rajab. He then pointed angrily at a bullet hole in a shop window. "The Americans did that because the mojahedin were running about outside last week".

His use of the word `mojahedin`, meaning "soldiers of God", carries an ominous echo of other Islamic guerrilla movements, and according to Mr Rajab, the resistance is concentrated in the mosques.

The imam of al-Saleh mosque in Ramadi, Jihad Abed Hussein al-Alawani, says he was no supporter of Saddam, who put him in jail for three years, but he is unsurprised about the attacks. "It is wrong to put these attacks down only to fedayeen, remnants of the Ba`ath party, or former army officers," he said. "They are coming from ordinary people and the Islamic resistance because the Americans haven`t fulfilled their promises."

The Americans had interrogated him "very politely" for eight hours, he said, because of the content of his Friday sermons. "I asked them whether they would not resist if Germans or Fidel Castro occupied Washington, and of course they said yes," he added.

Comments such as these suggest that though the number of attackers could be small, their actions are supported by a wider pool of Iraqis in the Sunni areas.

After a convoy of lorries was attacked in Baghdad on Wednesday Mansour Badri, a teenager, said he was happy. "The Americans lied to us when they said they would save us from Saddam. They just want to occupy our country," he explained.

He and his friends said Ba`ath party supporters had encouraged teenagers to fight US troops and offered them money.

The US army has conducted four big offensives in the Sunni triangle since April. Their objective is to stamp out the insurgents, and officers cite impressive successes in terms of guerrillas detained or killed, though the Iraqis say many were innocent victims. And the intelligence gained does not appear to be particularly valuable, since US troops remain in the dark about their new enemy.

The plethora of theories from senior figures adds to the picture of a force which knows it has a long way to go to solve the problem. The one thing on which army and civilian chiefs seem to agree is that the attacks are low-level, dispersed and coordinated locally - which makes them harder to deal with.

"We cannot find any national command and control structure but we are working hard to find one," a senior US officer in Baghdad said. "We are in the process of war-gaming, in which we identify the enemy and look at all the different possibilities. We`re still at war".



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Britain must hold the line over Iran
US hawks are now recklessly talking up the `threat` from Tehran

Isabel Hilton
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian

If Tony Blair`s conversation with Ariel Sharon is a reliable guide, he appears to be shifting his position on Iran from one of constructive engagement to one of more overt concern about Iran`s nuclear programme. Are we seeing a re-run of the long approach to war, or just an increase in already established diplomatic pressure?

The problem with crying wolf, of course, is that when the hot breath is really on your neck, scepticism results. In fact, there are many reasons why governments are concerned about Iran: there are serious and longstanding suspicions about Iran`s nuclear programme, though nobody has yet tried to argue that Tehran is close to developing weapons. Iran has offered only limited cooperation with inspections and has not yet signed the protocol that would allow a more rigorous inspection regime. In this argument, it is intent that counts.

Iran also continues to support groups such as Hamas that Sharon would like to see disappear from the map before he signs any Middle East peace agreement and, the US alleges, it still harbours al-Qaida suspects. And, as the home of the Shia revolution, Iran carries weight among the world`s millions of Shia - notably, of course, in Iraq. If the occupying power in Iraq was ever to permit elections, it would have to accept the risk of an Islamic government more friendly to Tehran than to Washington and, in the short term, it has to deal with sections of Iraqi influence that are guarding the Iranian interest in the politics of Iraq.

All or any of the above might trigger a rise in the rhetorical temperature. But as with Iraq, the fundamental question is whether the US is already set on military action.

There is no doubt that the US is determined to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear capability, but in view of current difficulties in Iraq even the hardliners stop short of advocating a full-scale war. Instead, the hawks in the administration have argued for pre-emptive strikes against Iran`s nuclear facilities at Bushehr, Natanz and Arak. Until now, the British approach has been to try to use international regulation and inspection rather than military threat.

So far, Blair`s position is still consistent with a multilateral raising of the diplomatic temperature to bring pressure to bear on the regime, rather than a signal that Iran is an imminent military target. It is an approach that has the support of Russia and the EU - no doubt in the hope that the US might be persuaded there is more to gain by a multilateral approach than by a B52.

Russia, the chief promoter and supplier of nuclear technology to Iran, has been persuaded to hold out for assurances that the reactors it is supplying are peaceful, and for close accounting of the associated nuclear material. The EU is holding off on trade and cooperation with similar demands, plus pledges on reducing support for organisations deemed terrorist, on human rights and on peace in the Middle East.

Washington may not have undergone the full road-to-Damascus moment on a multilateralist approach, but the US has declined Iran`s offer of bilateral talks and - for now - is leaving it to the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite the Bush administration`s long record of undermining the IAEA`s work.

But inside the administration there are signs of division that go beyond military action: it publicly encourages dissent in Iran - including those who have been demonstrating in support of the progressive President Khatami against the mullahs. But hardliners within the administration want to adopt the People`s Mujaheddin, the extremist opposition group supported by Saddam Hussein, for use against Tehran. The group is on the US list of terrorist organisations, but it has recently been credited as the source of intelligence on Iran`s clandestine nuclear programme. Supporting the People`s Mujaheddin would alienate EU member states that have so far been willing to cooperate in applying multilateral pressure and strengthen the contention of Iran`s hardliners that there is nothing to be gained by cooperation with the US.

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, the evidence continues to mount inexorably in support of what many suspected through those long months of shifting official argument: that the desire for military action existed in neo-con circles, that the decision to make it happen was taken when 9/11 presented the administration with the opportunity, and that the arguments that followed were a long attempt to justify a decision already taken but not yet implemented.

Other leaders placed in the awkward position of having to decide between the two unpalatable options of being with or against the US, had to make their own accommodation between the bullying of a superpower bent on fullspectrum dominance and domestic public opinion. It was a destabilising choice for many of them, as it proved for Blair. If doing Washington`s bidding yielded any influence at all, he should use it now - for his own sake - to keep the pressure on Iran diplomatic.

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Bush launches magazine to teach young Arabs to love America
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
18 July 2003


So what if George Bush is threatening to invade your country? At least the kids in America have nice, white teeth and listen to the same music as you. Isn`t that enough for you to love the good `ol US of A?

That, at least, appears to be the message of a glossy new magazine published by the Bush administration and going on sale across the Middle East this week, targeting young people with a mix of features, celebrity profiles and music. The Arabic-language Hi magazine is US propaganda 2003-style. "We`re fighting a war of ideas as much as a war on terror," said Tucker Eskew, director of the White House`s Office of Global Communications.

Hi, a monthly, will be available for the equivalent of around $2 (£1.25) in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Algeria, Egypt, Cyprus and several Gulf states. Saudi Arabia - home to 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September and where drug dealers are publicly beheaded - has not yet been deemed ready to get Hi.

The first issue of the magazine, published by the State Department, contains features on the jazz musician Norah Jones, sandboarding, an apparent resurgence of interest in Arabic poetry in the US, and yoga. There is also a section on relationships entitled "Making Marriage Work". A feature on life in American universities has interviews with Arab students "enjoying the freedom of thought" in the US.

The administration claims the magazine is designed to show a positive image of America and highlight the similarities between young people in the US and the Middle East. The articles have been written by Arab Americans in Washington and stringers in the Middle East. "There is an editorial board which reviews all the articles," said a State Department spokeswoman.

While it has an annual budget of $4.2m (£2.6m), the magazine is just part of a broader media attack on the Middle East. In a speech to the Southern Centre for International Studies in Atlanta this week, Mr Eskew cited plans to spend $62m developing an Arabic language television network.

Not everyone is convinced the magazine and the network will succeed. Rani al-Hajjar, an Atlanta student and co-ordinator for Palestinian Media Watch, said: "I think if it`s coming from a cultural superiority complex, saying that we are infallible and saying that our policies are best, then I think it is liable to fail."
18 July 2003 08:33

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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July 18, 2003

Sinister voice back to haunt Baghdad chicken diners
By James Hider in Baghdad






A GROUP of Baghdadis sat in a spartan chicken restaurant 6,200 miles from Washington yesterday discussing a very different address to a very different nation. Saddam Hussein was back, denouncing the “lies” of Tony Blair and his ally George Bush.
With an exquisite sense of timing Saddam — or someone sounding remarkably like him — chose the Prime Minister’s big day, and the 35th anniversary of the Baath party’s rise to power, to release a tape exuding defiance of the coalition’s leaders.

Addressing their failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction, the voice demanded: “What will the two liars, Bush and Blair, say to their people and to humanity. What will they tell the world? What they said was wrong and baseless.

“The lies were known to the President of the United States and to the Prime Minister of Britain when they decided to wage war on Iraq.”

The voice mocked the new Governing Council of 25 prominent Iraqis that the coalition set up this week, declaring: “Whoever is appointed by the foreign occupier cannot give his people and the country anything other than the will of the occupiers.”

The only solution, the voice continued, was to “resist the occupation through jihad (holy struggle) so to inflict losses and evict the enemy from Iraq”.

The tape was the only topic of conversation in the restaurant on central Baghdad’s As-Sadoun Street, where the noise of generators powering the garish, brightly-lit coffee shops and ice-cream parlours was punctuated by regular bursts of distant gunfire. And the diners’ reactions reflected the ambivalence of a nation that for the most part loathed Saddam but likes the Americans little more.

“I feel very sad for my country, and happy to hear his voice,” declared Salman Qasel, 47, a taxi driver as he sipped strong black tea. “I hope he comes back. I would never work for the coalition. Look at the chaos we live in. People here need two things, electricity and security, and they don’t care who gives it to them.”

Baha Maadi, a 27-year-old waiter, demurred. “I’m not scared by the speech. Saddam is just looking for media attention. He cannot come back,” he said.

Outside the restaurant, a vendor selling cans of cold drinks to motorists insisted: “I think it was a Saddam double used by the Iranians. I think the coalition should finish up here and invade Iran.”

But a middle-aged passer-by said he would fear to work for the coalition after hearing the speech. “We’re worried we’d be attacked. We would be working for his enemies. When I heard his speech, I thought he sounded very powerful. Maybe he still has power in this country.”

The tape was broadcast by two Arab satellite television stations, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. US intelligence officials said it was being studied to determine its authenticity.

The CIA has said the voice on a similiar tape broadcast on July 4 was almost certainly Saddam’s, and Washington now acknowledges that he is still alive and in Iraq.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-749228,00.html

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July 18, 2003

Bush decides the time has come to ask for UN help
From Tim Reid in Washington



THE Bush Administration is seeking to place the occupation of Iraq under a United Nations mandate after growing pressure on Capitol Hill to “internationalise” an increasingly bloody and unpopular conflict.
The move, a dramatic reversal of US policy, came as General John Abizaid, the new coalition commander, said that tours of war-weary US troops are to be extended to at least a year to combat an increasingly organised and lethal guerilla enemy.

Already under pressure over the war’s rising cost and death toll, the Administration was dealt another significant blow yesterday after a leading Republican announced a Senate investigation of the White House’s role in President Bush’s controversial State of the Union speech in January.

In devastating testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday night, George Tenet, the CIA director, said that White House officials insisted that claims about Iraq’s alleged nuclear programme be inserted in the speech, despite CIA reservations.

Mr Tenet, forced by the White House to take the blame for a now discredited claim in the speech that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, “told us who the (White House) person was”, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat member of the panel, said.

“The person was insistent on putting this language in, which the CIA knew to be incredible,” Mr Durbin, who opposed the war, said. “All roads still lead back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (the White House).”

Pat Roberts, the committee’s Republican chairman, announced public hearings into pre-war intelligence for September and said that White House officials may now be called before the panel.

“I think there were mistakes made all the way up the chain,” Mr Roberts said. He said that the committee would “follow the trail wherever it leads”, adding: “We’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

Saxby Chambliss, another Republican on the Senate panel, said that if it was necessary to question Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush’s National Security Adviser, “then we will”.

Jay Rockefeller, the leading Democrat on the committee, said that the panel was going to investigate whether the claim in the speech “was part of a pattern of misleading by the Administration”. He said: “I think others in the Administration knew about it.”

The FBI also announced its own investigation yesterday into how bogus intelligence made its way into the President’s speech. That investigation will focus on how forged documents, alleging that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, made their way into US intelligence agencies.

Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, said that he had started discussions with other countries on a possible new UN mandate for Iraq, which would significantly broaden UN authority over the administration of the country.

Until now, the US has sought to limit UN activities in Iraq to humanitarian relief and has sought military assistance from countries on an ad hoc basis.

That approach has appeared increasingly futile, particularly after India, Pakistan and France all announced their refusal this week to send troops to Iraq without a UN mandate. The pressure on US troops caused by increasingly deadly attacks has become so great that Pentagon plans to send up to 10,000 part-time National Guard soldiers to Iraq were revealed yesterday.

Reflecting Washington’s increasing desperation for additional troops, as morale among US soldiers drops and public discontent grows over the death toll, General Powell said: “There are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations and I am in conversations with some ministers about this.”

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, said: “The question has been posed as to whether or not the Security Council may not help to improve the situation — a Security Council action that expands UN activities, and perhaps appeals to member states to make troops, policemen and other resources available for the stabilisation of Iraq.”

Diplomats said that the UN discussions would focus on the idea of a new resolution similar to the one that established the International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan, based in Kabul.

The Iraqi force would be international in make-up and authorised by the UN, but is likely to remain under overall US leadership, diplomats said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-749089,00.html

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July 18, 2003
Bush at His Side, Blair Is Resolute in War`s Defense
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON


WASHINGTON, July 17 — Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with President Bush today in defending the war to depose Saddam Hussein, saying the conflict was justified even if allied forces find no banned weapons in Iraq.

Mr. Blair, making a brief visit to Washington, also lent Mr. Bush his support on the question of whether the president had misled the American public in the weeks leading up to the war by including in the State of the Union address an allegation, attributed to British intelligence, that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa to restart its nuclear weapons program.

He said he stood by the intelligence, even though the White House now says it was not firm enough to have been included in a presidential speech.

Mr. Blair also had something he wanted from Mr. Bush. The prime minister said he would discuss with the president concern in Britain that British citizens captured in Afghanistan were being held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay as enemy combatants. The British government has made clear that it wants its citizens, including two scheduled to come to trial soon before a military tribunal, to be returned home to face trial there. Mr. Bush said he would discuss Mr. Blair`s concerns.

Despite Mr. Blair`s suggestion, in a speech to a joint meeting of Congress, that the war in Iraq would have been worth fighting even if no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons are found, Mr. Bush later insisted at a news conference with the British leader that they would be found. The president said that would "end all this speculation" about "whether or not the actions were based on valid information."

On a day when the White House came under increasing political pressure from Democrats to explain more fully how the passage about Iraq`s attempts to buy uranium got into the State of the Union address, Mr. Blair`s presence here helped the administration`s effort to shift attention to the broader question of whether the world is better off with Mr. Hussein gone.

"I really don`t believe that any responsible leader could ignore the evidence that we see and the threat that we face," Mr. Blair said today at a news conference at the White House after his speech on Capitol Hill.

With Mr. Blair at his side during the news conference, Mr. Bush turned a question about whether he took personal responsibility for including the disputed information in the State of the Union address into an opportunity to applaud his own performance as commander in chief.

"I take responsibility for making the decision, the tough decision to put together a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein, because the intelligence — not only our intelligence but the intelligence of this great country," Mr. Bush said, referring to Mr. Blair`s Britain, "made a clear and compelling case that Saddam Hussein was a threat to security and peace."

Mr. Blair, the fourth British prime minister to speak to a joint meeting of Congress, was invited in connection with being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

The British leader`s presence in the Capitol created a political paradox: Mr. Blair, whose Labor Party would be considered to the left of the Democratic Party in the United States on most issues, received a rousing welcome from a Republican-controlled Congress. Republicans were not only expressing their appreciation for his stalwart support of the United States in confronting Iraq and the broader threat from terrorism, but were also welcoming him as a bulwark against attacks, mostly from Democrats, on Mr. Bush`s credibility.

But he won over members of both parties with a self-deprecating reference to his own deepening political troubles at home, noting that he was not used to sustained applause. He brought down the house by noting that Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, had pointed out to him the fireplace in which the British had burned books from the Library of Congress in 1814.

"I know this is kind of late," Mr. Blair said with a comic`s timing, "but: sorry."

His speech, with all the trappings of a State of the Union address, was part explanation of the threat from terrorism, part celebration of the role of the United States in the world and part exhortation to the United States to use its power wisely and mend fences with Europe.

"There is no more dangerous theory in international politics today than that we need to balance the power of America with other competitor powers," Mr. Blair said, interrupted repeatedly by applause. "If Europe and America are together, the others will work with us. If we split, the rest will play around, play us off, and nothing but mischief will be the result of it."

Playing the traditional British role of trans-Atlantic intermediary, Mr. Bush added: "To be a serious partner, Europe must take on and defeat the anti-Americanism that sometimes passes for its political discourse. And what America must do is show that this is a partnership, built on persuasion, not command."

But Mr. Blair`s main message in his address to Congress was that the United States and Britain had no choice but to confront terrorism and, in Iraq, the possibility that terrorism would join forces with a nation that could make available chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.

"Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together?" Mr. Blair asked. "Let us say one thing: If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive."

"But if our critics are wrong, if we are right, as I believe with every fiber of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership," Mr. Blair continued. "That is something history will not forgive."

In his address to Congress, Mr. Blair did not mention the dispute over the intelligence Mr. Bush used in asserting that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush had cited a public report by Mr. Blair`s government last year that asserted that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Britain has said it had multiple sources confirming the validity of the information.

In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush attributed the information to Britain even though the Central Intelligence Agency had expressed reservations about the intelligence underlying it to Mr. Blair`s government last year, according to a letter sent last week to Parliament by Jack Straw, Britain`s foreign secretary.

But at the White House, Mr. Blair, whose own credibility in making the case for war has come under fire at home, defended both himself and Mr. Bush. "The British intelligence that we have we believe is genuine," he said in response to a question. "We stand by that intelligence."

In raising the issue of the detainees at at Guantánamo, Mr. Blair waded into an issue that has been a major irritant in relations between Washington and a number of allies.

Mr. Blair said he expected to issue a statement about the issue on Friday, after talks with Mr. Bush, and Mr. Bush signaled a somewhat grudging willingness to consider transferring the British citizens. "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people, and we look forward to working closely with the Blair government to deal with the issue," Mr. Bush said.

American courts have agreed with the Bush administration that the Guantánamo base, on the southeastern tip of Cuba, is not part of the United States and therefore that the 680 people there who are citizens of more than 40 nations have no recourse to protections afforded in the Constitution. At the same time, the Pentagon has called them "illegal enemy combatants" who do not have to be treated as prisoners of war, a designation in international law that provides certain rights.

The two Britons, Feroz Abbasi, 23, and Moazzam Begg, 35, are among six detainees the Pentagon has selected as the first defendants for trial before a military tribunal.

The military trials would be the first such proceedings in more than 50 years. If there is no agreement with Britain about its two citizens or with Australia about its citizen, David Hicks, 27, who is also among the six, the trials are expected to begin in about two months.

Later in the evening, the White House issued a statement saying Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair had agreed to establish procedures to allow their two governments to better share sensitive information and to establish a bilateral committee to better coordinate defense acquisition activities.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 18, 2003
U.S. Considers Private Iraqi Force to Guard Sites
By DOUGLAS JEHL


WASHINGTON, July 17 — The Pentagon is considering a plan to train a private Iraqi security force and make it responsible for guarding pipelines, government buildings and hundreds of other sites in Iraq, military officials said today.

The new private force, to be composed primarily of former Iraqi soldiers armed with small weapons, would take over from American troops the guard duties at as many as 2,000 sites, the officials said. Such a force would provide jobs to potentially thousands of unemployed Iraqis and ease the burden on an American military that is finding itself stretched thin in Iraq despite the presence there of nearly 150,000 soldiers. Some Pentagon officials believe private Iraqi security guards at prominent government sites could help ease tensions created by the atmosphere of foreign military occupation.

But such a transfer would also raise some security concerns by putting more weapons in the hands of the former Iraqi soldiers and other Iraqis who would compose a force that could include hundreds or even thousands of security guards, the officials said. They said the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and private American companies, including Kroll Inc., a well-known private security consulting concern, were discussing how members of the proposed force could be screened and approved.

The cost of training the Iraqi force would likely be paid by United States taxpayers, military officials said. The salaries for the Iraqi guards might also be paid by the United States, the officials said, at least until an Iraqi government emerges, although funds could be drawn from Iraqi oil revenue.

The proposed force, under discussion at the highest levels of the Pentagon, would be separate from the new Iraqi Army and Iraqi police force.

"The idea, first and foremost, is to have Iraqis providing security for Iraq, at places like the National Museum and other fixed sites, and there are civilian companies that do this very well," a senior military official said today. "An added benefit is that we definitely want to reduce the load on American soldiers."

A senior executive at Kroll said in a telephone interview that the company had been involved in "brainstorming sessions" in Baghdad with officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority about a possible role for the company in establishing a private Iraqi security force.

"Our sense is that the military has too much on their plate right now, and that these are issues that need to be addressed, and the way to do that is through the private sector," said the executive, Anne Tiedemann, a regional managing director and head of Kroll`s Europe, Middle East and Africa Region.

Ms. Tiedemann said the talks had not gone beyond a discussion phase, and military officials in Washington said no final decision had been reached. The officials would not offer any estimate of when the force might be established, how large it might be or what it might cost.

But the officials said that senior officers at the United States Central Command and the Pentagon were in favor of the idea and were proceeding on the assumption that the plan would swiftly be approved. They said they believed that the cost of training the Iraqi guards would be paid by American taxpayers.

"There will be a vetting process, because we have to insure as best we can that we don`t put weapons in the hands of the wrong people," one senior officer said. "But having said that, there are already vast amounts of weapons out there in Iraq in the hands of former regime officials, and compared to that this would be just a drop in the bucket."

Ms. Tiedemann said she recognized that "certainly there are some sensitivities about potentially arming individuals who might be perceived to some people as being high risk." Still, she said, "There is absolutely a way to address all of these issues, from a vetting standpoint, from a training standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, to be inclusive."

Kroll, based in New York, conducted an investigation in the early 1990`s to determine the location and value of assets Saddam Hussein`s regime had hidden outside of Iraq. The investigation was done for the Kuwaiti government as part of an effort to determine what assets could be seized as reparations for the damage to Kuwait during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Under the plan described by the military officials, Kroll or another private American company would be awarded a contract to provide training for the new Iraqi security force and would work with the American military and intelligence agencies in screening its members.

So far the United States has taken a leading role in the reestablishment both of a new, smaller Iraqi Army and a revitalized Iraqi police force. American officials are stripping the forces of top commanders and insisting that the officers, soldiers and policemen disavow any ties to the Baath Party and Mr. Hussein`s regime.

In outlining plans last month to form a new Iraqi Army over the next three years, American and British officials said the force would amount to about 40,000 soldiers, one-tenth the size of Mr. Hussein`s armed forces at their peak. Walter B. Slocombe, the senior American official in Iraq responsible for the dissolution of Mr. Hussein`s armed forces, said an initial force of 12,000 would be formed within a year.

That Iraqi force would operate without an air force, Mr. Slocombe said, and would be responsible for guarding the country`s borders and key installations.

The occupation powers also agreed last month to pay, for an indefinite period, the salaries of up to 250,000 idled Iraqi soldiers. But most of those soldiers remain out of work, and American officials said one benefit of a new security force is that it could provide jobs for at least some of the unemployed soldiers.

A senior United States military official said today that creating a private security force to guard some installations in Iraq made sense for the same reason that private security forces were used to guard American installations like the Smithsonian Institution and power plants.

"There are lots of times when it doesn`t make sense to put the military out front," the official said. "And in many instances, we think it will be better for the Iraqi people to see private Iraqi security guards instead of the American or Iraqi Army."



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July 18, 2003
Wolfowitz on Visit to Iraq to Assess Rebuilding Effort
By ERIC SCHMITT


BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 17 — Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz arrived here today for a five-day tour of Iraq to assess the Bush administration`s successes and shortcomings in the postwar reconstruction effort.

"I`m here to understand what is needed to complete the transition to a government and society of, by and for the Iraqi people," Mr. Wolfowitz said in brief remarks to reporters traveling with him, at the airport here.

In the next several days, Mr. Wolfowitz will crisscross the country, meeting with allied troops, Iraqi politicians, American occupation officials and others, to get a firsthand sense of what corrections may be necessary in the postwar strategy. His boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, visited Baghdad for a day six weeks ago.

A senior administration official said Mr. Wolfowitz`s priorities would include security, the economy and Iraq`s emerging civilian political structure.

The official said Mr. Wolfowitz planned to spend little time talking to officials engaged in the hunt for unconventional weapons, saying that was now a job for the intelligence agencies. A 1,500-member American team headed by a two-star Army general recently assumed responsibility for the weapons search.

On his arrival, Mr. Wolfowitz immediately launched into meetings with L. Paul Bremer III, the senior American civilian administrator for Iraq; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of the Army, the allied ground commander; and their top aides.

Speaking to reporters afterward, Mr. Bremer gave a largely upbeat report, saying the newly appointed 25-member Iraqi Governing Council could finish writing a new constitution in the next six to eight months, beginning in September, paving the way for democratic elections.

"You ought to be able to have elections by next year," Mr. Bremer said in an interview at his headquarters here, one of Saddam Hussein`s many ornate palaces now occupied by the allies.

Mr. Bremer acknowledged that Iraq had severe unemployment, which he said was much worse than that in the United States during the Great Depression. But he added that the allies were now paying pensions to Iraqi civil servants and stipends to former members of the Iraqi Army, and was taking steps to promote the growth of small businesses and to clear irrigation canals for farmers.

Other allied officials gave a more sobering warning that restoring security, especially in and around Baghdad, and rebuilding Iraq`s shattered economy were daunting challenges that would take years. All officials emphasized that the goal was to shift responsibilities to Iraqis.

"Anyone who comes here and thinks this will be an easy ride is mistaken," said Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who is the senior allied adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Mr. Kerik said the number of joint patrols by Iraqi and American security forces had increased to 1,100 a day from about 75 a day when he arrived seven weeks ago.

But he acknowledged that only 4,000 to 5,000 Iraqi police officers had returned to duty in Baghdad, a quarter of what allied officials say this city of 4.5 million people needs. Mr. Kerik added that virtually all of those officers would have to go through a three-week course to learn patrolling techniques and sensitivity to human rights.

Overall, about 32,000 Iraqi police officers have returned to the job, about half of the nationwide goal, which Mr. Kerik said would take at least 18 months to reach.

Sifting through successes as well as disappointments will be one of the main tasks for Mr. Wolfowitz, one of the principal intellectual architects of the administration`s Iraq policy.

This is his first visit to Iraq since the end of the major combat and his third over all, counting two trips he made shortly after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. One was to visit troops withdrawing from Iraq, the other to Kurdish areas in the north. A senior administration official said Mr. Wolfowitz had wanted to come sooner but held off to give Mr. Bremer more time to establish his operation.

Mr. Wolfowitz made no public comments today about the strains on the nearly 150,000 American troops, nor on the latest audiotape purporting to be a recording from Mr. Hussein.

Echoing comments by officials in Washington, Mr. Bremer said it was essential to provide proof of Mr. Hussein`s death or capture.

It is needed, he said, to reassure a fearful Iraqi citizenry and to deny a rallying point for Baath Party loyalists and other guerrillas, who continue to attack American troops and Iraqis who cooperate with American officials.

"The enemy has been watching us and they`ve adapted, and we`re adapting to them," said Col. Guy Shields, a spokesman for the military command here.

Colonel Shields said the latest series of raids against remnants of Mr. Hussein`s security forces had captured 40 senior officials since the operation started on Sunday.

Mr. Bremer said Iran continued to interfere in fledgling political reconstruction, including Tehran s intelligence service. "It`s not possible to rebuild a country if a country`s neighbor is trying to pick it apart," he said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 18, 2003
Seeing Iraq`s Future by Looking at Its Past
By HASSAN BIN TALAL


AMMAN, Jordan
Faisal I, who became the first king of Iraq in 1921, was a man of wisdom and foresight. He achieved what few, if any, leaders of the Muslim and Arab world of the last century could have done: he brought together all of his country`s disparate communities in a spirit of genuine friendship and reconciliation despite the constraints of the largest hegemonic power of that time, Britain.

One of the most remarkable results of the unity that King Faisal created was the Constitution of 1925, which not only incorporated points on human rights but also promoted the notion of a separation of powers. It is not hard to find parallels between the concepts expressed in this Constitution and those of the Charter of Medina, instituted at the time of the Prophet Muhammad — nor indeed between both these documents and the American Constitution.

Iraq under Faisal I was a country whose citizens participated in building the nation, no matter one`s denomination or affiliation, whether Shiite or Sunni, Chaldean or Sabaean, Arab or Kurd, Circassian or Turkman. Little wonder, then, that Iraq was the first Arab country to join the League of Nations, and became a model for other emerging nation-states in Middle East and beyond.

Today, despite the painful reality of a postconflict Iraq — whose orphans roam streets littered with unexploded weapons, where food and water is scarce and sanitation is almost nonexistent — we see hopeful similarities to that fledgling state. As in the king`s day, there is a sense of optimism, of a shared burden, and of a chance for freedom after a long period of absolute rule.

Unfortunately, Iraq today, as in the king`s time, is under occupation, and gripped by uncertainty as to whether this is a transitional phase toward a new beginning or something more sinister and unwelcome. Again, many Iraqis feel like unwilling recipients of a foreign interventionism whose slogan is "we know what is best."

The occupying coalition talks of transitional justice. But how can it explain the absence of an Iraqi court to deal with the affairs of its citizens? Other than a new, relatively powerless governing council, why are Iraq`s people — inheritors of the cradle of human civilization itself and arguably some of the most sophisticated and advanced in the Arab world — having to watch while others impose their will and their plans on the country?

The people now in charge of Iraq, be they in Baghdad or Washington, seem to lack the cultural sensitivity and proper knowledge of Iraq and its neighbors, and to have little regard for the religious and spiritual values of the Iraqi people, lacking even an appreciation of Iraq`s ecumenical and cosmopolitan past. Nor has the de facto authority shown any intention to put to use the intellectual and technical potential of the Iraqi people, causing even greater frustration, confusion and anger.

Iraq could once again be the model for the developing nation-state if it is able to humanize economics and politics, putting its citizens` well-being at the center of policymaking. True leadership in the Islamic sense ought to be about respecting sincerely held individual and communal beliefs; citizenship in its most pluralistic sense; and the peaceful management of diversity.

Of course, change in Iraq has to be peaceful and has to be desired by the people as a whole. That is not pandering to populism, but is the essence of strategic diplomacy. It is the historical legacy of King Faisal I, who enabled Iraqis to be stakeholders in their political future. The development — not imposition — of democracy in Iraq is vital.

Yet the current situation, with an increasingly nervous American and British military force, is a classic example of bad governance. Not only is it being interpreted in Iraq and abroad as a blatant and unnecessary form of neocolonialism, it also threatens to reap a bitter harvest of anti-Americanism. It will further destabilize an already volatile region.

Iraqis are rightly cautious of accepting solutions imposed on them by third parties that have their own economic or regional interests. They do not wish to find themselves, purposely or by default, having to ally with one or another interventionist force. Some steps to ensure a feeling (and reality) of Iraqi self-determination can be taken quickly. For example, Iraqi courts could be created to prosecute those convicted of serious felonies like murder, torture and rape. This would not only be the realization of justice in its most practical sense, but it would give Iraqi people some real power over their civil society.

The arrogance of power must not lead us to abandon wisdom. Wisdom is to listen to the voice of the people. Wisdom is to humanize rather than demonize the "other." Wisdom is to have hope and to consider the alternative options constantly. My friend Shimon Shamir, the Israeli scholar and former ambassador to Jordan, has wisely urged us to "turn our attention from the threat projected by the extremists to the promise implied by the moderates." Those of us who truly wish to help Iraq must now focus our efforts on realizing that promise.


Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan is moderator of the World Conference on Religion and Peace and president of the Club of Rome.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 18, 2003
Why Religion Must Play a Role in Iran
By REZA ASLAN


IOWA CITY

The student movement that has consumed Iran this summer has been interpreted by many senior American officials as a signal for the Bush administration to begin its next phase in democratizing the Middle East. But while the waves of protests and arrests — the latest came last week outside a Tehran university — may indicate the inevitable collapse of the Islamic Republic, what student leaders are calling for in Iran does not correspond with the administration`s designs for the region.

The president has interpreted the current situation in Iran as a conflict between Islamic theocracy and the kind of Western secular democracy his administration envisions for Iraq. But that is not at all how most Iranians see it. Over the past two decades, academics, reformist theologians and liberal clerics in Iran have been struggling to redefine traditional Islamic political philosophy in order to bring it in line with modern concepts of representative government, popular sovereignty, universal suffrage and religious pluralism. What these Iranians have been working toward is "Islamic democracy": that is, a liberal, democratic society founded on an Islamic moral framework.

This is not theocracy; it is religious democracy. And while that may seem like an oxymoron to most Americans, it is in no way a new paradigm: the Jewish version of this ideal currently exists in Israel. Indeed, it could be argued that the United States itself began as a religious democracy founded on a Protestant moral framework that still plays an influential role in our laws and politics.

Nevertheless, the concept of religious democracy has not been allowed to reach fruition in the Islamic world, partly because of foreign interference, partly because of religious fanaticism, but mostly because of the West`s overwhelming fear of Islamic government. It is this fear that has sustained an outdated foreign policy in the Persian Gulf, one that is still founded on containing Iran at all costs — regardless of the profound changes taking place in its government and society through the work of reformist politicians who are fighting for wider powers for the elected Parliament and greater freedom for the populace.

It is this same fear that has led to American military and economic support of antidemocratic regimes in Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan. More recently, this fear of Islamic government has forced the United States to forgo elections in Iraq in favor of appointing a Governing Council, lest the Shiite majority exercise its democratic right to self-determination.

But if there is any lesson to be learned from Iraq, it is that the American model of democracy is not necessarily applicable to the peoples of the Middle East, nor should it be.

The fact is that "democracy" is a contested term with no universally accepted definition; the notion that it must be based on secularism is not only a new concept, but a distinctly Western one. The conviction among many in the United States that a secular, democratic Iraq (if that itself is a possibility) can somehow become the model of democracy in the Middle East is both unreasonable and unfounded.

Recall that when the British and French colonized the Middle East, they did so in the guise of a civilizing mission. The idea was to transplant Western principles of government and society — ideals that took hundreds of years to develop in Europe — to uncivilized lands. However, no attempt was made to incorporate the cultural and religious identities of these regions. As a result, rather than embracing these ideals, the colonized peoples lashed out violently against them and reverted to a fundamentalist doctrine that rejected the West and everything it stood for.

What the United States must learn from the colonialist experience is that the only way to promote lasting democratic reform in the Middle East is to encourage it to develop according to its own indigenous culture and its own religious identity. That is precisely what reformists are trying to do in Iran, and rather than being feared or isolated, they should be supported.

If it can successfully fuse its democratic aspirations with its Islamic identity, then Iran, rather than Iraq, may be able to provide the template of democracy in the Middle East. At the very least, it can become the middle ground between the Islamic dictatorships of Egypt and Jordan, and the fundamentalist regimes of Saudi Arabia and the Taliban.


Reza Aslan, a visiting professor of Islamic studies at the University of Iowa, is author of the forthcoming ``No God but God: A New Interpretation of Islam.``



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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July 18, 2003
Empty Promises of Freedom
By FAWAZ A. GERGES


BEIRUT, Lebanon


With President Bush vowing to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East, Arab governments have begun professing a new commitment to encouraging democracy. Kings, emirs and dictators alike suddenly appear to have discovered the value of human rights and civil society and are trumpeting initiatives to promote them.

The problem is that there remains a huge gap between the rhetoric used by these governments and the reality of their response to peaceful dissidents and opposition groups. For every democratizing action, there`s an authoritarian reaction.

In Morocco, King Mohammed VI has been trying to change his country`s autocratic image and embrace democracy. Yet a court recently imprisoned a journalist, Ali Lamrabet, for "insulting" Mohammed in satirical articles.

In Saudi Arabia, the royal family said that it would confront religious hard-liners and open up the political system after terrorist bombings in May that killed 34 people. Yet later that month the Saudi government ordered the dismissal of the editor in chief of the daily newspaper Al Watan, Jamal Khashoggi, after he published articles criticizing the clergy for propagating extremism. His dismissal revealed that the royal family is more interested in appeasing the conservative religious establishment than in real reform.

In Jordan, King Abdullah II, who had dissolved Parliament in 2001, ordered legislative elections. However, a court barred Toujan Faisal, a democracy advocate (and the only woman who had ever won a seat in Jordan`s Parliament), from running in the elections last month. It ruled that she was disqualified because she had been convicted last year of "insulting the dignity of the state" by accusing an official of corruption in a letter she posted on the Internet.

In Egypt, a move that on first glance appears promising — the ruling party proposed democratic reforms that include the establishment of a new National Council for Human Rights and the abolition of state security courts and hard-labor sentences — is deceptive. By establishing its own human rights council, the government would in fact find a means of trying to force out the independent organizations that already exist.

The history isn`t encouraging. Those groups often complain about the Egyptian authorities` systematic efforts to intimidate them. Some human rights advocates have spent time in Egyptian prisons. It took three years of considerable American and European pressure to free a democracy activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who was arrested in 2000 and sentenced to seven years of hard labor for daring to monitor parliamentary elections.

Egypt would be more convincing in its talk of democracy if it abolished the emergency laws in effect since the 1967 Middle East war. Using these laws, the authorities have effectively impoverished intellectual and political life by arresting dissidents under the pretext that they are endangering public peace.

This is not to say that the gap between talk and action in nations that aren`t American allies is any better. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has promised liberalization. But last year, 10 people, including two members of Parliament, got 3- to 10-year sentences for advocating wider political freedoms and criticizing the authorities.

It`s been clear to me, as I`ve been doing field research in Arab countries over the last few years, that people in the Middle East want democracy. Thousands of courageous Muslims have paid dearly for speaking out against state oppression and religious fanaticism and for demanding political enfranchisement. These democrats hold the key to the Arab world`s future and deserve America`s support.

It`s also clear that Arab autocrats — even those who woo the West with democratic language — won`t do anything unless they`re nudged and pushed. Shamefully, President Bush and his senior aides spent most of their meeting last month with the leaders of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia pressing them to fight terrorism. What they should have been talking about was the importance of promoting democracy and reform. This emphasis sends the wrong message to Arab rulers and citizens by reinforcing the widely held perception that the United States uses democracy as a whip to punish its enemies, like Iraq, while doing business as usual with its autocratic allies.


Moreover, it is shortsighted. If America wants to end terrorism, it needs to understand that ultimately, democracy and respect for human rights and the rule of law are the most effective way to undermine extremism. That change will come about only when the United States begins exerting pressure on its allies, not just its foes.


Fawaz A. Gerges is professor of Middle East and international affairs at Sarah Lawrence College and author of the forthcoming "Islamists and the West: Ideology vs. Pragmatism."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 18, 2003
Passing It Along
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Here`s another sentence in George Bush`s State of the Union address that wasn`t true: "We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations."

Mr. Bush`s officials profess to see nothing wrong with the explosion of the national debt on their watch, even though they now project an astonishing $455 billion budget deficit this year and $475 billion next year. But even the usual apologists (well, some of them) are starting to acknowledge the administration`s irresponsibility. Will they also face up to its dishonesty? It has been obvious all along, if you were willing to see it, that the administration`s claims to fiscal responsibility have rested on thoroughly cooked books.

The numbers tell the tale. In its first budget, released in April 2001, the administration projected a budget surplus of $334 billion for this year. More tellingly, in its second budget, released in February 2002 — that is, after the administration knew about the recession and Sept. 11 — it projected a deficit of only $80 billion this year, and an almost balanced budget next year. Just six months ago, it was projecting deficits of about $300 billion this year and next.

There`s no mystery about why the administration`s budget projections have borne so little resemblance to reality: realistic budget numbers would have undermined the case for tax cuts. So budget analysts were pressured to high-ball estimates of future revenues and low-ball estimates of future expenditures. Any resemblance to the way the threat from Iraq was exaggerated is no coincidence at all.

And just as some people argue that the war was justified even though it was sold on false pretenses, some say that the biggest budget deficit in history is justified even though the administration got us here with cooked numbers.

Some point out that Ronald Reagan ran even bigger deficits as a share of G.D.P. But they hope people won`t remember that in the face of those deficits, Mr. Reagan raised taxes, reversing part of his initial tax cut.

Furthermore, this time huge deficits have emerged just a few years before the baby boomers start retiring and placing huge demands on Social Security and Medicare. The Social Security system is running a surplus right now, in preparation for future demands; the rest of the federal government is paying one-third of its expenses with borrowed money. That`s a record.

But haven`t administration officials said they`ll cut the deficit in half by 2008? Yeah, right. I could explain in detail why that claim is nonsense, but in any case, why bother with what these people say? Remember, just 18 months ago they said they`d more or less balance the budget by 2004. Unpoliticized projections show a budget deficit of at least $300 billion a year as far as the eye can see.

The last defense of the budget deficit is that it helps a depressed economy — to which the answer is "yes, but." Yes, deficit spending stimulates demand — but tax cuts for the rich, which have dominated the administration`s economic program, generate very little employment bang for the deficit buck. Of the 2.6 million jobs the economy has lost under the Bush administration, 2 million have been lost since the 2001 tax cut.

And yes, deficits are appropriate as a temporary measure when the economy is depressed — but these deficits aren`t temporary (see above).

Still, do deficits matter? Some economists worry, with good reason, about their long-run effect on economic growth. But I worry most about America`s fiscal credibility.

You see, a government that has a reputation for sound finance and honest budgets can get away with running temporary deficits; if it lacks such a reputation, it can`t. Right now the U.S. government is running deficits bigger, as a share of G.D.P., than those that plunged Argentina into crisis. The reason we don`t face a comparable crisis is that markets, extrapolating from our responsible past, trust us to get our house in order.

But Mr. Bush shows no inclination to deal with the budget deficit. On the contrary, his administration continues to fudge the numbers and push for ever more tax cuts. Eventually, markets will notice. And tarnished credibility, along with a much-increased debt, is a problem that Mr. Bush will pass along to other Congresses, other presidents and other generations.








Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Postwar Window Closing in Iraq, Study Says
More Funds, International Force Recommended to Improve Security Situation

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A09


A team of outside experts dispatched by the Pentagon to assess security and reconstruction operations in Iraq reported yesterday that the window of opportunity for achieving postwar success is closing and requires immediate and dramatic action by U.S. military and civilian personnel.

The team concluded that the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in charge of reconstruction efforts is isolated and underfunded, and it recommended that U.S. officials move immediately to internationalize the daunting task of rebuilding Iraq, particularly in light of "rising anti-Americanism in parts of the country."

Amid escalating guerrilla attacks against U.S. forces and mounting criticism of the Bush administration by Democrats for poor postwar planning in Iraq, the report represents a comprehensive, independent assessment of conditions there, both in terms of security and reconstruction.

"The `hearts and minds` of key segments of the Sunni and Shi`a communities are in play and can be won, but only if the Coalition Provisional Authority and new Iraqi authorities deliver in short order," the experts said in 10-page report to Pentagon officials, which they released at a news conference.

The report noted "significant progress" but said "the next 12 months will be decisive."

The team, organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, traveled to Iraq at Pentagon expense between June 27 and July 7. It was led by John Hamre, who served as deputy defense secretary in the Clinton administration and is now CSIS president.

Bryan G. Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said defense officials "agree with the assessment that there has been enormous progress in Iraq since the removal of [Saddam Hussein`s] regime and that significant challenges lie ahead."

"We look forward to working through the report in a systematic fashion to determine how we might put into practice the elements and findings, as appropriate," Whitman said.

While measured in tone and focused on 32 recommendations for rapidly improving conditions in Iraq, the report represents, in many respects, a critical assessment of the Bush administration`s postwar plan.

It implicitly faulted the administration for failing to adequately involve the international community and the United Nations in reconstruction activities. "The scope of the challenges, the financial requirements, and rising anti-Americanism in parts of Iraq argue for a new coalition that includes countries and organizations beyond the original war fighting coalition," the report said.

The report also noted that the administration, by vesting virtually all reconstruction authority in the Pentagon, chose a new model for postwar management that cut out many agencies more experienced in the field and relied on the Defense Department`s "relatively untested capacities."

The study did not weigh in on the much-debated question of whether the Pentagon lacked forces on the ground when the war ended to secure Iraq`s cities, prevent looting and forcefully demonstrate that U.S. forces were in control.

But the experts singled out security as Iraq`s primary problem and said "volatile" conditions must be dealt with over the next three months to prevent the window of opportunity for success from closing.

The U.S. military, despite the presence of 148,000 troops in Iraq, the report said, is not visible enough at the street level, particularly in Baghdad, and must reassess its force composition and tactics in response to a "steady deterioration in the security situation."

Frederick Barton, a team member and CSIS official, said that while there probably were not enough troops on the ground when the war ended in April, increasing the U.S. military force in the country now would be problematic, given the growing resentment of its presence.

Thousands of forces guarding military bases and Iraqi installations, he said, should be redeployed to increase their visibility and augmented by private security contractors and Iraqi police. But the job of rooting out remnants of Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party now waging a guerrilla war, he said, must remain primarily with U.S. forces.

Barton said he now believes the Iraqi insurgency is more sophisticated than the military initially appreciated. "We came to the conclusion while we were there that thousands of [Baathist fighters] just don`t go missing as an accident -- that it probably was a coordinated effort," Barton said. "It`s really not hard to travel around the country, and it`s not hard to [communicate by] word of mouth."

Another team member, Bathsheba Crocker, a former State Department attorney, said officials she met with in the southern city of Basra now believe the looting there was orchestrated by Hussein`s regime. "This wasn`t just the result of overexcitement or venting or whatever it was we thought it was at the beginning," she said. "The devastation is unbelievable."

Beyond security, the report said, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the agency in charge of reconstruction headed by L. Paul Bremer, must improve communications with the Iraqi people and decentralize its structure by opening 18 regional offices.

The authority will soon be in desperate need of funds and must be freed of bureaucratic restrictions so that it can rapidly commit money for essential improvements, the report says, particularly those related to the country`s water and power systems.

Hamre, in a foreword to the report, wrote that "the enormity of this undertaking cannot be overstated; there are huge challenges ahead."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Iraqi police gather by the bullet-riddled car of Haditha`s former mayor, Mohammed Nayil Jurayfi, who often gave information to U.S. troops.

washingtonpost.com
Iraqi Mayor`s Killing Reinforces Fear
Many Say Working With U.S. Will Lead to Retribution from Resistance Groups

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A08


HADITHA, Iraq, July 17 -- In this hilly town along the Euphrates River, people recall how Mohammed Nayil Jurayfi used to boast that his black Toyota Avalon had belonged to a senior Baath Party official -- until Jurayfi confiscated it on orders from U.S. Army officers.

His seizure of the Toyota and five other cars had been controversial, leading one local man to call him "an American collaborator" and another "a partner with the enemy."

But Jurayfi, an influential tribal leader who proclaimed himself mayor of Haditha after Saddam Hussein`s government dissolved, was unruffled, according to relatives and colleagues. He was so proud of his relationship with the U.S. military that he kept a framed citation of thanks from an American officer on his mantel.

On Wednesday afternoon, as he was returning home from his office with his youngest son, Ahmed, at least two gunmen sprayed his Toyota with dozens of bullets as it rounded a corner, police officials said. Jurayfi and Ahmed were killed instantly, the officials said.

In Haditha today, there was no doubt about why the mayor was killed.

"He was too close to the Americans," said Abdullah Jurayfi, the mayor`s cousin, as he sat at a wake in a long tent. "That was his big mistake."

In recent days, insurgents seeking to end the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq have broadened their targets from military personnel to Iraqis deemed to be collaborating with soldiers and civilian reconstruction specialists. Many Iraqis are too scared to work with Americans, which creates another troubling obstacle for the U.S. program to rebuild this country.

Last week, police officers in Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad, complained that they were being targeted by resistance fighters because U.S. military police were in the town`s police station. This month, seven new Iraqi policemen trained by the U.S. military were killed when a bomb exploded during their graduation ceremonies in Ramadi, about 60 miles west of Baghdad. Last month, the director of electricity distribution for the western half of Baghdad, who had worked closely with U.S. officials, was killed in her home.

On Monday night, a car bomb detonated prematurely outside a police station in Baghdad, decapitating one of the assailants in an attack that one Iraqi officer said was intended "to frighten people away from the Americans."

"Working with the Americans has become very dangerous," said police Lt. Ahmed Hassan Mohammed in Haditha, 125 miles northwest of Baghdad. "We have become targets, too."

A group calling itself the Iraq Liberation Movement distributed leaflets here today that said that "the heroes of the Iraqi resistance have begun to target some Iraqis and Iraqi police stations in order to liquidate some of the symbols of treason and espionage." The previously unheard-of organization warned residents "not to come close to vehicles and buildings used by the occupying power . . . so that the heroes of our movement can organize their operations."

Police officials said they did not know whether the group was responsible for Jurayfi`s death. Capt. Khudeir Mohammed Sael said several municipal employees received leaflets on Wednesday warning them not to go to work. The documents were signed by an organization that called itself Liberating Iraq`s Army, which this week claimed responsibility for several recent attacks on U.S. forces.

"We don`t know who is behind this," Sael said. "But we are sure it is people who do not want us to be friendly with the Americans."

Sael and others said Jurayfi`s death was just the latest in a series of attacks on people in Haditha deemed to be collaborating with U.S. forces. On Tuesday morning, he said, the house of a police lieutenant colonel was firebombed, killing two of his teenage children. Five hours before, the officer had served tea to several American soldiers in his garden, Sael said.

Last week, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the home of a prominent tribal sheik who had met with U.S. troops the day before, people said.

"There is a pattern here," Sael said. "It is a very frightening pattern."

U.S. officials in Baghdad said they were concerned about the increasing frequency of attacks on Iraqis who have been working with Americans, although they cast the incidents as acts of desperation by insurgents who were too cowardly to challenge uniformed troops.

"It`s a big problem when it comes to gaining the trust of our Iraqi partners," one senior official said. "We need the police officers and the teachers and the electricity workers and the other government workers to feel safe enough to work with us."

In Haditha, several police officers said continuing to work with Americans would be too risky.

Mohammed, the police lieutenant, said officers in Haditha did not conduct joint patrols with the U.S. military as police in other Iraqi cities do. Nor do they wear new, American-supplied blue shirts. Instead, he said, cooperation was far more discreet.

"We don`t drive through the city with them," Mohammed said, who wore the same khaki uniform officers in the town wore before the war. "That would be foolish."

Outside the station, away from fellow officers, Mohammed insisted in a soft voice that the town`s police force needed help from the Americans, but he said he feared the consequences of receiving more assistance. "We want to work with the Americans because we need new equipment. We need new radios and cars. We need training," he said as he stood next to Jurayfi`s bullet-riddled car, which had been towed to the station. "But we also know that if people see us working together, they will shoot at us like they do to the Americans."

The same sense of fear pervades the market in this overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim town that has prospered as a trading outpost on the road to Syria. Merchants almost uniformly stated they would not sell even a single can of soda to an American soldier -- but not always for the same reason.

"We`re not going to have anything to do with the occupiers," growled Sahib Hekmat, the portly owner of a small dry-goods shop. "Now, if we discover anybody in the town who is cooperating with the Americans, we won`t visit their home. We won`t even say hello to them in the street."

A few doors down, another shopkeeper also insisted he would not sell anything to passing U.S. soldiers, though he said he did not object to their presence in Iraq. "It will cause me trouble," the shopkeeper said.

Whether Jurayfi was apprehensive about his relationship with U.S. forces was a matter of debate today. Sael said the mayor asked the Americans to provide him a security detail, or at least a permit to carry a machine gun, but both requests were turned down. Sael also said a U.S. patrol drove by Jurayfi`s car shortly after the shooting but did not stop to help.

"If you deal with the Americans, they come to you and promise you so much, but when something bad happens, they leave you like they do not know you," he said.

But Abdullah Jurayfi maintained that his cousin was not worried about security and regarded guards as an embarrassment. "He thought it was shameful to have protection in his own city," he said.

No matter how he felt about his safety, the mayor apparently made little effort to play down his ties to the U.S. military, which, by several accounts, were not extensive.

A former Baathist who broke with the former ruling party in the 1970s and was imprisoned repeatedly for alleged pro-Syrian leanings, Jurayfi staked claim to the mayor`s office as soon as Hussein`s government fell.

He dispatched police to the streets and called on local tribal chiefs to help maintain order. His actions are regarded by many as the reason Haditha escaped the looting that befell other parts of Iraq.

When troops from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment moved into the area, he became a trusted intermediary for U.S. commanders. When they needed intelligence on former Baathists, his relatives said, he dished. When they needed help confiscating government automobiles from the town`s former leaders, he volunteered to do the job.

In an interview with a Post correspondent in late June, Jurayfi pronounced himself "very proud" of his citation from the U.S. Army.

He noted wryly that he had escaped three death sentences, which were commuted because of his prominence as a tribal leader. A jovial character and the father of 11 children, Jurayfi said he wanted to enter national politics in the new Iraq.

"I`m very optimistic about the future," he said in the sitting room of his large walled home. "God willing, these problems we have will disappear soon."

At the police station, officers saw an omen in the charred remains of his Toyota, which caught fire after a bullet pierced the gasoline tank. The only item not fully burned in the car was a piece of Iraqi currency. Although singed around the edges, the smiling visage of Hussein was clearly evident.

"He`s still haunting us," Sael said as he looked at the bank note.

As he walked away, he said he would not repeat the mayor`s "mistakes" of dealing with Americans.

"We must change what we do," he said. "If we don`t, they will kill us one by one."

Correspondent Peter Finn contributed to this report.



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washingtonpost.com
Why Defense Must Change


By Donald H. Rumsfeld

Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A19


Congress will soon decide whether the Department of Defense is to join the rest of the world -- and many newly revamped parts of the federal government, such as the Department of Homeland Security -- in entering the 21st century.

The issue is the Defense Transformation Act, legislation designed to allow the department to, among other things, manage its personnel.

Today it takes, on average, five months to hire a federal employee, 18 months to fire one and collective bargaining with more than 1,300 separate union locals to implement critical reforms. These negotiations can take years to accomplish.

While the nation is asking tens of thousands of reserve troops to leave their jobs and their families to help fight the global war on terrorism, it is estimated that on-duty military personnel are serving in more than 300,000 jobs -- at additional cost to the taxpayers -- that could be filled by civilian workers but are not because the department doesn`t have the authority to manage its civilian personnel. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than 80 percent of civilians deployed in the theater of operations were contractors. Why? Because a complex web of regulations prevents the Department of Defense from moving civilians to new tasks quickly. As a result, managers turn to uniformed personnel and to contractors to do what department civilians could and should be doing. A similar problem exists with respect to the hiring of new employees. While industry can offer promising applicants a job and a bonus on the spot, all the Defense Department can offer is a ream of paperwork and a promise to get back to them in three to five months.

In an era when our enemies are moving at the speed of satellites, cell phones and cyberspace, these burdensome regulations are not acceptable. The Department of Defense cannot meet the challenges of the future with an organization anchored to the past. We must be permitted to be as agile, flexible and adaptable as the forces we field in battle around the world.

The Defense Transformation Act would help provide the nation with that kind of agility and flexibility.

The new National Security Personnel System the president has proposed would reduce red tape, provide the hiring flexibility necessary to attract the best candidates quickly and competitively, and offer all employees a performance-based promotion system that rewards excellence rather than longevity. Instead of a bargaining process that requires negotiations with more than 1,300 separate local units, the new system would work with a half-dozen or more national unions, which would retain and protect all the rights of union workers but do so through a more efficient and reasonable process that would not take years to navigate.

Moreover, the new system would not only protect and ensure the fundamental rights of all civilian employees and provide improved opportunities for advancement; it would also likely increase the number of civil service opportunities and make the Defense Department more competitive with the private sector.

But the existing personnel system is not the only problem. Despite 128 studies to reform the department`s acquisition process, it now takes the department double the time it took in 1975 to produce a new weapons system -- this in an age when new technologies are coming on line in months, not decades.

Today the Department of Defense uses 1,800 different and antiquated information systems to run its finance and accounting programs, ensuring that timely and accurate business management information cannot be produced.

Current laws and regulations have created a situation in which, to develop and justify a budget, we must employ thousands of people, only a fraction of whom are focused on what is really important -- namely ensuring that the money is spent as Congress and the president determine and that the spending is having the desired results.

U.S. military forces are further hamstrung by outdated environmental regulations that are impeding our ability to train and better prepare the men and women in uniform for battlefield conditions.

These are just a few of the reasons why the Defense Transformation Act is so urgently needed.

Most of the proposals we are making are simple. Over the past months we have addressed most of the problems we have the power to fix. We are reducing headquarters and management staffs, streamlining the acquisition process by eliminating hundreds of pages of unnecessary rules and red tape, and implementing a new business management structure. But most of what remains to be done cannot be done without legislative relief.

Transformation of our military capabilities depends on our ability to transform not just the armed forces and the way they fight. We must also transform the Department of Defense. Congress shares the responsibility to help reach those goals. Passage of the Defense Transformation Act is critical to bringing the department into the information age and the 21st century.

The writer is secretary of defense.




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washingtonpost.com
Why Did Bush Go to War?


By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A19


The Niger uranium flap has achieved the status of midsummer frenzy, a molehill become a mountain in the absence of competing news stories. It was but one bit of intelligence out of dozens about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, by any measure, hardly the most important.

Nonetheless, it was more than likely false, thus giving an opening to the Democrats, desperate for some handle to attack President Bush`s huge advantage on the issue of national security. With weapons of mass destruction yet unfound, the Niger blunder opens the way to the broad implication that the president is a liar or a dissimulator who took the country to war under false pretenses.

How exactly does this line of reasoning work? The charge is that the president was looking for excuses to go to war with Hussein and that the weapons-of-mass-destruction claims were just a pretense.

Aside from the fact that Hussein`s possession of weapons of mass destruction was posited not only by Bush but also by just about every intelligence service on the planet (including those of countries that opposed war as the solution), one runs up against this logical conundrum: Why then did Bush want to go to war? For fun and recreation? Because of some cowboy compulsion?

The wilder critics have attempted wag-the-dog theories: war as a distraction from general political woes (Paul Krugman quotes the Robert De Niro character advising the president: "You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war.") or war as a distraction from a lousy economy. This is ridiculous. Apart from everything else, war is a highly dangerous political enterprise. No one had any idea that Baghdad would fall in three weeks and with so few casualties. Just as no one had any idea how costly and bloody the post-victory occupation would be.

On the contrary, the war was a huge political gamble. There was no popular pressure to go to war. There was even less foreign pressure to go to war. Bush decided to stake his presidency on it nonetheless, knowing that if things went wrong -- and indeed they might still -- his political career was finished.

It is obvious he did so because he thought that, post-9/11, it was vital to the security of the United States that Hussein be disarmed and deposed.

Under what analysis? That Iraq posed a clear and imminent danger, a claim now being discounted by the critics because of the absence thus far of weapons of mass destruction?

No. That was not the president`s case. It was, on occasion, Tony Blair`s, and that is why Blair is in such political trouble in Britain. But in Bush`s first post-9/11 State of the Union address (January 2002), he framed Iraq as part of a larger and more enduring problem, the overriding threat of our time: the conjunction of terrorism, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction. And unless something was done, we faced the prospect of an infinitely more catastrophic 9/11 in the future.

Later that year, in a speech to the United Nations, he spoke of the danger from Iraq not as "clear and present" but "grave and gathering," an obvious allusion to Churchill`s "gathering storm," the gradually accumulating threat that preceded the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. And then nearer the war, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush plainly denied that the threat was imminent. "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." Bush was, on the contrary, calling for action precisely when the threat was not imminent because, "if this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions . . . would come too late."

The threat had not yet even fully emerged, Bush was asserting, but nonetheless it had to be faced because it would only get worse. Hussein was not going away. The sanctions were not going to restrain him. Even his death would be no reprieve, as his half-mad sons would take over. The argument was that Hussein had to be removed eventually and that with Hussein relatively weakened, isolated and vulnerable, now would be more prudent and less costly than later.

He was right.

In fact, Bush`s case was simply a more elaborate and formal restatement of Bill Clinton`s argument in 1998 that, left unmolested, Hussein would "go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he`ll use the arsenal."

That was true when Clinton said it. It was true when Bush said it. The difference is that Bush did something about it.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Moving Right Along


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A19


What has finally caught up with the Bush administration is its habit of tossing out politically convenient arguments and then walking away from them after they have done their work. That`s what President Bush`s questionable statements on Iraq and the new estimates putting this year`s federal deficit at $455 billion have in common.

The Iraq story is spinning at such a furious pace that it`s hard to keep track of what the administration wants the public to believe. Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer came right out last week and said the president should never have cited that British government claim that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." CIA Director George Tenet said he should have kept the words out of the president`s State of the Union address but told a Senate committee on Wednesday that his staff didn`t even tell him that the questionable claim was in the speech until after it was given.

And the administration has opened a second, contradictory front. Led by Condoleezza Rice, the president`s national security adviser, the president`s defenders are also insisting that what Bush said was technically true because he was reporting only on what the British government had "learned." Besides, Rice has noted, the British still insist their uranium report was, as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it yesterday, "genuine."

Which means exactly what for Bush? That he was right all along? That Fleischer`s statement is now inoperative? That the president believes British intelligence more than he believes his own CIA director?

The real story here is that the administration knew perfectly well that the two arguments most likely to persuade Americans who had doubts about going to war were (1) that Saddam Hussein had some link to 9/11 and (2) that this mad dictator had nukes. The administration pushed the 9/11 connection as hard as it could, despite highly questionable evidence, and used the nuclear claim as an effective closing punch. Whatever works.

The administration`s past is also catching up with it on the deficit. A year ago the administration said the 2003 deficit would be $109 billion and the 2004 deficit would be $48 billion. Oops. This week, the president`s Office of Management and Budget said the deficit for 2003 would be $455 billion and for 2004 would be $475 billion. And this second estimate doesn`t even include the full costs of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The administration argues that it is unfair to say that Bush blew the $5.6 trillion, 10-year surplus he inherited. These "good faith estimates" of the size of the surplus, says the OMB`s mid-session review, took into account "no subsequent spending or tax changes, no recession, no collapse of the stock market, no September 11th terrorist attacks, no revelation of corporate scandals, no additional homeland security spending, and no war on terror."

But all those factors were known a year ago, when the administration offered its rosy picture of the fiscal future. Yes, budget projections are difficult, and Josh Bolten, the new head of the OMB, is an honest soul. But Rep. Jack Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, notes that the administration has substantially underestimated the deficit every year.

He also notes that the administration was warning of an economic downturn even before it took office. Bush thus offered two arguments for his 2001 tax cut that effectively contradicted each other: that the big surplus, guaranteed by good times, meant the tax cut wouldn`t cause deficits; and that the good times were in danger of ending, so his tax cut was essential to spur the economy. Whatever works.

The other big contradiction is the Bush administration`s claim that its tax cuts were designed to stimulate the economy now, when many of the reductions don`t even kick in until much later in the decade. But while the administration was certain enough about the future to offer a 10-year tax cut plan, its Office of Management and Budget offers only five-year deficit projections, neatly burying debate about the long term.

Deficits lack the drama of wars, and economic arguments are easy to muddy up. But the accountability that`s being imposed on the administration over Iraq will eventually extend to other spheres. Our victory in Iraq against a genuinely evil dictator was supposed to create a euphoria that would sweep aside inconvenient questions. If the aftermath of the war had gone better, the strategy might have worked. But the Bush spin machine now has sand in its gears because one question inevitably leads to another, and another.

Once it`s lost, credibility is very hard to earn back.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Something to Hide?


By David Ignatius

Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A19


As political crises mount in Washington and London over evidence about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction, it would be especially useful to have the testimony of a leading expert on the subject, Saddam Hussein`s science adviser, Amir Saadi.

Saadi (the seven of diamonds in the coalition`s deck of cards) surrendered voluntarily to U.S. authorities in Baghdad on April 12. He was the first senior Iraqi official to do so. Because he had never been a member of the Baath Party, U.S. officials were hopeful that he would provide honest information.

TV addicts will remember Saadi as the articulate, cleanshaven English speaker who tried (never entirely convincingly, to this viewer) to explain Iraq`s dealings with U.N. weapons inspectors. He was educated in Britain and Germany and married a foreigner, who was never allowed to live with him in Baghdad. Although he served as minister of petroleum and industries at various points, he was never particularly close to Hussein.

"He wanted to make himself available to the coalition forces for questioning and cooperation," said Saadi`s German-born wife, Helma, in an e-mail message this week. One of Saadi`s American supporters agrees: "He has everything to gain by being honest, and absolutely nothing to gain from continued deception."

So where has Saadi been for the past three months? His family believes he has been imprisoned at the Baghdad airport along with other Iraqi captives. His wife said that she has been communicating through the Red Cross and that in his last communication, on June 15, he told her he was "being treated correctly," was "allowed to shower once a week" and was passing the time reading and writing.

Saadi`s friends say there has been quiet discussion about his case with the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by L. Paul Bremer. Believing that Saadi is "clean," some officials of the authority have recommended three times to higher officials at the Pentagon that he be released, according to Saadi`s friends. Each of these requests has been rejected, they say.

But why muzzle Saadi? At a time when there are political firestorms in America and Britain over Iraq`s WMD program, why not let one of Iraq`s leading scientists answer questions? For example: When (if ever) were banned weapons destroyed? If they were destroyed, why didn`t Iraq make a full disclosure, as demanded by the United Nations? Was Hussein afraid that if he admitted he had destroyed his WMD stockpile, he would lose a deterrent against attack by Kurdish and Shiite enemies of his regime? These are precisely the questions Saadi could help clarify.

Saadi`s silence, I suspect, is evidence that the Pentagon and the White House have concluded that any public release of his testimony would undercut their position. After all, this White House is so desperate to protect President Bush on WMD issues that it is prepared to sacrifice CIA Director George Tenet. If Saadi`s testimony could help the president, surely we would have heard it by now.

I have the same question about another man who voluntarily surrendered to the coalition, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. He turned himself in April 24 after several days of negotiation involving an Iraqi American intermediary in the United States.

Aziz in his later years was not an intimate of Hussein -- that`s why he was only the eight of spades in the coalition`s deck. But he knows things that would be relevant to the British and American publics. Like Saadi, he has little incentive at this point to lie. His family even wants him to publish his memoirs.

I spoke with his son, Ziad Aziz, yesterday from Amman. He said his only official contact from his father was a June 14 letter via the Red Cross saying he was in good health. The younger Aziz recalled that when he said goodbye in Baghdad, his father seemed ready to cooperate fully. He, too, might be able to tell the world important information, were he free to do so.

What`s bothersome about these cases is that they reinforce the impression that the Bush administration has something to hide. Why not disclose the testimony of people the coalition worked so hard to catch? The only convincing explanation, argues a former CIA official, is that their accounts would "directly refute the Bush administration`s insistence that WMD still exist somewhere -- an assertion that we all know is growing more questionable every day."

The solid rationale for this war was liberating Iraq from Hussein`s brutal regime, rather than the shakier WMD evidence. How bizarre that Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to play a weak hand and that they now keep doubling their bets as its weakness becomes more apparent.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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July 18, 2003 EDITORIAL ARCHIVES


The Banality of Lying

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

You could best compare the Bush Cartel’s defensive posture on the uranium story to a live fish tossed into a slow-heated frying pan. The Bush Cartel lies so frequently -- and with such impunity -- that it appears surprisingly inept at actually having to defend a lie. Its members just aren`t used to being challenged.

Forgive BuzzFlash if we appear skeptical about the long-term impact of the phony Niger Uranium document "revelations." After all, it`s just one in a very long list of distortions, half-truths and lies that the Bush Cartel used to mislead the citizens of this nation into a war in which our soldiers are still dying. And the Bush administration is still trying to con us on the Iraq post-war war.

Tenet`s most recent reported confession that a White House official insisted on the 16-word statement being included in the State of the Union speech will add fuel to the fire, but without Bush and Cheney being forced to testify under oath, more scapegoats will be found and tossed overboard, allowing the S.S. Bush to stay afloat.

Indeed, if we continue to focus solely on the infamous 16 words, Bush`s credibility will be measured on the basis of one act of deceit. But this administration lies MORE than it tells the truth. Emphasizing the forged uranium document alone is a bit like arresting the head of a drug cartel for smoking a joint. Sure, you got him, but what about all the other crimes?

In the past few days, we have posted original BuzzFlash commentary and links to other articles that have detailed the Bush Cartel’s multiple deceptions and lies about Iraq. What`s most important to remember is that the majority of Americans believe these lies. The polls show that Americans supported the Iraq war based on the trumped-up propaganda that the Bush administration doled out through the media.

As the media partakes in a feeding frenzy on the uranium story, it overlooks the even more mind-boggling and brazen lies that have been uttered since January’s State of the Union address.

"What`s more disturbing?" one of our Buzzflash readers wrote us the other day:

1) The fact that Bush said the following regarding Saddam and the decision for war in his July 14th press conference:

"The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn`t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more
peaceful."

2) Or the fact that no one is calling him on it!

Bush does know that there were weapons inspectors in Iraq in the months prior to the war...doesn`t he?

While in Europe a few weeks ago, Bush claimed that two Iraqi vans were weapons of mass destruction, even though experts indicated that was an unlikely scenario -- and Britain had provided the vans to Iraq. Karl Rove knows that it`s a game of headlines, and if the President of the United States claims that America has found WMDs in Iraq, that will be the headline that people read.

Lies have, of course, also been the basic tool used by the Bush administration to fend off criticism of its failure to protect America from 9/11. In a recent BuzzFlash editorial, we mentioned, yet again, one of the most astonishing lies in a long list of audacious mendacity.

It’s still worth repeating. (Note that in this incident, Condi Rice once again carried the water for Bush):

Well, let`s take a look at a couple of examples from 2002. In the spring of that year, revelations were coming out that Bush had been warned of an imminent terrorist attack on the U.S. during a briefing in the summer of 2001, but ignored the warning and went off to vacation on his ranch for a month. Then came September 11th and the Bush Cartel acted as if it were all a big surprise. Other information about the Bush Cartel being asleep at the wheel in preventing the terrorist attack also began to emerge. There were starting to be rumbles in Congress about an independent investigation of 9/11 being created. Cheney even called Tom Daschle to threaten that an independent investigation would make the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

The Bush Cartel hauled out Condi to "explain" that it was true that Bush had been warned that Al-Qaeda hijackings might occur in the near future, but that Bush wasn`t told about plans to attack the World Trade Center or Pentagon so he didn`t take action to protect them. The press dutifully accepted this explanation. But as BuzzFlash pointed out at the time -- and we assume most second graders would understand this, but apparently not the mainstream press -- the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon WERE hijackings. If Bush had taken steps after his pre-9/11 security briefing to put law enforcement on heightened alert, he might very well have prevented the hijacking attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. But the American press and the TV pundits couldn`t figure out this little bit of basic common sense and convinced the American public that Condi had cleared everything up. It staggers the mind that they could get away with this transparent, nonsensical, lie. Condi admitted that Bush was warned about potentially imminent hijackings, the source of the 9/11 attacks. That is the bottom line, period.

Furthermore, if Bush was warned in the summer of 2001 that Al-Qaeda was planning spectacular hijackings and did nothing significant to increase airport security, what does that tell you? Another point that seemed to cast doubt on Condi`s claims of Bush innocence in terms of having failed to prevent 9/11 was that she claimed that no one had known that Al-Qaeda was planning to attack buildings with planes. But that was quickly disproved by BuzzFlash and other sites who pointed out that Bush had attended a G-8 conference in Genoa, where anti-aircraft missiles were deployed for the specific reason that intelligence gathering had revealed Al-Qaeda was planning to attack buildings in the Italian city, targeting the G-8 conferees. That was one reason Bush slept on a boat offshore. And that occurred before the "smoking gun" briefing in the summer of 2001!

The lie that Rice told to explain away Bush`s pre-9/11 briefing on the threat of deadly hijackings by Al Qaeda was the political equivalent of robbing a bank in broad day light -- and getting away with it.

Jumping back to the present, David Corn, a columnist for "The Nation," documents how it appears that the Bush White House may have deliberately "outed" a CIA agent, in order to get back at former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson moved to the top of the Bush/Cheney enemy`s list when he revealed to the Washington Post that he had warned the Bush administration that the Niger documents were undoubtedly fakes BEFORE the State of the Union speech. (See [LINK]) Revealing the identity of a CIA agent who is working undercover may not only be a violation of the law, it is an act of treason. Why did the Bush administration allegedly commit this act of treason? To intimidate others who might speak out, it would appear. The CIA agent, in question, you see, is Wilson`s wife.

So we are not just dealing with deceit; we are dealing with an administration that, apparently, if Corn is right, betrays its own CIA agents and its own "war on terrorism." The specialty of the CIA agent who the Bush administration allegedly rendered inoperative by outing her is, of course, "tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material."

However, in the absence of a formal inquiry that would require Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld to be queried under oath about ALL the lies that they fed to the American people -- including 9/11 (before and after), the ginned-up terrorists alerts, the pre-Iraq deceits, the Cheney energy task force, Bush and Cheney’s Enron relationships, favors done for campaign contributions, the plan to "starve the American government" through a combination of tax cuts and soaring federal deficits, North Korea, Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Al Qaeda, (the list could go on for pages, but we will spare you the pain of reading it) -- in the absence of a truly independent legislative or legal probe into the dark underside of the Bush Cartel, this administration will likely continue to get away with deception.

If they were all put under oath -- and documents were surrendered -- there would be impeachment proceedings on far too many counts to list, and, in a perfect world, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft would serve jail time. Of course, it will never come to that. Bush, ever the coward, would strike a deal. The Bushes believe it is the duty and responsibility for their servants to take the rap.

Corruption breeds corruption. When a BuzzFlash reader recently took John Kerry to task for his dismissal of Democrats who continue to decry the theft of election 2000, the reader understood that an administration that came into power through a Supreme Court coup, engineered by a Federalist Society judge who believes he takes his orders from God, was corrupt from its illegitimate birth.

But when big lies are such a daily occurrence, it is hard to see how any long-term damage will be done to the Bush administration. The key members of the Bush Cartel lie so frequently, it now seems banal. Lying has become an acceptable standard in the Bush administration; in fact, it is part of an admired skill set.

The Republicans have successfully used the vehicles afforded them by the structure of our democracy to reverse the will of the people. Consider Kenneth Starr and the impeachment hearings; the 2000 Supreme Court decision; Karl Rove and Tom DeLay’s unprecedented congressional redistricting robberies in Texas and elsewhere; and the Gray Davis recall effort in California.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have been timid (and we are being kind) about using the legislative process or independent investigations to expose Republican lies and corruption. When Tom Daschle had control of the Senate, he did little to encourage his committee chairmen to vigorously investigate the Enron relationships with the White House, the Bush Administration’s failure to try and prevent September 11th, Ashcroft’s dismantling of the Constitution, and so on.

Now the Democrats in Congress don’t even have the power to probe the Bush administration’s pathological lies. The Democrats do, however, have the platform to keep the Bush administration on the defensive by jumping on every lie like a junkyard dog.

This administration is kept afloat on a sea of lies. Expose the lies, and its credibility and legitimacy will sink to the bottom of the water.

Allow them to get away with deceit, and the sweet water of democracy will turn into a quagmire of deficits, deaths and deception.

It already has.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

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Umdenken der US-Regierung?

Florian Rötzer 17.07.2003

Offenbar erwägt Außenminister Powell nun eine Beteiligung an einer UN-Friedensmission in Liberia, während gerade ein Gesetzesvorschlag für den Rückzug aus der UN im Repräsentantenhaus abgelehnt wurde

Bislang war die Sprachregelung der US-Regierung für eine Friedensmission in Liberia, dass man, sobald Charles Taylor außer Landes ist, möglicherweise mit einer kleinen Truppe die ECOWAS-Soldaten unterstützt und eine UN-Mission vorbereite. Keinesfalls aber wolle man sich direkt bei einer UN-Mission beteiligen (Die Bush-Regierung, das Pentagon und Liberia [1]). Offenbar aber haben mit den Schwierigkeiten im Irak nun die Falken mit ihrer unilateralen Politik an Boden verloren und ist der Druck groß, dass die US-Regierung nicht wieder eigene Wege geht. Vom US-Außenministerium wurde bereits eine Resolution vorbereitet, die jetzt auch eine Beteiligung von US-Soldaten an einer UN-Mission vorsieht.

Die US-Regierung steht in Bezug auf die Zusammenarbeit mit der UN unter Druck. Konservative fordern, dass sich die USA ganz aus der UN zurückziehen sollen. Erst am Mittwoch ist der vom republikanischen Abgeordneten Ron Paul im Repräsentantenhaus eingebrachte Gesetzesvorschlag "American Sovereignty Restoration Act" abgelehnt worden. Das Gesetz sah vor, dass die USA aus der UN austritt und ihr kein Geld mehr gibt. Immerhin stimmten 74 für diesen Gesetzesvorschlag, 350 aber dagegen.

Das Gesetz hätte auch jede Zusammenarbeit mit der UN untersagt und sogar den Vertrag von 1947 gelöst, mit das Hauptquartier der UN nach New York kam. Weder sollte es mehr Geld für humanitäre Aktionen der UN oder mit ihr zusammenarbeitende NGOs geben noch für militärische Friedensmissionen. Mitarbeitern der UN sollte die diplomatische Immunität in den USA entzogen und aus allen Abkommen oder Verpflichtungen ausgetreten werden.

Ron Paul [2] ist texanischer Abgeordneter, ein Libertärer und verficht ein "Project Freedom". Er tritt für weniger Staat ein, auch für eine "non-nation-building" Außenpolitik und sieht sich daher von der Bush-Regierung getäuscht, die den Staat aufgebläht hat. Scharf wendet er sich gegen die Kriegspolitik der Bush-Regierung und die Macht der Neokonservativen. Die UN fördert für ihn antiamerikanische Stimmungen. Sie "verschendet nicht nur Steuergelder, sondern ist gegenüber Amerika aktiv feindlich". Außen- und Innenpolitik müssen nach Paul vollständig in der Hand der Amerikaner bleiben, die UN hingegen sei bereits der Ansatz einer Weltregierung:

Die UN will zunehmend mehr unsere Umwelt-, Handels-, Arbeits-, Waffen und Steuergesetze bestimmen. Sie will unsere Bill of Rights missachten und amerikanische Bürger in ihren internationalen Schwindelgerichtshöfen anklagen. Sie will die Macht des Kongresses über Kriegsentscheidungen übernehmen und unsere Soldaten um die ganze Welt schicken, um als UN-`Peacekeepers` zu kämpfen. Irgendwann wird sich das amerikanische Volk zwischen der amerikanischen nationalen Souveränität und einer zunehmend mächtigen UN-Weltregierung entscheiden müssen.

Trotz solcher Differenzen in den Reihen der Konservativen hat offensichtlich das Versagen der Kriegsbefürworter, die weder in Afghanistan noch im Irak Pläne zur Wiederherstellung des Friedens und zum Aufbau einer demokratischen Regierung ausgearbeitet hatten, bereits zu einem gewissen Umdenken geführt. Auch im Kongress werden die Stimmen lauter, die die Einbeziehung der Nato und der UN im Irak fordern, auch wenn das oft nur der durchsichtige Versuch ist, Kosten und Verantwortung für die von der US-Regierung betriebene Invasion auf weitere Schultern zu wälzen.

Wie die Washington Times berichtet [3], wurde im Außenministerium bereits eins Resolutionsentwurf ausgearbeitet, der auch die Beteiligung von US-Truppen in Liberia vorsieht. Sie sei aber noch zurückgehalten worden, weil das Pentagon sicherstellen wollte, dass die US-Soldaten Immunität gegenüber dem Internationalen Strafgerichtshof (ICC) haben. Der Text lautet allerdings so, dass die Soldaten aller an der Friedensmission beteiligten Staaten nur deren jeweiliger Jurisdiktion unterworfen sind, wenn diese nicht das Statut von Rom ratifiziert haben. Die Resolution soll in den Sicherheitsrat eingebracht werden, falls US-Präsident Bush sich für die Entsendung von US-Soldaten nach Liberia entscheidet.

Viele Politiker sprechen sich aber derzeit nicht für einen weiteren Auslandseinsatz aus, den das Außenministerium zu befürworten scheint. Schon jetzt ist die Kapazität des Militärs durch den Irak-Einsatz am Rande und gärt es bei den Soldaten. Manche Abgeordnete, wie der Republikaner Saxby Chambliss von Georgia sehen in Liberia auch kein nationales Sicherheitsinteresse. Die Demokraten neigen eher zu einer Friedensmission. Powell will mit einem UN-Einsatz, der von Kofi Annan dringend gefordert wird, vermutlich auch die Kritiker an der unilateralen US-Politik besänftigen und dürfte wohl damit von der UN Hilfe für den Irak erwarten.

Links

[1] http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/15225/1.html
[2] http://www.house.gov/paul/
[3] http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20030717-121024-3191r.h…

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/co/15234/1.html

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-…


Blair Stresses Hussein`s Fall, Not Arms Hunt
In a speech to Congress, the British leader asserts `history will not forgive` hesitation in the face of menace. He and Bush say weapons will be found.
By Robin Wright
Times Staff Writer

July 18, 2003

WASHINGTON — In a passionate speech to Congress on Thursday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said history will forgive the U.S.-led coalition if weapons of mass destruction are not found in Iraq because of the broader good of fighting tyranny and preventing future terrorism.

Blair`s visit was meant to honor America`s staunchest ally in the war, and he was accorded the rare distinction of being invited to address a joint session of Congress. The British leader also was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

But shortly after receiving a hero`s welcome on Capitol Hill, Blair joined President Bush for a tense exchange with reporters at the White House, where the pair stood by their assertions that the deadly weapons will be found but avoided answers to the tough questions each faces at home.

Bush said postwar chaos, a decade of practice in hiding weapons programs and only recent cooperation by high-level officials from Saddam Hussein`s regime explained why arms had yet to be uncovered months after the fall of Baghdad.

The two leaders` answers did little, however, to solve mounting questions over conflicting intelligence assessments about whether Hussein attempted to buy uranium from Africa, a key indication of whether Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program.

At the center of the controversy is Bush`s assertion in his January State of the Union speech that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger, a claim the president attributed to the British. Lawmakers are investigating who in the White House pushed to include the remarks despite CIA expressions of concern. It was subsequently revealed that the allegations of Iraq`s attempts to buy uranium were at least partly based on forged documents.

Blair said he stands by intelligence assessments concluding that Baghdad did try to make the purchase. "The British intelligence that we have we believe is genuine," he told reporters.

For his part, Bush dodged a question about whether he would accept responsibility for the sentence in his speech.

"I take responsibility for putting troops into action. I take responsibility for making the tough decision to put together a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush said. Both U.S. and British intelligence "made a clear and compelling case that Saddam Hussein was a threat to security and peace," he said.

"As long as I hold this office I will never risk the lives of American citizens by assuming the goodwill of dangerous enemies," the president said.

"We`re being tested in Iraq. Our enemies are looking for signs of hesitation. They`re looking for signs of weakness. They will find none."

New Details

Meanwhile, new details emerged on the negotiations between the CIA and the White House over the State of the Union allegation. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and others said CIA officials identified the senior White House aide who persuaded the agency to allow the allegation into the speech.

Durbin declined to name the White House official, but others identified him as Robert G. Joseph, an advisor on counter-proliferation issues and homeland security to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan characterized Durbin`s comments as "nonsense" and said the senator is "trying to justify his own vote" earlier this year against the war in Iraq.

Speaking to a packed House chamber, Blair strongly defended the decision to topple Hussein and said he believes "with every fiber of instinct and conviction" that the United States and Britain have to show leadership to ensure that terrorists do not get their hands on the world`s deadliest weapons.

"If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong, if we are right ... and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership," Blair said.

"That is something history will not forgive," he said, triggering a sustained standing ovation from Congress, one of more than three dozen times his speech was interrupted by applause.

Acknowledging his political problems at home, where he has been under fire from his political opposition and from within his own Labor Party over Iraq, Blair noted with a grin that the standing ovation that greeted him was "more than I deserve and more than I`m used to, quite frankly."

In an eloquent address laced with humor and American history, Blair heralded the role the United States has played in fighting the broader war on terrorism despite skepticism and questions even among its allies. Once again, he played the role of bridge between a United States traumatized by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a Europe suspicious of America`s power and willingness to use it.

"There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood, or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day," Blair said.

America`s leadership in international affairs is so crucial in the 21st century that it makes theories that prevailed during the Cold War and in 19th century Europe outdated, he said.

"There is no more dangerous theory in international politics today than that we need to balance the power of America with other competitive powers, different poles around which nations gather," Blair said.

"It is dangerous because it is not rivalry but partnership we need, a common will and a shared purpose in the face of a common threat."

Any effective alliance begins with America and Europe, he insisted. When they stand together, others will cooperate. When they split, others will play the two sides off against each other and "nothing but mischief will be the result," he said.

History Not a Guide

History, Blair said, offers scant guidance on how the world should confront challenges posed by the rise of fanaticism and its access to weapons and technology. "We are bound together as never before, and this coming together provides us with unprecedented opportunity, but also makes us uniquely vulnerable," he said.

Blair nudged the United States to forgive key European powers for their differences. "Don`t give up on Europe," he said. "Work with it."

While Europe must defeat the new anti-Americanism that "sometimes passes for its political discourse," the United States must show that the partnership is built on "persuasion, not command," he told an audience of lawmakers, military brass and Cabinet secretaries.

Blair also gently urged the United States to recognize that the war against terrorism will not be successful if fought only with bullets.

"This is a battle that can`t be fought or won only by armies.... Our ultimate weapon is not our guns but our beliefs.... The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack."

Republicans looked almost giddy during Blair`s speech, while the reaction was mixed among Democrats until Blair made references to peaceful diplomacy. Blair also urged Washington to follow through on three hotspots it bears primary responsibility for resolving.

The U.S.-led coalition must deliver on its promise of democracy to Iraq, for the sake of both Iraq and the coalition.

"How hollow would the charges of American imperialism be when these failed countries are and are seen to be transformed from states of terror to nations of prosperity, from governments of dictatorship to examples of democracy," he said.

But the war on terrorism will also not end without a final Arab-Israeli peace, because "here it is that the poison is incubated," allowing extremists to translate the conflict into a broader battle between civilizations and between religions, he warned. As agonizing and hopeless as they often seem, Blair said, peace negotiations are better than the alternative.

And if Afghanistan needs additional soldiers from the international community to widen the new government`s control outside Kabul, "our duty is to get them," Blair said. The coalition that waged war to oust the Taliban regime should also help eradicate dependency on poppy production and drug trafficking by providing alternatives.

Blair`s speech "was on an international level the best speech I have ever heard," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif). House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Texas) said Blair reminded Americans of their leadership role in the world — "despite 16 words in a State of the Union address."

But independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont said the address hardly dealt with Iraq and didn`t change the facts that Congress and the public are now grappling with, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) noted that the two leaders still have "a cloud hanging over their heads.

"They are contradicting themselves about the lie," she said in a reference to the disputed intelligence that was contained in Bush`s January State of the Union speech.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said Blair showed the need to "consult rather than demand. It`s not `my way or the highway.` "

Times staff writer Justin Gest contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-postwar…
WASHINGTON`S BATTLE PLAN


Preparing for War, Stumbling to Peace
U.S. is paying the price for missteps made on Iraq
By Mark Fineman, Robin Wright and Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writers

July 18, 2003

WASHINGTON — Secretly, they gathered in an auditorium in the nation`s snowbound capital — uniformed generals, assistant Cabinet secretaries, war college professors with top security clearance, and senior planners from the Pentagon, the U.S. Central Command and dozens of other federal agencies.

The date was Feb. 21. More than 100,000 U.S. and British troops were already poised at Iraq`s doorstep. Their battle plan was rehearsed and ready. In fewer than 30 days, the first American tanks would cross the sand berm into Iraq from Kuwait, launching the tip of the spear of what would be a swift and brilliant battlefield victory.

Yet this two-day gathering at the Pentagon`s National Defense University was the first time all of these planners had gathered under one roof to address an equally vital matter: how to win the peace in Iraq once the war was over.

"The messiah could not have organized a sufficient relief and reconstruction or humanitarian effort in that short a time," recalled Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst who attended the session.

"The military`s war planning was light-years ahead of its planning for everything else," added a senior defense official who was present.

Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who led the meeting and would soon attempt to lead the peace, called it a rock drill: "It`s a military term — you know, you turn over all the rocks."

When they did, Garner acknowledged in a recent interview, the group uncovered "tons of problems," including gaps in planning, coordination and anticipation of such mission-threatening problems as looting and civil unrest.

Nearly five months later, the price for those gaps is still being paid.

Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, U.S. and British troops have struggled to bring order from chaos. Water, electricity and security are in short supply, fueling resentment among many Iraqis. A guerrilla-like resistance has taken shape against the occupation; U.S. casualties mount almost daily in an op-eration that is costing nearly $4 billion a month and stalling the withdrawal of American forces.

The Bush administration planned well and won the war with minimal allied casualties. Now, according to interviews with dozens of administration officials, military leaders and independent analysts, missteps in the planning for the subsequent peace could threaten the lives of soldiers and drain U.S. resources indefinitely and cloud the victory itself.



Rivalry and Misreadings

The tale of what went wrong is one of agency infighting, ignored warnings and faulty assumptions.

An ambitious, yearlong State Department planning effort predicted many of the postwar troubles and advised how to resolve them. But the man who oversaw that effort was kept out of Iraq by the Pentagon, and most of his plans were shelved. Meanwhile, Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon, also began postwar planning, in September. But he didn`t seek out an overseer to run the country until January.

The man he picked, Garner, had run the U.S. operation to protect ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Based on that experience, Garner acknowledged, he badly underestimated the looting and lawlessness that would follow once Saddam Hussein`s army was defeated. By the time he got to Baghdad, Garner said, 17 of 21 Iraqi ministries had "evaporated."

"Being a Monday morning quarterback," Garner says now, the underestimation was a mistake. "But if I had known that then, what would I have done about it?"

The postwar planning by the State and Defense departments, along with that of other agencies, was done in what bureaucrats call "vertical stovepipes." Each agency worked independently for months, with little coordination.

Even within the Pentagon there were barriers: The Joint Chiefs of Staff on the second floor worked closely with the State Department planners, while Feith`s Special Plans Office on the third floor went its own way, working with a team from the Central Command under Army Gen. Tommy Franks.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld`s civilian aides decided that they didn`t need or want much help, officials in both departments say.

Central Command officials confirmed that their postwar planning group — dubbed Task Force Four, for the fourth phase of the war plan — took a back seat to the combat planners. What postwar planning did occur at the Central Command and the Pentagon was on disasters that never occurred: oil fires, masses of refugees, chemical and biological warfare, lethal epidemics, starvation.

The Pentagon planners also made two key assumptions that proved faulty. One was that American and British authorities would inherit a fully functioning modern state, with government ministries, police forces and public utilities in working order — a "plug and play" occupation. The second was that the resistance would end quickly.

Some top Pentagon officials acknowledged that they have been surprised at how difficult it has been to establish order.

"The so-called forces of law and order [in Baghdad] just kind of collapsed," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an interview. "There`s not a single plan that would have dealt with that This is a country that was ruled by a gang of terrorist criminals, and they`re still around. They`re threatening Iraqis and killing Americans."

The military`s sprint to Baghdad initially vindicated Rumsfeld`s prime directive to transform the U.S. armed forces into a lighter, more mobile force. It shortened the war, probably prevented many of the disasters the Pentagon had been planning for and saved lives during the takeover of Iraq. One senior Central Command official said the still-classified battle plan called for as many as 125 days of combat. Baghdad fell in just 20.

But the quick victory also created what Franks called "catastrophic success." It left large areas of the country and millions of Iraqis under no more than nominal allied control, with a force considerably smaller than some experts inside and outside the military had warned would be needed to stabilize and occupy the country.

"I would not for a minute in hindsight go back and say, `Gee, we should have gone slower so we could have had more forces built up behind us to control areas that we went past,` " Wolfowitz said.

One result, he acknowledged, is "it leaves you with some holes you fill in behind."

But could those unfilled holes have been foreseen? Many outside the Pentagon say yes.

The Beginnings

The seeds for planning a postwar Iraq were sown on April 9, 2002, when Afghanistan was still on center stage and an invasion of Iraq was just talk. That was the first meeting of the Future of Iraq project, the brainchild of Thomas S. Warrick, a veteran civil servant in the State Department`s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.

Warrick, who declined to comment for this report, quietly recruited about 240 Iraqi exiles, in Europe and the U.S., with professional experience in such fields as criminal justice, health, economics and oil. They drafted blueprints for everything from securing the streets to reforming the Iraqi currency.

"We emphasized the security issue from the beginning," said Ali Al-Attar, an Iraqi American physician from northern Virginia. "That was one of the major concerns. We were expecting that the Baathists were going to sabotage our work."

Reforming and restructuring Hussein`s armed forces was another top priority of the Future of Iraq project. Iraq`s army and other military commands employed nearly 500,000 people, most of them men with large families to feed. Only a handful were closely tied to Hussein`s Baath Party.

Mohammed Faour, a former major in Iraq`s special forces, chaired the project`s defense working group, which produced a volume of studies laying out a quick reformation of the army. They concluded that the soldiers could be retrained to protect and repair government buildings, airports, bridges, dams and other key infrastructure.

Yet instead of putting the soldiers to work, U.S. occupation authorities abruptly disbanded the armed forces as part of a de-Baathification campaign, sending hundreds of thousands of former soldiers into the streets in angry protest.

"Nobody listened to us," Faour recalled sadly. "We were just put aside."

It didn`t help that the State Department project was something of a backdoor operation from the start.

"We started it just as an academic exercise, knowing that getting any kind of pre-Iraq planning approved through the interagency process would probably be impossible," one senior State Department official said.

"After it was up and running, we briefed and invited others to attend," the official said. At first no one did, but as the prospect of war grew stronger, representatives from Vice President Dick Cheney`s office, the National Security Council and even the Pentagon attended some of the meetings.

As early as last July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff formed a team to plug into the State Department`s planning process, working with Warrick. And late last summer, the National Security Council staff sought to coordinate all the postwar planning efforts in an effort that came to be known simply as ``the interagency.``

Not that it mattered. Military officials "had their own list of people they wanted involved and didn`t want to take recommendations from us," the State Department official said.

In October, while Warrick`s group worked on its blueprints and the administration pushed its diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, a new Pentagon office headed by Feith was created partly to oversee postwar planning. It operated in secret — even its name, the Special Plans Office, was intended to obscure its purpose, officials said.

"The Special Plans Office was called Special Plans because, at the time, calling it Iraqi Planning Office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts," Feith told reporters last month.

But that veil of secrecy also insulated the Defense secretary`s postwar planners from other agencies` assessments on Iraq that didn`t easily mesh with their fast-moving, light-force battle plans.

Looking back, senior officials from State and other departments charge bitterly that Feith and other Pentagon aides based most of their assessments on information provided by exiled Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, who predicted that the regime would suddenly collapse by "decapitation," leaving the government`s institutions in place, and who expected that postwar Iraq would be a country of U.S.-flag-waving citizens.

Feith vehemently denies that Pentagon planners fell victim to over-optimistic Chalabi predictions. Such charges, he said, are based on "the notion that we`re a bunch of simple-minded saps and unsophisticated jerks."

U.S. intelligence officials, long skeptical of Chalabi, say they warned repeatedly that the postwar period would be tough.

"The U.S. intelligence community warned early and often about myriad threats it anticipated at the outset of the war and the challenges likely to erupt in the postwar environment," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said in a statement to The Times.

Intelligence officials, he added, were "utterly consistent in arguing that reconstruction rather than war would be the most problematic segment of overthrowing Saddam`s regime. Specifically, the [intelligence community] warned prior to the conflict that Iraqis would probably resort to obstruction, resistance and armed opposition if they perceived attempts to keep them dependent on the United States and the West."

As fall turned to winter and U.S. troops began arriving in the Persian Gulf by the tens of thousands, a veritable library of warnings and proposed remedies was piling up within the administration, focusing on the very items that would ultimately paralyze much of the postwar effort: a lack of security, electricity, water and other basic needs.

Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and longtime professor at military war colleges, prepared an elaborate document spotlighting the fragility of Iraq`s electricity and water systems after decades of neglect. In private meetings arranged by former Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon, he warned such senior administration officials as Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush`s national security point man on Iraq, that both systems would collapse even if they weren`t targeted in the war.

"This is a catastrophe waiting to happen," several senior Defense Department officials said Gardiner told them at the time.

At the State Department, Future of Iraq participants also predicted widespread power outages that would almost surely short-circuit reconstruction. They recommended shipping in "mini-power stations" to supplement Iraq`s antiquated, overloaded and damaged electrical grid.

The group also foresaw the collapse of telecommunications. It proposed rolling out cellular "networks in a box" capable of linking several thousand users in metropolitan areas within the first weeks of occupation.

For months, the Central Command separately had sent progress reports on the war planning to the Pentagon, and for months a list of postwar issues showed up at the bottom of the memo as unresolved "open items," officials said. But Feith and his aides assured Rumsfeld that they had the planning process under control.

Bush gave Rumsfeld overall authority for the postwar plan, to maintain what he called "a unity of concept and a unity of leadership," Feith said. Despite some misgivings, State Department officials said, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell agreed.

"Since so many of the responsibilities were military security responsibilities, the only person who could really do that was the secretary of defense," Feith said.

A Man With Experience

If the Pentagon was to run postwar operations in Iraq, Feith needed both a mechanism and a man.

The mechanism would be the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA, which Bush would create Jan. 20 by presidential decree. The man would be Jay Garner.

In the aftermath of the 1991 war, then-Maj. Gen. Garner had distinguished himself pacifying northern Iraq. He had opened the way for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds to peacefully return home.

Garner had also caught the eye of Rumsfeld, who later picked him to serve along with Wolfowitz on a high-profile commission that examined the feasibility of a ballistic missile defense system.

On Jan. 9, Feith placed a call to Garner in Manhattan. Garner was in a business suit delivering the year-end earnings report for his company, SYColeman, a subsidiary of defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp.

"I`m calling you as a request from Secretary Rumsfeld. We have to put together a team for postwar Iraq, if there is a war," the retired general remembers Feith saying. "We`d like for you to come in and do the planning, put the team together and get it organized."

Garner balked. At 64, he had been out of the Army almost six years and was deep into a lucrative second career with L-3, which had bought out his Santa Barbara-based SY Technology for about $48 million two years earlier.

"Well, I don`t know if I can do that," Garner said he told Feith. "I`ve got a company here I`m running that`s got about 2,000 people, and I`ve got a wife I`ve been married to for over 40 years, so I`ve got to get permission from both."

In the end, after securing his wife`s blessing and a four-month leave from L-3, Garner moved back to the Pentagon on Jan. 17 — just 62 days before the military launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Garner recalled the "vertical stovepipe" he inherited:

"Defense had done a lot of planning. State had done a lot of planning. USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] had done an awful lot of planning. Agriculture had done planning. Treasury had done an awful lot of planning. Justice Department had done an awful lot of planning.

"Each one of them did their own planning, and they did it — this isn`t a criticism of them, it`s just the way you start things — they did it with the perspective of their agency."

For example, the Central Command had drawn up detailed lists of targets the military should avoid in order to facilitate reconstruction. But it did so initially with no input from other agencies that had a more precise understanding of the vulnerabilities of Iraq`s obsolescent infrastructure.

It wasn`t until shortly before the first missiles and bombs were launched at Iraq that Garner`s group added a long list of additional targets to be avoided, which he conceded was not entirely respected.

"What needed to happen was the horizontal integration of these plans. And there had been no mechanism to horizontally integrate them until Secretary Rumsfeld thought of putting ORHA together," Garner said.

By all accounts, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith closely managed ORHA from the start, and were directly involved in choosing many of its top civilian officials.

The Defense Department blocked Warrick, creator of the Future of Iraq project, from joining ORHA. Senior State Department officials said he was packing files to move to the Pentagon when he was told to stay put. One reason, State Department officials said, was that he wanted a wide range of Iraqis to be included in a new government. Pentagon leaders were pushing exile leader Chalabi.

Asked whether he, Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld had blocked Warrick, Feith said: "I never the met the guy. I wouldn`t know him if he walked in the room." He added, however, that Garner`s team and its successor, the Coalition Provisional Authority, "are mostly State Department people."

After a month spent recruiting a team that included five former generals and eight current or retired ambassadors, Garner convened his first interagency meeting, the so-called rock drill, in February.

In attendance were assistant secretaries from Defense, State and other departments. U.S. and British generals from Task Force Four flew in from Kuwait. There were so many warriors and extras in the Eisenhower Hall at National Defense University, one attendee recalled, "it was like a cast call for the remaking of `Ben-Hur.` "

A diplomat who was there suggested another Hollywood analogy: the Clint Eastwood movie about aging astronauts brought in to save the day.

"There was a feeling that these were like the Space Cowboys," he said. "They had been brought together at speed, brought in from retirement and running companies or their farms at the twilight of their careers. They were all impressive and able and had great camaraderie and knew how each other worked. But they had to take on a huge task in a very short time with too many unknowns To do it right, that rock drill needed to have begun 18 months earlier."

U.N. diplomacy dominated the headlines that weekend. At Garner`s meeting, the painful truth about postwar Iraq was uncoiling.

Said a senior Defense Department official: "Rebuilding local governance, immediate replacement of the security apparatus — these things were never adequately discussed." The attitude was, "We`ll go with what we`ve got and take care of the rest when we get there."

On the crucial issue of security, a senior official on Garner`s team said, "The civilians and the military never got on the same page."

When the rock drill broke up on Saturday, Feb. 22, war was just 26 days away. But two intervening events would add greatly to the postwar burden — a result of costly miscalculations on how long-standing U.S. allies would respond.

On March 1, Turkey upended Washington`s battle plan by denying the use of Turkish land as a staging area for a northern front. That allowed an escape route for Hussein sympathizers to their traditional strongholds north of Baghdad, where the resistance since the war has been the worst.

And on March 5, France, Russia and Germany pledged to oppose a U.N. resolution supporting the war, thwarting the administration`s diplomatic plans.

Until then, U.S. strategy was still based on winning U.N. endorsement to act against Iraq — so the international community would play a larger role both during and after the war.

Only days before the assault began, the United States realized it would have only a handful of allies to help it run postwar Iraq.

Waiting to Go In

Garner would have to call audibles, as Wolfowitz described it later.

One week after the rock drill, Garner deployed an advance party of about 30 staffers to Kuwait. He followed on March 16 with about 165 people in tow, setting up interim headquarters in seaside villas at a resort south of the capital, Kuwait City.

Four days later, U.S. and British troops poured into Iraq. Garner`s group planned while the war raged. Baghdad fell on April 9. But for nearly two weeks more, Garner`s team remained stuck in Kuwait.

Garner said Gen. Franks would not let him in sooner because the situation on the ground was too dangerous. Garner thought his absence was dangerous.

"If you are absent too long, while expectations are created for our government a vacuum occurs," Garner told a Times reporter while he was cooling his heels at Kuwait`s seaside Hilton. "And if you are not there, the vacuum gets filled in ways you don`t want."

Finally, on April 17, Garner flew to Central Command operations headquarters in Qatar to meet with Franks.

"You got to get me into Baghdad," he recalled telling Franks. "And he said: `It`s not secure enough yet. I can`t get you in there right now.` I`ve known Franks for 25 years. So we talked back and forth. That night, he called me back and he said, `OK, you`re released to go.` "

Garner and a small staff arrived in Baghdad on the 21st, followed in the next few days by 300 more in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans.

Garner said he was shocked by what they found.

In the days following the Army`s capture of the palatial icons of Saddam`s rule, and while Garner and his team were idling in Kuwait, the only crowds in Baghdad were the swarms of Iraqis who dissected almost every government ministry building desk by desk, wire by wire and pipe by pipe.

So massive was the looting that, just three days after the U.S. secured the capital, computers were selling for as little as $35 in the thieves market.

"Our planning process was that we needed to immediately [restore] the ministries, because that`s the only way that you get government services back and get the country functioning again," Garner said.

"But what happens is when we get there, they`re not there anymore."

One reason planners underestimated the looting, Garner said, was his own history with the Kurds in northern Iraq. There, he said, the looting was comparatively modest, and he expected the same in Baghdad.

The Kurds "looted, but the buildings were left intact They didn`t pull out the wiring. They didn`t pull out the plumbing and they didn`t put it on fire," Garner said.

If Garner was unprepared for what he found, so were the soldiers who captured Baghdad.

Buckets of Staplers

On April 9, Task Force 4-64 of the 2nd Brigade of the Army`s 3rd Infantry Division — the brigade that took central Baghdad — began the day on a war footing.

That morning, its infantrymen had surrounded the Justice Ministry, a nine-story building in the center of the capital. They had heard noises inside during the night and feared that Iraqi snipers were holed up there.

But when they broke through the gates and cautiously entered the lobby, weapons raised, the soldiers were greeted by two grinning boys hauling plastic buckets filled with stolen desk blotters, staplers, pens and paper clips.

Mirror images across Baghdad and much of Iraq formed a klepto-kaleidoscope: Mobs of men and boys ran up and down the stairwells of ministries, hauling off desks, chairs, copiers, fax machines, telephones and carpets. GIs stood next to their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and watched them strip the buildings clean.

Troop commanders said they had never been told by their superiors that safeguarding the ministries was a top priority.

To the south, 2,200 troops from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Pendleton were posted to Nasiriyah. While looters rampaged, the Marines fought off snipers, delivered a baby, rebuilt an orphanage and tried to put the power and water systems back in place.

"We were trying to clear out the bad guys, provide security and restart the government. Nobody ever taught us how to do that," said Col. Thomas Waldhauser, the commanding officer.

Few would expect forces to fight with one hand while stopping looters with the other. But critics say that wouldn`t have been necessary if there were more troops to begin with.

Applying the same peacekeepers-to-population ratio that was used successfully in Kosovo, 500,000 troops would be needed in Iraq, said James Dobbins, the Bush administration special envoy to Afghanistan and the Clinton administration special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

There are currently about 148,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq.

"While the U.S. could take Iraq with three divisions, it couldn`t hold it with three divisions," said Dobbins, now director of international security and defense policy at Rand Corp.

Feith said his planners did anticipate disorder and looting — but decided that other risks, such as oil field fires, refugee flows or famine, were more dangerous.

"When you plan you [assess] various risks and you say, `You can`t do everything,` he said. "That`s life

"There were certain risks that we decided to invest more resources in, and there were other risks that we understood that we couldn`t address to the same extent

"Nobody expected this to be immaculate. Everybody expected that this was going to be a war and that there was going to be an aftermath, and the aftermath was going to be untidy."

Garner has many defenders in the administration who say his mission was almost impossible, given the planning process that preceded him.

With restoration of Iraq`s basic services seemingly stalled, and deadly attacks on U.S. forces rising, something had to give. It turned out to be Garner. He insists he was not pushed out; his term was fixed at four months from the start. But the announcement of his departure was abrupt.

Though his replacement didn`t come much earlier than Feith initially told him it would, the expectation was that Garner would have the Iraqi ministries up and running by that time.

At 8 p.m. on April 24, just three days after he got to Baghdad and with the city sliding into chaos, Garner remembers, "I got a call from Rumsfeld, who says, `Jay, the president selected Jerry [L. Paul] Bremer to be the presidential envoy [to Iraq].` And he says: `You`re going to like him. He`s a good guy.`

"And I said, `Well, I`ll bring him in here, and I`ll go home.`

"And he said: `No, I don`t want you to do that. I want you to transition.`

"And I said, `How long do you want me to stay?`

"And he said, `You and Jerry work it out.` "

Garner left Baghdad on June 1, three weeks after Bremer arrived. On June 16, Wolfowitz formally dissolved the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.

Looking to the Future

As Bremer now struggles to normalize Iraq amid rising violence and the destabilizing likelihood that Saddam Hussein is still alive, Rumsfeld and other administration officials have taken to pointing out the chaos that has followed similar events in other countries, including the American Revolution.

Critics say that is all the more reason to be ready for the worst.

"It`s not true there wasn`t adequate planning. There was a volume of planning. More than the Clinton administration did for any of its interventions," said Rand`s Dobbins.

"They planned on an unrealistic set of assumptions," he said. "Clearly, in retrospect, they should have anticipated that when the old regime collapsed, there would be a period of disorder, a vacuum of power They should have anticipated extremist elements would seek to fill this vacuum of power. All of these in one form or another have been replicated in previous such experiences, and it was reasonable to plan for them."

Looking back from the third floor of the Pentagon, Feith dismissed such criticism as "simplistic." Despite initial problems, he said, progress is being made, with order returning to most of the country and a new Iraqi governing council in place.

Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

"We`re going to get better over time," promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. "We`ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase" distinct from combat, he said. "The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum

"This is the future for the world we`re in at the moment," he said. "We`ll get better as we do it more often."




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Richard T. Cooper, Warren Vieth, Sonni Efron, Greg Miller, Alissa J. Rubin, Esther Schrader, John Hendren, Tony Perry, David Zucchino and Laura King, and Times researchers Christopher Chandler and Robin Cochran.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

THE PROTESTS

• Unrest in postwar Iraq has hindered the U.S.-led reconstruction effort. One source of anger was the Pentagon`s decision to disband the armed forces, which employed nearly 500,000 people. A State Department working group had argued for preserving the jobs.

THE LOOTING

• U.S. officials acknowledge that they badly underestimated the amount of looting that would follow the war. Troop commanders say they were never told by their superiors that safeguarding the ministries — vital to building a new Iraqi government — was a priority.

THE DESTRUCTION OF FACILITIES

• Telecommunications buildings and other infrastructure were ruined by looters and others after the war. A prewar planning document had warned the Bush administration that Iraq`s neglected water and power systems were likely to collapse.

JAY GARNER

• The retired Army general, left, the first civilian administrator in Iraq, said that by the time he got to Baghdad, 17 of 21 ministries had "evaporated" because of looting.

DOUGLAS FEITH

• His Pentagon office initially worked without input from planners at the State Department.

TOMMY FRANKS

• The quick victory in Iraq created a "catastrophic success," according to the wartime commander.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ

• No plan could have dealt with Iraq`s collapse of law, the deputy Defense secretary says.

L. PAUL BREMER

• Garner`s replacement as civilian administrator is now in charge of normalizing the country.

AHMAD CHALABI

• The Iraqi opposition leader, who advised the Pentagon, predicted broad support for the U.S.

DONALD RUMSFELD

• President Bush gave the Defense secretary overall authority for the postwar plan to maintain "unity."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-inte…
THE WORLD


CIA Names Bush Aide in Speech Scandal
Officials say he persuaded the agency to allow a dubious claim about Iraq`s nuclear ambitions in the State of the Union address.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

July 18, 2003

WASHINGTON — In closed-door testimony on Capitol Hill, CIA officials named a senior White House aide who persuaded the agency to allow a questionable allegation about Iraq in President Bush`s State of the Union address, a senator and other officials involved in the classified hearing said Thursday.

A Democrat on the panel said the way CIA Director George J. Tenet and other witnesses described the negotiations between the agency and the White House made it clear that the administration ignored warnings not to include an allegation about uranium in Bush`s speech.

"They weren`t searching for the right words, they were searching for a way around the obvious," said Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the committee.

Describing White House officials as "hell-bent" on working the allegation into the text, Durbin said the administration "had to go into bargaining mode with the CIA to skirt around the misleading nature of the statement."

The White House was seeking to support assertions by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, a key part of the case for going to war. Much of the other evidence about Iraq`s nuclear ambitions had been disputed by United Nations inspectors and other experts.

Durbin declined to name the White House official, but others identified him as Robert G. Joseph, a senior advisor on counter-proliferation issues and homeland security to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan characterized Durbin`s comments as "nonsense" and said the senator was "trying to justify his own vote" earlier this year against the war in Iraq.

The exchange came as Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a joint news conference, again defended their decision to go to war amid growing criticism of their prewar claims that Saddam Hussein`s regime possessed banned weapons and posed an imminent threat.

The White House acknowledged for the first time last week that Bush`s assertion that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium in Africa was based on flawed intelligence and should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.

Tenet took the blame for the matter in a statement last Friday, saying the agency had vetted the speech. But he also made it clear that the agency had raised objections and approved the language only because the White House reworked the text to attribute the claim to Britain.

Thursday`s disclosures by Durbin and other officials provided the most detailed account yet of those delicate negotiations between the White House and CIA.

According to their accounts, Joseph, the National Security Council official, had faxed a portion of the speech to the agency that included language accusing Iraq of seeking uranium from Niger.

The text was reviewed by Alan Foley, who heads the CIA`s counter-proliferation center. Foley, who also testified at Wednesday`s hearing, was the CIA official who identified Joseph under questioning from senators.

According to accounts of testimony presented at the hearing, Joseph called Foley to discuss the language. Foley urged the White House not to use the Niger allegation because of doubts about the underlying intelligence, and Joseph agreed.

But then Joseph suggested alternative language attributed to British intelligence, which had published a dossier in September accusing Iraq of seeking uranium from countries in Africa.

Foley replied that the CIA had sought to warn the British away from that claim. Finally, Joseph asked whether it would be accurate to say that the British had made the allegation about uranium, and Foley assented.

"I don`t think this was a casual exchange," Durbin said. "Somebody [in the White House] decided they needed this to build a case."

Durbin noted that all of these negotiations took place after Tenet had personally intervened to get similar language removed from a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati in October.

The claims began to unravel publicly in March, when U.N. inspectors examined documents that were the basis for the Niger allegation and concluded that they were forgeries.

Though Durbin said he believed the testimony makes it clear the White House was "insistent" on using the uranium allegation in the speech, others said that was open to interpretation.

The CIA witnesses were "merely recounting a conversation" and never said explicitly that they felt pressured or any White House "insistence," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CNN. "Different senators have different interpretations. But in my view there was no pressure."

Durbin and other Democrats are now pressing to have Joseph and other White House officials, perhaps including Rice, testify before the committee.

Roberts said it would be premature to make such a request of the administration but left open the possibility, saying, "We will take this inquiry wherever it goes."

He said the committee expects to hear in coming weeks from the inspector general of the CIA, as well as Pentagon and intelligence officials overseeing the hunt for banned weapons in Iraq. Committee members also said they wanted to see memos and other communications between the CIA and the White House during the speech negotiations.

There were also new details Thursday on the origin of the Niger claim.

The forged documents were first obtained by Italian intelligence authorities, who turned them over to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October. The papers were shared with the CIA station there but were not delivered to agency headquarters in Langley, Va., until February of this year.

Even then, at first they were merely translations of the documents, a U.S. intelligence official said, with none of the markings or stamps that would have been necessary to examine them for evidence of forgery.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-luntz18…
COMMENTARY



Celebrity Gets Arnold Only So Far
By Frank Luntz
Pollster and communications consultant Frank Luntz`s clients have included New York City mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

July 18, 2003

There are small pockets in the United States, most notably on the Left and Right Coasts, where folks really think Martin Sheen is the president and George Bush the pretender. For millions of Americans, what happens every Wednesday night on NBC`s "The West Wing" is more important than events in the actual White House.

Americans share an almost mythic fascination with everything entertainment and a disgust with everything political. Hollywood celebrities make 10 to 100 times more a year than Congress members for doing a lot less, and your average voting-age American is more apt to know the stars of any two summer blockbusters than his representatives in Congress.

These days, the intersection between entertainment and politics is a congested one. Some say that Washington is full of ugly actors and Hollywood is loaded with pretty politicians.

Yet when seemingly nonpolitical celebrities like, say, Jerry Springer or Jesse Ventura encourage speculation about running for office, the path is not always smooth.

In fact, it is almost compulsory that members of the hard-working but relatively anonymous media will assert the inherent decline of democracy as we know it. Here — as if exhumed from a high-school time capsule — are the bespectacled members of the school paper railing about how popular quarterbacks and head cheerleaders so easily win class elections.

But for all the intellectual discomfort it causes our nation`s "opinion elites," there is no stopping this tide. Just as surely as television news anchors more closely resemble soap opera stars with each passing year, so are the stars of Hollywood more closely resembling politicians. Naturally enough, they are taking full advantage of it.

Although Americans are suckers for those Abraham Lincoln pick-myself-up-by-the-bootstrap stories, there is no denying that a familiar name and a few million in campaign cash provide a tremendous leg up. After all, name recognition is extraordinarily important in winning votes — and yet 50% of Americans can`t even name their two senators. We did exit polling on election day in 2000 that showed that one out of five voters couldn`t name George Bush`s running mate.

By contrast, Arnold Schwarzenegger`s name recognition in California today is close to 100%. As a consultant to Michael Bloomberg`s campaign for mayor in New York, I know the value of money as well as anyone else. But be clear about this: Even after spending $30 million dollars, Bloomberg was not as well known in New York as Arnold Schwarzenegger is in California today.

Of course, getting elected is not just a matter of how well known you are; over the years, celebrities have had mixed results. Sonny Bono went from half of a popular singing duo to Congress (with a few missteps and two decades in between), yet actor Ralph Waite was unable to descend from Walton`s Mountain in his unsuccessful congressional bid. Mike Curb climbed the Top 40 charts, but he was able to climb no higher than California lieutenant governor. Similarly, "The Love Boat`s" Gopher, Fred Grandy, became an Iowa congressman but failed to win statewide office, and Jesse Ventura won statewide office but ended his term as one of the nation`s most unpopular governors. And lest we forget, there was that most successful entertainer-turned-politician — that Reagan guy.

A mixed bag, yes. But is it fair to condemn out of hand such entertainment industry crossovers any more than it is to prejudge crossover trial lawyers, pest exterminators, high school teachers or, as in both presidential nominees in 2000 — sons of famous politicians — just because of where they come from?

Celebrity, like personal wealth, gets you to the starting gate, but it is surely no guarantee of success. If it were, you`d be writing letters to California senators Al Checchi and Michael Huffington rather than Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

Come election day, if the ability is there, it doesn`t matter whether the candidate`s fame derives from being a "star," a business mogul, a successful war hero or even a political scion.

So what should would-be, could-be governor Arnold Schwarzenegger learn from all this if he wants to jump from the silver screen to the governor`s mansion? As a pollster, I would tell him that it`s imperative to tell the voters not what he thinks but who he really is. That is, rather than act the part of a politician with all the political language, postures and plans, he needs to tell Californians how his celebrity life and business success have made him especially suited to lead the state.

In today`s political environment, it is a clear advantage to be an outsider, but that is not enough. He needs to make clear why Arnold the actor, the producer, the businessman, the humanitarian, the husband of Maria Shriver, the body builder and the wide-eyed Austrian immigrant who landed at an American airport in 1968 is the guy to do the job.

Sure, Californians will ask where he stands on "the issues" and will want to know that he is capable of communicating with his colleagues. (Despite recent history, a governor should be able to at least interact with state legislators.) But for each opinion he holds and for each principle he chooses to express, he must take pains to show its organic roots in his lifelong experience.

Even if he were today`s Laurence Olivier, Schwarzenegger couldn`t act the part of governor. Either it`s in him or it isn`t. His glittering Hollywood history has given him access to the bully pulpit of fame. He should be allowed to give his two cents and, more important, show us where he got them from.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Pat Robertson, God`s Simp
In which the Divine announces plans for a major karmic enema for all of organized religion, ASAP
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 18, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/



There he sits, face scrunched, eyes clenched tight, fists balled up like he`s clinging to the last Valium on Earth, colon in tortured knots, soul shriveled into a tiny black speck of bile and nothingness, invoking God and sodomy and incest and quivering like he`s sitting on the red-hot poker of divine enlightenment itself. You go, Pat.

You know this image. It appears regularly on the noxiously quasi-religious "700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network, one of those frightening and culturally surreal little cable channels you skip over as fast as possible on your way to "The Daily Show" or maybe "Taxicab Confessions" or "South Park."

Pat Robertson is praying feverishly to his apparently deeply homophobic and hate-filled Almighty, asking if He`d pretty please stomp on over ASAP and forcibly remove three specific Supreme Court justices from the bench and replace them with scowling conservatives who are equally homophobic and quivering and desperately small minded as he is.

Apparently, it`s Pat`s patented 21-day "prayer offensive" (not to be confused with his customary "offensive prayer"), some sort of cosmic faux-Christian effort to oust those sodomy-condoning judges who don`t agree with the Right`s hardcore anti-gay agenda and also because apparently God only listens to sweaty bundles of self-righteous indignation if you implore Him over and over again for three weeks straight. Check the PalmPilot, man. God is busy.

Robertson is raving about his favorite demons, sodomy and prostitution and incest, like he was caught in some sort of John Waters fever dream, and it is absurd and sad and pitiable and yet because tens of thousands of deluded heavily narcotized believers seem to actually listen and respond to his words and send him wads of money, his pseudo-religious spasms makes national news.

Because this is how organized religion works. God takes sides. God favors certain worthy groups. This is how it works. God wears stars-and-stripes underwear, brushes His teeth with macho NRA slogans.


It is timeless and time tested and insipid and Robertson does it and Falwell does it and BushCo does it and Osama does it and Saddam does it and the Shiites do it and Mormons do it and Israel and Palestine do it and Scientologists, well, they don`t really do it because they believe in creepy and very expensive alien cults featuring giant hunky posters of "Top Gun"-era Tom Cruise.

God smites those who don`t follow His prickly misinterpreted rules or who make the mistake of falling in love with someone of the same gender or believe in the subtle and beautiful power of goddesses or trees or magic or ancient ritual or the divine potency of sex or open-souled personal expression. Oh yes He does. Just look at Pat`s desperately earnest little face. It must be true.

This is how God operates. He divides His time between remaking the entire universe at all times in all dimensions for every living creature everywhere, and giving a crap about whiny fundamentalist Christian zealots and their toxic sex phobias.

God is customizable. God force-fits into whatever narrow little channel of bilious self-righteousness the world`s fanatics and their medicated perspective want Him to. This is the nature of God. He is supremely convenient. He can be used to back up almost any claim. He is rubber and you are glue and whatever you say bounces off him and sticks to you.

Alas, Pat is not alone. Huge indeed are the hunks of the culture and of religious fundamentalism as a whole that fully and wholly believe their particular version of God possesses exactly their very own set of ragin` intolerant lopsided values and hatreds and fiery finger-points and if you don`t agree you are gonna burn and pay and cry.

Robertson is proof. Born-again George W. "God is on America`s side" Bush is proof. Osama "Allah hates America" bin Laden is proof. The Israel-Palestine conflict is proof. Falwell is proof and Franklin Graham is proof and even the pope his own doddering self is sad, semi-tragic proof.

That we are not quite ready to evolve. That we are not quite ready to break free. That we are not ready for larger and more enlightening and illuminating answers that don`t consist of narrow pinprick quietly misogynistic worldviews that kill spiritual individuality and snuff divine expression and thwart love`s potential.

It must come straight back to the individual. As always. Back to you, believing for yourself, defining God for yourself, locating Him/Her/It inside the self, independent of doctrine and BushCo and snarling military leaders and Pat Robertson`s sanctimonious little roadblock to the progress of the human soul.

Because believing in God should not make you dumb. Believing in divine power should not make you a blind lockstep jingoist zealot right-wing homophobe drone, bowing and kneeling and feeling unworthy and sinful and then changing the channel to ESPN2 and watching log rolling.

Believing in your own divinity should, of course, make you radiate. And think. And squirm. And ponder and investigate and get calm and wonder and explore and lick and drink good wine and make love to any gender you like and allow that divine definition to shift and transform with time and self and breath. Simple, really. And also very, very messy. As it should be.

This just in: The divine is right now launching its own offensive, called "Oh just shut the hell up you buncha bickering sexless little faux-religious simps of the world." Pat and Jerry and the organized religions of the world were, understandably, unavailable for comment.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

[Joerver]

Das hört sich schon an wie ein Wettkampf Golf Krieg I gegen Golf Krieg II 147:148, wobei die 148 eine etwas seltsame Zählweise voraussetzt, dass z.B. alle nicht durch Feindeinwirkungen getöteten von der USA in dieser Aufstellung nicht gezählt werden. Da gibt es schon einige erwiesenen Falschmeldungen, die auch bei den Angehörigen in den USA zu Irretationen geführt haben. Die Zahl der insgesamt getöteten liegt bei über 250 Soldaten USA und GB zusammengezählt.

U.S. Death Toll in Iraq Surpasses 1991 Gulf War
Fri July 18, 2003 10:46 AM ET




By Huda Majeed Saleh
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The number of U.S. soldiers killed in combat in Iraq surpassed the toll for the 1991 Gulf War on Friday when a servicemen was killed in a blast in the restive town of Falluja.

His death was the 148th in combat since the war was launched nearly four months ago. A U.S. military spokeswoman said the soldier`s Humvee drove over an explosive device in the town 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad. There were 147 American fatalities in the 1991 war.

The soldier was the latest victim in what U.S. officials say is a "guerrilla-style" war waged by supporters of Saddam Hussein who was toppled on April 9 in the U.S.-led war.

The attack came a day after an audiotape said to be made by Saddam, was broadcast on Arabic television, urging Iraqis to launch a jihad, or holy struggle, to oust occupying troops.

A top Pentagon architect of the war was in Baghdad on Friday as a panel of experts warned that Washington had three months to create law and order or risk descent into chaos.

In the southern town of Najaf, a powerful Shi`ite Muslim cleric said a new U.S.-backed governing body in Iraq did not represent Iraqis in a strong rebuke to Washington`s efforts to launch a democratic process in the country.

Thousands of Shi`ites converged on the holy city to hear Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr call for an Islamic army and a new constitution.

"We condemn the Governing Council headed by the United States," Sadr said in a fiery sermon at Koufa mosque near Najaf.

"An Islamic army must be created and volunteers for this great army must come forward."

The 25-member Governing Council was inaugurated on Sunday. Thirteen members are Shi`ites, mostly returned exiles with links to the United States.

Most Shi`ite religious leaders, who wield vast powers among the Shi`ite majority that had been oppressed by Saddam, have expressed delight at his downfall and declared opposition to armed attacks on U.S. and British forces.

In the Sunni areas of central Iraq, prayer leaders sent a mixed message with clerics in Falluja urging calm while in Baghdad there were calls to resist the occupation.

The U.S. military said on Friday it had detained 611 people, including 62 former "regime leaders," in its latest operation aimed at eliminating armed Iraqi resistance.

Operation Soda Mountain mounted 141 raids, seizing 4,297 mortar rounds, 1,346 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 635 other weapons, it said.

U.S. troops in the Sunni city of Tikrit, Saddam`s birthplace, also blew up a large statue of the Iraqi leader, a military spokesman said.

"HISTORY WILL FORGIVE"

U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair strongly defended the war when they met in Washington on Thursday.

In a speech to the U.S. Congress, Blair said history would forgive the United States and Britain for invading Iraq, even if they were proved wrong about the threat from its suspected weapons of mass destruction.

"If we are right, as I believe with every fibre and instinct of conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive," Blair said.

Bush insisted Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and had been trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

A U.S. military spokeswoman in Baghdad said on Friday Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had arrived in Iraq but could not say what he would be doing.

Wolfowitz, a powerful deputy to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is seen as one of the most hawkish figures in the Bush administration`s Iraq policy.

A team of experts, invited by Rumsfeld to assess Iraqi reconstruction, issued a report on Thursday asserting "the next three months are crucial to turning around the security situation, which is volatile in key parts of the country."

They recommended "the entire effort be immediately turbo-charged" by swiftly increasing funding for reconstruction and involving many more Iraqis in rebuilding the country.

[Joerver]

Many Say No Dem Could Do Better Than Bush

Friday, July 18, 2003

By Dana Blanton



• Still Important to Find WMD in Iraq | Gay Marriage

As postwar violence continues in Iraq and Democratic hopefuls latch on to new questions surrounding prewar intelligence, President Bush’s job approval rating remains strong. Even so, the president’s reelect numbers have taken a hit in the latest FOX News poll.

The national poll of registered voters, which was conducted July 15-16 by Opinion Dynamics Corporation, finds approval of President Bush’s job performance has dropped below 60 percent for the first time in four months. The president’s approval stands at 59 percent, which is down 12 percentage points from his wartime high of 71 percent and is now closer to his prewar and pre-9/11 ratings.

On Iraq, about the same number — 57 percent — approve of the president’s handling of the situation (35 percent disapprove), but less than half (47 percent) approve of how Bush is managing the economy (44 percent disapprove).

If the 2004 presidential election were held today, 42 percent would vote to reelect Bush, 31 percent for the Democratic candidate and 19 percent say it depends on the Democrat or it’s too soon to say. Support for reelecting Bush dropped nine points in the last month, with the shift toward the "depends/too soon to say" column instead of the nameless "Democratic candidate."

"The Democratic candidates are all still pretty much unknowns to the voters," comments Opinion Dynamics President John Gorman. "It is clear, however, that many voters are at least willing to consider the idea of not voting for Bush. The trick for the Democrat will be to emerge as an acceptable alternative; the trick for Bush will be to define the Democrat who does emerge as an inferior alternative."

When asked if any Democratic presidential candidate could do a better job than Bush is doing on Iraq, 22 percent of voters say yes, 58 percent say no. Things are only slightly more positive for Democrats on managing the economy, with 32 percent of respondents saying a Democrat could do a better job than Bush is doing and 50 percent saying no.

On both questions, few of the respondents who say a Democrat could do better, are also able to volunteer a candidate’s name. Of those candidates mentioned as doing a better job on Iraq, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry (search) is named most often at 11 percent, followed by New York Sen. Hillary Clinton (search) at nine percent, and former Vice President Al Gore (search) at seven percent.

As the Democrat who could do a better job than Bush on the economy, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is mentioned most frequently at eight percent, and close behind are Clinton and Gore both at seven percent.

There still is not much excitement for the field of Democratic contenders. At this stage in the presidential campaign, half of Americans (52 percent) are unable to give the name of a Democratic candidate they agree with the most and another 21 percent say "none." In fact, no candidate even receives double digits, with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman (search) capturing the top slot with seven percent, followed by Kerry (four percent), Clinton, Dean and Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt (search) (all at three percent).

And there’s not much change when looking only at self-identified Democrats — Lieberman, Kerry, Clinton and Dean each receive seven percent of voters saying they agree with them the most, with 50 percent of Democrats at this point in the campaign saying they "don’t know" which candidate they agree with on the issues.

Overall, the top issues that voters say will be "very important" to their vote in the next presidential election include the economy (83 percent), health care (76 percent), education (75 percent), Social Security (72 percent), terrorism (69 percent) and Medicare (66 percent).

The top three "very important" issues among Democrats are the economy (89 percent), health care (86 percent) and education (82 percent). Among Republicans the priorities are the economy (77 percent), terrorism (74 percent) and education (69 percent).

[Back to top]

Still Important To Find WMD In Iraq

As was the case in mid-April, a majority thinks it is important to the successful conclusion of the U.S. military action in Iraq to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction, however, the number saying it is "very important" has declined sharply. Today, just over a third (35 percent) think it is "very important" to find WMD compared to half (51 percent) who thought so in an April 22-23 poll.

Americans are intent on knowing the fate of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Fully 83 percent think it is important to find evidence of Saddam’s capture or death, with 59 percent saying it is "very important," up from 52 percent in the previous survey.

Despite the perceived importance of these achievements, slightly fewer Americans are confident these goals will ultimately be met. A majority (60 percent) is confident the U.S. will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but only one in five is "very confident" evidence will be found. Similarly, 58 percent are confident Saddam will be captured or killed, but only 20 percent are "very confident."

The objective that garners the most optimism is helping Iraq "set up a stable government," with most (74 percent) saying they are confident the U.S. will be able to do accomplish this (36 percent "very" and 38 percent "somewhat" confident).

Half of Americans believe the United States going to war with Iraq was justified even if weapons are never found, while 12 percent think the war was justified only if the WMD are discovered and 27 percent think the war was not justified at all. Opinions are predictably partisan on this issue, as 78 percent of Republicans think the war was justified even without finding the Iraqi weapons compared to just 21 percent of Democrats.

Voters are almost evenly divided on the importance of the prewar intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs. Nearly half (45 percent) think the questioning of the intelligence is a "minor issue being blown up" by Bush’s political opponents, compared with 41 percent who think it is a "major issue." Again, clear partisan differences are seen on this issue — 55 percent of Democrats think examining the prewar intelligence is a major issue while, conversely, 63 percent of Republicans call it a minor issue.

[Back to top]

Gay Marriage

By an almost two-to-one margin the public opposes allowing gay couples to "marry legally." Less than a third (32 percent) say homosexual couples should be able to marry while 58 percent say they should not.

Views on this issue vary dramatically by age, with young adults much more supportive of allowing gays to marry. Just over half (53 percent) of 18-34 year olds approve compared to one third or less in the age groups of 35 and older. In addition, Democrats (44 percent) and independents (31 percent) are more likely than Republicans (21 percent) to support allowing same-sex couples to marry.

Recently, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (search), R-Tenn., said he supports a constitutional amendment being drafted by members of Congress that would ban homosexual marriage.

Alle Zahlen und Fragen.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,92221,00.html

[Joerver]

Broken promise

America`s approach to governing Baghdad has failed to involve Iraqis, says ISAM al-KHAFAJI, who returned home to help rebuild his country


From Friday`s Globe and Mail

On July 9, with deep sorrow, I respectfully submitted my resignation as a member of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council to U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
I did this with great sadness but, in doing so, I was able to leave Iraq with a clear conscience. If I stayed any longer, I might not be able to say that. I feared my role with the reconstruction council was sliding from what I had originally envisioned -- working with allies in a democratic fashion -- to collaborating with occupying forces.

I had returned to Baghdad in May, just a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with much hope after 25 years in exile from my country. It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life to accept the invitation of the U.S. government to return to Iraq with more than 140 other Iraqis as part of this council to help with the post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation of ministries so that Iraq could eventually be turned over to a transitional government.

My understanding of this council, which first reported to Jay Garner, the retired United States general, and now to civil administrator Paul Bremer, was that it would work with Iraq`s ministries, not as ministers but, in the background, as advisers. Its goal was to restore Iraq`s badly damaged infrastructure -- the electricity, the hospitals, the water supplies and the transportation routes -- at least to its pre-war state so that the country could be turned over to a transitional government. Though we council members came from all over the world, we all are Iraqis. Many of us have been exiled for many years, but we still consider ourselves Iraqis. When you keep in touch with what is going on in your country, it is not a big deal whether you are outside.

I accepted the fact that we were a defeated country, and I had no problem working with the United States to pull my country out of a quagmire. But there seemed to be no interest on the part of the coalition in involving Iraqis as advisers on the future of their country. Our role was very limited. Even reporters who visited us took note, writing that although the reconstruction council has an office within the presidential palace, there seems to be little done there apart from members reading their e-mail -- certainly a luxury in post-war Baghdad.

There was so much euphoria when Baghdad first fell, but the Americans came in and acted with arrogance. While many Iraqis are relieved to see Saddam out of power, and accept the fact that the U.S. is the only power than can secure some semblance of order, they now see the U.S. acting as an occupier.

Sadly, the vision for a transitional government and democratic elections, put forward by Mr. Wolfowitz seems to have been forgotten in the everyday pressures of post-war Iraq. Mr. Wolfowitz is a visionary, but he has not done the work to see the concrete application of his vision. He said he wanted to help bring democracy to Iraq and many of us thought we should support him because we too want to see democracy in Iraq. In practice, however, he is just one player -- albeit a big player -- and there are many others on the ground in Iraq who do not share his vision. Many reports have noted that even the soldiers here bluntly say they take their orders from their general, not from Mr. Bremer. Bitter disputes between the defense department and the state department, which were evident even before the war began and duly reported in the U.S. press, continue to affect the situation. Even though Mr. Bremer has the formal authority within Iraq, it seems like each and every decision must go back to Washington, and we are the victims of indecision.

Iraq is now in almost total chaos. No one knows what is going on. We`re not talking here about trying to achieve an ideal political system. People cannot understand why a superpower that can amass all that military might can`t get the electricity turned back on. Iraqis are now contrasting Saddam`s ability to bring back power after the war in 1991 to the apparent inability of the U.S. to do so now. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories. Many wonder if the U.S. has a reason for not wanting the electricity back on.

Now Mr. Bremer has established the Iraqi Governing Council. Sitting together to consider the future of Iraq are 25 representatives, hand-picked by the U.S.-led coalition. The composition is not a bad one, but few of the members have substantial domestic constituencies. (The exception is the Kurds whose parties have been active among their people since the 1991 Gulf War.) Whether the Council is effective or not depends on whether its members are able to reach any consensus. I fear they will be played against one another. To succeed, they must take a unified position on issues and tell Mr. Bremer to go to Washington and say "this is what Iraqis want, now please give your support for that." Ultimately, the Council must be prepared to say: "give us full authority and we will ask for your advice when we need it."

I am thus far, the first and only member of the reconstruction council to resign. There may be others, though many will no doubt stay and hope for the best.

For my part, I remain optimistic for my country, at least in the medium term. When I think about the Iraqi people, how strong they are, how hard they work without complaining under summertime temperatures reaching 55 C. I feel there is much left within these people of Iraq. There are many signs that Iraqis are working together, without serious tensions between ethnicities. All this is good news for a future Iraq. In the short term however, I fear there will be more conflicts run through with both Iraqi and American blood.

I hope the day will come when I will return to Iraq. I miss it already.

Isam al-Khafaji is a professor of political economy at the University of Amsterdam and author of the forthcoming Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East. He was a member of the Democratic Principles Working Group convened by the U.S. State Department last fall to discuss the future of Iraqi governance.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030718.coi…

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Thursday | July 17, 2003

What to do about George?
By Steve Gilliard

It`s about three months too early to call the Iraq policy a complete and utter failure. The Administration could clearly make concessions and bring in the UN and NATO, but given the generally deceitful nature of the Bush and his White House, few countries are likely to trust them to administer anything, much less an Iraq where their men can get killed.

But, as it was so clearly predictable that the Iraq war would morph from conventional combat to guerrilla war, as it had done in both 1920 and 1991, eventually the series of lies used to rush the country into war will be exposed. With that, Bush`s problems will explode from the barely manageable to the fatal.

Bush`s one asset is his personal character, or more accurately, the illusion of his personal character as an honest, straight shooting man. The reality would be more like a boorish man who is intellectually incurious, but if you`ve seen Being There, the simplistic statements of mentally disabled gardener Chauncey are turned into political genius, you can understand how the process works. People wanted, no, needed Bush to turn from the callow, incompetent son into a heroic, decisive president. The media were as shell shocked by 9/11 as anyone and Bush`s simplistic statements, aided by a coterie of cold warriors and complex men with simple answers, created an image which many Americans embraced.

The problem is that Bush is not a leader. He is a hanger on. He is too proud to follow, and too weak to lead. He can create the aura of leadership, mostly by a stubborn refusal to alter his thinking or by admit error. But when real leadership is required, he simply cannot follow through.

The whole Yellowcake mess, where he allowed CIA Director Tenet, who regardless of your feelings about his competence, to take responsibility for a mess to protect his subordinates, indicates exactly what little character Bush has. The words came from his mouth, no matter who vetted it, he is ultimately responsible, and foisting it off on subordinate is not leadership.

Bush is avoiding the blame for things which are his fault. It is his fault, not the CIA director`s, if misstatements get in the State of the Union speech. But then why should Bush suddenly embrace personal accountability after a lifetime of dodging it. He`s never admitted his problems with alcohol or drugs, his miserable business record and turned his bad school performance into a sneering joke.

He has no sense of consequence for any of his actions. Despite a lifetime of things not working out, a lifetime of being saved by cronies and friends of his family, he still acts as if he`s a self made man. Dana Milbank uses a damning quote in his Washington Post piece today:

Minnesota Public Radio this week quoted Mary Kewatt, the aunt of a soldier killed in Iraq, saying: "President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said `bring it on.` Well, they brought it on, and now my nephew is dead."

In the past, similarly stupid statements by Bush have gone unnoticed or uncommented upon, but his "bring it on" comment so unfortunately echoed by Gen. Tommy Franks, rubbed many people the wrong way. Because unilke taunting Osama Bin Laden, there is a real risk to cheap talk about the guerrilla war. It seemed cheap and unneccesary, almost cowardly. John Wayne would never say such a thing. Nor would Clint Eastwood or any of the heroes of America`s psychic landscape. It is what the villians say before they are defeated.

Americans, as indicated by an article in today`s New York Times, are beginning to wonder if Bush lied.

In Ohio, Iraq Questions Shake Even Some of Bush`s Faithful
By JAMES DAO

CINCINNATI, July 16 — Jim Stock voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and says that if the election were held tomorrow, he`d vote for President Bush again. But he says he is troubled by indications that the White House used questionable intelligence about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa to push for war in Iraq. And he wants a fuller accounting.

"I`d like to know whether there was any deliberate attempt to deceive," said Mr. Stock, 70, a retired public school administrator. "My feeling is there was not. But there was an eagerness in the administration to pursue the battle and to believe information that wasn`t quite good."

"It`s painful to say," he added, "but I don`t like where this is coming down."

If there are dark political clouds for Mr. Bush in this largely socially conservative region, they are forming around voters like Mr. Stock. Though they supported the war in Iraq, they now say they are growing uncomfortable with reports that the White House might have used inaccurate intelligence to justify it.

What is lost to many people, especially on the left, but on the Beltway right as well, is the corosive effect of dead and wounded GI`s on public opinion. It isn`t just about supporting our troops, but the real effect of broken marriages, crippled teenagers, PTSD, which affects the America most people live in. People embrace their cynicism and think Bush can lie his way out of the mess he`s created when, in reality, there is no way that the two can be reconciled. Both Truman and Johnson paid for wars without end. Bush will not be an exception to this.

Even if Iraq turned out fine, the lies would still be corrosive. But the combat in Iraq is not lessening, and has the potential to be much worse than it is. We stay in Iraq only of the sufference of the Shia clerics.

In the end, the question will not boil down to if Bush can be defeated, but even if he can run. Bush bet everything on a successful Iraq policy, one which is elusive and lacks all but the most nominal support of our allies. That policy and the arguments used to start the war are now collapsing. Bush has no alternative to offer except success in Iraq. The economy is a shambles, the tax cuts exploded the deficit, without Iraq, he doesn`t have much to offer, especially when his personal credibility is questioned.

Niger is the tip of a deep iceberg of lies and lies from the White House ultimately benefit one person, the President. It is only a matter of time before it becomes a story not of what to do in Iraq, but what to do with George.


Posted July 17, 2003 12:51 PM | Trackback (1) | Temp Comments (10)

http://www.dailykos.com/archives/003430.html#003430

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[Joerver]

War Dr. Kelly, die geheimnisvolle Quelle der BBC, die die Untersuchungsausschüße gegen Blair ins Rollen gebracht hat?
Die opposition fordert die Rückkehr Blairs aus Tokio.

MoD to hold inquiry into Kelly death

Matthew Tempest and agencies
Friday July 18, 2003


Tony Blair arriving in Tokyo today. Photo: AP

The Ministry of Defence is to hold an independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading up to the death of David Kelly, the prime minister`s official spokesman said today.
The move has yet to be confirmed by the MoD itself, although a judge is expected to be appointed as early as this afternoon.

Mr Blair`s spokesman, speaking as the prime minister arrived in Tokyo on the latest leg of his marathon diplomatic mission, said: "We have indicated that if this is Dr Kelly`s body, then the government intends to hold an independent judicial enquiry.

"In these circumstances, people should not jump to conclusions and they should exercise restraint."

He said: "The prime minister is obviously very distressed for the family.

Mr Blair`s official spokesman added: "The prime minister has been speaking for a fair amount of time on the phone in recent hours to the permanent secretary at the ministry of defence, Sir Kevin Tebbitt and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and [the] constitutional affairs secretary, Charles Falconer."

The discovery of the body in the Oxfordshire beauty spot -now presumed to be the missing defence scientist - will also require a coroner`s inquest. The remains are expected to be identified formally tomorrow.

The move - in stark contrast with the government`s refusal to sanction a judicial inquiry into the intelligence basis of the Iraq war - arises partly from the highly unusual circumstances that brought Dr Kelly into the public eye.

Although the MoD official "outed" himself to his line manager for having met BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, a bizarre chain of events was then set in motion which saw Dr Kelly televised and highly dramatic grilling by the foreign affairs select committee.

The MoD issued a statement, agreed with Dr Kelly, not naming him but calling on the BBC to confirm whether he was the source. When the broadcaster refused to do so, his name emerged into the media.

Earlier today the Conservative member of the FAC Sir Richard Ottaway told Sky News: "Now that political machinations have actually, or could have, resulted in the death of a potentially important person in this whole thing, I don`t think it will help the government one iota.

"I think it brings into stark, stark exposure the role that the spin doctors inside the government and the Labour party are handling this situation."

Later Mr Ottaway was asked on Radio 4`s World at One if he thought the committee had been convinced that Dr Kelly was Mr Gilligan`s source.

He replied: "Some of us were convinced that he definitely was not, others less so, but the balance of opinion was highly unlikely."

Mr Ottaway said the committee reconvened to simply ask Gilligan to name his source because it was quite clear Dr Kelly was not the source.

"There are games going on here, there are people trying to make points, trying to shut down avenues of inquiry, trying to open up things.

"But putting up Dr Kelly was just part of the distraction and it`s had the most ghastly result and I am deeply critical of those involved."

Mr Ottaway said yesterday`s ad-hoc reconvening of the FAC, without all members present, to grill Mr Gilligan for a second time, was an "abuse of the process".

"It is more game playing. Dr Kelly agreed that it wasn`t his opinion that he wasn`t the source, but he couldn`t have been the source because he was unaware of the revelations in the story, which were subsequently proved true," he said.

John Maples, another Conservative member of FAC, said: "There must be more to this than we had thought. I do not know what that means, I just think there is.

"I would have thought he would have gone away from that meeting feeling better, feeling at least `I am in the clear with these guys`."

But the foreign affairs committee chairman, Donald Anderson MP, was keener to downplay today`s events. He told Sky News there was "no way in which government ministers can be blamed" for the way in which Dr Kelly`s name became public.

He added: "It is awful, but this is not relevant any more to the work of our committee."

Asked on the BBC World at One if he thought the questioning of Dr Kelly had been too strong, he said: "If it was strong, the criticisms appear to be more directed against the MoD, rather than against him.

"I concede of course it was wholly outside his normal experience, therefore must have certainly been an ordeal for him.

Mr Anderson was asked if he was surprised that government ministers immediately said that as far as they were concerned, Dr Kelly was the source and they would continue to believe that until the BBC said something different.

Mr Anderson replied: "Well, it appears that he was, because on the process of elimination he was the only one who mentioned the 45 minutes."

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy welcomed the announcement of a judicial inquiry.

He said: "I welcome the fact the prime minister has said there will obviously have to be a full-scale inquiry into what on earth led to this happening."

This afternoon the Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, welcomed the news of the inquiry, but said it should be "wide-ranging" rather than just focussing on the circumstances around the death of Dr Kelly.

He also called for the prime minister to return to Britain from his diplomatic trip to the Far East.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1001129,00…

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Death of public servant stuns UK`s establishment
By Roger Blitz, UK Affairs Editor
Published: July 18 2003 19:06 | Last Updated: July 18 2003 19:06


The untimely death on Friday of David Kelly, a mild-mannered civil servant, is the most shocking and serious episode in the "Iraq dossier" crisis engulfing the UK government.


The discovery of Mr Kelly`s body five miles from his home in the Oxfordshire countryside connects to a chain of events that began with a radio news story in May and raises searching questions about integrity in British politics.

For seven weeks, the UK government has engaged in a concerted attempt to defend prime minister Tony Blair`s claim that the threat of weapons of mass destruction justified sending British troops to Iraq.

Mr Kelly was a small but significant player in that process. A 59-year-old microbiologist advising the ministry of defence, he appeared to have been the source of a BBC story alleging the government`s intelligence dossier in September on Saddam Hussein`s potential for using weapons of mass destruction had been embroidered on political orders to make a more convincing case for war.

Mr Blair has seen initial public approval for the speedy overthrow of the Iraqi dictator replaced by growing cynicism, led by a sceptical media, at failure to find the WMD the dossier said existed.

Mr Blair`s postwar difficulties were aggravated by the story from the BBC`s most influential news programme, which coined the memorable phrase that the dossier had been "sexed up".

But in what appeared to some observers as a way of taking the heat off the prime minister, Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair`s director of communications, went on the attack.

Mr Campbell`s ire was inflamed by a newspaper article by Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist who broke the story. In it, he said Mr Campbell inserted into the dossier that Saddam Hussein could launch WMD within 45 minutes, a claim frequently repeated by Mr Blair in the run-up to war.

Lies, said Mr Campbell, as both he and Mr Gilligan were summonsed by a prominent parliamentary committee looking into the decision to go to war to justify their positions.

Mr Campbell has been severely bruised by events. The committee decided only by the chairman`s casting vote that he had not "sexed up" the dossier, but they censured Mr Campbell over a second so-called "dodgy dossier", released in February. This had purported to be based on intelligence sources but had also copied material verbatim and without attribution from a PhD student`s article and had not been cleared by Mr Blair or intelligence chiefs.

But the attempts to discredit Mr Gilligan and the BBC continued unabated, with the search for the journalist`s mole becoming the principal obsession of parliament and the media in recent weeks, to the general bewilderment of the public.

"Quite clearly there was a concerted effort to root out whoever had had the temerity to speak to a journalist, supposedly out of turn," said one political commentator and former colleague of Mr Gilligan`s.

That effort, with the finger of suspicion pointing to high-ranking government officials, will be scrutinised by the independent judicial inquiry announced on Friday by a shocked Mr Blair.

In the secretive yet gentlemanly world of the British civil service, Mr Kelly`s name at first "emerged" as the defence official who may have been the BBC source. Then, 10 days ago, Mr Kelly admitted publicly to meeting Mr Gilligan to discuss the dossier.

On Tuesday, in the full glare of the media, the quiet, bespectacled Mr Kelly was brought before the same committee of MPs that had grilled Mr Gilligan and Mr Campbell. One MP warned him he was in "the High Court of Parliament" as the barely audible Mr Kelly said he believed he was not the main source.

The behaviour of the MPs is also under scrutiny. Only on Thursday night, they publicly admonished Mr Gilligan, accusing him of changing his story after questioning him for a second time.

Mr Kelly`s death has stunned all the players involved in this drama, resembling as it does a fictitious political thriller. That there is a real and seemingly innocuous victim makes it all the more troubling.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/Sto…

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A brass, sword-wielding, horse-riding Saddam Hussein statue is engulfed in a ball of flame as it is blown from its perch outside Hussein`s palatial grounds in Tikrit, around 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, July 18, 2003. REUTERS/U.S. Army/Craig Pickett
A boy balances on the barrel of a destroyed and abandoned Iraqi army artillery gun on the outskirts of the capital Baghdad July 18, 2003. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the United States was unprepared for the collapse of law and order in post war Iraq and the subsequent difficulties there, the Los Angeles Times said on Friday. REUTERS/Serwan Azez

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To Show Loyalty, Rice Lies for Bush
by Joe Conason



According to contemporary political lore, the Bush clan exalts loyalty above every other virtue. Other politicians envy that inviolable code, whose power is reflected in the absence of leaks from the White House, in the lockstep obedience of politicians in Congress and around the country, and in the enormous cash donations from hundreds of wealthy "friends." This is how dynasties are built to endure.

But at the highest level, in the inner councils, such feudal allegiances often require awful sacrifice and compromise. For those who now work for George W. Bush, loyalty means surrendering professional integrity and accepting public humiliation. Loyalty means uttering words and phrases that nobody can believe. Loyalty means misleading the people and the press about the gravest matters of state.

Loyalty means lying.

Consider the poignant case of Condoleezza Rice, who entered this administration as a respected academic expert on Russian affairs and the former provost of Stanford University. Unlike some of the figures around the President, Dr. Rice had no serious blots on her reputation when she was appointed national security advisor. From a family that suffered the indignities and deprivations of segregated Alabama, she has long been admired as an African-American woman who rose by dint of personal effort and scholarly ability as well as affirmative action. The list of honors, degrees, directorships and other achievements on her official résumé is extraordinary.

After serving in the first Bush White House on the National Security Council, and then a stint in the 2000 campaign as a discreet adviser on foreign affairs, she had come to be regarded by the political clan as among its most reliable members. Sometimes she almost appeared to have been adopted by the President and his family.

But during the past two years of international crisis, Dr. Rice has been dispatched to prevaricate repeatedly in defense of her boss. She was caught spreading a false story about Sept. 11, claiming that Air Force One flew the President to Oklahoma after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because "intelligence" indicated that terrorists were aiming for the White House and the Presidential jet. Later she testified that the U.S. government had never anticipated an assault by airliner, when in fact there had been many warnings of exactly such tactics—most notably during the summer of 2001, when Western intelligence services set up anti-aircraft batteries around the Genoa summit to protect the President.

Memories are short in this country, so Dr. Rice escaped those embarrassing incidents with her reputation more or less intact. Then last year, as the determination of the White House to wage war on Iraq became plain, she began to promote dubious stories about Saddam Hussein’s regime. As national security advisor, she had access to all of the sensitive intelligence about Iraq, so the press and Congress took her pronouncements seriously.

More than anyone other than the President himself, Dr. Rice stoked fears about a "mushroom cloud" rising over an American city unless the U.S. waged war on Iraq. To promote such dread, she warned that a shipment of aluminum tubes purchased by the Iraqis could only be intended for a uranium-enrichment device. Long after the International Atomic Energy Authority debunked that claim, the national security advisor continued to insist that it must be true.

Still, she had gotten away with those whoppers as well, thanks to the complaisant national press corps. Lately, however, she has engaged in deceptions that are too obvious and too simple to ignore. Not only is she responsible for the false allegation about Niger uranium in the State of the Union address, but she dishonorably forced C.I.A. director George Tenet to say that was his fault rather than hers.

Dr. Rice knew that the C.I.A. had questioned the veracity of the Niger uranium tale. She knew because Mr. Tenet had warned her deputy, Stephen Hadley, of its dubious quality three months earlier. Yet she permitted that sentence to be uttered by the President. Now she tells us that those 16 words were "accurate" because the information was attributed to British intelligence. She wants us to believe that until last month she had never heard about the mission to Niger undertaken by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who reported back to the C.I.A. and the State Department that the Niger uranium story was a fake.

But neither she nor the President, nor anyone else in authority, ever cared whether that story was true. It merely served a purpose, like the "aluminum tubes" allegation, and the assertion that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda, and the other prewar "intelligence" myths designed to excite belligerence and undermine the U.N. inspection process.

Dr. Rice played her role in that campaign with consummate loyalty indeed. She continues to do so, and in the process she has damaged herself permanently for an unscrupulous family of politicians. I hope they’re grateful.

You may reach Joe Conason via email at: [e-mail].

back to top
This column ran on page 5 in the 7/21/2003 edition of The New York Observer.

http://www2.observer.com/observer/pages/conason.asp

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Dear BuzzFlash,

Lately, it seems that National Policy has actually been forged based on repeated embarrassing and inexplicable utterances of our Poseur President.

Although his facial tics seem to be somewhat under control, the wild epithets are getting more unruly and wilder than ever.

Circulating my animation depicting this rare macho-speech syndrome may hopefully go a long way towards convincing the world that Dubya`s dyslexia is nothing compared to his Cowboy Tourette`s. And it`s because of this apparently uncontrollable affliction that we won`t be issuing France, Germany, Belgium, Norway and the rest an apology for throwing that national hissy-fit over their refusal to sanction our invasion of Iraq.

One Citizen
Charleston, WV

[Joerver]

"Another soldier was killed Wednesday in an attack on a convoy in Baghdad, bringing the number
of American battle deaths in Iraqi to 148 surpassing the 147 killed in Dad`s 1991 War."
--The soulless bastards at CNN, continuing to cover for Bush no matter what the price
U.S. soldier killed http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/07/16/sprj.irq.main/…


While not technically a lie, CNN is doing all they can to pretend there aren`t 224 dead Americans.
By qualifying the deaths as "battle deaths," CNN wants America to continue to tolerate this war
because, after all, "only" 147 men have died, right?

Lying bastards, refusing to tell the whole truth because Mr Rove needs a war he can manage.

By the way, how did those other 76 men die?
Car accidents?
Can 76 men die in car accidents?



Dubya says:
"They weren`t drafted, they knew there were risks...
...and if any of them go AWOL or desert, I`ll have them shot on sight."

[rv_2011]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 18. Juli 2003, 15:23
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,257623,00.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,257623,00.html

(No more) E-Mail

Bushs Aschenputtel-Test

Macht definiert sich im 21. Jahrhundert zunehmend als Kontrolle über die Kommunikations- und Informationsflüsse. Wer der Bush-Administration per E-Mail schreiben will, muss sich zunächst einem Gesinnungstest unterziehen. Oder haben wir da was falsch verstanden?


"Contact"-Webseite der Bush-Regierung: Kurzer Draht nur für Freunde?

Als das Internet Mitte der neunziger Jahre endgültig seinen Siegeszug begann, schien so vieles möglich: Die Welt schien kleiner zu werden, die Kontakte unmittelbarer, und alle Menschen ein kleines bisschen gleicher. War es nicht so, dass man mit einem Mal Staatslenker und Popstars, Künstler und Großkopferte mit nur einem Mausklick und binnen Sekunden erreichen konnte? "E-Mail senden", und schon sprach man zu, wenn schon nicht mit den Mächtigen?

Nein, natürlich war das nicht so. Aber es sah zumindest so aus.

Chefs, lautet eine Web-Weisheit, surfen nicht - sie lassen surfen. Und so hatten und haben gerade Politiker Referenten, die für die Sichtung der E-Mail zuständig waren und sind.

Und trotzdem: Es hatte schon was, sich hinsetzen zu können und mal eben dem mächtigsten Menschen auf Erden brieflich die Meinung zu geigen. "[e-mail]" wurde zu einer der bekanntesten Mailadressen der Welt.

Wer da heute hinschreibt, berichtet John Markoff in der "New York Times", kann sich nicht darauf verlassen, dass sein Brief überhaupt noch gelesen wird. Das ist keine steile Behauptung, sondern ein fast wörtliches Zitat von der neuen "Webmail"-Seite des Weißen Hauses. Denn klammheimlich hat die Bush-Administration die Regeln für die Kommunikation mit der Regierung geändert.

Neues aus Washington, Preussen

Wer künftig kommunizieren will, steht vor einem Formular-Parcour, bei dem selbst preußische Einwohnermeldeamts-Beamte glänzende Augen bekämen. Neun Seiten Hindernislauf gilt es zu überwinden bis zur persönlichen Bemerkung.

Es beginnt mit dem Aschenputtel-Test: Will man meckern oder loben? Ist man für oder gegen Bush?

Nur ein Heiliger nimmt das nicht als Gesinnungstest wahr und vertraut darauf, dass Lob wie Tadel ihren Adressaten erreichen - und nicht das Gute ins Töpfchen, das Schlechte ins Kröpfchen wandere.


Vorgefilterte Themenauswahl: Nuklearwaffen kann man loben oder tadeln, Überwachungsgesetze nicht

Jimmy Orr, einer der Sprecher des Präsidenten, versichert natürlich, das alles sei eine Verbesserung und solle die Kommunikation mit dem Bürger erleichtern. Schließlich erhalte der Präsident täglich rund 15.000 E-Mails, und wer wollte damit noch fertig werden?

Also entwarfen die Strategen ein System, dass die eingehende Mail haarklein nach Kategorien ordnet. "Wer schreibt da?" ist die erste Frage, und Lügen gilt nicht: Erst wer in einem mehrstufigen Prozess seine Identität bewiesen und per E-Mail einen Freischalt-Code erhalten hat, darf seinem Präsidenten schreiben. "Seinem" ist hier wörtlich zu nehmen, weil E-Mail aus dem Ausland überhaupt nicht mehr vorgesehen ist.

Man darf alles sagen, was man sagen darf

Für US-Bürger geht es dann weiter: Auf zwölf Politikbereiche mit etlichen Unterpunkten darf man Bezug nehmen. Ein System mit eingebautem Galgenhumorfaktor: So darf man zwar die Atomwaffenpolitik Bushs loben, findet aber keinen Unterpunkt, unter dem man beispielsweise Bushs Bürgerbeschnüffelungs-Gesetze kritisieren könnte. Was soll`s, das hat schließlich am Donnerstag schon der Senat übernommen, als er die Mittel für Bushs "Total Terrorism Awareness"-Programm strich.


Es gibt Themen, über die redet Georg Walker Bush nicht gern: Der gesamte Themenblock "Arbeit" bis hin zu "Arbeitslosigkeit" gehört zu den Unthemen der Kontaktseite

Trotzdem bleibt hier ein schaler Beigeschmack. Das System quantifiziert offenkundig das E-Mail-Aufkommen nach verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten. Egal ob sie nun gelesen wird oder nicht: Schon die Vorsortierung sorgt dafür, dass in Form einer Ablehnungs- oder Zustimmungsstatistik zu aktuellen Politikbereichen die E-Mail der Bush-Administration nützliche Informationen bietet.

Für Regierungssprecher Orr ist das ganze Prozedere nur eine Teilautomatisierung eines Systems, durch das die Bürger ihre Anliegen dem Präsidenten schneller nahe bringen können sollen. Die Vorfilterung diene dem Zweck, dem Briefschreiber auch dann passgenaue Antworten zu seinem Thema geben zu können, wenn der Brief nicht von einem Menschen gelesen werde: Meckerbriefschreiber gegen den Irak-Krieg erhalten dann automatisch eine sachliche Antwort. Ganz nebenbei sind sie aber auch mit Namen und Adresse registriert.

Automatisierte Abfertigung

Ein Schelm, wer Böses dabei denkt. Orr versichert, beim neuen Mailsystem gehe es gerade darum, persönlich wahrgenommen zu werden: Sogar automatisierte Grußworte des Präsidenten zu Jubiläen, Geburten und ähnlichen Anlässen ließen sich anfordern. Wie schön. Überhaupt kommt der neue "Contact"-Auftritt des Weißen Hauses freundlich-nüchtern daher, mit einem schönen Foto eng befreundeter Partner bebildert: Bush und Blair spazieren da verliebt wirkend und grinsend durchs Bild, und fast scheint es, als hielten sie Händchen. So eng kann freundschaftlicher Kontakt sein, und sicher besitzt Tony Blair auch Georg W. Bushs persönliche Mailadresse.

Seine britischen Landsleute aber müssen sich wie alle Ausländer und alle, die sich frei zu Themen äußern wollen, die die Bush-Administration gerade nicht diskutiert haben will, per Telefon, Fax oder Brief ans Weiße Haus wenden. Die Einzelheiten sind der "Contact"-Seite der Regierungs-Homepage zu entnehmen. Mehr Distanz in einem Medium, von dem sich Bürgerbewegte einst größere Nähe und einen direkteren Draht zur Politik erhofften, hat noch niemand hinbekommen. Die Seite ist beispielhaft - abschreckend.

Frank Patalong

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 11:28 a.m. EDT July 18, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

A U.S. soldier was killed Friday when insurgents detonated a bomb under a military convoy in which he was traveling in the violent city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. The 3rd Infantry Division soldier died of injuries in the midafternoon attack on the main Fallujah bridge over the Euphrates River. No word on the number of wounded, but a witness saw four U.S. soldiers evacuated.
British police say a body found in central England matches the description of a missing defense adviser. David Kelly, a former weapons inspector, was one of the figures at the center of a political storm over allegations that Prime Minister Tony Blair`s office altered intelligence on Iraq`s alleged weapons programs. The government denies the claim.
A bronze head of Saddam Hussein is now a trophy for U.S. soldiers in Tikrit. The U.S. military used 12 pounds of plastic explosives to topple a 30-foot statue of Saddam in the former dictator`s northern Iraqi hometown.
U.S. soldiers operating in northern Iraq say they`ve found a huge weapons cache in a farmhouse outside Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit. They say the cache includes 250 assault rifles, eleven-thousand rocket-propelled grenade rounds, and two tons of C-4 explosives.
U.S. Army engineers have defused what they describe as a huge homemade bomb found on a highway near the Baghdad airport. It was discovered during a routine daybreak patrol not far from where a soldier was killed during an attack on a military vehicle earlier this week.
More people, more money and more international assistance are needed to "supercharge" the reconstruction of Iraq. That`s according to a Pentagon advisory panel that visited the country and surveyed the progress being made by the U.S.-led administrators.
A Navy sailor died Thursday of a non-combat gunshot wound in the southern Iraqi town of Hamishiyah. The military says there were no U.S. combat deaths during Thursday`s 35th anniversary of the Baath Party coup. American forces were on guard in anticipation of possible attacks to mark the holiday.
Two experts on Iraq`s nuclear program say a key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren`t meant for nuclear bomb production. This information is contrary to what President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address.
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair contend they won`t be proved wrong in their prewar claims about Iraq`s weapons capabilities. But even if they are, Blair says a menace has been defeated and history will forgive.
Prime Minister Tony Blair is vowing Britain will be with the United States in the long fight against terrorism and for liberty. He insists the Iraq war was justified, and he adds he believes that "with every fiber of instinct and conviction."
Polish Armed Forces are learning lessons from U.S. troops about what they will face when they take over command in south-central Iraq. The Polish troops will lead a group of international troops when American forces turn over the command in September.
More signs of Saddam Hussein`s deadly reign have been unearthed in Iraq. The U.S. military says it`s found another mass grave -- this one in northern Iraq. It`s believed to contain the bodies of up to 400 Kurdish women and children.

ACCUSED SPY
A federal judge in Chicago has denied bail to 61-year-old Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi. He is accused of spying on Iraqi opposition groups for Saddam Hussein. The magistrate says Dumeisi had "hitched his star to the perverted, homicidal mass murderer and torturer of women and children."


TROOPS RETURN
About 175 members of the 23rd Fighter Group`s 75th Fighter Squadron have returned home from Iraq. The pilots and air crews arrived at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina about 5 a.m. after spending about five months supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. The squadron was replaced at Tallil Air Base in Iraq by the 74th Fighter Squadron from Pope.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Joerver]

Clash of the century

July 19 2003


The events of the past two years have shown us that the world`s great faultlines are religious rather than economic. The "clash of civilisations" is too real to ignore.

When former US president Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, several conservative commentators complained that it shouldn`t have been awarded to someone who had been misguided enough to praise the human rights record of the late Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia. But given what happened when Yugoslavia disintegrated, others might suggest that poor old Tito himself deserved the prize every year from assuming power during World War II until his death in 1980 - for performing miracles.

The former Yugoslavia was built on the faultlines between three civilisations - Western, Orthodox and Islamic - and 40 years of communist rule failed to do anything more than paper over divisions that stretch back through centuries of Ottoman rule to the Great Schism of 1054, and even further to the Roman emperor Diocletian.

After visiting the region a decade ago, the Vatican`s "foreign minister", Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, reported to Pope John Paul II that "Yugoslavia doesn`t exist anymore. When I was in Zagreb I felt as if I were in Vienna, and when I was in Belgrade I felt as if I were in Istanbul." And while there is no doubt that it took a deliberate campaign of manipulation to unleash the bloodshed of the 1990s, the fact remains that the war in the Balkans was one of a series of "civilisational" conflicts that have become all too familiar in the post-Cold War world.

It is exactly 10 years since Professor Samuel P. Huntington first theorised this new era in The Clash of Civilisations? - one of the most controversial and hotly debated articles ever published by the US journal Foreign Affairs. The director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Huntington sees international conflict after the Cold War as characterised not by traditional rivalries between nation states or by arguments over ideology or economics, but by cultural and civilisational differences.


"Differences among civilisations are not only real; they are basic," he writes in the essay. "Civilisations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most importantly, religion. The people of different civilisations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views on the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes."

Huntington divides the globe into nine occasionally awkward tectonic plates - Western (led by the US), Orthodox, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian and Japanese, with Latin America and Africa more doubtfully classified as "candidates" for civilisation status, and Buddhism, oddly, as a "fossil" civilisation largely absorbed and superceded by China and India.

He envisages friction in all directions along the borders between these civilisational plates, and also within civilisations. At various times, the vast and increasing global reach of Western power and influence will bring us into conflict with each of the other civilisational groups (the West against the rest). But in particular there will be two major clashes: one in the short term with a resurgent Islam and, perhaps more ominously, a longer-term clash with an emerging China.

Since expanded into a book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1997), the Huntington thesis seems to have been remarkably prescient in the light of recent world events: al-Qaeda, President Bush`s "crusade", the Taliban, Kashmir, Nigeria, Bali, the "axis of evil" and even the division between Sunnis, Shi`ites and Kurds that threatens the unity of postwar Iraq. Although perhaps it doesn`t explain the recent admission by Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary of Defence, that the main reason behind military action in Iraq was oil.

The Huntington thesis has annoyed almost everybody. From the start, he was accused of massively over-simplifying the causes of Islamic extremism, offering "civilisational incompatibility" as the reductive explanation for Islamic extremism rather than dealing with specific Muslim grievances.

More recently, and especially since the war in Iraq, he has been dismissed as a darling of the US neo-conservatives, and his theory as a justification for the juggernaut of globalisation and the new Bush doctrine of pre-emptive unilateralism.

The truth is that Huntington is an old-fashioned Democrat rather than an ideologue. A former speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and Jimmy Carter, he is a teacher who shuns interview requests. Ironically, he developed his theory during classes at Harvard to get his students to challenge their triumphalist Western assumptions.

In the 1990s the world had become fixated on globalisation - the new-found ability of capital, corporations and technology to move around the planet almost instantly, uniting it into one market. Indeed, a few years earlier, Huntington`s former student Francis Fukuyama had come up with his own theory of the end of history, in which he anticipated the onset of globalisation by arguing that, Western democratic liberalism and market capitalism having beaten Soviet communism, the rest of history would be a kind of American mopping-up operation.

Huntington warned against such assumptions, arguing that "in the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilisational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous."

Why the hostility to Huntington`s theory? In the West, there are signs that it points to a change in academic fashion - potentially a change on the Left, not merely a shift to the Right. Cultural materialists on both Left and Right are annoyed because the theory returns us to the idea that religion matters in explaining how people live and how the world works - that culture is fundamental, enduring and more important than economics. It also challenges the illusion of the ecumenical pacifists that true religion is only ever about love and peace. Above all, it cuts across three decades of Western self-hatred since Vietnam, challenging us to reacknowledge not just the West`s misdeeds, but also its vast collective achievement.

Huntington has been extremely reticent about any suggestion that he predicted the attacks on the World Trade Centre, but if he provided the theory, the planes on September 11 provided the material facts. In response to nihilistic evil on this scale, postmodern relativism was seen to flounder. After September 11, it is clear that the grand old narratives are holding and the long historical view is back.

When Palestinian writer Edward Said published his article The Clash of Ignorance in US political weekly The Nation a few weeks after September 11, it was telling that most of his indignation was directed at Huntington, while Osama bin Laden barely rated a mention. Referring to the "alleged opposition between Islam and the West", Said described the Huntington thesis as a gimmick, and argued that "labels" like Islam and the West "mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won`t be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as that".

Interviewed by New Perspectives Quarterly at the same time, Huntington carefully acknowledged that Muslim governments had been far from uniformly anti-Western in their response to extremism:

"Bin Laden is an outlaw expelled from his own country, Saudi Arabia and later Sudan. The Taliban which supports him was recognised by only three of 53 Muslim countries in the world. All Muslim governments except Iraq - but including Sudan and Iran - condemned his terrorist attack. Most Muslim governments have at least been acquiescent in the US strategy to respond militarily in Afghanistan. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference condemned bin Laden`s terrorism - but did not condemn the US response."

Perhaps ironically, the best indication that Huntington doesn`t see the world in monolithic terms can be found in the most controversial sentence in his original essay: "Islam has bloody borders." Think of the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban, or the local jihads being waged against scores of local Christian and animist communities stretching from Malawi and Nigeria to Pakistan and Central Sulawesi - conflicts which have nothing to do with anger at Western power.

Meanwhile, many Muslim commentators deny that there is a "clash of civilisations", although they often go on to describe the Muslim experience of Western imperialism in exactly these terms. In fact, there is more than a passing resemblance between Huntington`s theory and the classical Islamic division of the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Perhaps this kind of binary distinction between "us" and "them" is typical of how all cultures think - Islamic, Jewish, Christian, French, Chinese, Australian ...

Huntington insists that the Islamist resurgence of recent decades really is a revival, and that it is not just anti-Western but also genuinely modern - inspired by such 20th-century thinkers as Egypt`s Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, Sayyid Maududi of Pakistan and Ayatollah Khomeini - and was ignited by the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

In this, he appears to disagree with leading Orientalist professor Bernard Lewis, an important influence on Huntington. Lewis coined the term "the clash of civilisations" in a 1990 article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled The Roots of Muslim Rage. The author of What Went Wrong? (Oxford University Press, 2002), he views the Islamic world as backward, paralysed and oblivious to Western developments like the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution - and he suggests that Islam is intrinsically unable to modernise. On this reading, an event like September 11 is an expression of envy at Western success, the impotent fury of a religious civilisation in terminal decline. The really significant clash between Islam and the West seems to have happened in the past.

This leads to what for me is the most interesting question behind the Huntington thesis: what is modernity? Is it just about technology? Or is it also about a state of mind that is only possible because of Western individualism, egalitarianism, freedom of choice and civil institutions and rights? Doesn`t America`s greatest strength lie in its culture, which enables its economy to work brilliantly? Isn`t modernity a quintessentially Western invention which is gradually being exported to the rest of the world? Or is it just another slippery word? We are back to Francis Fukuyama (these days speaking the language of the "clash of civilisations"), who in 2001 wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "It is not an accident that modern liberal democracy emerged first in the Christian West, since the universalism of democratic rights can be seen in many ways as a secular form of Christian universalism."

These murky questions appear to be working themselves out in the Iranian Revolution, which may well be nearing its end. As Ayatollah Khomeini understood, the failure of the revolution would raise unavoidable questions for the entire Islamic world about whether Islam can ever be the basis for an effectively functioning modern state.

Huntington is also haunted by a sense of Western decline - possibly too much so. His suggestion that the world is becoming less Western defies common sense. His concern that "the West no longer has the economic or demographic dynamism required to impose its will on other societies and any effort to do so is also contrary to the Western values of self-determination and democracy" turned out to be an accurate description of Europe, but not the US and its coalition partners.

In fact, the bombing of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq pose many interesting problems for the Huntington thesis: a significant part of the Western public, especially in Europe, was clearly opposed to war under almost any circumstances.

The Iraq war has also driven a wedge between America and Europe, problematising Huntington`s idea of a secular West led by the US. Richard Butler, Australia`s former UN ambassador, recently suggested that the EU is deeply concerned by US unilateralism, and beginning to respond. He says we may see the present unipolar world give way to a strangely Orwellian "tri-polarity", where superpower status is shared by the US, Europe and an Asian bloc led by China. In this context, it is surely not insignificant in cultural terms that the "coalition of the willing" comprised three Anglo-Saxon nations, while France, Germany and Russia fumed on the sidelines.

Of particular interest in Huntington`s book is his brilliant analysis of what he terms "torn" societies - nations striving with difficulty for acceptance into a civilisation where they did not previously belong, such as Russia ("a torn country since Peter the Great"), Turkey, Mexico and Australia. Given that Huntington was writing in the 1990s, he now seems spot on in his prediction that there would be a popular backlash in Australia to Paul Keating`s project of moving closer to Asia, and that the ruling elites of Asia would also reject the idea. In Huntington`s terms, the Howard Government`s policy of strengthening our alliance with the US makes more "civilisational sense". Well, at least in the short term. Presumably what never goes away is the underlying dilemma of our geography - that Australia is a sparsely populated settler society in a non-European part of the globe.

But perhaps Huntington`s most confrontational contention for a society like Australia is that culture is not in the end "multicultural". He is an opponent of US multiculturalists, whom he says "wish to create a country not belonging to any civilisation and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society."

But doesn`t history shows the very opposite? Multiculturalism is the reason why the Roman Empire lasted so long, and Muslim societies have also been at their most vital when they open to people and ideas from outside. At this point perhaps Huntington`s critics are correct and he does reveal how static and monolithic his thinking about civilisations really is. They change constantly, if slowly, and are much more porous than he allows.

These are challenging times for Muslims living in the West. September 11 has brought increased suspicion, police raids and occasionally violence, when we know that the overwhelming majority of Muslim migrants are loyal citizens in their adopted homelands. For Australia, the US and much of Europe, the future is surely multicultural.

Arguably, multiculturalism has always been a more sophisticated process in practice than its opponents usually recognise, or indeed its supporters. Immigrant communities do indeed gradually absorb the core values, and even the underlying cultural myths of the host society. And far from an end to multicultualism, there are already signs, especially in Europe, of an emerging Multiculturalism Mark Two, where shared values are more openly insisted upon.

For example, the Dutch have established a new seminary near Utrecht for the training of imams, who will be expected to speak Dutch and be familiar with Holland`s anti-discrimination laws. And France has always staunchly promoted republican values through the education system. A new inquiry there has just been announced to look at whether Muslim girls should be allowed to wear the hijab at school, and earlier this year a national Muslim consultative council was established to encourage more French Muslims into the national mainstream.

However, all this may be more applicable to the surface of society than to the fundamental forces that shape it in the long term. In the end, Huntington provides a very useful and endlessly stimulating diagnosis of the problem at a global level. What he doesn`t see so clearly is that the solution doesn`t just lie in the consolidation of Western power - but in learning how to live together in local communities.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/18/1058035202575.html

[Joerver]

[IMG]http://newyorker.com/images/headers/he_logo.gif[/url]
Hersh mit einer umfassenden Analyse über Syrien. Hersh ist einer bekanntesten amerikanischen Analysten. Hatte auch Perle abgeschossen.Ist aber in seinen Aussagen relativ unabhängig.

THE SYRIAN BET
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Did the Bush Administration burn a useful source on Al Qaeda?
Issue of 2003-07-28
Posted 2003-07-18
On the night of June 18th, Task Force 20, an American Special Operations team stationed in Iraq, expanded its operations dozens of miles inside Syria. Military intelligence had observed large numbers of cars and trucks speeding toward the border, and senior officers suspected that the vehicles were carrying fleeing members of the Iraqi leadership. Communications intercepts had indicated that there were more Syrian soldiers congregated along the border than usual, including some officers. The military concluded, according to a senior Administration official, that “something down there was going on.” Two days earlier, one of Saddam Hussein’s closest aides, Abid Hamid Mahmud, had been captured, and told his interrogators that he and Saddam’s two sons had sought refuge in Syria but were turned back. Although the Syrian government denied knowledge of the brothers’ whereabouts, the military was now ready to cross the border to stop any future flight attempts.

Sometime after midnight, Army helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles attacked two groups of cars heading into Syria, triggering enormous explosions and fireballs that lit up the night sky. A gas station and nearby homes were destroyed. Task Force 20 sped across the border into Syria. Five Syrian guards were injured and flown to Iraq in American helicopters for medical treatment, and several other Syrians were seized, handcuffed, and detained before being released.

Pentagon officials subsequently praised the nighttime mission. “I’m confident we had very good intelligence,” Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference on June 24th. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, “There were reasons, good reasons, to believe that the vehicles that were violating the curfew that existed in that area were doing it for reasons other than normal commerce.” Asked if he believed that senior Iraqi leaders had been killed in the raid, Rumsfeld said, “We’re trying to find out.”

In fact, according to current and former American military and diplomatic officials, the operation was a fiasco in which as many as eighty people—occupants of the cars and trucks as well as civilians living nearby—were killed. The vehicles, it turned out, were being used to smuggle gasoline. The Syrian government said little publicly about the violation of its sovereignty, even when the Pentagon delayed the repatriation of the injured Syrian border guards—reporters were told that the guards had not been fully interrogated—for ten days.

Weeks later, questions about the raid remained: Why had American forces crossed the border? And why had the Syrian response been so muted? An American consultant who recently returned from Iraq said, “I don’t mind so much what we did, but it’s the incompetence with which we did it.” A senior adviser to the Pentagon noted that the people who were killed had “put themselves into the gray area” by smuggling fuel across the border. “The troops were trying to work with actionable intelligence,” the official said. “You might make the same mistake.” This month, two retired veterans of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Vincent Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who now consult on intelligence issues, noted in a newsletter for their private clients that the attacks had been based on “fragmentary and ambiguous” information and had led to increased tension between Rumsfeld and the C.I.A. director, George Tenet.



Tenet’s involvement was significant. American intelligence and State Department officials have told me that by early 2002 Syria had emerged as one of the C.I.A.’s most effective intelligence allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq. (A number of the details of the raid and the intelligence relationship were reported by U.P.I. on July 16th.) Tenet had become one of Syria’s champions in the interagency debate over how to deal with its government. His antagonists include civilians in the Pentagon who viewed Syria, despite its intelligence help, as part of the problem. “Tenet has prevented all kinds of action against Syria,” one diplomat with knowledge of the interagency discussions told me.

Syria is one of seven nations listed by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism. It has been on the list since 1979, in large part because of its public support for Hezbollah, the radical Islamic party that controls much of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for, among other acts, the 1983 bombing of the American Marine barracks in Beirut, which left two hundred and forty-one Americans dead; it was implicated in the 1984 kidnapping of William Buckley, the C.I.A.’s Beirut station chief, who was tortured and murdered; and it has been linked to bombings of Israeli targets in Argentina. Syria has also allowed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, two groups that have staged numerous suicide bombings inside Israel, to maintain offices in Damascus.

Nevertheless, after September 11th the Syrian leader, Bashar Assad, initiated the delivery of Syrian intelligence to the United States. The Syrians had compiled hundreds of files on Al Qaeda, including dossiers on the men who participated—and others who wanted to participate—in the September 11th attacks. Syria also penetrated Al Qaeda cells throughout the Middle East and in Arab exile communities throughout Europe. That data began flowing to C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives.

Syria had accumulated much of its information because of Al Qaeda’s ties to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic terrorists who have been at war with the secular Syrian government for more than two decades. Many of the September 11th hijackers had operated out of cells in Aachen and Hamburg, where Al Qaeda was working with the Brotherhood. In the late nineties, Mohammed Atta and other Al Qaeda members, including Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who is believed to have been one of the organization’s top recruiters, worked on occasion at a German firm called Tatex Trading. Tatex was infiltrated by Syrian intelligence in the eighties; one of its shareholders was Mohammed Majed Said, who ran the Syrian intelligence directorate from 1987 to 1994. Zammar is now in Syrian custody.

Within weeks of the September 11th attacks, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A, with Syria’s permission, began intelligence-gathering operations in Aleppo, near the Turkish border. Aleppo was the subject of Mohammed Atta’s dissertation on urban planning, and he travelled there twice in the mid-nineties. “At every stage in Atta’s journey is the Muslim Brotherhood,” a former C.I.A. officer who served undercover in Damascus told me. “He went through Spain in touch with the Brotherhood in Hamburg.”

Syria also provided the United States with intelligence about future Al Qaeda plans. In one instance, the Syrians learned that Al Qaeda had penetrated the security services of Bahrain and had arranged for a glider loaded with explosives to be flown into a building at the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters there. Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who served until early this year on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, told me that Syria’s help “let us thwart an operation that, if carried out, would have killed a lot of Americans.” The Syrians also helped the United States avert a suspected plot against an American target in Ottawa.

Syria’s efforts to help seemed to confound the Bush Administration, which was fixated on Iraq. According to many officials I spoke to, the Administration was ill prepared to take advantage of the situation and unwilling to reassess its relationship with Assad’s government. Leverett told me that “the quality and quantity of information from Syria exceeded the Agency’s expectations.” But, he said, “from the Syrians’ perspective they got little in return for it.”



For thirty years, Hafez Assad, Bashar Assad’s father, ruled Syria through the socialist Baath Party. The journalist Thomas Friedman has described him as looking “like a man who had long ago been stripped of any illusions about human nature.” He dealt with his opponents brutally. In 1982, after years of increasingly violent terrorist attacks throughout Syria, Hafez Assad ordered a massive military assault on the Muslim Brotherhood in the northern city of Hama. He saw the group as a threat to his control of Syria, and his forces, showing little mercy, killed at least five thousand people, many of them civilians, in a monthlong battle that left the city in ruins. In 1994, his oldest son and presumed heir, Basil, was killed in an automobile accident. Bashar, then twenty-eight, was studying ophthalmology in London, where his wife, Asmaa, worked in the executive-training program at J. P. Morgan. They returned to Damascus in 1994, and shortly after the death of his father, in June, 2000, Bashar took over the Presidency.

Unlike his father, Bashar is routinely depicted in Western newspapers not as ruthless but as unsure, inexperienced, and unable to control a corrupt Old Guard. Last month, I visited him at his office in Damascus. Tall, gangly, and seemingly shy and eager to please, Assad was waiting at the door for me. He offset his tentative and somewhat fussy manner with humor. He was frank about his reasons for speaking to me: he wanted to change his image, and the image of his country. “September 11th was like out of a Hollywood movie—beyond anyone’s imagination,” he said. “But it was not surprising as a concept. We actually experienced innocents being killed on our streets, and we know how it feels.” Syria had sent official expressions of sympathy, backed by offers to share intelligence. “We thought Al Qaeda was not different than the Muslim Brotherhood as a state of mind,” Assad said.

“For us,” Assad said, September 11th “was a good opportunity. The need to coöperate was very self-evident, and it was in our interest. It was also a way to improve relations.” Syria hoped to get off the list of state sponsors of terrorism; its case was based in part on the fact, acknowledged by the State Department, that it hadn’t been directly implicated in a terrorist act since 1986. On a practical level, removal from the list would make Syria eligible for trade and other economic aid—and arms sales—from which it is now barred.

In interviews and public statements, Assad has tried to draw a distinction between international terrorists and those he called part of the “resistance” in Israel and the occupied territories, including young Palestinian suicide bombers. It is a distinction that few in the Bush Administration would endorse. Syria’s enmity toward Israel has been unrelenting, as has its criticism of the United States for its support of Israel. In a typical comment, made in late March to Al Safir, a Lebanese newspaper, Assad declared, “No one among us trusts Israel; not the Syrians, not any other Arabs. . . . We must be very careful. Treachery and threats have always been Israeli characteristics. Through its existence, Israel always poses a threat.”



Assad and his advisers—many of whom are his father’s cronies—had hoped that their coöperation in the hunt for Al Qaeda would allow them to improve and redefine their relations with the United States. Among other things, the Syrians wanted a back channel to Washington—that is, a private means of communicating directly with the President and his key aides. But there was a major obstacle: Syria’s support for Hezbollah. “Hezbollah may be the A team of terrorists and maybe Al Qaeda is actually the B team,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in a speech last September.

Last fall, however, General Hassan Khalil, the head of Syria’s military intelligence, told Washington that Syria was willing to discuss imposing some restrictions on the military and political activities of Hezbollah. The General requested that the C.I.A. be the means of back-channel communication. A senior Syrian foreign-ministry official I met argued that a back channel was crucial because while Assad might be able to take quick action against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a public stance against Hezbollah would be impossible. “He can’t do it,” the official said, adding that the leader of Hezbollah, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, is enormously popular in Syria.

The proposal went nowhere. A former State Department official told me that the C.I.A., ecstatic about the high level of coöperation with Syrian intelligence, “didn’t want to destroy the ‘happy talk’ about Al Qaeda by dealing with all the other troubling issues in the back channel.” The State Department, he added, did not like the Agency’s having access to U.S.-Syrian diplomatic correspondence. And the Pentagon, preoccupied with the Iraq war and ideologically hostile to Syria, vehemently opposed a back channel.

“The intelligence coöperation on Al Qaeda was important and effective,” said Martin Indyk, who served as Ambassador to Israel in the Clinton Administration and is now director of the Saban Center. “But the Syrians thought it would compensate for all their other games with Iraq and the Palestinian terror organizations, and it doesn’t.” On the issue of shutting down the Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices in Damascus, Indyk said, “They’re playing around.” He asked, “Why are they doing it despite our anger? One, they think we’re going to grow short of breath in Iraq and fail with the Middle East road map. So they’re biding their time. And, two, there doesn’t seem to be much consequence for not heeding our warnings.”

Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli Ambassador to Washington, who headed the Israeli delegation during the ill-fated peace talks with Hafez Assad in the mid-nineties, acknowledged that he was aware of the key Syrian intelligence role in the war against Al Qaeda, but he made it clear that Israel’s distrust of Syria remains acute. Rabinovich wondered aloud whether, given the quality of their sources, the Syrians had had advance information about the September 11th plot—and failed to warn the United States. He said that under the elder Assad the Syrians had been “masters of straddling the line.” He added, “Hafez negotiated with us, and he supported Hezbollah. The son is not as adept as the father, who could keep five balls in the air at the same time. Bashar can only handle three—if that. He has good intentions, but he’s not in control. He can’t deliver.” For that reason, Rabinovich believed, Israel has urged Washington not to open the back channel to Assad. For the Syrians, he added, “the best channel is a back channel—it’s ideal. They are then not embarrassed in public and they buy themselves some time.”



Many of those I spoke to said that there had been an apparent shift in Hezbollah’s behavior—one that may have created an opening which the Bush Administration has yet to exploit. “With the exception of exchange of fire over the Shebaa Farms”—a disputed area on the Lebanese border—“it’s been quiet since the Israeli evacuation in 2000,” said Richard W. Murphy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as Ambassador to Syria in the nineteen-seventies. “The fact is Hezbollah knows its limits.” Murphy pointed to Hezbollah’s deepening involvement in the Lebanese government: Nasrallah’s group now has twelve seats in the parliament. Many in Pentagon circles and in Israel attribute Hezbollah’s silence to America’s swift defeat of the Iraqi regime. “The U.S. is now in the Middle East, and east of Israel,” a retired Israeli intelligence officer told me. As a result, another Israeli official said, “Hezbollah is playing defense today.”

Michel Samaha, Lebanon’s minister of information, told me that Hezbollah has stabilized daily life in southern Lebanon, by controlling and monitoring the sometimes violent activities of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in squalid refugee camps scattered through the area. He argued that America was making “a foolish mistake” by not trying to engage Hezbollah. The group, Samaha said, complied with Syria’s insistence that it prevent would-be Palestinian suicide bombers from crossing the border into Israel. Rabinovich also said that Hezbollah had become more “careful” in its actions against Israel.

Martin Indyk questioned how much credit Syria should get for the change. “Nasrallah independently figured it was a good time to quiet things down, well before the war in Iraq,” he says. “I don’t think the Syrians were against it, but I wouldn’t rush to credit them for the cooling down. Hezbollah, like Hamas, has read the map much better than Bashar and has decided it makes sense to keep its head down, preserve its assets and resources, rebuild where it needs to, and wait for the next round.”

I spoke with Nasrallah, who is in his early forties, over tea at his offices south of Beirut. In his speeches to the faithful, his language is laced with hostility toward Israel and the United States, and with rationalizations for suicide bombings. In his conversation with me, he said, “I used to believe that the Americans would need a year or two before the Iraqis begin protesting, but here they are doing it in just two months, not two years.” Armed resistance, he said, was inevitable: “The history of Iraq says that it is possible to occupy Iraq, but one can’t stay there for long.” (On the eve of the war, he had said that American troops should expect “martyrdom operations” and that “Death to America was, is, and will stay our slogan.”)

Nasrallah emphasized that he was not seeking a confrontation with the United States. Because of Hezbollah’s ability to disrupt a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, I asked Nasrallah about his view of the renewed talks. He hesitated a moment and declared, “At the end, this is primarily a Palestinian matter. I, like any other person, may consider what is happening to be right or wrong. . . . I may have a different assessment, but at the end of the road no one can go to war on behalf of the Palestinians, even if that one is not in agreement with what the Palestinians agreed on. Of course, it would bother us that Jerusalem goes to Israel.”

I asked, “But if there was a deal?”

“Let it happen,” he answered. “I would not say O.K. I would say nothing.”



In midwinter, despite intense American pressure, Bashar Assad decided that Syria would not support the invasion of Iraq. Coöperation on Al Qaeda was now a secondary issue.

In our interview, Assad said that his opposition to the war was based on principle. “Could the Iraqi people ignore an American occupation because they hated Saddam? The United States doesn’t understand the society—not even the simplest analysis.” His decision was also driven by internal politics. America had demanded that Syria monitor and curtail the heavy flow into Iraq of smuggled arms and other military necessities from Syrian entrepreneurs—many with high-level Baath Party connections. “The U.S. had satellite photographs of the equipment and information on high-ranking Syrian officials,” a foreign diplomat with close ties to Washington said. “Bashar did not cut it off. The United States got furious.”

Even Assad’s most hopeful supporters told me that it was not clear how much control he had over his own government. Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian-born political scientist now at Washington’s Middle East Institute, told me, “Bashar is trying to reach out to the people, and the people like him, but what stands in the way is the financially corrupt state.”

Hafez Assad supported the first Gulf War, and Dennis Ross, who was President Clinton’s special envoy to the Middle East, said that Bashar Assad had “bet wrong” in refusing to support America this time. “He got nervous after the war and sent a series of messages saying he wants peace,” Ross said. He added, “Assad has to know that he won’t get by on the cheap—he truly must cut off support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad.” But, Ross went on, if he did so the U.S. should reward him “by renewing talks on the Golan Heights”—land Israel occupied in 1967. Ross said that, so far, there was no indication that the Administration was pursuing such an approach.

Instead, in late March Rumsfeld said that Syria would be held accountable for its actions. He accused Syria of supplying Iraq with night-vision goggles and other military goods. He also suggested that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction might be stashed there. Syria denied the assertions, and members of the intelligence community I spoke to characterized the evidence against Syria as highly questionable.

The Syrians were rattled by the threats, in part because many in and close to the Bush Administration have been urging regime change in Damascus for years. In 2000, the Middle East Forum, a conservative Washington think tank, issued a study offering many of the same reasons for taking military action against Syria that were later invoked against Iraq. “The Defense Department pushed for the hard line on Syria,” a former State Department official told me. “I think Rummy was at least testing the waters—to see how far he could go—but the White House was not ready.” The former official added that Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, “is not going to sit on the Pentagon the way she’d have to in order to give the policy of engaging Syria politically a chance. She won’t until the President has made his preferences clear. This kind of policy drift on Syria would be sustainable for another Administration, but Bush can’t take it indefinitely. He’s defined the war on terrorism in theological terms. A President who says ‘You’re either with us or against us’ can’t let policy drift. Rumsfeld’s approach is to tell the President, ‘You do in Syria what you promised to do.’”



In Washington, there was anger about what many officials saw as the decision of the Bush Administration to choose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al Qaeda. In a sense, the issue was not so much Syria itself as a competition between ideology and practicality—and between the drive to go to war in Iraq and the need to fight terrorism—which has created a deep rift in the Bush Administration. The collapse of the liaison relationship has left many C.I.A. operatives especially frustrated. “The guys are unbelievably pissed that we’re blowing this away,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “There was a great channel at Aleppo. The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they”—Rumsfeld and his colleagues—“want to go in there next.”

“There is no security relationship now,” a Syrian foreign-ministry official told me. “It saddens us as much as it saddens you. We could give you information on organizations that we don’t think should exist. If we help you on Al Qaeda, we are helping ourselves.” He added, almost plaintively, that if Washington had agreed to discuss certain key issues in a back channel, “we’d have given you more. But when you publicly try to humiliate a country it’ll become stubborn.”

Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. officer who served in Syria and is the author of a new book, “Sleeping with the Devil,” on Washington’s relationship with the Saudis, agreed that the Syrians had more to offer. “The Syrians know that the Saudis were involved in the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they for sure know the names,” Baer told me.

“Up through January of 2003, the coöperation was topnotch,” a former State Department official said. “Then we were going to do Iraq, and some people in the Administration got heavy- handed. They wanted Syria to get involved in operational stuff having nothing to do with Al Qaeda and everything to do with Iraq. It was something Washington wanted from the Syrians, and they didn’t want to do it.”

Differences over Iraq “destroyed the Syrian bet,” said Ghassan Salamé, a professor of international relations at Paris University who served, until April, as Lebanon’s minister of culture. “They bet that they could somehow find the common ground with America. They bet all on coöperation with America.” A Defense Department official who has been involved in Iraq policy told me that the Syrians, despite their differences with Washington, had kept Hezbollah quiet during the war in Iraq. This was, he said, “a signal to us, and we’re throwing it away. The Syrians are trying to communicate, and we’re not listening.”
http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?030728fa_fact

[rv_2011]

Die FR widmet heute die Seite 3 ("Im Blick" ) ausschließlich dem Thema Guantanamo:
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http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/im…

Die "schlechten Menschen" von Guantánamo

George W. Bushs Urteil steht schon vor den ersten Prozessen gegen die Terrorismus-Verdächtigen fest

Von Dietmar Ostermann (Washington)


Gefangen in Guantánamo (dpa-Archiv)

Tony Blair hat am Donnerstag bei George W. Bush noch einmal interveniert. Mit Erfolg. Für zwei britische Guantánamo-Häftlinge sind die geplanten Militärtribunale zunächst abgewendet. Für die rund 670 übrigen Insassen des primitiven Lagers im exterritorialen Gebiet auf Kuba ändert sich freilich nichts.

Für den US-Präsidenten sind die mutmaßlichen Taliban- und Al-Qaeda-Kämpfer, die Washington als "illegale Kombattanten" seit anderthalb Jahren auf dem Militärstützpunkt Guantánamo Bay in der Karibik gefangen hält, "schlechte Menschen". Das wisse man "sicher". Offiziell gilt die Unschuldsvermutung. Bush sollte sein Urteil eigentlich erst ganz am Ende fällen. Er fungiert bei den geplanten Sondergerichten als letzte Berufungsinstanz.

Sprüche wie die von der gemeinsamen Pressekonferenz mit Blair in der Nacht zum Freitag sind es, die Kritikern der Militärtribunale regelmäßig die Nackenhaare in die Höhe treiben. Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld, die erste Berufungsinstanz, hatte einst von den "Schlimmsten der Schlimmen" gesprochen, Bush pauschal von "Mördern". Die vom US-Präsidenten Ende 2001 verfügten und von der Rumsfeld-Behörde seither verfeinerten Verfahrensregeln machen die Tribunale für Kritiker im In- und Ausland zu "kangaroo courts"; zu Prozessen also, bei denen die Schuld vorab feststeht.

Die Rechte der Angeklagten sind eingeschränkt, die Standards der Beweisführung gegenüber herkömmlichen Gerichten aufgeweicht worden. Das Pentagon klagt an, verteidigt, verurteilt und prüft Einsprüche - wenn es die "nationale Sicherheit" erfordert, unter Ausschluss von Verteidigern, Angeklagten und der Öffentlichkeit. Ein Todesurteil kann von drei Militärrichtern verhängt werden. An amerikanischen Gerichten sind dazu immerhin zwölf Geschworene nötig.

Was bislang nur auf dem Papier existiert hat, soll demnächst in der Praxis erprobt werden. Anfang Juli hat Präsident Bush sechs Kandidaten für erste Musterprozesse benannt, darunter auch die beiden Briten, die nun Aufschub erhielten. Vizeverteidigungsminister Paul Wolfowitz muss nun in jedem Einzelfall entscheiden, ob die Beweislage einen Prozess rechtfertigt. Namen wurden in Washington offiziell nicht genannt, aber inzwischen weiß man, dass sich unter den sechs zunächst Auserwählten neben den britischen Staatsangehörigen auch der "australische Taliban" David Hicks befindet. Sie alle wurden in Afghanistan aufgegriffen und gelten selbst in den Vereinigten Staaten eher als Mitläufer denn als Top-Terroristen der Al Qaeda.

Dass ausgerechnet drei Gefangene aus den Ländern der engsten Irak-Verbündeten für die Pilotverfahren ausgewählt wurden, hat in London für Ärger gesorgt, dem die Bush-Regierung jetzt Rechnung trug. In Washington wird spekuliert, dass das Trio sich kooperationsbereit zeigte und die Beweislage eindeutig sei. Der Militärjurist Eugene Fidell vermutet hingegen ganz praktische Gründe: Sie sprechen Englisch, was die Verhandlung vor den Militärrichtern enorm vereinfacht hätte.

Dass George W. Bush damit seinen treuen Freund Tony Blair daheim in arge Schwierigkeiten brachte, hatte in Washington offenbar niemanden gestört. Fidell, Direktor des privaten Nationalen Instituts für Militärjustiz in Washington, hält es für " völlig undenkbar", dass Bush aus Rücksicht auf den Premier die beiden Briten nun doch noch nach London überstellt, wie das der britische Außenminister Jack Straw angeregt hatte. Der ideale Kandidat für eine rasches Verfahren wäre wohl der Australier Hicks: Dessen Regierung hat die Tribunale als "fair und transparent" bezeichnet. Die Regeln entsprächen juristischen Standards.

Das sehen viele Bürgerrechtler und Juristen in den USA und weltweit anders. Für Fidell ist die Bush-Regierung dabei, dauerhaft ein paralleles Justizsystem zu etablieren. Darauf deute die Veröffentlichung der Verfahrensregeln im Federal Register hin, das dem deutschen Bundesgesetzblatt entspricht. Schon heute könnten vor Militärtribunalen theoretisch auch Gefangene aus Irak angeklagt werden, wenn ihnen terroristische Aktivitäten nachgewiesen würden. Statt seltene Ausnahmefälle zu bleiben, könnten die zuletzt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg abgehaltenen Sondertribunale zu Dauereinrichtungen werden, warnt Fidell.

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DER GASTBEITRAG
Verhöhnte Menschenrechte

Die Weltöffentlichkeit darf nicht länger schweigen

Von Sumit Bhattacharyya

Spräche die gesamte Situation nicht rechtsstaatlichen Prinzipien Hohn, man könnte von Fortschritt sprechen. Weit über ein Jahr, nachdem die ersten Terrorismusverdächtigen in Guantanamo in Drahtkäfige eingewiesen und von der Außenwelt abgeschnitten wurden, hat US-Präsident Bush sechs der mehreren hundert Inhaftierten für einen Prozess benannt. Es erwartet sie ein Prozess, der die internationalen Standards für faire Gerichtsverfahren eklatant verletzt.

Das beginnt mit dem Status der Gefangenen: Die US-Regierung hatte verkündet, sie befände sich mit dem Netzwerk Al Qaeda "im Kriegszustand" und nehme daher für sich das Recht in Anspruch, vermeintliche Mitglieder oder Sympathisanten bis zur Beendigung dieses - wie lange auch immer währenden - "Krieges" in Haft zu halten. Sie bezeichnet die Verdächtigen als "unrechtmäßige Kombattanten" - ein Begriff, den es im humanitären Völkerrecht nicht gibt. Darin wird nämlich gefordert, dass unabhängige Gerichte feststellen müssen, ob es sich bei Gefangenen um Kriegsgefangene gemäß der Genfer Konvention handelt oder nicht. Kriegsgefangene haben Rechte, etwa das der Aussageverweigerung. Sie dürfen nicht gefoltert oder anderer menschenunwürdiger Behandlung ausgesetzt werden. Nachdem CIA-Vertreter verkündet hatten, dass im "Kampf gegen den Terrorismus" Folter kein Tabu sein dürfe, wundert es nicht, dass die USA - erfolglos - versuchten, ein Zusatzprotokoll zur Antifolterkonvention zu verhindern, das unabhängige Kontrollen von Gefangenenlagern ermöglicht.

Offen bekennen US-Offizielle, dass im amerikanischen Kriegsgefangenenlager Bagram in Afghanistan Verhörmethoden angewandt werden, die man als Folter bezeichnen muss: endlose Verhöre, Schlafentzug, ständige Beleuchtung. Die Autopsie von zwei Gefangenen, die dort gestorben sind, ergab als Todesursache massive Schlagverletzungen. Gefangene werden von den USA in Länder wie Pakistan oder Saudi-Arabien ausgeliefert, in denen nachweislich gefoltert wird. Berichten, nach denen CIA-Mitarbeiter auf der Insel Diego Garcia im Indischen Ozean nicht nur bei Folterungen zugesehen haben, sondern auch aktiv daran beteiligt waren, wurde von offizieller Seite nie nachgegangen.

Wie werden die bevorstehenden Prozesse ablaufen? Das Verfahren regelt eine präsidiale Order vom November 2001. Sie gilt nur für Ausländer. Der Präsident ernennt ein Militärgericht. Dieses gibt eine Urteilsempfehlung ab, die bei Todesstrafe einstimmig sein muss. Die Entscheidung über das Urteil fällt im Prinzip der Präsident; George Bush hat diese Kompetenz dem stellvertretenden Verteidigungsminister Paul Wolfowitz übertragen. Dieser kann die Urteilsempfehlung nach Belieben bestätigen oder verwerfen. Damit ist die Trennung von Exekutive und Judikative ebenso aufgehoben wie die von Ankläger und Richter. Aussagen, die auf Hörensagen beruhen oder anonym abgegeben werden, sind als Beweismittel zugelassen. Das gilt auch für Geständnisse, die unter Folter erpresst werden. Die Prozesse sollen unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit stattfinden. Die Angeklagten erhalten einen (englischsprachigen) Pflichtverteidiger. Wahlverteidiger sind theoretisch zugelassen; es ist aber unklar, ob sie Zugang zur Basis in Guantanamo erhalten werden. Und schließlich: Eine Berufung vor ordentlichen Gerichten ist nicht möglich.

Der "Kampf gegen den Terrorismus" hat die Menschenrechte in eine Krise gestürzt. Es ist nicht nur das leichtfertige Aushebeln mühsam errungener völkerrechtlicher Prinzipien, dem die Menschenrechtsbewegung so fassungslos gegenübersteht - es ist vor allem das laute Schweigen der Weltöffentlichkeit. Das Schweigen darüber, dass hier die Menschenrechte als universelles Recht eines jeden zur Disposition gestellt werden, indem in "Menschen wie wir" und "unrechtmäßige Kombattanten" unterschieden wird. Menschenrechte sind aber keine Luxusware für gute Zeiten. Um mehr Sicherheit auf der Welt herzustellen, bedarf es eines Paradigmenwechsels. Er muss darauf gründen, dass den größten Schutz vor Gewalt und Unsicherheit diejenigen Staaten genießen und bieten, deren Führungen rechtsverantwortlich agieren und die Menschenrechte achten. Die USA haben als Vorbild hier eine besondere Verantwortung.

Nachdem bekannt wurde, dass zwei der sechs Benannten britische Häftlinge sind, gab es offizielle Proteste aus London. Wer protestiert für die mehreren hundert anderen Bürger, denen ihre Grundrechte seit Monaten verweigert werden?

Sumit Bhattacharyya ist USA-Experte bei der deutschen Sektion von Amnesty International.

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Stockholm verlangt Auslieferung

Schweden protestiert laut gegen Inhaftierung ohne Grundlage

Von Hannes Gamillscheg (Kopenhagen)


Ein Schwede und ein Däne sitzen in Guantanamo ein. Während Stockholm sich öffentlich mit Washington anlegt, setzt Kopenhagen auf stille Diplomatie.

Auch der jüngste Besuch der schwedischen Außenministerin Anna Lindh bei ihrem US-Kollegen Colin Powell brachte eine Lösung nicht näher: "Was den schwedischen Gefangenen in Guantanamo betrifft, habe ich leider nichts Positives zu berichten", sagte Lindh. Nach 555 Tagen sitzt der 23-jährige Mehdi Muhammed Ghezali weiterhin in seiner Zelle auf der kubanischen US-Basis, und das Auslieferungsbegehren, das Stockholm zu Jahresbeginn stellte, ist unbeantwortet.

Entweder solle man Ghezali den Prozess machen oder ihn freilassen, fordert Lindh. Engagierter als andere Regierungen setzt sich die schwedische für "ihren" Gefangenen ein. Auch die Bevölkerung macht Druck. Als der aus Algerien stammende Vater in einem den Guantánamo-Zellen nachgebauten Käfig für Ghezalis Freilassung protestierte, unterschrieben 12 000 Stockholmer seine Petition.

Für den Status des "feindlichen Kämpfers" habe Washington "keine haltbare völkerrechtliche Grundlage geliefert", rügt Carl-Henrik Ehrencrona, oberster Jurist im Stockholmer Außenministerium. Entweder müsse Ghezali als Kriegsgefangener behandelt werden. Dann habe man ihn freizulassen, sobald der Krieg beendet sei. Oder er werde als Zivilist strafverfolgt, dann aber mit allen Rechten. Eine Auskunft über Ghezalis weiteres Schicksal hat Lindh bisher nicht erhalten.

"Mit ihren lauten Protesten haben die Schweden auch nicht mehr erreicht als wir", verteidigte sich der dänische Außenminister Per Stig Möller, als ihm die Opposition vorwarf, den dänischen Guantánamo-Gefangenen im Stich zu lassen. Doch auch die "stille Diplomatie", die die Dänen bevorzugen, führte nicht zum Erfolg. Selbst Dänemarks Teilnahme am Irak-Krieg brachte keine Pluspunkte.

US-Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld versicherte dem Premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Washington zwar, sich um das Schicksal des Dänen zu kümmern. Doch seither sind drei Monate vergangen. Eine Antwort über den von Zeitungen als Slimane Abderahmane identifizierten Sohn einer Dänin und eines Algeriers steht aus. Möller scheint das nicht anzufechten. "Er ist Kriegsgefangener, und wir haben auch schon 30-jährige Kriege erlebt", sagte der Konservative, ehe er seine Bemerkung als unpassend und den Fakten widersprechend - die Guantánamo-Häftlinge sind nach US-Definition keine Kriegsgefangenen - zurückziehen musste.

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Elf Pakistaner durften in die Heimat

Behörden verhören die Ex-Häftlinge nach der Rückkehr

Von Peter Isenegger (Neu-Delhi)


Die US-Behörden haben am Donnerstagabend elf pakistanische Guantánamo-Gefangene in ihre Heimat zurückgeschafft. Insgesamt waren nach dem Zusammenbruch des Taliban-Regimes in Afghanistan 54 Pakistaner auf den US-Stützpunkt in Kuba gebracht worden. Ihnen wurde vorgeworfen, enge Beziehungen zur Taliban-Führung oder zu Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda unterhalten zu haben. Vier Pakistaner waren von den USA bereits früher in ihre Heimat abgeschoben worden.

Im vergangenen Sommer hatte die pakistanische Regierung ein Expertenteam nach Guantánamo geschickt, das die Identität der pakistanischen Gefangenen prüfen und sie über ihre Verbindungen zu Al Qaeda befragen sollte. Das Team kam mit der Überzeugung zurück, die Häftlinge gehörten nicht Al Qaeda an und würden widerrechtlich in Guantánamo festgehalten.

"Wir tun alles, um die pakistanischen Gefangenen aus Guantanamo in ihre Heimat zurückzubringen", meinte damals ein pakistanischer Spitzen-Diplomat. Für Azeem Khan, der in einem kleinen Ort im pakistanisch-afghanischen Grenzgebiet lebt, war dieses "alles" noch lange nicht genug. Die pakistanischen Behörden hätten es nicht einmal für nötig befunden, Kontakt mit den Angehörigen der Guantánamo-Gefangenen aufzunehmen und sie über den Stand der Dinge zu informieren, beschwerte er sich im Frühjahr.

Azeems 28-jähriger Sohn Essa hatte sich während seines Medizinstudiums in Peschawar in eine Afghanin verliebt und zog nach der Heirat mit ihr nach Afghanistan. Dort wurde er im Spätherbst 2001 von Angehörigen der Nordallianz - unter dem Verdacht, für Pakistan spioniert zu haben - verhaftet und an die Amerikaner übergeben. Vom Schicksal seines Sohnes erfuhr Azeem erst Monate später, als ihm das Rote Kreuz die ersten Briefe des Guantánamo-Häftlings aushändigte. Seine Familie schwört, dass Essa unschuldig sei.

Ob sich Essa Khan unter den Freigelassenen befindet, ist noch unklar: Die Identität der zurückgeschafften Pakistaner wurde von den Behörden nicht bekannt gegeben. Die Gefangenen wurden von einem pakistanischen Luftstützpunkt an einen unbekannten Ort verbracht, wo sie von Behördenvertretern verhört würden, wie es im Innenministerium hieß.

Mohammed Sanghir, ein früher freigelassener Guantánamo-Insasse, will die US-Regierung auf neun Millionen Euro Schmerzensgeld und Schadenersatz verklagen. Zwar hätten ihm am Ende seiner zehnmonatigen Haft die Amerikaner gesagt, dass er unschuldig sei. Aber mit keinem Wort hätten sie sich entschuldigt.

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GIPFELTREFFEN
Tony Blair erreicht Zusagen für Häftlinge

Von Reinhart Häcker (London)


Der britische Premierminister Tony Blair ist am Donnerstag vor den beiden Häusern des amerikanischen US-Kongresses mit Beifallsstürmen empfangen worden, die seine kühnsten Träume übertroffen haben mögen. Und bei seinem anschließenden Gespräch mit US-Präsident George W. Bush erreichte er dann ein unverhofftes Zugeständnis.

Die USA sagten nach britischen Regierungsangaben vom Freitag zu, zwei wegen Terrorverdachts im umstrittenen US-Stützpunkt Guantanamo Bay gefangen gehaltene Briten nicht vor ein Militärgericht stellen. Der britische Generalstaatsanwalt Lord Goldsmith werde mit den amerikanischen Behörden über das weitere Schicksal des 23 Jahre alten Feroz Abbasi und des 35-jährigen Moazzam Begg verhandeln, hieß es weiter. Die beiden gehören zu sechs mutmaßlichen Mitgliedern des Terrornetzes Al Qaeda, die noch in diesem Herbst vor US-Militärgerichte gestellt werden sollten. Dabei hätte ihnen auch die Todesstrafe gedroht.

Unter den wirklich schwer zu lösenden weltpolitischen Probemen zwischen der alleine übrig gebliebenen Weltmacht und ihrem treuesten Verbündeten in Europa schien bei oberflächlicher Sicht die Internierung von insgesamt neun Terror-Verdächtigen aus Afghanistan mit britischen Pässen und die bevorstehende Eröffnung von Militärgerichtsverfahren gegen zwei von ihnen noch am leichtesten beizulegen zu sein. Doch gegenüber "Verbrechern" hatte der amerikanische Präsident noch nie nachgegeben. Erst nach ausführlichen Gesprächen beim abendlichen Dinner ließen sich die Amerikaner zu einer "gemeinsamen Erklärung" über die beiden Angeklagten erweichen.

Was Bushs Zugeständnis für die Inhaftierten bedeutet, wird frühestens in der nächsten Woche klar. Dann nehmen die britischen Juristen Rücksprache mit amerikanischen Offiziellen.

Die Sache ist so schwierig, weil sich das amerikanische Rechtsverständnis - zumindest unter Bushs erzkonservativen Repubikanern - und das britische fundamental unterscheiden. Die bevorstehenden Verfahren gegen die ersten Angeklagten laufen vor Militärgerichten. Da am Ende die in Großbritannien abgeschaffte Todesstrafe droht, scheinen die Angeklagten mit "freiwilligen" Schuldbekenntnissen noch die besten Überlebenschancen zu haben: Dann stehen ihnen "nur" langjährige Haftstrafen, aber keine Hinrichtung bevor.

Aus alldem erklärt sich, dass die britische Öffentlichkeit die Vorgänge in Guantánamo Bay weit wichtiger nimmt, als das in den USA der Fall ist. Begg, ein moslemischer Prediger, wurde angeblich aus Pakistan nach Afghanistan "entführt", und der Student Abbasi soll gleichfalls keine Verbindungen zu Gewalttätern haben. Wie sie in die Mühle von Guantánamo gerieten, gilt als unklar.

Der scheinbar einfachste Weg, die beiden an die Justiz der britischen Mit-Sieger zu überweisen, schien bisher versperrt: Die Amerikaner verlangten verbindliche Erklärungen über hohe Strafen, die stolzen Krongerichte sehen sich dazu aber natürlich nicht in der Lage.

[Joerver]

The vendetta`s victim
Crisis for the Blair government

Michael White, Richard Norton-Taylor, Steven Morris and Matt Wells
Saturday July 19, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair`s government was last night shaken to its foundations by the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, the backroom Whitehall scientist caught in the lethal crossfire over weapons of mass destruction between Downing Street and the BBC.

Though No 10 moved quickly to concede a judicial inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, into the official handling of Dr Kelly during the last week of his life, the latest tragedy arising from the Iraq war looked set to cast an ever-longer shadow over Mr Blair`s already troubled second administration.

The prime minister`s Boeing 777 was high over the Pacific en route to Tokyo from his triumphant address to a joint session of Congress in Washington when news emerged at breakfast time of Dr Kelly`s disappearance from his Oxfordshire home. The timing evoked Greek tragedy: triumph followed by disaster.

Within hours a body, still officially unidentified, was found shortly before Mr Blair`s flight landed in the Japanese capital on what was meant to be routine trade and political business.

Alastair Campbell, the No 10 communications director, who is the main target of opposition and media attacks, had earlier flown home from the US and was busy last night organising the government`s defence.

Mr Campbell has no intention of resigning over the tragedy. And some senior and well-informed backbench MPs believe that the report of the intelligence and security committee (ISC), expected in September around the same time as Lord Hutton`s narrower investigation is published, will exonerate him from the BBC-promulgated charge of "sexing up" the key Iraq intelligence dossier.

Far from home, on the kind of week-long foreign trip which many voters mistrust, Mr Blair was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, his "history will forgive us" claim for the invasion of Iraq instantly overshadowed by the body discovered on Harrowdown Hill, near Abingdon.

The muted reaction to the tragedy of politicians on all sides is unlikely to last and there was immediate criticism of the way No 10 and the Ministry of Defence had, in the view of some MPs, allowed Dr Kelly to become the "fall guy" in the affair.

A Labour MP, Donald Anderson, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee (FAC), was also forced to defend his panel`s conduct, despite concluding that Dr Kelly was "most unlikely" to be the BBC`s mole and complaining in writing to Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the contract scientist had been "poorly treated by the government" since voluntarily admitting an "unauthorised" media contact.

The FAC interrogated the soft-spoken Dr Kelly on Tuesday, six days after he was outed as Whitehall`s most likely source for the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. It was a rough session. Next day he endured a gentler grilling by the more senior intelligence and security committee of MPs and peers, who extracted "nothing new" from him.

Amid genuine distress expressed by Mr Blair and echoed by Iain Duncan Smith and Charles Kennedy, some MPs backed complaints that Dr Kelly was unfairly roughed up - a complaint Gilligan also made on his own behalf after a second FAC grilling on Thursday.

The FAC has already reported, though it has belatedly concluded Mr Gilligan is an "unsatisfactory witness". The reporter is unlikely to face ISC interrogation, though the committee will see transcripts of his and Dr Kelly`s private testimony. So will Lord Hutton if he so wishes.

A key question facing the judicial inquiry is the pressure put on Dr Kelly by the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, in the attempt to flush out the BBC`s source. Mr Hoon is potentially as much in the frame as Mr Campbell. He and his senior officials will be crucial witnesses at the inquiry.

Crucial to the inquiry will be the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly`s admission to senior MoD officials that he might have been a source for Gilligan`s claim that No 10 had inserted, against intelligence advice, the claim that Iraq could ready its banned weapons in 45 minutes.

The MoD says Dr Kelly volunteered that he had met Gilligan after reading the reporter`s evidence to the FAC, as he later told MPs himself. Five days later, the MoD issued a carefully worded statement, agreed with Dr Kelly but drafted in a way that made it relatively easy for him to be identified.

Mr Hoon, like Mr Campbell, was convinced Dr Kelly was the BBC`s source and relentlessly pursued the corporation in an effort to expose him. The corporation defied calls to confirm or deny that claim, insisting on protecting its source.

Both sides dug in, leaving Dr Kelly in no-man`s-land. No 10 is adamant that it played no part in the process, but confirms he was warned that his agreed anonymity might not last. He was even offered secure accommodation and faced no disciplinary action other than a mild reprimand, officials said last night.

Dr Kelly left home, a three-storey 18th-century farmhouse in the south Oxfordshire village of Southmoor, at around 3pm on Thursday. When he failed to return after a few hours, friends and neighbours began to hunt for him. They called the police at 11.45pm. The force helicopter was scrambled and sniffer dogs were brought in. By morning more than 70 officers were involved and a body was found at about 9.30am in a wood on Harrowdown Hill, about two miles from Dr Kelly`s home.

Though the body will not be formally identified until today, police are certain it is that of Dr Kelly. Clothes on the body matched those the scientist had been wearing.

The manner of his death remained unknown last night but it is understood investigators quickly ruled out natural causes.

Suggestions that Dr Kelly, a father of three daughters, suffered shotgun injuries or that a rope was found at the scene were discounted by police sources. No suicide note has been found at the scene or at Dr Kelly`s home.

Police sources said the family did not report the disappearance more quickly because they were so sure that, despite the pressure he was under, he would not be driven to take his own life.

However, when Dr Kelly`s wife, Janice, spoke to a close friend of her husband`s, the television journalist and author Tom Mangold, before the body was found she conceded that her husband had been furious at how he had been treated over the last two weeks. Mangold said: "She said he was very stressed and unhappy about what had happened. This was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in."

She told Mangold her husband had felt physically sick after he left the foreign affairs committee.

The BBC was reeling from the news, appearing unsure how to react. It put out a short statement, which said: "We are shocked and saddened to hear what has happened and we extend our deepest sympathies to Dr Kelly`s family and friends."


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Ich kann und will nicht alle Artikel nicht alle Artikel über den Tod von Dr.Kelly einstellen. Hier noch einmal der Link zum Guardian, für alle, die mehr lesen wollen.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/0,12123,736008,00.html

Moral blackmail will not do
Failure to find WMD damages Blair - and the doctrine of pre-emption

Malcolm Rifkind
Saturday July 19, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair would have us believe that the furore over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been manufactured by some improbable alliance of a machiavellian BBC, Labour malcontents and Tory opportunists. If only it were true it would give a whole new meaning to the third way. The truth is, however, both more sobering and more disturbing. It goes to the very heart of whether we really have a healthy parliamentary democracy and proper accountable government in Britain today.

A decision to go to war is the most serious and most difficult decision any prime minister will ever take. When that war is to be with a country that has not attacked you, we are in new territory for a modern British government. When it is, furthermore, a war waged without the express approval of the UN and with the nation and parliament deeply divided, the reasons and the justification have to be clear, demonstrable and consistent.

The prime minister, in his address to Congress, declared that history would forgive him and President Bush, even if WMD were never found in Iraq, because of the undoubted bestiality of Saddam Hussein and his regime. We are challenged to admit that without the war Saddam would still be in power, able to terrorise both his own people and his neighbours.

This attempt at moral blackmail will not do. The issue is not whether the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. Of course it is. It would also be a better place without Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro and a host of other tyrants and despots, but there is no intention of the British government to support wars in order to get rid of them.

Nor did Tony Blair call for an invasion of Iraq during the first five years of his prime ministership, when Saddam was as evil as he was last year. During that period the prime minister supported the strict enforcement of sanctions and the no-fly zone that had been the policy of the Clinton administration in Washington and the Major government in London.

What changed was George Bush`s arrival in the White House and 9/11. Thereafter Blair recognised that in order to retain the confidence of the new president, and to ensure British influence in Washington, he would have to support regime change in Iraq and the new doctrine of pre-emptive wars. He knew that geopolitical arguments would be unlikely to convince the Labour party or the British public of the need for war.

But he also, rather shrewdly, concluded that a combination of an imminent threat of WMD in the hands of Saddam Hussein combined with a reminder of the human rights abuses of his regime would have the best prospect of swinging recalcitrant MPs and the British public behind him.

This led directly to dodgy dossiers, weapons that could be launched in 45 minutes and an unhealthy reliance on raw intelligence reports. I don`t doubt that Blair was sincere in his protestations. Disraeli`s remark about Gladstone is very apposite: "He could convince most people of most things and himself of almost anything." I was one of those who, with deep reservations, concluded that if there was reliable evidence available to the British government and if they and the US were determined to go to war they should have our support, and the quicker it was over the better.

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the failure to find WMD and the resultant deep belief that parliament and the public were misled on the supreme issue of peace and war.

It has deeply damaged the trust the prime minister previously enjoyed. This has been made worse by his refusal to admit that, however unwittingly, he might have misled the nation. Even Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have accepted that they might have got it wrong and that the threat from WMD might have, in fact, been no worse than it had been for years. But Blair has spent weeks refusing to acknowledge this. The only implicit admission of failure is the new claim that evidence of "programmes" for WMD rather than the weapons themselves, will, undoubtedly, be found. Not a shred of evidence to support this is forthcoming.

For Blair the omens are serious. Normally, when a prime minister is under pressure he can fall back on the support of the grassroots of his own party. In Blair`s case it is the grassroots of Labour that loathe him most. Come back Ramsay MacDonald. All is forgiven.

Nor can the prime minister claim that in seeking to remain close to the US he was following the precedent of all his predecessors since Churchill. Of course, it is sensible for Britain to continue as America`s closest ally, but this has not stopped previous prime ministers - Labour and Tory - from distancing themselves from Washington when circumstances so justified.

Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam. Margaret Thatcher did not allow her warm relationship with Ronald Reagan to prevent her bitter criticism of the US, both over the invasion of Grenada and over the American attempt to impose sanctions on European countries trading with the Soviet Union over gas pipelines in the 1980s. I was sent by Thatcher to Washington to try and sort out the latter problem. I reached a compromise with the US deputy secretary of state, Kenneth Dam. The only thing we couldn`t agree was whether the compromise should be known as the Rifkind/Dam or the Dam/Rifkind agreement. The Americans preferred the latter.

The failure to find WMD is also crucial to the credibility of the new US doctrine of pre-emption. There is nothing illogical, unethical or undesirable in hitting an enemy first whom you know is planning to hit you. That is no more than a form of self-defence. But that must be subject to two major considerations. First, it cannot be a right for the US alone. If it is valid it must be available to any member of the UN in comparable circumstances. That alone would make the world a very dangerous place.

Second, pre-emptive war could only be justified if, either before or after you launch it, you are able to produce credible evidence of the intention of the other state to attack you. In the case of Iraq there has been no evidence of an intention by Saddam to attack the US. The failure to find WMD suggests that nor was there any intention to launch an early attack against any of his neighbours.

That does not mean that Saddam Hussein was not a dangerous and unpredictable menace. It does mean that, in the absence of significant international support, the Americans and the British were unwise to launch an invasion of a sovereign state. It would be ironic and rather sad if the US Congress came to that conclusion before the British prime minister. It would not be surprising.

· Sir Malcolm Rifkind was defence secretary from 1992-95 and foreign secretary from 1995-97.

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Blair hätte mal besser den aufrechten Gang geübt, anstelle seiner Pudelhaltung.

Bush aids Blair by halting trial of Britons in Guantanamo Bay
Nicholas Watt in Tokyo
Saturday July 19, 2003
The Guardian

Legal proceedings against the two Britons facing a military trial in Guantanamo Bay were suspended last night to allow talks between British and US legal officials.

In a minor concession to Tony Blair, who is facing a growing row at home on the issue, George Bush personally authorised the temporary halt to proceedings. His move paved the way for Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, to fly to Washington next week for talks with US officials.

Downing Street refused to comment on the likely out come. But officials are hoping that the Americans will observe what the prime minister has called "proper canons of law".

Mr Bush, who has branded the two Britons "bad men", agreed to the concession over dinner with Mr Blair in the White House on Thursday.

The prime minister`s official spokesman, speaking at the end of Mr Blair`s overnight flight to Tokyo, said: "Legal proceedings against individuals have been suspended pending discussions next week between high-level legal teams in the United States.

The UK side will be led by the attorney general." He added that proceedings against nine Britons at Guantanamo Bay would be suspended. "The president listened to the concerns raised by the prime minister."

The concession will ease the pressure on Mr Blair, who is facing a cross-party campaign on behalf of Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, who are facing secret military trials which could lead to the death penalty. The other Britons being held at Guantanamo Bay are not facing the immediate prospect of a trial.

While Downing Street welcomed the move, it is unlikely to ease the pressure on the families of the men, who still fear the worst. It is understood that of the three options open to US officials they are likely to agree to only the mildest of concessions. The options are:

· Repatriating the two men to face trial in Britain. This is seen as highly unlikely because Britons can only be tried at home for a handful of offences committed abroad, which do not apply here; · Sending the two men for an open trial on the US mainland in the same way as the Taliban supporter John Walker Lindh, who escaped Guantanamo Bay because he comes from California; · Agreeing to open up the legal proceedings against the two Britons in Guantanamo Bay, making it easier for them to appoint defence lawyers and lifting the threat of the death penalty.

Although Washington is only likely to offer mild concessions, Downing Street is privately pleased because Mr Bush`s decision shows Mr Blair is able to wield influence in the White House.

Labour critics of the war against Iraq regard the fate of the two Britons as a touchstone issue which will show whether the prime minister is a poodle of Mr Bush or an ally who can persuade the president to change his mind.

As the two leaders prepared to go into dinner at the White House on Thursday night, Mr Blair`s case was not helped when Mr Bush condemned Mr Begg and Mr Abbasi.

Standing next to the prime minister in the White House, the president said: "These were illegal combatants. They were picked out off the battlefield, aliens aiding and abetting the Taliban."

More than 200 MPs from across the Commons have signed a motion condemning the treatment of the two men, who have been held incommunicado for 18 months. If they plead not guilty, they could risk the death penalty for alleged terrorist offences.

Under the current rules of the tribunal the US defence department would control the judge and the prosecution. The men would technically be entitled to appoint their defence lawyers, but these would have to undergo a Pentagon vetting procedure.

Since Camp Delta opened there have been 28 reported suicide attempts.


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Kelly didn`t stand a chance against the frenzy of No 10
Blair has decided his own reputation must be defended, whatever the cost

Hugo Young
Saturday July 19, 2003
The Guardian

We have to remember that this tragedy began with something utterly unworthy of such an outcome. It was an extremely trivial point. It wasn`t about life and death in war. It didn`t deal in official secrets. It wasn`t a case of espionage, betraying the security of the country. The point at issue was a story quite marginal to these things that might have mattered. It was: could Saddam Hussein have launched weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes? The point that was stirred into turmoil, and then driven towards tragedy, was even narrower: whether Saddam could do this or not, who was the source of a BBC story saying some knowledgeable insiders did not believe it?

This is trifling stuff. In a normal political world, where top people had not taken leave of their senses, it would not produce a crisis. It certainly would not push anyone over the brink to suicide, if that`s what happened to David Kelly. So you have to look further and see what made a triviality achieve all that.

The answer is regrettably simple. The 45-minute detail was hyped by Tony Blair into the essence of the foulest charge against his sainted integrity, and therefore had to be squashed by every means. The smell that`s left behind is even more odious: that of a state - executive and parliament combined - willing to abandon all sense of proportion to score political points against its critics.

How a small detail, a sideshow, billowed into suicidal crisis is the government`s work from start to finish. It alone put 45 minutes into the public realm, last September. Blair projected it further, in his introduction to the dossier. This was meant to shock, and it did so. Some of us thought and wrote that it sounded incredible. But there it was, doing the work it was designed to do: scare part of the country into supporting a future assault on Saddam Hussein.

Stage two of this infamous and potent - if virtual - 45 minutes came later. As war got closer and another dossier appeared, rumblings emerged from the intelligence world. There were reports, not least in the Guardian, indicating dissatisfaction among the friends at Vauxhall Cross, where MI6 is located. They didn`t like the way politicians were turning the sceptical speculations of intelligence into firm public assertions, designed to play the same role as the 45 minutes: scare us witless into war.

But only when the main war was over did the notorious 45 explode to the top of the agenda. Again this was the government`s doing. Andrew Gilligan, on the Today programme, reported, as an item of anxiety in the intelligence world, that one knowledgeable insider thought the September dossier had overhyped the 45. Because the 45 had been so graphic - the crown jewel in the glittering propaganda for war - maybe its tarnishing caused special pain.

Whatever, this was the moment at which Blair and Alastair Campbell decided to begin an exercise in hyperbole that soon swept every available particle of state power into the defence of their integrity. This involved them in several degradations. Here are some.

One, refuting charges that were never made: viz that Campbell inserted the 45 into the dossier knowing it to be false, whereas the real issue was one of presentational nuance, not overt falsity.

Two, using this minor issue to blur the far greater question overhanging the government at the very time the Gilligan story came out: viz did Blair tell the truth about why we went to war, and would WMD ever be found?

Three, insisting that the source of the story was what mattered, and squeezing every air pipe to try and get the BBC to disclose it - as if this mattered more than the manifest postwar fact that the 45 was always a myth, and the WMD probably no longer exist, for all of which, the prime minister now tells a confessional Congress, "history will forgive us".

A source, a source, my kingdom for a source, said Blair and his people. Once the source appeared, and as long as he was sufficiently unimportant, the credence of the critics of 45 would be destroyed. Enter David Kelly, an obscure though not unimportant consultant to both the Foreign Office and the MoD, who volunteered to his bosses that he had talked to Gilligan and maybe helped him on the story, without being his prime source. The honourable act of a man who had no idea he would shortly be thrust into the maelstrom that uniquely surrounds a prime minister who has decided that his integrity, if not his political life, is under threat.

There are secondary players in this sordid game. The BBC`s and Gilligan`s performance on the question of the source has been shifty. No doubt they had to be careful. Confidentiality is a sacred and essential rule. But when Kelly first appeared, they said the real source was in a different department, implying an intelligence official rather than a defence consultant.

Later they refused even to confirm or deny anything. This left the impression with some people that Kelly might indeed have been the source. Kelly himself, a man unaccustomed to the limelight, may have had the same sense that he was being fingered. If so, the BBC did its bit to add to the hideous pressure a delicate man was already feeling as the source Campbell/Blair needed and were imposing maximum pressure to unearth.

The recent behaviour of the foreign affairs committee of the Commons has been more ignominious. Its first report on the origins of the Iraq war was measured enough. It did not deliver all the exonerations for which Downing Street was looking. But then its chairman and Labour members seem to have got caught up in the frenzy of No 10, suddenly calling Gilligan for a second interrogation and coming out from behind closed doors to smear his reputation. Coupled with their gratuitous bullying of David Kelly to name himself as the culprit, these second-division politicians showed little respect for natural justice. Most of the Labour ones sounded like agents of No 10. They now seek a statutory ban on journalists having the nerve to conceal their sources from so august a body as a Commons select committee.

But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn`t take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

That`s how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man`s life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend.

· Supping with the Devils, a collection of Hugo Young`s writing, is published by Guardian books and is available at £14.99 from 0870 066 7850.

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The bitterest betrayal
Among the 680 men imprisoned at Camp Delta, Cuba, are nine Britons. The US says they are hardcore terrorists, and holds them without charge. But where is the evidence? And why is our government so silent on their plight? By Tania Branigan and Vikram Dodd

Saturday July 19, 2003
The Guardian

Nusaba Begg was barely a year old when the twin towers in New York were attacked on September 11 2001: a little girl from Birmingham on a big adventure in Afghanistan with her family. She is nearly three now and back home, but her father, Moazzam Begg, is in Camp Delta, held by the Americans as part of their war on terror. Eighteen months ago, Pakistani security forces seized the 35-year-old, bundling him into a car boot, and handed him over to US authorities. He was taken to an airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he was held for a year in a cell deprived of natural light. Now he is a prisoner of the US at Guantanamo Bay.

Nusaba cannot remember what her father looks like. "When she sees a man with a beard about the same age as her father, she points and says, `He`s my dad,` " says her grandfather, Azmat Begg. "When the man walks away, she gets sad."

The Beggs are one of 11 families up and down Britain who, for up to 18 months, have been waiting for any news of the men held as "unlawful enemy combatants" in the military camp at Guantanamo Bay. All the prisoners have been held without charge, trial or promise of eventual release; without access to lawyers; without contact with anyone but their guards, secret service interrogators and - occasionally - visiting British officials.

There are nine Britons and two British residents among the 680 detainees at Guantanamo: more than from any other western country. The youngest of the Britons are 20; the eldest 36. Two of the men, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, a 23-year-old former computer studies student from Croydon, are among the first six detainees selected to face trial before a military tribunal. In the system devised by the Americans, military officers are judge and jury, with defence counsel handpicked by Washington. Conversations between lawyer and client are monitored by the military. The accused could face the death penalty. The US says they are either terrorists or linked to terrorism, although it will not elaborate on its suspicions, let alone the charges. Critics argue that the courts are loaded to ensure convictions. In the unlikely event of acquittal, the prisoners could still be detained indefinitely.

The planned trials have provoked outrage around the world, not just from human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Fair Trials Abroad, but from usually steadfast supporters of America such as the former Tory ministers Douglas Hogg and Nicholas Soames. More than 200 MPs signed a Commons motion last week calling for the men to be given a fair trial. The mounting pressure has forced the government at least to be seen to be making serious efforts to have the Britons sent home to face any trial. This in turn has provoked scepticism, not least because of the unlikelihood of securing a conviction. The evidence the Americans have against Begg and Abbasi is probably too flimsy and circumstantial to satisfy a British criminal court, even if an appropriate charge could be decided upon.

Azmat Begg says that the best option would be for his son to face trial in Britain. "At least he will be relieved by seeing his wife and children, and he`ll get a fair trial." But relief is clouded by worry. "The uncertainty is causing more pain to the whole family. He`s been one and a half years in prison and he will say anything they want him to say."

Moazzam Begg - or detainee JJEEH#00558 to his captors - is described by his family as a deeply religious man and devoted father, though his sole contact with his children is now through letters he sends home via the Red Cross. In one, he urges them to work on their English spelling. In another, he asks his family to video his youngest child, born a few months after he was seized and whom he has never seen. Replying to a message from his nephews - who know only that he is "away" - he wrote gently, "I don`t know when I am coming home and am afraid `souvenirs` will be quite hard to bring back."

His family say that Moazzam used to run an Islamic book and video store in Birmingham. In the spring of 2001, he and his family left for Afghanistan, where Moazzam worked on a literacy project and another scheme to provide villages with a water supply. When, after the September 11 attacks, the US bombed Afghanistan in early October, Begg took his wife and three children to Islamabad in Pakistan for safety. It was there in February 2002 that he was picked up by Pakistani security forces. In the car driving him away, locked inside the boot, he was able to make a brief mobile phone call to his father telling him of his arrest.

Azmat Begg, a retired bank manager and member of the Liberal Democrats, does not recognise the US description of his son as a fundamentalist terrorist; he says Moazzam went to a Jewish school, and still has Jewish friends. Furthermore, it is unlikely that someone intending to be an al-Qaida operative would take a family of small children with him.

Guantanamo Bay, located on the south-eastern tip of Cuba, is reachable only by a US military flight: its remoteness adds to its security. With its white sand and turquoise sea, it would make an ideal holiday resort. Instead, it is home to the prison with the tightest security in the world. The 45-mile territory, held by the US under a lease signed in 1934 and still used as a naval base, is uniquely useful to Washington. The US courts have ruled that it is not American soil, which means that they have no jurisdiction over how the detainees are treated. But nor does Cuba. The prisoners here are in a legal black hole. The base`s motto, emblazoned on a sign at the airport, reads: "Honour Bound To Defend Freedom."

In the face of international criticism, the US now permits reporters a restricted visit to Camp Delta. Here, the officials talk carefully of "detainees"; never, ever, of "prisoners". In his office, General Geoffrey Miller, who heads the mission, brushes off questions about three-year-old Nusaba`s pain. Each of the 680 men held - the largest proportion of them Afghans and Pakistanis - is a dangerous terrorist, he says: "Everyone here, as they came in, was a great threat. We`ve gone through a very thorough screening process before any enemy combatants came to Guantanamo, [to ensure] that they both have intelligence value to help us win the global war on terrorism, and that they pose a threat to the US or our allies."

Other officials, however, have been less keen to support US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s initial boast that the prisoners were "very tough, hardcore, well-trained terrorists"; off the record, some have privately admitted that detainees included those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Among the 40 or so men so far released from the camp are several pensioners.

Although the Guardian tour was tightly managed, there were cracks in the image that the US has strived so hard to construct. Those in daily contact with the prisoners - their guards - contradict the official line; they do not talk of trapping dangerous terrorists, but primarily of holding people to pump them for intelligence. "These people may not be criminally orientated; they might be having information we might want to know," says Sergeant David Keefer. "I don`t view any one of them as terrorists - that`s not my job to decide - but neither am I a bleeding heart. I treat each one as a pertinent information giver. The mindset of dealing with a criminal is different from dealing with an Afghan farmer," he adds, ambiguously.

Officially, the US will give no information about the British detainees - whether they are being held together, or whether any of them are ill. However, Sgt Keefer did concede: "I`d say they fare better in this environment because the connection is easier for us with them [because of the shared language], and for us to facilitate their needs," adding that they are "helpful, if they are in a good mood", acting as unofficial interpreters; the guards speak no Arabic or Urdu and many inmates speak no English. "They want to talk about football, or soccer, they want to know the scores, what club is strong or about the cup."

Another guard, Private Jennifer Bartlett, says that the Britons are suffering. "Some get angry and do not want anything to do with anyone; some sit there and talk about their family, tell you about their kids - it helps them cope with it," she says. Their apparently endless detention depresses them, she admits. "It`s just the duration of the time they have spent here, not knowing what`s going to happen, when they are going home. They will sit and read a letter from their family, and they are frustrated, sometimes they get down. Sometimes they cry after reading their letters." When they receive them, that is.

Three of the Britons, who, to the bewilderment of their families, are believed to have become caught up in the war in Afghanistan, come from Tipton, a small town in the West Midlands. They played football together each week, and two of them - Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, both 20 - were classmates at Alexandra high school. They, and their team-mate, Shafiq Rasul, all flew to Pakistan, separately but within a week or so of each other - between the end of September 2001 and the start of thewar against the Taliban on October 7. A fourth man from Tipton, Munir Ali, who was in the year above Asif and Rhuhel at school, also flew to Pakistan in October, telling his family he was meeting mates for a holiday. He has not been seen or heard of since.

It was at his family`s suggestion that Asif Iqbal went to Pakistan, and his father, Mohammed, accompanied him; his parents believed it was time for him to get married and settle down. Asif met his prospective bride during his first week in Faisalabad, but told his father that he wanted some time to think. He would visit a friend in Karachi for a break and give his decision on his return. "I told him: careful," says Mohammed. "Karachi is a big city, a dangerous city. When he got there, he phoned and said, `Dad, I`m fine, don`t worry about me.` He said he would be back in two weeks` time. That was nearly two years ago."

Mohammed pulls on the first of a chain of Benson & Hedges. He has dark circles under his eyes and shuffles a little when he walks; the stress has exacerbated his heart condition. "I am 70. I wanted him to get married and be happy. I made a mistake and am sorry about that. Now my missus wakes up in the morning crying, `When is my Asif coming back? When will my Asif come back?`"

Asif Iqbal, whose school photographs show a slight boy with candid eyes and a shy but engaging smile, was devoted to his family, often returning from long factory night-shifts and beginning to cook and clean at once, so that his invalid mother could rest.

On October 4, shortly after Asif left, Rhuhel Ahmed announced to his family that he was flying to Pakistan to help with his friend`s wedding. On January 26 2002, they learned that he was being held at Guantanamo Bay. "He is a kid, straight out of school. How could he be a terrorist? Out of here, and then at end of one month he was stopped," says his father Riasoth, pondering Rhuhel`s journey to the prison camp.

Rhuhel was 19 when he left; a college student and keen kickboxer who had trained from the age of 14 and who rarely came home from a contest empty-handed. A handful of chrome trophies still line the walls of his parents` pebble-dashed terraced house on a shabby estate. "We go to bed every day and, passing his room, his bed seems very empty," says Riasoth as his wife Salaha Begum keens on the sofa. "My wife, sometimes she cries, sometimes she shouts. Last week she could not sleep. You sleep two minutes and wake for five hours. She is making herself ill. It`s very lonely. Of the six kids, he is the most friendly, the most active. He was full of life, joking and laughing. He talked too much. Trying to make you happy. Lovely."

But in the weeks before Rhuhel flew to Pakistan, he became depressed after discovering that problems with his eyesight appeared much more serious than he had initially suspected. "Everything in his life had been for boxing purposes. Then he said his eyes were wrong. The doctor said he couldn`t see from there to there," says Riasoth, gesturing across the room. "Rhuhel said, `If I don`t see anyone in front of me, how can I fight?`"

Shafiq Rasul, at 25, is older than the others. His older brother Habib admits that he was concerned when he saw Shafiq preparing for his departure to Pakistan in late September 2001. "He was wearing a [Ralph Lauren] Polo cap with the Stars and Stripes on and a Polo T-shirt, Armani jeans," says Habib, 30, a compact man with a Black Country twang and the intensity of an easy-going man stretched taut by circumstance. "War was coming in Afghanistan and I knew there were marches in Pakistan and I said, `I wouldn`t wear that there - any suggestion that you are British or American won`t go down well.`"

The trip had been Habib`s suggestion. A successful IT consultant, he had hoped to set up a business with Shafiq, who was at a loose end after finishing college. Habib knew that computer training in Lahore cost a tenth of its price in the UK and proposed that Shafiq should gain new skills while exploring his family`s roots; the younger man`s previous trips abroad had been to Benidorm and Tenerife on an 18-30 holiday.

Shafiq is 6ft 2in, but "baby-faced", says his brother, and cheeky; a passionate Liverpool fan who dreamed of fast cars. "A very young lad, in a world of his own - a kid, really," says Habib, who slips into the past tense unwittingly when speaking of his brother. "He was more westernised than anyone. Most of his friends were into clubbing and drinking; he`d go out all the time. Our first language is Punjabi, and he couldn`t even speak that, not very well. He was into designer clothes; he`d spend £280 on a pair of trousers. He didn`t lose his identity, but it was very rare to see him in the mosque."

Shafiq`s girlfriend, like most of his friends, was white; he insisted that he would make a love match. To the Rasuls, Shafiq`s detention is as baffling as it is disturbing. He took most of his designer wardrobe with him - hardly an indication that he planned to fight on the frontline - and they spoke to him shortly before he was apparently picked up by the Northern Alliance. "They are saying that he had gone to the border, learned to speak the language and how to fire a weapon in one week," says Habib. "The summer before this happened, we went camping together in Wales. About 2am, we heard rustling and he said, `I`m going to sleep in the car.` He was scared of a squirrel running around in the night and they think he was involved with the worst terrorists in the world?"

If it appears implausible that three young friends should all end up in the hands of US forces by chance, it seems still more unlikely that they could be described as hardened al-Qaida terrorists and Taliban fighters. It is impossible to tell whether they had a particular plan in mind when they left the UK, but it seems more probable that, if they did hatch a plan to fight for the Taliban, they did so impulsively, possibly following their arrival in Pakistan. And it seems equally likely that they did not go to fight at all - that at most they went in search of excitement, naive young men caught up in the moment, wondering what the war meant, how it would be, perhaps wanting simply to witness a world event.

Iqbal and Ahmed had convictions for violent disorder and actual bodily harm respectively, following what Midlands police describe as a minor gangfight a few years earlier. But despite extensive inquiries, there is no evidence that they had links to fundamentalist groups. Other young Asians in Tipton say that all three were friendly and good-humoured to newcomers, and "looked out" for younger, more vulnerable boys. All had reached potential turning points in their lives - but there was nothing to suggest that they were set on a path of extremism.

Plenty of people have speculated as to what happened in the very few weeks between the boys` arrival in Pakistan and their capture; but firm information is scarce. Unconfirmed reports have suggested that Rasul, Iqbal and Ahmed were detained in northern Afghanistan by Northern Alliance troops; a Red Cross worker told their local newspaper that he had seen them in Shibergan prison in December that year, observing that they did not seem to be "battle-hardened" and that they had told him they were not terrorists. Their families doubt whether they were ever in Afghanistan at all, and suggest they may have been picked up from the Pakistan side of the border by overzealous Alliance troops who may have hoped for rewards from the US authorities. Riasoth Ahmed, father of Rhuhel, expresses the bafflement of them all: "How he got there and why he went there, God knows. Honest to God, I do not know."

All that is known for certain is that, by the time they arrived in Cuba, Rasul was "very, very lucky to be alive", according to the Red Cross - his weight had plummeted from 12 and a half stone to seven stone.

Back home in Tipton, Nasreen Iqbal leafs through brief messages from her younger brother Asif. "We treasure them as if they were gold," she says. "They are the only form of reassurance we have. We sit here every morning, waiting for the postman, thinking, `Has it come today?` But it doesn`t, and we have been waiting since January."

What little does get through makes disturbing reading, as much for what it omits as for what it contains. Whole sections are blacked out - one postcard was censored so brutally that it now reads only: "Dear Pops how are you, I`m fine [censored] lots of luv, Asif." On another, a lengthy blacked-out section ends, "but other than that, everything is fine". At one point, Asif writes that he "may lose my mentality"; at another, "Have you ever eaten [censored] or sometimes [censored]? Ha ha. People have started killing mice for entertainment." Nasreen shakes her head. "There`s obviously something not right with him psychologically." Like other relatives, she fears that her brother will return a broken, even unrecognisable, man.

There have been at least 28 suicide attempts at Camp X-Ray - the original Guantanamo prison camp, now abandoned - and its replacement, Camp Delta. Some prisoners have found enough material in their sparse cells to fashion ligatures with which to hang themselves; others have tried to dash their heads against hard surfaces. Azmat Begg has begun to fear, from some of his son Moazzam`s letters, that he may be contemplating suicide.

A specialist mental-health unit, Delta block, opened in March this year - eight months after the first suicide attempt. Captain Al Shimkus, who runs the prison hospital, says that the detainees have the same quality of care as the soldiers. However, unlike their guards, the prisoners are strapped to their hospital beds.

General Miller blames the suicide attempts on factors such as pre-existing mental illness, rather than the stress of incarceration. But the Red Cross, which is allowed access to inmates, is uncharacteristically forthright about the regime`s effects: "The uncertainty these internees face as regards their legal status and their future does have a very adverse impact on their physical and mental wellbeing," says spokeswoman Antonella Notari. "A lot of them are pushed to despair. It is a clear indication that these people are under extreme stress and anxiety."

Their diet hasn`t helped, either. James Kluck, the man in charge of catering, says that from this month detainees will get three hot meals a day. Until now, their lunch had been a special military meal, called a "meal ready to eat", or MRE, which has "impacted on their health", says Kluck. "It`s a polite way of saying it makes some of them ill." The MRE is designed for troops in the field, providing enough calories and nutrients for a strenuous day with heavy equipment. Camp Delta`s prisoners are locked up for a minimum 23-and-a-half hours a day, and the lack of fibre and excess calories caused by prison meals has played havoc with their systems, causing some to develop high blood pressure. "With hindsight, it could have been thought about earlier," admits Kluck.

Reel after reel of concertinaed razor wire surrounds Camp Delta. Countless soldiers patrol the boundary and the many gates; floodlights around the camp are kept on all night. Our guide, Captain Adolph McQueen, the camp commandant, tells us that the row of portable cabins just inside the entrance are for "admin". In fact, they are where the interrogations take place. Both Begg and Abbasi have been questioned here, by the British secret service as well as by US agents.

Further inside the compound is a series of huts, each with 48 cells, where a network of blowers battles to cool the merciless heat, 110F today. Each small cell is surrounded by solid green mesh, to ensure that inmates can be seen at all times; lights burn into them all through the night. One of the bright orange jumpsuits worn by inmates - polyester mix, despite the crushing heat - is lain out for media inspection. On the floor, a painted white arrow points to Mecca, 12,793km away.

A 25ft by 35ft exercise area, also enmeshed, is draped with a net for shade. The prisoners can exercise two at a time, for half an hour, between three and seven times a week - depending on how well they comply with orders. Some, however, prefer the small acts of rebellion available to them; one in 10 inmates is deemed "non-compliant". The most serious offence was throwing water on the guards; others have stuffed the wrappers from their cereal bars down the toilets, to block them.

Those who show "positive behaviour", says Capt McQueen, move to the "medium-security" fourth camp, where 125 white-clad inmates are allowed to lunch outside, behind high wire fences, and associate with each other. The other three interconnected camps are all high security.

Guantanamo`s newest and most notorious addition is Camp Iguana, which holds children whom the US regards as enemy combatants. It is less formidable than the adult version: the wire fence is just 12ft high and the all-night floodlights are softer. A 20ft long rectangle has been cut from the green canvas surrounding the camp, so that the children can see the Caribbean sea. "It adds a certain tranquillity to the environment," says Dave Wodushek, who runs Camp Iguana. He is saddened that people so young are held here: the four children, believed to be Afghans, are as young as 13. He blames those countries which use children as soldiers.

The boys incarcerated here live two to a flat, where they spend at least 21 hours a day. With permission from their guards, they can cross the black tape line in front of the fridge - inside are pretzels, peanut butter, fruit, and a packet of beef jerky that is probably not halal. In the freezer lies a half-eaten Hershey chocolate bar. The regime is strict, and formal education lasts two hours a day, with group therapy sessions provided once a week. Board games and half-completed jigsaws lie on a table in the living area. At other times, intelligence agents come to their flats to interrogate them. Wodushek says that the children are respectful and compliant, but sometimes cry: "They ask when they are going home," he says.

The stridency of US foreign policy unleashed by September 11 is evident all around the base. In the base shop, a T-shirt sports a rat in Afghan clothing, with the slogan "Taliban bowl" and below it "JTF [Joint Task Force] Guantanamo Bay". Another has a cartoon of Saddam Hussein fleeing Baghdad - for France. Elsewhere on the base, a poster warning soldiers not to send sensitive information in emails has a picture of the fireball bursting from one of the twin towers. In New York and Washington, there are, as yet, no official monuments to those who died that day. Instead, Camp Delta serves as a memorial, not to America`s sorrow, but to its anger.

"Americans cry about freedom of speech, democracy and liberty, but what are they doing themselves?" asks Habib Rasul, whose 25-year-old brother Shafiq was one of the first Britons taken to Guantanamo Bay.

For Maxine Fiddler, older sister of Jamal Udeen, another of the Britons held in Cuba, there is a double sense of injustice - she had initially heard from the authorities that her brother was safe and in good hands, only to have hope dashed. And now she has learned from the Red Cross that none of the scores of letters sent to him at Camp Delta in more than a year has reached him. Udeen, who is 36, left for Pakistan around the same time as the men from Tipton. He had been away from home for only three weeks when the Americans stumbled across him in a prison in Kandahar. He told them he had paid a lorry driver to take him from northern Pakistan to Iran as part of a backpacking trip, but was stopped near the Afghan border by Taliban soldiers who saw his British passport and jailed him, fearing he was a spy.

Maxine says that at that time he described the Americans as "his saviours". The British Foreign Office told her that he would be back home as soon as they had got him a passport. Weeks later, the family discovered from the media that he had been taken to Guantanamo Bay. The US appeared to believe that he had joined the Taliban only for them to turn on him, perhaps fearing he was a spy; one Foreign Office source described his travel itinerary as "weird". But his family say he was retracing a journey he had made a decade earlier, following the Footsteps To Pakistan guidebook.

Born Ronald Fiddler to devout church-going Jamaican parents, Jamal converted to Islam in his 20s. His sister believes he found peace there after years of emotional trauma; their mother left the family home when he was just two. Maxine describes her "baby brother" as a gentle, quiet man with a dry and occasionally silly sense of humour: "a very smart, a very serious person".

He rarely spoke of his faith unless asked, and after four years learning Arabic and teaching English at Khartoum University in Sudan, seemed happy enough to return home, marrying and setting up a computer business with his wife. He was a devoted father to their three children and was devastated when the marriage broke down, moving back to Manchester, where he worked as an administrator in a Muslim school. His trip was supposed to be part of that fresh start.

Two of the other British detainees flew out to Pakistan at some point in summer 2001, telling their families they wanted to study Arabic. Tarek Dergoul, 25, is of Moroccan origin and a lifelong Muslim; he grew up in Bethnal Green, London, and was a care worker for the elderly. His whereabouts were a mystery for many months, until, in May 2002, his family learned that he was held in Cuba. He had allegedly been captured in the Tora Bora mountain complex, where retreating al-Qaida forces fled, and had apparently had an arm amputated.

Richard Belmar, 24, was raised as a Catholic by his devout parents, but went off the rails a little in his adolescence and was expelled from his secondary school. His conversion to Islam in his late teens, following in the path of his elder brother Andrew, appeared to steady him and he grew into a polite, respectful man. He worshipped at Regent`s Park Mosque, a mainstream mosque with no history of radicalism, close to his home in Maida Vale, London.

The ninth Briton, Martin Mubanga, was raised as a Catholic on a council estate in London, and turned to Islam later in life. The 29-year-old motorcycle courier was of dual nationality, the son of a Zambian government official who moved to Wembley in the 1970s. His brother and sisters still live in the area, but refuse to discuss his case. Neighbours said he moved out of his last flat, on a new-build estate in Neasden, at least two years ago, and there are rumours, unsubstantiated, that he had attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. All that is known is that he appears to have fled the war zone for Zambia, only to be picked up by the authorities and returned to the Americans in spring 2002.

For 18 months, there has been very little public outcry about the Britons held in Cuba. Only now, when the military tribunals have been mooted, have a substantial body of politicians found their voice and begun lobbying for a fair trial. If America`s treatment of its prisoners angers their families, the British government`s failure to press the case of its citizens is the bitterest betrayal. "The Foreign Office are basically a bunch of jokers," says Habib. "Talk to them? I may as well go in a corner and talk to the wall." The families` only real support has come from campaigning lawyers such as the solicitor Louise Christian, who is acting for several of the families, and a handful of sympathetic MPs.

The problems may have been exacerbated by the families` inability to act en masse. Although several are in touch with each other, there is no single campaign for the rights of those imprisoned in Cuba. Some families have simply kept their heads down, fearing that anything they say could be distorted and used against their loved ones. But there is also the problem that many of the accusations made about the detainees rest on little more than guilt by association. Despite thorough investigations by police and secret services, there is no evidence that the Tipton men, for example, associated with fundamentalist groups - merely a rash of unsubstantiated and often contradictory claims. Unsurprisingly, this has left the families reluctant to associate their men with others who they fear might have more substantive links to extremists.

Until the announcement of the military tribunals, ministers had refused even to meet relatives of the detainees. The news brought the government`s most outspoken comments yet - Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin told the Commons that it had "strong reservations" about them - but Tony Blair initially promised only to make "active representations" to the US to ensure a fair trial. Not enough, say the families, who have lost faith in the government that is supposed to represent them. They are convinced that the detainees` religion and race - all are black or Asian - are to blame. It is as if the men are "not really" British because they are Muslim, and because they are not white.

"We can shout and scream as much as we like - they aren`t going to listen to us," says Habib. "Being British doesn`t mean anything now. I always thought being British was something to be proud of. I`ve been all over the world, and if you say you`re from Britain they respect you. Now it just means you have a passport."

"We have gone everywhere and no one can help," says Riasoth Ahmed. "I cannot say anything to Tony Blair. He doesn`t listen to me. I cannot say anything to Bush; he doesn`t listen to me. These are big people. They are not interested. I`m very happy in this country. The last 25 years I have been here have been good for the government as well as for me. Now my boy is taken, the government say nothing to help. Nobody understands why these boys are there. But nobody bothers."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Ein Wiedergeborener hat es schwer.

Missionary position
In the US, Blair takes too much on trust

Leader
Saturday July 19, 2003
The Guardian

For those who say they simply cannot fathom Tony Blair`s apparently willing subservience to George Bush`s Washington, his speech to this week`s joint session of the US Congress offers a clue. Mr Blair sees the world not as it is but as he thinks it should be. His motivation is as much moral and emotional as it is intellectual. "I feel a most urgent sense of mission about today`s world," he told America`s leaders. "We are bound together as never before... (but) the danger is disorder". Terrorism was the principal threat, he said, encouraging chaos and perpetuating injustice. To defeat it by delivering freedom and prosperity to countries that live in "shadow and darkness" was the primary task for 21st-century leaders, working together, not in competition. Mr Blair understands post-imperial Britain`s limitations; in a sense, Britain is no longer big enough for him. So, in pursuit of his global mission, he looks to America, the predominant power, to lead the vital charge. "Destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time," he told his audience. "The task is yours to do... Our job is to be there with you."

Mr Blair`s good intentions are indisputable, his faith is plain. But his analysis, by starting in the wrong place, leads him to the wrong conclusions. History was not somehow begun again on Sep tember 11, 2001, by a single event in a single country. Terrorism is not the sudden cause but the long-standing symptom of injustice. If a third of the planet lives in poverty, if millions suffer under dictatorship, as he says, it is because the wealthiest nations, especially the US, are prepared to tolerate such a situation and, worse, exacerbate it by their selfish policies. Freedom and justice are estimable goals; but they cannot be defined and imposed from without. If such ideals are to flourish, they must grow organically, not be delivered on another man`s terms. Other nations` values must be freely chosen; they cannot be dictated from a universal script with an American army at the door. Evil will not be banished by mere brute force and in this at least, Mr Blair`s message was correct.

In the world as it is, as opposed to the Blair world of should be`s, the Bush administration`s unrelenting pursuit of national interest, its frequent, bullying use of military force, its contemptuous, divisive attitude towards Europe and the UN, and its narrow, ideological outlook render this US government the least fitted in living memory to take up the task defined by Mr Blair. Thus "our job" is not so much to back Mr Bush as to restrain him. To borrow an American phrase, wake up, Tony, and smell the coffee.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Auch der Independent hat nur ein Thema: Dr. Kelly.
http://www.independent.co.uk/

The death of a civil servant, a casualty of war
By Paul Vallely
19 July 2003


At 3 o`clock on Thursday afternoon two men - whose destinies had become, in the previous few days, inextricably intertwined - each took a fateful step.

David Kelly, a microbiologist and one of the country`s leading experts in biological and chemical weapons, left the three-storey 18th century farmhouse in the village of Southmoor near Abingdon which was his home. He was wearing an off-white cotton shirt, blue jeans, brown shoes. He told his wife, Janice, he was going for a walk and set off in the direction of Harrowdown Hill, a rural area popular with walkers, but off the beaten track, a few miles away near the Oxfordshire/Wiltshire border.

At almost exactly the same time, Andrew Gilligan, the defence correspondent of BBC Radio 4`s Today programme entered a committee room 65 miles away in Westminster to give evidence, for the second time, to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which was investigating claims that Tony Blair`s Government had exaggerated intelligence reports to make the case for war against Iraq.

It was a private session that ended acrimoniously with the committee chairman, Donald Anderson, holding an extraordinary impromptu press conference in the corridor in which he accused Mr Gilligan of changing his story over what happened at a meeting two month earlier between the journalist and Dr Kelly. Mr Gilligan vigorously rejected the accusation and persisted in his refusal to name the source of his story that the dossier outlining the case for war had been "sexed up" by Downing Street.

But Dr Kelly was never to hear the outcome of the session, which he had known - from the news that morning - was to take place. He did not return from his walk. At 11.45pm his family called Thames Valley Police and reported that he was missing. Yesterday at dawn a team of 70 police officers began a search. At 9.20am they found Dr Kelly`s body in a densely wooded part of Harrowdown Hill, a Thames Valley Police spokesman said.

His family was devastated. His wife was too upset to say anything publicly, but told a family friend, the former BBC correspondent Tom Mangold, that her husband had been severely stressed by the whole affair. "She told me he had been under considerable stress," Mr Mangold said, "that he wasn`t well. She didn`t use the word `depressed`, but she said he was very, very stressed and unhappy about what had happened and this was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in."

Southmoor village was in shock too. Neighbours who knew Dr Kelly, his wife, their daughter Sian, 32, and their twins Rachel and Ellen, 30, said they were a "lovely family". Steve Ward, the landlord of Dr Kelly`s local, the Hind`s Head pub, said: "He was the most level-headed sensible person I`ve ever come across ... I can`t believe that he would do anything like this.

Another villager said: "He never discussed his work, he was a straightforward family man - always a very nice person to talk to ... We`re all greatly saddened."

But the news also sent ripples around the world. The Prime Minister was informed of the discovery of the body as he flew from Washington to Tokyo on his diplomatic marathon. He and his officials received the news in stunned silence.

The same response characterised the reaction of all sections of the political and news establishment embroiled in the prolonged row over the run-up to the war in Iraq. Immediately, the blame game began as those involved sought to shrug off the recriminations and pass them on to someone else.

Mr Anderson was quick to deny that the committee`s questioning of Dr Kelly had been too strong. "If it was strong, the criticisms appear to be more directed against the Ministry of Defence, rather than against him," the MP said. "It wasn`t as if he could be seen as a victim in the corner, or a person against whom a complaint was being made. So I don`t think the questioning was aggressive against him ... I am sure that any objective person, looking at the transcript or listening to the hearing, would see that the tone was not aggressive at all."

The MoD promptly began briefing that Dr Kelly had at no point been threatened with suspension or dismissal as a result of his admission that he had spoken to Mr Gilligan. It was made clear to him at the time that he had broken civil service rules by having unauthorised contact with a journalist, but "that was the end of it", said a spokesman.

Downing Street too was keen to deny suggestions that the dead man had been made a "fall guy". A No 10 spokesman insisted that Dr Kelly had come forward voluntarily with the information that he had met the BBC correspondent who had sparked the weapons row.

But everyone was clear that Dr Kelly`s death had immense political implications, increasing pressure for a full, independent judicial inquiry into the whole affair. That pressure will only be partly alleviated by Downing Street`s announcement yesterday of a judicial inquiry focusing just on the microbiologist`s death and which will not be extended to cover the issue of the accuracy of the two dossiers making the case for war on Iraq.

The talk in Westminster was that the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, would have to resign - or that the tragedy might hasten the departure of Alastair Campbell as Tony Blair`s head of communications and strategy at Downing Street. The BBC was facing accusations that had it confirmed that Dr Kelly was not the Gilligan source he might still have been alive.

Few people had thought the long, impenetrable saga - which one MP indelicately described yesterday as a "soap opera" - would end like this when on 29 May Mr Gilligan broadcast an item on the Today programme that a senior British official had told him that the Government`s dossier on Iraq, published last September, was "sexed up" by Mr Campbell against the wishes of the intelligence services. Within a month Mr Gilligan repeated the claim to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry on the Government`s presentation of the case for war. A week later Mr Campbell, while giving evidence to the committee, aggressively denied the accusation and demanded an apology from the BBC.

When the committee`s report was published on 7 July, it cleared Mr Campbell - on the casting vote of the chairman - but pronounced that "undue prominence" was given to the dossier`s claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction "within 45 minutes". At that point it seemed the story was all over bar the recriminations. But the next day, the MoD issued a statement announcing that an official - later named as Dr Kelly - had come forward to admit he met Mr Gilligan at Charing Cross Hotel in London and discussed Iraq`s weapons on 22 May, a week before the original story was broadcast.

Dr Kelly, it emerged, had been part of the team that had helped draft part of the dossier, but only a section dealing with the history of UN inspections in Iraq.

The 59-year-old Oxford-educated microbiologist, originally with a background in agricultural science, had been scientific adviser to the MoD`s proliferation and arms control secretariat for more than three years. He had risen through the ranks at the ministry`s chemical research centre at Porton Down in Wiltshire to become head of microbiology. He led all inspections of Russian biological warfare facilities and worked as senior adviser on biological warfare in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War and visited that country 37 times during seven years as a weapons inspector.

Why Dr Kelly came forward was unclear. It may have been that, as a member of the Commons` committee put it, his motives were "courageous and honourable". He may perhaps have feared that he was about to be unmasked - he had been approached by the Sunday Times some weeks before and asked whether he was the BBC mole. Perhaps he was smoked out by pressure within the MoD, which would have been formidable, as anyone who has undergone a top civil service leak inquiry would testify.

Either way, the pressure was intense and Dr Kelly went to his bosses. For five days they are said to have interrogated him. He told his line manager at the MoD that he may have been Mr Gilligan`s source but that "on reflection" he had decided that what he told the journalist was so different from his report that he could not be the source.

Additional factors seemed to corroborate that. The reporter had admitted relying on a single source for his report, whom he describes as someone he had known for years and who did not work in the MoD - descriptions that did not fit Dr Kelly. Mr Gilligan had made notes of their conversation on a PalmPilot, and yet the BBC man had testified that he had taken comprehensive notes during the meeting with his sources, which had been deposited with the BBC legal department.

Five days later the MoD issued a rushed statement at 6.03pm announcing that an unnamed official had come forward to admit meeting the Today reporter. Some commentators speculated that it had been timed to dilute media coverage of a Commons rebellion by Labour MPs over foundation hospitals, though the MoD later insisted that it had been issued so late because they had to track down Dr Kelly on his mobile phone and get him to pull into a motorway service station to agree the wording of the statement.

Whatever the truth about the timing of the revelation - just a day after the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee issued its ambiguous report clearing Mr Campbell but denouncing the "undue prominence" given to the 45 minutes claim - it seemed panicky and political.

Though Dr Kelly had insisted he was not the source of the most controversial elements in the Gilligan story - a view with which the committee agreed - and therefore not the BBC mole, the political spin which was put on the announcement implied that No 10 was briefing that it was "99 per cent convinced" that Dr Kelly was the mole. So were political voices within the MoD.

The same idea hung in the air around the select committee hearing. Journalists reported how Dr Kelly was "barely audible" during his 20-minute interrogation at Westminster.

As temperatures soared outside on one of the hottest days of the year, a committee clerk switched off the noisy cooling fans so that the softly spoken government adviser could be heard. They wrote of how the silver-bearded, bespectacled man dressed in a pale green suit and tie, a visitor`s pass hanging around his neck, sat with his head slightly bowed.

But though he told the committee that Mr Gilligan`s account of his conversation with his source was so different from their conversation that he did not believe that he could be the source - and though the committee chairman, Mr Anderson, later wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to say it seemed "most unlikely" that Dr Kelly was the journalist`s source - the spin merchants seemed determined to make the mud stick.

The next day Ben Bradshaw, the hyper-loyalist Blairite junior Environment minister and a former BBC reporter, was still insisting that in the absence of a denial by his former employers it should be assumed that Dr Kelly was the mole. The BBC claimed that it was all a Downing Street "trick" to root out the real source.

It all took its toll on the unhappy scientist. As did the way he continued to dwell on what he saw as the unfairness of the intense questioning by MPs on the committee. At one point Labour`s Andrew Mackinlay had thundered angrily at the scientist: "This is the high court of Parliament and you are under an obligation to reply!" He then said to Dr Kelly: "I reckon you`re chaff. You`ve been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like the fall guy? I mean, you`ve been set up haven`t you?" Dr Kelly had replied: "That`s not a question I can answer."

And when the Conservative member, Sir John Stanley, said "You were being exploited to rubbish Mr Gilligan and his source, quite clearly", Dr Kelly could only shrug and say, "I`ve just found myself in this position out of my own honesty of acknowledging the fact that I had interacted with him."

One MP detected how unhappy Dr Kelly was at what was happening to him. The Tory committee member Richard Ottaway, who said people like Dr Kelly were not used to the pressure faced by MPs on a day-to-day basis, said: "He did give a hint of the pressure he was under when he said he was unable to get to his house at the moment because of the media intrusion."

Yet, privately, it was clear the impact all this had on Dr Kelly. Last night, his friend, journalist Tom Mangold, said Dr Kelly had believed he was Mr Gilligan`s major source, after all. Mr Mangold said Dr Kelly`s wife had told her that her husband was infuriated and made deeply unhappy by the way events unfolded. "She told me that he was very, very angry about what had happened at the committee," Mr Mangold said, "that he wasn`t well, that he had been to a safe house, he hadn`t liked that, he wanted to come home."

Last night the theories were rebounding around Westminster. Did Dr Kelly`s death imply that he really was Mr Gilligan`s mole and could not bear the remorse of having lied? Had Mr Gilligan exaggerated or been misled about Dr Kelly`s role? Or had Mr Gilligan genuinely had another source, and the pressure on Dr Kelly came from elsewhere - perhaps the fear that he might be recalled for yet another interrogation by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Whatever the truth, there can be little doubt that the pressure of events combined to a level intolerable for Dr Kelly - and that a good man and faithful public servant died as yet more collateral damage of this questionable war and the spin used to distract public attention from the real issues of whether war was justified.

During a lecture on his role as a senior UN adviser on biological warfare he once said: "When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, little did I realise that Saddam Hussein would dictate the next 10 years of my life." Nor did he realise it would dictate the course of his death.
19 July 2003 10:20


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

Vielleicht kann D die `Wach und Schließ` anbieten.

Pentagon seeking private security firm to police Iraq
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
19 July 2003


With large parts of Iraq still gripped by lawlessness and guerrilla warfare, the Pentagon is planning to hire a private security firm to arm and train thousands of former Iraqi soldiers to guard government buildings, pipelines and other important installations.

The Pentagon has been in talks with the private security firm Kroll to train the former soldiers to take over duties at spots now guarded by US soldiers. The guards would carry small-arms and be responsible for security at up to 2,000 sites.

The plan has two main aims. It would provide jobs for some of the Iraqi soldiers unemployed since the US administration in Iraq formally disbanded the army, and officials hope it could also ease tensions where local people resent occupying troops as guards.

"The idea, first and foremost, is to have Iraqis providing security for Iraq at places like the national museum and other fixed sites and there are civilian companies that do that very well," a senior military official told The New York Times. "An added benefit is that it will reduce the load on US troops."

Although the US has 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon admits their presence has been stretched thin, the lack of numbers exacerbated by an unexpected level of resistance from Iraqi fighters.

This week, the US officer in charge of US forces in Iraq, General John Abizaid, the new head of Central Command, said troops may have to expect year-long tours of duty to deal with what he described as a "classic guerrilla-type campaign".

About 150 US soldiers have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq with the toll rising almost every day. Underlining the seriousness of the threat the occupying forces face, another American soldier was killed yesterday when a bomb detonated a under a military convoy in the city of Fallujah.

A senior executive at Kroll, Anne Tiedemann, said company officials had been involved in a "brain-storming session" with the US-led civilian authority in Iraq. "Our sense is that the military has too much on its plate and that these are issues that need to be addressed and the way to do that is through the private sector," she said.

A Pentagon advisory team has reported that the opportunity for achieving postwar success in Iraq and establishing a peace is closing fast. The team of experts said immediate and dramatic action was required by the US if the situation was to be turned around.

"The hearts and minds of key segments of the Sunni and Shia communities are in play and can be won but only if the coalition provisional authority and new Iraqi authorities deliver in short order," said the report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, whose experts travelled to Iraq at the request, and expense, of the Pentagon.

The team made 32 recommendations to bring about a rapid improvement, and warned that the next three months would be crucial.

It also explicitly criticised the Bush administration for not more fully involving the international community and the United Nations in the postwar reconstruction. "The scope of the challenges, the financial requirements, and rising anti-Americanism in parts of Iraq argue for a new coalition that includes countries and organisations beyond the original war-fighting coalition," it said.

Meanwhile a CIA analysis has determined that an audiotape aired on Arab television this week was "probably" the voice of Saddam Hussein. A US intelligence official said: "The exact date of the recording cannot be determined, but it could very well have been recorded in recent days." The message called for resistance "to inflict losses and evict the enemy from Iraq".

• Mowaffaq Alani, Iraq`s ambassador to China, has taken over his embassy in Beijing at pistol-point and locked out other diplomats, refusing US orders to return to Baghdad, the diplomats said.
19 July 2003 10:23

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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July 19, 2003

David Kelly, victim of another war?
By Tom Baldwin, Michael Evans, David Charter and Adam Fresco

Scientist at the heart of struggle between No 10 and BBC found dead





David Kelly was said to be under "considerable stress" after being named as a BBC source on the WMD dossier

TONY Blair yesterday promised to launch an independent inquiry into the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, who Downing Street believes was the source for BBC allegations against the Government.
The discovery yesterday morning of a body matching Dr Kelly’s description, in an Oxfordshire wood close to the weapons expert’s home, is already causing deep anguish and bitter mutual recrimination in Westminster.

The Ministry of Defence adviser was said to be under “considerable stress” after being named as a possible source for BBC claims that Alastair Campbell had “sexed up” an intelligence dossier on Iraq to strengthen the case for war.

Dr Kelly, 59, was dismissed as “chaff” by an MP when he gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into the allegations on Tuesday. The previous day, he had also been subject to a private 45-minute cross-examination by the Intelligence and Security Committee.

The former Iraq weapons inspector and Porton Down scientist had admitted meeting the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan on May 22 but stated he could not have been the source for the story broadcast seven days later.

His wife, Janice, reported him missing after he failed to return home in Abingdon on Thursday evening. After a massive police search, the body of a man was found yesterday morning at Harrowdown Hill, a beauty spot about two miles from their home.

Although the cause of death will not be established until next week, it is widely believed he committed suicide.

Mr Blair’s official spokesman, speaking as the Prime Minister arrived in Tokyo, said there would be an independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading to Dr Kelly’s death. This is expected to include questions about whether he was the BBC’s source, as well as the way his name emerged in the media and the decision to subject him to cross-examination by MPs after he told the MoD about his meeting with Mr Gilligan.

Mr Blair, who spent a long time talkng to senior ministers and officials on his flight, was “obviously very distressed for the family”, said his spokesman.

Fingers are already being pointed at Mr Campbell, Downing Street’s communications director, as well as the BBC, the select committees and the media — which Dr Kelly had complained was hounding him.

Mr Campbell, who learnt the news on his return to London from Washington this morning, is understood to be deeply shocked but unlikely to quit. Friends said he had done “nothing wrong” and the tragedy showed “something has gone horribly wrong with our political and media culture”.

Iain Duncan Smith suggested that Mr Blair should consider cutting short his visit to the Far East and return to the UK for a possible re-call of Parliament.

He said: “There are many questions that will need to be asked over the coming days and I think if I were the Prime Minister I would want to be back here to deal with these.”

A BBC spokesman said: “We are shocked and saddened to hear what has happened and we extend our deepest sympathies to Dr Kelly’s family and friends. While Dr Kelly’s family await the formal identification, it would not be appropriate for us to make any further statement.”

But Robert Jackson, Dr Kelly’s local MP, said that if he had committed suicide, the BBC was to blame. The corporation should have confirmed that Dr Kelly was not the source after the select committee reached that conclusion, the Tory MP for Wantage said.

He said: “I am obviously very concerned about this and I think the responsibility of the BBC should not go unmentioned. The management refused to say he was not the source Gilligan had given them.

“The question then is pressure he came under. The pressure was significantly increased by the fact the BBC refused to make it clear he was not the source.”

One of Dr Kelly’s close friends, the veteran journalist Tom Mangold, said that the scientist believed he was the main source behind Mr Gilligan’s story.

The claim contradicts Dr Kelly’s insistence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that he did not believe he was the prime source.

“I guess he could not cope with the firestorm that developed after he gave what he regarded as a routine briefing to Gilligan,” Mr Mangold told the BBC Radio 4 PM programme.

“He felt he was Gilligan’s major source. As I recall it, Andrew Gilligan said the man he spoke to was an expert on weapons of mass destruction and they met at a London hotel.

“If that’s true that sounds to me like Dave Kelly.”

Asked why he had told the committee that he was not the main source, Mr Mangold said: “I think his famous precision let him down there, because what he said to me was that there were parts of the Gilligan transmission that he did not recognise, but that did not mean that he wasn’t the main source.”

Richard Ottaway, a Tory member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said the committee reconvened simply to ask Mr Gilligan to name his source because it was quite clear Dr Kelly was not the source. “There are games going on here, there are people trying to make points, trying to shut down avenues of inquiry, trying to open up things.

“But putting up Dr Kelly was just part of the distraction and it’s had the most ghastly result and I am deeply critical of those involved.”

A police search team found Dr Kelly’s body lying in a wooded copse two miles from where he lived in the small village of Southmoor, less than ten hours after he was reported missing late on Thursday night.

A police source said that the body was beneath the trees and they had ruled out hanging, an overdose or use of a gun in the death. They also said that natural causes had been ruled out. Dr Kelly was a keen walker and had left at 3pm. When he had not returned by midnight one of his three daughters rang police to report his disappearance.

Detectives searched his home and it is believed that they took away a computer and several files from the house. It is not known if he left a note.

One of his oldest friends told yesterday how Dr Kelly would not have liked being in the limelight. From his home in America, Roger Avery, a professor of virology, said: “I feel he got himself caught up in the middle of all that against his wishes because he is not a publicity-seeker.”

The first hint that Dr Kelly was about to get caught up in the row over whether the Government had deliberately “sexed up” the intelligence dossier was when he returned to his office in Whitehall from a week’s trip to Iraq.

He was shown a transcript of the evidence Mr Gilligan had given to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and recognised certain technical references to be ones he had divulged during his lunch with the reporter.

He wrote a memo to his line manager explaining his fears that he might have been the informant for Mr Gilligan’s story on the BBC Today programme. Later, however, when Dr Kelly appeared before the committee, he said he could not have been the main source because of allegations that bore no resemblance to the conversation he had with the journalist on May 22.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-750154,00.html

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US soldier killed in Baghdad

A US soldier was shot dead while patrolling in Baghdad. The soldier was from the 1st Infantry Division, said Corporal Todd Pruden, a spokesman for the military. He gave no other details and the soldier`s name was being withheld while the next of kin were informed

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Mean streets: a soldier from the 3/124th Infantary patrols a rubbish-strewn area of northern Bagdad.


July 19, 2003

On patrol with the US Army in Bagdad`s deadly alleys
From Stephen Farrell on night patrol in Baghdad


4 AM. The graveyard shift, and after five months of 24-hour operations Staff Sergeant Michael McGuinn is a weary American who has had enough of trudging through this dark alleyway filled with putrid vegetables, looted children’s roundabouts and invisible threats.

On the deserted Baghdad rat-run, lit only by a full moon, the 25-year-old National Guardsman is not rude or hostile, just tired and cynical. Like the rest of his 3/124th Infantry foot patrol, he has heard too many lies and excuses for breaking the 11pm-to-4am curfew, in a culture too distant from their own Florida upbringings to make real engagement possible.

“This is Kid Alley. They come up asking you for things, bugging the hell out of you. Some of them are nice. The kids like us, but the older ones have a peculiar look in their eyes. I wouldn’t trust any of them,” he says.

“The children are everywhere around here. I don’t know how many women I’ve seen in labour. These people shit out kids like turds.”

Passed like a basketball from armoured to US Marine to infantry divisions during the war, the 124th, a National Guard outfit of reservist policemen, students and businessmen, now polices the aftermath of war.

They have not been here as long as the celebrated 3rd Infantry Division, who had their long-anticipated return home postponed again this week. But few expect to be back in Florida before their year is up on January 7.

“Man, I am ready to go home,” one private sighs, leafing through a handful of glossy magazines: Country (music) Weekly, Cigar Aficionado and, incongruously, Spirituality and Health.

Dear John letters have ended marriages; students see little prospect of returning in time for the next semester; and sitting back at the fetid, darkened headquarters, there is little to do but sleep or sprawl in the large auditorium, where a television blares out cable news and Eminem videos.

Back on the streets for another patrol, another 124th unit mans a traffic checkpoint, stopping the handful of curfew violators for searches and a lecture. The company, which is 90 per cent college students, prides itself on having more wit and initiative than regular army units, and certainly operates with a relatively light touch.

Any car approaching at high speed gets four M16s in the windscreen and a lecture. But Shia pilgrims late back from the southern holy cities are waved on their way after a cursory search.

There is universal scepticism, however, about the main excuses for lateness: pregnant women and sick parents.

“Baby, baby,” complains one soldier as another vehicle approaches, predicting the lament from the woman clad in a black abaya clearly visible in the rear seat. “They can’t all be pregnant.”

They are not. The woman has a worm in her ear and needs urgent hospital treatment because she is in pain, the driver tells The Times interpreter, the only Arabic-speaker present.

There is no hatred or anger for Iraqis, just wariness and some disdain. Two nights ago an Iraqi fired a rocketpropelled grenade at the unit’s headquarters, the size of an ocean liner, and missed completely. The tone is not so much relief as contempt.

“How can you miss a building that size,” one grins. “Mind you, that guy was cross-eyed. I mean his eyes were really skewed and his RPG was bent like a banana. How dumb can you get?” Others simply cannot understand the dirt, squalor and poverty that they see around them and have little desire to see more of the country than their own sector. “I think the Iraqis aren’t the brightest,” one mutters, cradling his M16. “Their work ethic is for shit. They work from ten to one, and their moral values . . . man. They are supposed to be orthodox Muslims, but we arrested eight dudes the other day who were drunk all day long.”

Others are more focused on the unit’s own performance. Although their sector is one of the quietest in Baghdad, everyone feels the growing Iraqi frustration.

Dawn at a newly opened petrol station, and that frustration has just increased. Encouraging the garage guard to puncture illegal jerry cans with his bayonet, the unit found one of the petrol station’s own attendants with three canisters in his car.

Handcuffed in front of his children, he is now being frogmarched down the street in a show of anti-black market rigour that dismays some.

Sergeant Raymond Branch, 33, a prison officer in real life, groans and points to the now surly children who would normally run up shouting ‘Good Bush’ ”. “We have spent a month trying to get them to like us and now they hate us again. Why didn’t we put him in a car and drive him back?” A veteran of the first Gulf War, he says that his men will carry on. But there is no doubting their desire to return home. “They are holding their own at moderately pissed off, with a lot of teeth-gritting going on.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-749761,00.html

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July 19, 2003

Bright-eyed and Bushy: people of no faith make a stand at last
By Ben McIntyre



Are you a Bright? You are obviously bright, or you wouldn’t be reading this newspaper. But are you a Bright?

A Bright, according to the newly launched Brights website www.the-brights.net/, is “a person holding a naturalist, as distinct from a supernaturalist, view of the world”. Brights may be atheist, agnostic, scientific, baffled or merely doubting, but what unites them is a disinclination to believe in God, ghosts, reincarnation or the tooth fairy. Newly-minted Brights are the latest sociopolitical grouping to demand political attention and claim discrimination in the US. We’re Brights; we’ve got rights; get used to it.

The term Bright was coined, consciously imitating the gay rights movement, in reaction to the steady spread of religious politics under George W. Bush. Outing himself as a Bright last week, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett declared in The New York Times: “Whether we Brights are a minority or, as I am inclined to believe, a silent majority, our deepest convictions are increasingly dismissed, belittled and condemned by those in power — by politicians who go out of their way to invoke God and to stand, self-consciously preening, on what they call ‘the side of the angels’.”

Brights insist that they do not wish to thrust their own disbeliefs on others, but merely to be tolerated in the same way as believers. “Though at present they can’t admit it and get elected, the US Congress must be full of closet Brights,” wrote Richard Dawkins, Oxford Professor of Public Understanding of Science and another self-professed Bright who predicts that “the more Brights come out, the easier it will be for yet more to do so”.

Inevitably, Brights have come under attack not only from the more militant Christians, but also from atheists and others who see no reason to be rebranded as Brights.

There is undoubtedly something cringingly self-satisfied and self-conscious about the term. The website urging Brights to stand up and be counted even offers handy tips on revealing your inner brightness. For example, it advises: “If someone inquires about your own religion, you can pop up with, ‘Well, actually, I am a Bright’. The other person’s curiosity will probably take hold: ‘A Bright? What is that?’ ” In fact, of course, the conversation would probably go: “What’s your religion?” “Well, actually, I’m a Bright.” The other person will immediately suspect they are in the presence of a prat. “A Bright, eh? Well, good for you ... must get on.”

Nevertheless, Brights have a point. In Bush’s Washington, “godless” is the supreme insult, for religion suffuses every aspect of this presidency. In his recent memoir, the former Bush speechwriter David Frum noted that while Bible study class was “if not compulsory,” it was “ not quite uncompulsory”. As Dennett pointed out, the anti-Bright bias is often invisible, because non-believers do not declare themselves. In large parts of the US, thanks to the atmosphere fostered by the Bush Administration, candidates for office, whether as police chief, judge or senator, are happy to declare their beliefs, while millions of Americans who don’t believe, like gays of an earlier era, are obliged to remain silent. There is nothing so overt as “Brightbashing”, yet there is an underlying assumption of shared belief, a one-nation-under-Godism that reveals itself in subtle ways. When I covered the last presidential election, I lost count of the number of times I heard a candidate thank God for the weather.

British Brights have a far easier time, of course, yet there are hints that Mr Blair, if not actually a Brightophobe, is not exactly an advocate of Bright rights either. His prewar rhetoric was awash with rectitude, giving the impression that the angels were not just on his side, but driving the tanks. A striking passage in Peter Stothard’s new account of Blair at war reveals that the Prime Minister wanted to end a broadcast with the words “God bless”, and was only dissuaded by advisers who pointed out that “people don’t want chaplains pushing stuff down their throats”. Blair called them ungodly. This week, Blair declared that history would forgive the war in Iraq. In Blair’s Manichaean world, God and history are the same.

It may be argued that a profound faith is a useful, though certainly not an essential, element of leadership, but the religious convictions of Blair and Bush are entirely their own affair, and that is what they should remain. Blair’s beliefs inform his decisions, but those of Bush do more, offering an easy shorthand for moral superiority and the assumption of a shared collective faith.

I shall not be coming out as a Bright just yet. For a start, the term “secular humanist” may be old-fashioned but it is still serviceable, and mercifully doesn’t sound like something dreamed up as an advertising gimmick. It has the added advantage that the Religious Right in America already loathes it, so it must be just fine.

The term Bright seems too all-embracing for so many shades of doubt and certainty. Why, in rejecting the extravagant claims of organised religion, would one want to be part of a group organised around the absence of religion? Almost by definition, Brights would be opposed to joining any club clamouring to have them as a member, and for that reason alone I suspect the Brights may dim pretty quickly.

Looking on the bright side, however, the Bright movement may allow us to reclaim other words too long demonised by believers. Just as the gay movement has reclaimed “queer”, so the dawn of the Brights may be an opportunity to take back words such as atheist, rationalist and freethinker. There is already a fine word that does the job of Brights, which has been horribly abused over the centuries and is just waiting to be reclaimed by non-believers worldwide. Infidel: now that is a title I would come out of the closet for.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-749827,00.html

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July 19, 2003
U.S. May Be Forced to Go Back to U.N. for Iraq Mandate
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS


WASHINGTON, July 18 — The Bush administration, which spurned the United Nations in its drive to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq, is finding itself forced back into the arms of the international body because other nations are refusing to contribute peacekeeping troops or reconstruction money without United Nations approval.

With the costs of stabilizing Iraq hovering at $4 billion a month and with American troops being killed at a steady rate, administration officials acknowledge that they are rethinking their strategy and may seek a United Nations resolution for help that would placate other nations, like India, France and Germany.

Administration officials contend that they are being practical, but within their ranks are policy makers sharply critical of the United Nations and those who would consider it humiliating to seek its mantle after risking American lives in the invasion that ousted Mr. Hussein.

The administration`s quandary deepened today, when Russia announced that it would consider sending peacekeeping troops but only with a United Nations mandate that set out a specific mission and timetable.

President Bush`s meeting this week with Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, was part of a flurry of consultations in recent days between administration and United Nations officials. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, reached out to diplomats on the Security Council, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell emerged from a meeting with the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, saying he was discussing ways to expand international support for the Iraq occupation, including seeking a new United Nations resolution.

Mr. Powell said Security Council Resolution 1483, which was approved in May and calls on all members to assist in Iraq`s reconstruction, should be enough "cover" for countries to claim an endorsement from the United Nations. But he acknowledged that the nations that matter most are not buying that.

"There are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations, and I am in conversations with some ministers about this, as well as with the secretary general of the United Nations," Mr. Powell said.

The discussions reflect a growing sense that the reconstruction of Iraq will require a new international alliance. For all their rapid success in the military phase, the American-led forces are struggling to establish stability and normalcy in Iraq. A Pentagon advisory panel that just returned from Iraq reported a pressing need for international assistance.

Even supporters of the administration`s policy say its efforts are in jeopardy, and minute military planning gave way to disarray once the major combat ended.

"It`s increasingly clear there was really some underestimation of the number of people who would be required after the regime fell, and the length of time required to stay there," said Paul Saunders, director of the Nixon Center, a nonpartisan research organization whose honorary chairman is Henry A. Kissinger.

Mr. Saunders said there were two reasons for the United States to go back to the United Nations.

"It would be helpful to diffuse responsibility for this massive undertaking, and share any dissatisfaction with others and not be the sole target ourselves," he said. "Externally, it`s also helpful in rebuilding some of the relationships that were strained in the dispute over going in."

Several nations have chafed at the idea of submitting their troops to American-British control. Others, which clashed with the United States and withheld support for a resolution authorizing war, want to tweak Washington for disregarding them.

India dealt the administration a sharp blow this week, refusing to send peacekeeping troops unless they operated under the auspices of the United Nations. The administration, which had lobbied New Delhi strenuously, had been hoping for a full division of 17,000 peacekeepers, which would have made India the second largest military presence in Iraq after the United States.

The administration had been particularly eager to enlist the Indians, because their presence is widely seen as a bellwether for numerous other developing countries.

In Moscow, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said that Russia would consider sending troops but that a new United Nations resolution was "the most likely way of securing the participation of a large number of countries."

One diplomat on the United Nations Security Council said virtually no additional nations — with the exception of some in pro-American Eastern Europe — were willing to place their troops under American or British control in Iraq. "It would create a lot of problems for them," said the diplomat, who has been courted by White House officials.

Currently, 19 nations have a troop presence in Iraq, and Pentagon officials say 19 more have promised to send forces. About 13,000 non-American troops are now in the country, most of them British, compared with about 147,000 Americans.

Some military experts say the United States should move quickly to reduce the overwhelmingly American cast to the occupation. More foreign peacekeepers could relieve American troops who are already taxed by combat and extended stays, and now must contend with tedious chores, like protecting buildings. Peacekeepers from other countries also might lessen Iraqi resentment toward the Americans.

"Iraqis are extremely sensitive about being occupied," said Robert C. Orr, the Washington director of the Council on Foreign Relations, who took part in the Pentagon`s advisory panel. "It just doesn`t feel the same if an Indian or Pakistani soldier is on the corner than if it`s an American in Kevlar."

Administration officials have been reluctant to return to the United Nations on Iraq matters since the nasty breakdown of talks in the Security Council over whether to authorize war. The standoff was particularly damaging to relations with France and Germany, which sought to give United Nations inspectors more time to seek prohibited Iraqi weapons.

Before the American-led attack, United States officials and lawmakers chided their longtime allies, and the House of Representatives banned the term "French fries" from the cafeteria. Mr. Bush warned that the United Nations risked fading "into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society."

Apart from the bad blood, administration officials worry that United Nations participation might force them to cede operational control over Iraq, even as the United States continues to pay most of the cost.

Polls show that the French and the Germans are not convinced that the war was necessary. But they are eager to normalize relations with Washington, European officials say.

"We are certainly not pleased to see the Americans having problems, because winning the peace is in the interest of everyone," said Jean-Marc de la Sablière, France`s United Nations ambassador.

The administration would particularly like help in covering reconstruction costs. It has set up a donors` conference for October but risks falling far short without a diplomatic breakthrough.

Mr. Fischer, the German foreign minister, and Christopher Patten, the European Union`s commissioner for external affairs, discussed the possibility of financial support in meetings with Mr. Powell this week.

The catch to Europe`s offer is that donations must be administered by an international organization, the United Nations Development Program or the World Bank.

At the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador, said it was unclear whether a new resolution might be offered to placate potential peacekeeping contributors. "It`s a question of what potential contributors want, whether the Security Council could give them what they wanted and whether the authority on the ground could give them what they wanted," he said.

A senior Indian diplomat in New York said today that some United Nations diplomats were arguing that the current resolution acknowledging the allies` control could be amended to meet the concerns expressed in New Delhi, Moscow and Paris. Others, he said, think a new resolution is required.

Unless such a resolution could ensure that Indian troops were seen to be serving the needs of the Iraqi people — not those of the American and British occupiers — the diplomat said it would be difficult to get popular support for a decision to send troops.

In private discussions, Ms. Rice has told diplomats that greater involvement by the United Nations may be on the horizon. Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are said to favor a United Nations role, while Vice President Dick Cheney and his aides have argued against it.

Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said today that the administration was looking forward to a Security Council briefing next week by the United Nations representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and members of the new Iraqi Governing Council, to advance the discussions.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said it would be philosophically hard for some administration officials to return to the United Nations.

"They`ll disguise it; they`ll find ways to excuse it," Mr. Nye said. "For some of them — in particular those who celebrated that we didn`t use the U.N. — it will be painful."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 19, 2003
White House Tells How Bush Came to Talk of Iraq Uranium
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON


WASHINGTON, July 18 — The White House today set out its most detailed explanation yet of how disputed intelligence about Iraq`s weapons program made it into President Bush`s State of the Union address, contradicting a crucial element of the version of events provided by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In a briefing for reporters, a senior administration official said the White House had changed an initial draft of the speech to make it more credible by attributing the assertion that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa to a public British intelligence dossier.

The official said the change had been made after internal White House deliberations about the best way to present the information and not, as intelligence officials have said, in response to concerns raised by the C.I.A. about the credibility of intelligence reports that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger.

As part of today`s briefing, the White House declassified part of its main prewar intelligence summary on Iraq`s weapons programs. The document, a National Intelligence Estimate, encompasses the findings of the main intelligence agencies. The document noted reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Africa but included a warning from the State Department that the reports were "highly dubious."

White House officials said the document was one of those drawn on by speechwriters as they put together the State of the Union address. The official who gave the briefing today said Mr. Bush was unaware of the State Department`s skepticism.

The president "is not a fact checker," the official said.

The document also noted that the intelligence agencies had "low confidence" in some of its conclusions, including when Saddam Hussein might use weapons of mass destruction, whether he would try to attack the United States and whether he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. Administration officials had cited all those possibilities in building a case for the war.

In a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee last October, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said Mr. Hussein "probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions" if he were attacked. But Mr. Tenet did not write that his agency had a low level of confidence in its ability to form such an assessment.

In his State of the Union address, on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush made a case for why Iraq was a threat to the Mideast, the United States and the world.

He referred to what he said were attempts by Iraq to rebuild its nuclear weapons program and said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

But the reliability of the intelligence reports was later undermined when letters that had been a critical part of the evidence turned out to have been forged. This month the White House said it had been a mistake to include the assertion.

The White House held the briefing today and declassified part of the intelligence findings in an effort to quell a political furor over whether Mr. Bush misled the American public by exaggerating the threat from Iraq. Democrats have been using the issue to question Mr. Bush`s credibility not only on the war but also on domestic policy issues.

The administration`s latest account left some questions unanswered and raised some new ones.

The White House`s account left unresolved exactly why Mr. Bush included the reference to uranium. Not only had the State Department expressed misgivings, but the C.I.A. had expressed reservations to British authorities before Britain published its intelligence dossier last fall, according to Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary.

In particular, the administration`s account of how it settled on the wording in Mr. Bush`s speech was at odds with accounts from the C.I.A.

The senior administration official said the White House originally drafted the speech to say "we know" a series of things about Mr. Hussein`s weapons programs, like "We know that Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," and "We also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa."

The decision to mention uranium came from White House speechwriters, not from senior White House officials, the official said.

The official said that on the day before the speech, the White House team drafting it "decided that it would be much more credible if we could explain to the public how we knew it — not just assert it, but to fully disclose as much as possible how we knew this information."

As a result, the official said, the speech was changed to attribute each statement to a specific source.

The official said that Bob Joseph, the director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, then asked the C.I.A. to approve that portion of the speech. "It was cleared to use the British as a citation," the official said.

The intelligence agency did not mention to Mr. Joseph that it pushed Britain not to use the uranium information in its public document, the official said.

The C.I.A. has provided a different account.

On July 11, Mr. Tenet said agency officials raised "several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence" with White House officials. "Some of the language was changed," Mr. Tenet said.

Other intelligence officials have recounted a back-and-forth between Mr. Joseph and Alan Foley, a C.I.A. expert on banned weapons, in which Mr. Foley recommended making no reference to uranium purchases.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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July 19, 2003
Mixed Grades on National Parks

President Bush has clearly done a better job than his predecessors in tackling the huge repair backlog in the national parks, estimated at $4.9 billion when he came to office. It is equally clear, however, that he will have to increase and accelerate new spending if he is to meet his campaign pledge of fixing the parks` deteriorating buildings, roads, bridges and even sewer systems by 2006.

Mr. Bush made the national parks an important part of his 2000 campaign, and his efforts in their behalf remain one of the brighter spots in an otherwise dismal environmental record. A midterm report card presented two weeks ago by Interior Secretary Gale Norton asserted that he was right on schedule, with $2.9 billion spent or committed, 900 projects finished and another 900 scheduled. All this was impressive and, as is often the case with reports like these, overdrawn.

Mr. Bush`s annual spending on structural projects is $100 million higher on average than President Bill Clinton`s. He has also finished the first comprehensive inventory of the needs of the system`s 388 individual units — a major step toward more rational management. But it is a stretch to suggest he is halfway home. Much of that $2.9 billion has gone to cover current maintenance and new construction. By some estimates, the backlog still hovers at about $5 billion. In any case, finishing the job is going to require big new investments.

On other park issues, the president`s record is mixed. In a competing report card, the National Parks Conservation Association, an influential advocacy group, gave the administration a D-minus for overall parks` stewardship.

Some shortcomings have nothing to do with Ms. Norton. The haze and visibility problems that afflict many parks, for instance, are directly traceable to the White House`s reluctance to enforce the Clean Air Act fully. However, Ms. Norton herself has embarked on several initiatives that have drawn Congressional fire, including a dubious scheme to "outsource" thousands of park service jobs. Her stewardship of individual parks has also been inconsistent, reflecting her attentiveness to local political pressures at the expense of an overarching national vision.

This strategy may occasionally produce good outcomes, as in the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, where she has moved to restrict off-road vehicles and end oil exploration at the request of Gov. Jeb Bush. But we wish she had been similarly forthright in challenging the governor`s recent capitulation to Florida big-money interests that seek to undermine the federal-state agreement to restore the Everglades. In another bow to local commercial interests, she remains determined to allow snowmobile use in Yellowstone National Park despite serious misgivings in Congress, in the Environmental Protection Agency and even in her own National Park Service.

The main problem, though, is underfinancing, and on this score the administration cannot rest.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Hier im Norden würde man sagen, Rummy ist ein Schnacker. Aber es soll noch Menschen geben, die meinen, dass der Sinn seiner Aussagen irgendetwas mit Realität zu tun hat. Ich finde eher mit Kabarett. Dabei soll er mal Geschichte gelehrt haben, ich glaube eher geleert. Ihm geht es meist um eine Provokation und weniger um den Sinn.
July 19, 2003
The Founders and the Fedayeen
By MARY BETH NORTON


WEST TISBURY, Mass.
When questioned about the difficulties American forces are having in rebuilding Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has taken to giving a history lesson. Several times he has spoken of another country in "chaos and confusion" during a period characterized by "looting, crime, mobs storming buildings, breakdown of government structures and institutions that maintained civil order, rampant inflation caused by the lack of a stable currency, supporters of the former regime roaming the streets . . ."

This picture should seem familiar to Americans, he says, because it is based on "historians` descriptions of the conditions here in America in 1783." Well, as someone who has spent three decades teaching and writing about that era, I recognize very little of the postrevolutionary United States in Mr. Rumsfeld`s depiction.

First, the factual problems. His insistence that the new nation had to deal with roving loyalists, "many of whom had fought against the Continental Army," is simply not true. Virtually every person who publicly took sides against the Revolution left with the evacuating British forces in 1782 and 1783, and not just because they feared (with reason) for their safety. Most wanted no part of an independent United States. More than 100,000 refugees ended up in the West Indies, Canada or Britain itself.

Nor did a "breakdown of government structures" lead to widespread theft and looting. Historians have uncovered no evidence of a crime wave in the 1780`s; states and localities never descended into chaos. The new states had all drafted constitutions by mid-1777 under orders from the Second Continental Congress. By the early 1780`s some of those governments were being reorganized, but they never ceased to function.

Further, Mr. Rumsfeld seems to have conflated the problem of inflation during the war itself — when the Continental currency depreciated to worthlessness by 1780 — with postwar circumstances, when the states and national government began to get their finances under control well before the Constitution was drafted.

At least Mr. Rumsfeld is not one of those "revisionist historians" his boss, President Bush, has derided. In fact, the basic interpretation of American history he advances is so ancient it creaks. The idea that America under the Articles of Confederation (from 1781 to 1788) was a time of strife and ineffectual government was first put forward in the 18th century by supporters of the Constitution. It was perpetuated by 19th-century historians who wanted to portray the delegates to the Constitutional Convention as disinterested saviors of the nation. Historians initially challenged this dismal view of the 1780`s early in the 20th century, and it has essentially been dead for at least 50 years.

There was, it is true, one major instance of violence in the Confederation years: Shays` Rebellion in western Massachusetts in late 1786 and early 1787. As Mr. Rumsfeld points out, Shaysite mobs did attack courthouses and an armed force assaulted an armory in search of guns and ammunition. But they were not challenging the new nation — they were opposed only to the harsh taxation and land-foreclosure policies in Massachusetts. The rebels (some of whom had served in the revolutionary forces) saw themselves as protecting "the liberties or properties of the people." Massachusetts rather easily put down the Shaysites, but the legislature then quietly acceded to most of their demands. Nothing in the incident seems comparable to events in Iraq.

This is not to say that the government under the Articles of Confederation was perfect or even adequate. It had many flaws — most notably, lack of national authority over commerce and taxation. The Constitution was designed to correct those flaws. So today`s historical consensus views the Confederation period not as a time of chaotic confusion but rather as a stumbling first attempt to create a viable national government for what had been 13 separate colonies. Thus even if one ignores Mr. Rumsfeld`s factual errors, his analogy with today`s Iraq seems to hold little water.

For one, before independence, the American colonies had no unified government: the Revolution and its aftermath created the nation. Prewar Iraq, on the other hand, had a highly centralized economy and government, which has now collapsed.

The United States won its war. Iraq lost. Iraqis must now create a new polity under the supervision of an occupying power. There was no British Paul Bremer sitting in Philadelphia and telling us what to do in the 1780`s.

Most important, perhaps, Americans in the 1780`s had a tradition of self-governance and civil society stretching back more than 150 years, to the foundation of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1619 and continuing within the individual states. Under Saddam Hussein, any semblance of civil society in Iraq was ruthlessly suppressed for decades.

As part of his education package, President Bush has proposed an initiative to improve the teaching of American history in the public schools. I wonder if his secretary of defense might benefit from a refresher on the revolutionary era.


Mary Beth Norton, a professor of American history at Cornell University, is author of "In the Devil`s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Die amerikanischen Zeitungen berichten von der Tour de France. Die L.A.Times macht ihren Sportteil sogar damit auf, auf jeden Fall solange Armstrong führt. Ein kleiner Ausflug nicht ganz weg vom Thema, denn Armstrong soll ein Freund von Bush sein, obwohl er sich kritisch zum Irakkrieg geäußert hat.

Aus der WaPo


Lance Armstrong lost Friday`s stage to Jan Ullrich, above, who finished the stage in 58 minutes, 32 seconds. Armstrong was 96 seconds behind him.
Photo Credit: Laurent Rebours - AP


http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-tour19jul19,1,4407999.st…


Armstrong Is Feeling the Heat From Ullrich
German wins 12th stage in 100-degree temperatures to move within 34 seconds of defending champion.
By Diane Pucin
Times Staff Writer

July 19, 2003

CAP` DECOUVERTE, France — Jan Ullrich is the favorite now. So says Lance Armstrong.

The Tour de France should belong to Ullrich, a supremely talented 29-year-old German who destroyed the field, Armstrong included, in Friday`s individual time trial.

It will be up to Ullrich to set a pace, to drive up and up and up the Pyrenees faster and with more confidence than he has ever shown in the mountains.

That`s what Armstrong says. Armstrong says he thinks he can counter the German who rides for a new team, Bianchi, because his old team, Coast, went bankrupt a few weeks before the 2003 Tour. But Armstrong says he also is impressed by how Ullrich kept his rhythm and enjoyed the brutal heat and pulverized the 29-mile rolling time trial course.

Now, Armstrong says, let`s see what Ullrich has left for the big hills.

Ullrich cut 1 minute 36 seconds off his deficit to Armstrong and moved from sixth place into second overall — 34 seconds behind the American — with his ride Friday. Ullrich never slowed down in finishing the course in 58 minutes 32 seconds, an average of 30 mph. Armstrong finished second in the stage.

Alexandre Vinokourov, the Kazakh who had been second, is third, 51 seconds behind Armstrong. Tyler Hamilton, the American who has been riding with a broken collarbone, moved from fifth to fourth place but lost time to both Armstrong and Ullrich.

Armstrong and his United States Postal Service team, which has been put together expressly for what happens in the next five days in the hot, high mountains of southwestern France, face their toughest challenge since Armstrong made his miraculous comeback from near-fatal cancer and won the first of his four consecutive Tours in 1999.

There was glee all around the outdoor amusement park made out of an abandoned mine when Ullrich beat Armstrong in Friday`s 12th stage.

The last week of this Tour will be a real competition now and not another Armstrong coronation.

If Armstrong, the 31-year-old from Austin, Texas, is to tie Spaniard Miguel Indurain`s record of five straight wins, he will have to find his advantage in the mountains.

His trainer, Chris Carmichael, says Armstrong needs to build a solid two-minute or more lead over Ullrich in the last mountain stages before the Tour`s final time trial on the next-to-last day of the 23-day event.

Armstrong says if he has the same 34-second lead he has now over Ullrich for that time trial, "I will not lose sleep."

The first Pyrenees climbs begin today, when the Tour turns south out of Toulouse and heads 122.5 miles up to Ax 3 Domaines, a mountain resort town near Andorra. Among the toughest hauls will be the 6,603-foot ride to the Port de Pailheres.

Sunday, with four climbs more than 4,000 feet, may be the most telling. The stage travels into Spain and back to France and it will be a chance for Armstrong to pick up those extra minutes Carmichael says he needs.

While Armstrong made his biggest splash with his stage win at the L`Alpe d`Huez in 2001 when he gave Ullrich a backward stare, then left Ullrich in his wake, the American has had better overall results in the Pyrenees the last two years.

As much as Armstrong had touted Ullrich as his main competition this year, it was still a surprise to see the 1997 Tour winner dominate.

Ullrich missed almost 14 months — and last year`s Tour — after knee surgery and a suspension for testing positive for Ecstasy, a recreational drug he said he used in a nightclub while recovering from his surgery.

Reports that Ullrich gained substantial weight during his recovery and the drug suspension led to speculation that the young man who had once been considered the most promising athlete on the Tour and the one most likely to challenge Indurain`s record would not have the grit to make a comeback.

Even Ullrich said he was riding this year`s Tour only as preparation to make a real challenge in 2004.

"From the start," Ullrich said, "I never thought I could win this time trial. But all of a sudden, I got my old rhythm back. I didn`t expect this myself."

Armstrong, who said it was "a tough day," when temperatures were recorded as high as 104 degrees over the course, also said he miscalculated how much water he needed.

"I had an incredible crisis," Armstrong said. "I felt like I was pedaling backward. I ran out of water. That was the thirstiest I`ve ever been in a time trial."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Hat man in den USA einen Präsidenten, oder jemanden, der Nachrichten vom Telepromter abliest?
washingtonpost.com
Warning in Iraq Report Unread
Bush, Rice Did Not See State`s Objection

By Dana Milbank and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 19, 2003; Page A01


President Bush and his national security adviser did not entirely read the most authoritative prewar assessment of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, including a State Department claim that an allegation Bush would later use in his State of the Union address was "highly dubious," White House officials said yesterday.

The acknowledgment came in a briefing for reporters in which the administration released excerpts from last October`s National Intelligence Estimate, a classified, 90-page summary that was the definitive assessment of Iraq`s weapons programs by U.S. intelligence agencies. The report declared that "most" of the six intelligence agencies believed there was "compelling evidence that Saddam [Hussein] is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad`s nuclear weapons program." But the document also included a pointed dissent by the State Department, which said the evidence did not "add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was making a comprehensive effort to get nuclear weapons.

The unusual decision to declassify a major intelligence report was a bid by the White House to quiet a growing controversy over Bush`s allegations about Iraq`s weapons programs. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is seeking to question White House aides after hearing from CIA officials who said that Bush aides pushed to include contested allegations about Iraq`s nuclear ambitions in Bush`s speech. The CIA account was contradicted during yesterday`s White House briefing.

Bush aides released eight pages of the NIE, including various findings supporting Bush`s charges against Iraq: that Iraq was "continuing, and in some areas expanding," chemical, biological and nuclear programs; that it possessed forbidden chemical and biological weapons; and that it was likely to have a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade.

But the excerpts also show that significant doubts were raised about key assertions Bush made in his State of the Union address. According to the NIE, a consensus document based on the work of six agencies, both the Energy Department, which is responsible for watching foreign nuclear programs, and the State Department disagreed with another allegation, voiced by Bush, that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were for a nuclear weapons program.

The State Department`s intelligence arm (INR) also offered a caustic criticism of the controversial claim, raised by Bush in his State of the Union address, that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa. "(T)he claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR`s assessment, highly dubious." The objection was included in an annex to the report. The White House did not release the full text of the objection. The allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa was in the main portion of the report but was not one of the report`s "key judgments."

A senior administration official who briefed reporters yesterday said neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice read the NIE in its entirety. "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document," said the official, referring to the "Annex" that contained the State Department`s dissent. The official conducting the briefing rejected reporters` entreaties to allow his name to be used, arguing that it was his standard procedure for such sessions to be conducted anonymously.

The official said Bush was "briefed" on the NIE`s contents, but "I don`t think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it." Asked whether Bush was aware the State Department called the Africa-uranium claim "highly dubious," the official, who coordinated Bush`s State of the Union address, said: "He did not know that."

"The president was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided in his speech," the official said of the decision to use it in the address to Congress. "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

The partial disclosure of the NIE by the White House added new complexity to the controversy over whether Bush was backed by solid intelligence in making accusations about Iraq`s weapons programs.

The allegations about Iraq`s nuclear ambitions were particularly important as the White House made its case for war in Iraq, illustrating the urgency of confronting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush said in Cincinnati in October. The International Atomic Energy Agency later challenged many of Bush`s nuclear allegations and exposed as a forgery a document indicating Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger.

The senior official, who fielded questions for 75 minutes in the White House briefing room, presented a version of events leading up to Bush`s State of the Union address that contradicted testimony given to the Senate intelligence committee this week by CIA officials. The official said that while the CIA successfully removed a specific allegation from an October Bush speech, that Iraq had sought 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium ore in Niger, the CIA raised no objection to any statement about uranium in Africa in the State of the Union speech.

The official said that in the drafting of Bush`s January speech, aides decided to attribute the uranium allegation to British intelligence because of a "stylistic" decision to provide sources for several allegations, "to make the speech more credible." The official said no draft of the speech mentioned specific amounts of uranium and said "there was not a sharing of various language or anything like that" between the White House and the CIA.

Alan Foley, a senior CIA official, told a closed-door hearing of the Senate intelligence committee on Wednesday that before Bush`s State of the Union address, he called National Security Council official Robert Joseph to object to a line saying Iraq wanted to purchase 500 pounds of uranium from Niger, according to congressional and administration sources who were present at the hearing.

The official who briefed reporters yesterday said the uranium assertion in Bush`s January speech was based on more than the British intelligence. The NIE, while saying the Niger claim was the work of a "foreign government service," also said "reports indicate Iraq also has sought uranium ore from Somalia and possibly the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

Officials from two government departments said yesterday that those claims were not verifiable, either.

As to the overall nuclear assessment, the NIE said, "Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them."

But the State Department, in its dissent, challenged the circumstantial nature of the other agencies` assessment: "Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, [the State Department`s intelligence office] is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for completion of activities it does not now see happening."

The White House official said the majority view prevailed. "When you get all six agencies, you take dissent into consideration, you note their dissent, but there is a majority judgment that`s made," the official said. "It was made in this case, and that`s why it was relied upon."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
`Weekend Warriors` No More
National Guard`s Expanded Role in Iraq Combines Risky Duties, Long Deployment

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 19, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, July 18 -- One night in mid-March, three days before the Iraq war began, 30 Florida National Guardsmen swung picks and shovels in the Iraqi desert.

Until they were called up on the day after Christmas, they had been bartenders, salesmen, police officers and firefighters. Now they were assigned to support a Special Forces unit, which needed them to knock a Humvee-size hole through a huge sand berm on the Jordan-Iraq border.

When they finished, Spec. Jeffrey Wershow, a tall and exuberant 22-year-old college student from Gainesville, ran to the top of the berm to wave the Special Forces on. A video from that night showed him, like an earlier generation of soldiers on Iwo Jima, raising a standard toward the sky, this time flying the Stars and Stripes above the Florida state flag.

Four months later, Wershow and another guardsman from Charlie Company are dead, among the first National Guard combat fatalities in more than a decade. The remaining soldiers from the unit, part of the largest force of National Guard troops in combat since the Korean War, are still bunked down in Baghdad, wondering when they will get to return to the civilian lives they left behind more than half a year ago, some on 24 hours` notice.

"We thought Hurricane Andrew was the worst it would ever get in the National Guard," said Sgt. Walton E. Lowrey, 37, of Ocala. "When this call came, even though we were stupefied and astonished that we were actually going to war, we were honored and we were ready to come."

"But now these guys have seen a lot and endured a lot," Lowrey said, standing in a Baghdad Convention Center lounge that has been turned into a crowded barracks. "And it`s outside the scope of what the National Guard has been used for in the past. They deserve, and they have earned, the right to go home."

All over Iraq, exhausted and increasingly on-edge troops are beginning to wonder aloud when they will be sent back to the States. Many have endured blinding sandstorms, extreme heat, homesickness and months of eating nothing but military MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. Now they also face unnerving and intensifying guerrilla-style assaults that have killed 35 soldiers since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat over.

Many units, particularly those stationed at outlying bases where there is little relief from temperatures that rise daily to more than 110 degrees, are increasingly suffering from fatigue and frustration.

Some, including the Army`s 3rd Infantry Division, have been away from home since last September. After several conflicting announcements about when the outfit would leave Iraq, both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, said it would be home by September.

A few members of the division caused a minor ruckus this week when they vented their frustration to interviewers and criticized Rumsfeld by name, prompting a public rebuke from Abizaid at his first news conference as commander.

But in interviews with numerous soldiers here, it is clear that while many are bitter about the long deployment and uncertain departure dates, more accept those facts as unpleasant realities of their job. "We want to go home, but nobody`s going to mutiny," Lowrey said.

"It`s definitely stressful, but it`s no different than what I saw years ago," said Staff Sgt. Paul E. Stevens, 53, a Vietnam veteran and the oldest member of Charlie Company. "It`s pretty common for people to complain. It`s always been that way."

For National Guard troops, whose role is fast expanding in U.S. military strategy, the frustration of being away from home has added dimensions. Most of them are older soldiers, many in their thirties, who left active duty and thought their combat days were behind them.

"We are not weekend warriors anymore, we are in the line of fire," said Rich Arnold, a spokesman for the National Guard Association, a private Washington-based group that lobbies on behalf of the Guard. "A lot of people who signed up for the Guard are not used to the mission they have been given in the last two years."

Reggie Saville, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, an office of the Defense Department, said that 90,000 Army and Air National Guard personnel have been mobilized for the Iraq war and another 26,000 have been placed on alert for possible deployment.

Saville said that is the largest number of Guard troops in combat since the Korean War; 75,000 were mobilized for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He also noted that Guard units have been in combat in Iraq longer than at any time since the Vietnam War.

"It`s had an effect on small-town U.S.A.," Arnold said, noting that many municipalities are missing their police officers, firefighters, shopkeepers and others who have been called up. "It`s had a ripple effect."

At least six National Guardsmen have been killed in combat in Iraq, Saville said. None was killed by hostile fire in the Gulf War, although several were killed in non-combat accidents.

He said the Guard`s changing role is largely due to the fallout from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Everything is changing for the Guard. . . . We never had the World Trade Center [attack] before," he said.

Of the U.S. Army`s 10 combat divisions, the equivalent of six are already here in Iraq. With troops stretched thin, the National Guard has been called up in record numbers.

After marching through the desert during the war, the soldiers of Charlie Company are now assigned to provide security for the Baghdad Convention Center, where Iraq`s new Governing Council was introduced last weekend.

The soldiers have turned two lounges into temporary barracks filled with wall-to-wall canvas cots and the usual decorations of soldiers at war: photos of their children in football uniforms, calendars of sports cars and pinups, portable DVD players and an armory`s worth of flak jackets, machine guns and grenade launchers.

They say it is nicer than the sheep pen they camped in for almost a week when they arrived in Baghdad on May 28. And the showers in the basement are better than their old "bird baths," their name for giving themselves showers with baby wipes and a bucket of water.

Most are used to the conditions. Probably three-quarters of the unit`s members have served in the military on active duty, and many fought in the Gulf War. But most said they thought their wartime days were behind them and that National Guard duty would consist simply of the standard training formula: one weekend a month, plus two weeks a year.

Lowrey and others said they had no regrets about coming to Iraq and still believed they were doing important work that will improve life here. But they said the financial burden on them was generally greater than on full-time, active duty soldiers who are accustomed to a military salary.

"There`s a lot of guys who have had to give up jobs and sacrifice all kinds of salary to be here," said Lowrey, who had to close his private investigator`s business because of his long absence. He estimated that he is losing at least $1,200 a month while away from home.

Spec. Jared Cruze, 36, a 1985 graduate of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, joined the Guard because of Sept. 11. He had an aunt who worked in the World Trade Center and an uncle who worked in the Pentagon. Three weeks after the attacks, he enlisted in the Guard in his new home town of Orlando.

"We don`t mind doing our job here, but we had seven days to get ready to come here," Cruze said. "It`s a crusher, mentally and physically."

Cruze said the long deployment to Iraq has cost him financially. He said he makes more money tending bar in Orlando for a night or two than he does in a week in the Guard. And his plans to start his own business have been put on ice.

"It`s definitely hit my pocket, and hit it hard," said Cruze, who predicted that an increasing combat role for the National Guard would cut enlistments. "Retention rates in the Guards will hit an all-time low."

Everyone in the unit said Wershow`s death was the worst moment of going to war. Wershow was killed by a single bullet to the head on July 6 as he was walking out of a cafeteria at Baghdad University, where he was providing security to visiting American education specialists.

Charlie Company is part of the 2nd Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard, which dates to the 1880s. Wershow was the unit`s first combat casualty since 1945, said Saville, the Pentagon official.

Sgt. Robert Hardwick was with Wershow when he was killed. They had separated for just a moment, while Wershow went into a cafeteria for a soda. Hardwick said he watched him go in, buy the drink and emerge with a grin on his face. They made eye contact, then Hardwick said he turned away for a moment and heard a single gunshot, fired point-blank by an assailant who disappeared back into the crowd.

"I`ve seen a lot of death in my life," said Hardwick, 32, a police officer in St. Augustine who was on active duty with the 82nd Airborne Division from 1989 to 1993 and served in the Gulf War. "But when it hits so close to home, it`s harder to swallow."

Sgt. Daniel Jackson, 39, who works for UPS and served 11 years on active duty, including in the Gulf War, said that despite the hardships the soldiers are enduring, he is not ready to go home. He said he has been nagged for years by the thought that the U.S. military left Iraq too early in 1991, and that the Iraqi people continued to suffer terribly under Saddam Hussein.

"We`ve all made sacrifices and we all want to go home," Jackson said. "But if we leave now and nothing changes, missing my son Daniel`s high school graduation was for nothing. I want to make sure our sacrifices mean something."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
A Mad Dash Across the Desert In the Land Where Ali Baba Lives


By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 19, 2003; Page C01


BAGHDAD -- War is hell, and Ali Baba works at its tollbooth.

Actually, lots of Ali Babas do. That`s the nickname given to thieves in Iraq, a reference to the Forty Thieves tale in "1001 Arabian Nights." In that story, Ali Baba stole from highwaymen. On the 600-mile desert road from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, he was the guy with an AK-47 who might steal from me. Or at least that`s what everybody said.

With Baghdad International Airport closed to commercial flights, about the only ways to get to this grim city are down a couple of exceptionally long and lonely roads: one from Jordan to the west, and one from Kuwait to the south.

The Ali Babas here have turned that into a business opportunity. With alarming regularity, they have been robbing cars plying the routes. Many of those cars have been filled with journalists loaded down with expensive satellite phones and thick wads of cash. The Ali Babas are now collecting it all like a road tax.

A recent risk report from a British security company noted that "robbers are pretty content to open fire at vehicles to stop them" along the road from Jordan. It noted that in one two-hour period a week ago, four of five convoys traveling the road were held up. A "large American TV network" had two vehicles robbed by Ali Babas with an AK-47 and a 9mm pistol.

"The robber with the pistol fired two rounds through the windscreen of the crew`s vehicle exactly where the driver`s head would have been if he had not ducked," the report noted.

With that report in hand, I joined a convoy headed for Baghdad earlier this week.

We left Amman at 4 a.m. for the four-hour drive to the Iraqi border. The scenery never changed. The road cut through empty, flat desert stretching to the horizon in every direction. It looked like an ocean, without the benefit of color or motion. It was brown and dead, like the bottom of the Earth`s foot.

The border station was filled with U.S. soldiers and mighty photos of Saddam Hussein with the heads rubbed out. We handed over our passports, got a grunt and a stamp, traded a "howdy" or two with the young GIs, then walked into Iraq, which had all the charm of the Jordanian desert with the additional pleasure of Ali Baba.

That`s when we met Willy and Mitch.

They are "security consultants" on contract to CNN, which was kind enough to let me tag along in their convoy to Baghdad. Willy and Mitch are the kind of guys you expect to meet around the edges of a war zone: unshaven, cocksure and hard as a submarine`s hull. If Rhodesia still existed, they`d be in the bar there -- or maybe Angola or Kosovo. Willy is Scottish, Mitch is an Aussie. Nobody made kilt or kangaroo jokes.

In sum, they were the most beautiful thing I had seen all day.

Willy stood in a border gas station, where the day was already as hot as a pizza oven, and laid it all out for us.

He and Mitch had just led another convoy out of Baghdad to the border and encountered no problems. But Ali Baba had been busy anyway. A car 10 minutes behind their convoy had "got done" by thieves. No worries, said Willy, that wasn`t going to happen to us.

We would travel in five Chevrolet Suburbans. Willy and Mitch`s two "colleagues" -- one an Arab and one a side of beef with male pattern balding -- would drive in the front car. Willy and Mitch would drive in the last car. The second and fourth Suburbans were packed with CNN gear. And the "packages" -- three CNN employees and I -- would be sandwiched into the middle car, like a load of bananas.

It would be about five hours to Baghdad, Willy said. Only the last two hours were really dangerous, the stomping ground of Ali Baba, but we`d need to stay alert. We set off in formation and crossed the brown expanse at just under 100 mph.

We drove for three hours, seeing nothing, except for small picnic areas every few dozen miles, filled with round concrete tables under plastic umbrellas. We pondered the weird idea of happy family picnics there.

Just outside Ramadi, about 100 miles from Baghdad, we stopped at a gas station. On Willy`s orders, we hauled on our bulletproof flak jackets and one of the CNN people pulled on her black military helmet.

"Okay," Willy said, in his cheeriest Sean Connery voice. "Let`s run the badlands."

A few minutes later, Willy was on the radio with instructions.

"If a vehicle comes up alongside you and shows a weapon, either a pistol or a Kalashnikov, give a shout on the radio," he said. "We handle it. And if anything happens, keep on going, and we`ll stay and handle the situation."

The word "situation" stayed with us.

Then a yellow Chrysler taxi, as out of place on that road as a camel in Times Square, pulled up alongside us fast, and forced its way into second position in the convoy. There was puckering. Before we could reach for the radio, Mitch flew past us in his white Suburban, with Willy sitting in the back seat, perked up like a Kalashnikov-toting bird. They jammed in behind the Chrysler and began, almost literally, pushing it out of our line. It was a false alarm. Turned out the taxi driver was merely clueless, and had no idea how close he came to the Ali Baba Exterminator. After Mitch and Willy had "pushed him out of our sights a bit," we sped up.

"Lead on, Macbeth," Willy said over the radio. When we finally crossed the Euphrates and reached Baghdad, our driver, a Jordanian who had not spoken for hours, turned to us with the good news: "Here okay," he said. "Ali Baba finished."

With the Ali Baba threat behind us, we all relaxed and exhaled. Then we pulled into the streets of Baghdad, saw the buildings reduced to scrap by missiles and bombs. Tanks and Humvees filled with U.S. soldiers rolled along, watching for the invisible attackers who have killed more than 30 of them in recent weeks. As the newsreel of fear and destruction played past us out the windows, we suddenly remembered that we had forgotten: Ali Baba was the least of our worries.

There`s a war on here.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
How to Cool Down U.S.-German Relations: Have a Draft


By Nora Boustany

Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A14


Is the season of furor over between Washington and Berlin? Nothing but beer under the bridge?

For their first meeting in Washington after a slow but sure way back to better relations, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell surprised his German counterpart, Joschka Fischer, during a formal State Department lunch Wednesday by producing a case of beer. The classic German bottles were empty, but their caps had been refastened, according to German Embassy officials.

"I have this beautiful gift for you," Powell announced in his usual deadpan style, to roars of laughter. The lager had been offered to Powell on his last visit to Berlin in May, because he had once mentioned he missed those old-fashioned, re-sealable bottles, which could be put back in the fridge for later and cooler consumption.

Talk about a knack for ice-breaking diplomacy. "I could not find anyone who would take these back," Powell quipped, making light of Germans` prickliness about waste and the environment.

The Middle East "road map," postwar Iraq, Iran`s nuclear program and Afghanistan, where Germany has 3,000 troops, were among the topics Fischer discussed over the past two days with Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney.

On Iraq, Fischer said Germany was ready to contribute to humanitarian efforts, but indicated that his country`s decision not to send troops was unchanged. Fischer made that comment after Powell told a reporter that he had updated Fischer on the nations that have offered to assist in peacekeeping and stabilization efforts in Iraq and on conversations with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

"I think the relevant Security Council Resolution 1483 made it quite clear that the responsibility on the ground is in the hands of the coalition," Fischer told reporters Wednesday. "We are not part of the coalition."

A transcript of Powell`s and Fischer`s comments was made available yesterday on the German Embassy`s Web site.

The German ambassador, Wolfgang Ischinger, said Germany`s position was not challenged in meetings with administration officials, although some U.S. legislators questioned Fischer on what the United States could do to prod European countries to become more involved. The ambassador said Fischer emphasized that a more central role for the United Nations was very important in the overall effort of peacekeeping and nation-building, so Iraqis would ultimately view the coalition`s actions as liberating.

Ischinger noted as significant Cheney`s and Powell`s reaffirmation that the U.S.-German relationship had not gone under despite difficulties. "We are back to what we had been trying to restore, a normal working relationship," he said.

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Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, July 18, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/18/MN24…


Fallujah, Iraq -- Morale is dipping pretty low among U.S. soldiers as they stew in Iraq`s broiling heat, get shot at by an increasingly hostile population and get repeated orders to extend their tours of duty.

Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you`ll get an earful of colorful complaints.

But going public isn`t always easy, as soldiers of the Army`s Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.

The brigade`s soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They`ve been away from home since September, and this week`s announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.

It was bad news for the division`s 12,000 homesick soldiers, who were at the forefront of the force that overthrew Saddam Hussein`s government and moved into Baghdad in early April.

On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he`d been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.

The retaliation from Washington was swift.


CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."

First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don`t ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you`re giving the sort of chin-forward, everything`s-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.

Only two days before the ABC show, similarly bitter sentiments -- with no names attached -- were voiced in an anonymous e-mail circulating around the Internet, allegedly from "the soldiers of the Second Brigade, Third ID."

"Our morale is not high or even low," the letter said. "Our morale is nonexistent. We have been told twice that we were going home, and twice we have received a `stop` movement to stay in Iraq."

The message, whose authenticity could not be confirmed, concluded: "Our men and women deserve to be treated like the heroes they are, not like farm animals. Our men and women deserve to see their loved ones again and deserve to come home."

After this one-two punch, it was perhaps natural that on Thursday, the same troops and officers who had been garrulous and outspoken in previous visits were quiet, and most declined to speak on the record. During a visit to Fallujah, a small city about 30 miles west of Baghdad, military officials expressed intense chagrin about the bad publicity. And they slammed the ABC reporters for focusing on the soldiers` criticism of Rumsfeld, Bush and other officials and implying that they are unwilling to carry out their mission.


COMPLAINTS CALLED ROUTINE
"Soldiers have bitched since the beginning of time," said Capt. James Brownlee, the public affairs officer for the Second Brigade. "That`s part of being a soldier. They bitch. But what does `bad morale` really mean? That they`re not combat-ready or loyal? Nobody here fits that definition."

The nervousness of the brass has a venerable history. It has long been a practice in American democracy that the military do not criticize the nation`s civilian leaders, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur found out in 1951, when he criticized President Harry Truman`s Korean War strategy -- and was promptly fired.

Yet several U.S. officers said privately that troop morale is indeed low. "The problem is not the heat," said one high-ranking officer. "Soldiers get used to that. The problem is getting orders to go home, so your wife gets all psyched about it, then getting them reversed, and then having the same process two more times."

In Baghdad, average soldiers from other Army brigades are eager to spill similar complaints.

"I`m not sure people in Washington really know what it`s like here," said Corp. Todd Burchard as he stood on a street corner, sweating profusely and looking bored. "We`ll keep doing our jobs as best as anyone can, but we shouldn`t have to still be here in the first place."

Nearby, Pfc. Jason Ring stood next to his Humvee. "We liberated Iraq. Now the people here don`t want us here, and guess what? We don`t want to be here either," he said. "So why are we still here? Why don`t they bring us home?"

E-mail Robert Collier at [e-mail].

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Cheney task force took early interest in Iraqi oil, group says
Judicial Watch releases documents that include map of energy facilities
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Associated Press
Originally published July 19, 2003






WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney`s energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq`s oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released yesterday by a private watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department papers that included a detailed map of Iraq`s oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The papers also included a detailed map of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates and a list of oil and gas development projects in those two countries.

The papers were dated early March 2001, about two months before the Cheney energy task force completed and announced its report on the administration`s energy needs and future energy agenda.

Judicial Watch obtained the papers as part of a lawsuit by it and the Sierra Club to open to the public information used by the task force in developing President Bush`s energy plan.

Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president, said he had no way to guess what interest the task force had in the information, but "it shows why it is important that we learn what was going on in the task force."

"Opponents of the war are going to point to the documents as evidence that oil was on the minds of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq," said Fitton. "Supporters will say they were only evaluating oil reserves in the Mideast, and the likelihood of future oil production."

The task force report was released in May 2001.

In it, a chapter titled "Strengthening Global Alliances" calls the Middle East "central to world oil security" and urges support for initiatives by the region`s oil producers to open their energy sectors to foreign investment.

The chapter does not mention Iraq, which has the world`s second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Trevor Francis, a Commerce Department spokesman, said the people at the department who worked with the Cheney task force were not available.

He said he was not familiar with the papers and referred questions to Cheney`s office.

A spokeswoman for the vice president did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment yesterday.

A two-page document obtained with the map and released by Judicial Watch lists, as of March 2001, companies in 30 countries that had an interest in contracts to help then-President Saddam Hussein develop Iraq`s oil wealth.

The involvement of Russia and France has been documented.

Also on the list were companies from Canada, Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, India and Mexico. Even Vietnam had interest in a service contract and, according to the paper, was close to signing an agreement in October 1999.

Nearly 40,000 pages of internal documents from various departments and agencies have been made public related to the Cheney task force`s work under the Judicial Watch-Sierra Club lawsuit.

The task force has refused to turn over any of its papers.

http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.oil19jul…

http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun | Get home delivery

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Lying -- a Bush Family Value
By Robert Parry
July 18, 2003
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In most cases, it wouldn’t matter much that a 40-year-old long-time heavy drinker refused to admit to his alcoholism, nor that years later, he continued to play word games when asked about his cocaine use. Doctors might say that denial isn’t good for a person’s recovery, but that wouldn’t affect the rest of us.

Click here for printable version

The difference in this case is that the substance abuser somehow became president of the United States. And by hiding his earlier problems, George W. Bush learned what is becoming a dangerous lesson – that his family and political connections can protect him from the truth.

Politicians with less powerful friends may pay dearly for their little lies or perceived exaggerations, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore learned. But the Bushes are not like lesser-born men. The Bushes have asserted themselves as a kind of American royalty. When the rare question about their truthfulness penetrates the outer defenses, aides step in to spin the facts, or a cowed news media minimizes the offense, or if necessary, some subordinate takes the fall.

Meanwhile, the American people are supposed to bend over backward with testimonials, saying it would be unthinkable that "straight-shooting" George W. Bush would ever intentionally mislead the people. The Bushes simply aren’t capable of lying, even when the public is watching a train wreck of lies about the reasons for the Iraq War.

The American public`s not even supposed to notice when Bush – as recently as July 14 – altered key facts about how the war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein began earlier this year. "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in," Bush said at the White House. "After a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power."

With U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan sitting next to him and White House reporters in front of him, Bush lied. In reality, Hussein’s government had allowed the U.N. inspectors to scour the countryside for months and was even complying with U.N. demands to destroy missiles that exceeded the range permitted by international sanctions.

In early March, U.N. inspectors were requesting more time for their work and noting that the Iraqis finally were filling in details about how they had destroyed earlier stockpiles of weapons. But Bush cut the inspections short and launched his invasion.

Now, asserting a kind of kingly right to say whatever he wishes without contradiction, Bush revised the history to put himself in a more favorable light. The lie was so obvious that some Bush watchers suggest it indicates either a growing brazenness in his deceptions or a disconnect between Bush’s mind and reality.

Still, Bush continues to chastise those who question his honesty about the Iraq War as "historical revisionists." He accuses them of trying to rewrite or falsify the history. Meanwhile, Bush’s own rewriting of the prologue to the Iraq War drew only passing notice from a U.S. news media that still accepts the myth of Bush, the "straight shooter."

A Family Legacy

Bush’s words and deeds around the Iraq War suggest that deception was one lesson that George W. Bush learned from his father.

With his blue-blood connections and his CIA experience, George H.W. Bush understood the expediency of truth. From his CIA tradecraft, the elder Bush also knew how a population could be manipulated through lies, which could then be covered up or forgotten in the glow of victory.

As CIA chief in 1976, the elder Bush led the counterattack against the historic congressional and press investigations of CIA abuses, including the agency’s involvement in assassinations of foreign leaders. Those cover-ups reached into Bush`s own tenure at the CIA, with efforts to frustrate an investigation into the murder of Chile`s ex-foreign minister Orlando Letelier, who was blown up while driving down Embassy Row in Washington on Sept. 21, 1976.

Though Bush promised that his CIA would do all it could to help identify the killers, senior CIA officials instead took actions to divert investigators away from the real killers – agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a Bush favorite.

Bush`s CIA leaked a phony intelligence finding to Newsweek magazine. "The Chilean secret police were not involved," the CIA told Newsweek. "The agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile`s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime." [Newsweek, Oct. 11, 1976]

Years later, prosecutors would learn that the CIA had important evidence linking Chile`s secret police to the assassination – assassin Michael Townley even had claimed the purpose of his trip to the United States was to visit the CIA – but CIA director Bush withheld that information. "Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case," said federal prosecutor Eugene Propper. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com "Bush & the Condor Mystery."]

Iran Capers

The senior Bush`s hand appeared in other intelligence mysteries of the era. In 1980, with the Republican Party desperate to regain power, then-vice presidential nominee Bush allegedly joined other senior Republicans in secret talks with the radical Iranian government, obstructing President Jimmy Carter`s attempts to win the release of 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Carter’s failure paved the way for Ronald Reagan`s election, followed by the release of the hostages on Reagan`s Inauguration Day. [For details on George H.W. Bush’s role in these events, see Consortiumnews.com’s "October Surprise X-Files" or Robert Parry’s Trick or Treason.]

Later, the elder Bush became enmeshed in other secret negotiations with Iran, the illegal Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme. But he was always careful to cover his tracks. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke in fall 1986, Bush asserted that he was "not in the loop." He then got help from Representatives Dick Cheney and Henry Hyde, who protected Bush’s political flanks as the investigation wound through Congress in 1987.

By the time the elder Bush secured the Republican nomination for president in 1988, his role in the Iran-Contra scandal had been carefully concealed from the voters and was treated as "old news" by much of the U.S. news media.

In summer 1988, Bush still found himself trailing Democrat Michael Dukakis in the polls. So Bush realized that another lie was in order. Since the Massachusetts governor was refusing to rule out the possibility of a tax increase as a "last resort," Dukakis was open to a charge that he was a "tax-and-spend" liberal. Bush sealed the deal in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. After mocking Dukakis’s "last resort" comment, Bush declared, "Read my lips: No new taxes."

The lie helped the elder Bush get what he wanted: the presidency. He then broke his "read-my-lips" pledge by agreeing to raise federal taxes.

In 1992, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh uncovered evidence that proved George H.W. Bush was very much in the loop on the arms-for-hostages operation and had misled the American people. But Bush stanched further disclosures about his secret involvement with Iran’s fundamentalist government by pardoning a half dozen Iran-Contra defendants on Dec. 24, 1992. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com`s "Bush Family Politics."]

A Strategy

This strategy of expedient lies, mixed with aggressive cover-ups, has served the younger Bush well, too. He ducked the cocaine-use question with a clever answer about being qualified to serve in his father’s White House – where time limits were set for disqualifying employees over illegal drug use. He one-upped his father’s "no-new-taxes" pledge with his own promise to cut taxes while paying off the federal debt.

Handing out nicknames to reporters, the back-slapping George W. Bush skipped through Campaign 2000 with even less press criticism than his father got. More importantly, he escaped the scrutiny that the press corps concentrated on Gore, whose every utterance was dissected for possible signs of exaggeration or deception.

Bush was, after all, a Bush, who was expected to restore "honor" and "dignity" to the White House. [For more details on the imbalanced campaign coverage, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Protecting Bush-Cheney," or "Bush`s Life of Deception."]

Once Bush was in the White House, the news media routinely hailed him as a "straight shooter," a man the people could trust. That image became self-perpetuating even as many of Bush’s central campaign promises crumbled.

For instance, Bush’s vision of paying off the federal debt, doling out large tax cuts and still having plenty of money in reserve for emergencies has turned out to be a bitter myth. While Bush won passage of three major tax cuts, supposedly reversing his father’s "mistake" of violating his no-new-taxes pledge, Bush also has encountered the logical result of what Gore derided during Campaign 2000 as "fuzzy math."

After inheriting a $290 billion surplus from Clinton, Bush has piloted the United States into a vast ocean of red ink. The latest White House estimates project a federal deficit this year of $455 billion, only to be exceeded next year by a deficit of $475 billion, figures that actually understate the scope of the problem by applying a $150 billion surplus from the Social Security trust fund. The actual government deficits will top $600 billion, according to the White House projections.

In breaking his balanced-budget pledge, Bush even employed what looks like another lie. He claimed over and over again in speeches during 2002 that he had left himself an escape hatch. He claimed to have stated during a campaign swing in Chicago in 2000 that he would only run a deficit in the event of a war, a national emergency or a recession. "Never did I dream we’d have a trifecta," Bush joshed in what some critics saw as a tasteless joke about the Sept. 11 murders of more than 3,000 people.

As the New Republic later reported, another problem with the supposed escape-hatch remark was that nobody could find a record of Bush ever making it during the campaign. It later turned out that Gore, not Bush, had offered a similar formulation about the three kinds of situations that could justify a deficit.

The Iraq Case

Even more dramatically, this say-whatever-is-needed strategy has carried over into issues of war and peace. Last year, as Bush decided to drive the American people to war, like so many cattle being herded to market, he and his administration engaged in wholesale misrepresentations of the dangers posed by Iraq.

While much attention has focused recently on Bush’s use of the apparently bogus claim that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger or some other African country, that was only one element of Bush’s larger strategy of deception.

In pushing the emotional hot button of nuclear war, Bush and his aides also cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as evidence of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program. Scientific experts concluded that the tubes were unfit for that purpose. Still, the notion of a nuclear-armed Iraq succeeded in spooking the American people. "We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," declared White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002.

Bush and his team also hyped claims of an Iraqi connection to al-Qaeda, causing nearly half the American public to believe falsely that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Bush and his administration insisted, too, that Iraq had trigger-ready weapons of mass destruction consisting of tons of chemical and biological weapons. The administration also said the Iraqis had unmanned aerial vehicles that somehow could spray these lethal agents over the United States. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Misleading the Nation to War."]

As crude as these lies and exaggerations may appear in retrospect, they worked. Bush got what he wanted. Congress granted him the authority to go to war, and by significant percentages, the American public supported Bush launching a pre-emptive invasion against a country that was not threatening hostilities against the United States.

The distortions were less effective with the United Nations and with world public opinion. Despite a much-praised performance displaying satellite photographs and intercepted phone calls, Secretary of State Colin Powell failed to convince the U.N. Security Council that U.S. intelligence had solid proof of its allegations that Iraq was hiding vast stores of WMD.

In reality, Powell’s presentation was just an extension of the administration’s propaganda drive – the photographs proved nothing and Powell even grafted incriminating words onto the transcript of one intercepted conversation. But Powell, a media favorite, suffered little from his dishonest performance. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Bush`s Alderaan."]

A majority of the U.N. Security Council refused to authorize war and pressed for additional time to let U.N. weapons inspectors complete their searches for Iraqi weapons. Bush, however, insisted that the danger posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction required immediate action and he launched the invasion on March 19.

Uncertain Victory

In three weeks, the U.S.-led invasion had defeated the Iraqi army and ousted Hussein’s government in Baghdad. Thousands of Iraqis were killed along with more than 100 U.S. soldiers, but American forces found nothing resembling Bush’s pre-war assertions about tons of WMD.

Belatedly, as U.S. soldiers continue to die in a growing guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation, the American news media has begun to focus on the disparity between the pre-war claims and the facts on the ground. Nevertheless, the Bush administration’s distortion of intelligence and outright lies have continued unabated.

The CIA and the Pentagon issued a report in May alleging that two captured trailers amounted to proof that the Iraqis had a mobile biological weapons program. The report rejected explanations from Iraqi scientists that the trailers were for producing hydrogen for weather balloons used for targeting artillery.

"Those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons are wrong," Bush declared, referring to the mobile labs. "We found them." However, more detailed analysis of the trailers by U.K. and U.S. experts determined that the trailers were unfit for biological weapon production and appear to have been for making hydrogen as the Iraqis had claimed. [For one of the first critiques of the CIA-Pentagon report, see Consortiumnews.com`s "America`s Matrix."]

Bush`s revisionist history about the prelude to war – cited above – is just another example of the continuing pattern of lies and cover-up.

Still, for the U.S. news media, there remains a great hesitancy about stating the obvious, calling Bush a liar. It’s one thing to suggest that Bush was badly served by his staff on the Iraqi intelligence, but it remains outside the bounds to conclude that Bush willfully lied to the American people.

The evidence, however, indicates that Bush played a central role in the deception campaign. Last January, for instance, the White House portrayed Bush as the man in charge of the State of the Union address. He edited the drafts, the White House said. He wrote notes in the margins. He gave his speech writers pointers.

It`s now clear that Bush’s aides, in turn, pressed the CIA to let Bush use the strongest possible language about Iraq’s alleged pursuit of uranium in Africa. Bush’s speech then exaggerated the uranium claim even more, giving millions of Americans the impression that the uranium allegations were true, even as Bush’s own intelligence officials thought the charges were bogus.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush said in the speech. His "has learned" construction conveyed a sense of accuracy about the charges. Still, even in a story about Bush’s uranium deceptions, Time magazine observed what it calls "the faith Americans had in his essential trustworthiness." [See Time’s "A Question of Trust," posted July 13, 2003]

National Denial

The discrepancy between the Bush as presented by the news media and the Bush who seems so ready to deceive has created confusion among many Middle Americans, who only now are beginning to question Bush’s honesty.

"I’d like to know whether there was any deliberate attempt to deceive," said Jim Stock, a 70-year-old retired school administrator who voted for Bush in 2000. "My feeling is there was not. But there was an eagerness in the administration to pursue the battle and to believe information that wasn’t quite good. … It’s painful to say, but I don’t like where this is coming down." [NYT, July 17, 2003]

So how did this national denial about Bush’s apparent dishonesty develop? Why does the U.S. press corps fail to hold the Bushes to the same standard of honesty demanded of other politicians? How do the Bushes maintain a reputation for honesty when the facts don’t square with that image?

Part of the answer, of course, lies in the power of the Bush defenders to trash anyone who questions that image of integrity. Already, Bush’s defenders are heaping ridicule on those who challenge Bush over his Iraqi deceptions. "The flap over who baked the yellowcake uranium story is so transparently political that it is tempting to ignore," sniffed a Wall Street Journal editorial. [July 14, 2003]

And if past history is any guide, one must assume that Bush may well wriggle away from this latest attention to his half-truths and lies. Nevertheless, Americans will still have a chance in November 2004 to enforce some accountability on this Bush. With the U.S. deficit soaring to record heights, with the U.S. economy shedding more than two million jobs and with American troops dying in Iraq, the voters may be less and less tolerant about Bush’s casual relationship with the truth.

Perhaps, finally, the American people will demand that the Bushes no longer be treated like a protected royal family, but rather like the rest of us who pay a price when our words and the facts don`t fit.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/071803a.html

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 9:24 a.m. EDT July 19, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

A U.S. soldier guarding a bank in Baghdad has become the 149th American combat casualty since the war in Iraq began. The soldier was killed by small arms fire -- just as military officials were wrapping up two operations that netted hundreds of arrests and thousands of weapons.
The military says it has wrapped up Operation Ivy Serpent and Operation Soda Mountain. Some 1,200 people were detained in the two sweeps, including 112 suspected of close ties to the former Saddam Hussein regime.
A U.S. soldier was killed Friday when a bomb was detonated by remote control at a traffic circle near the main bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah.
A U.S. serviceman was injured Friday when the convoy he was in was attacked north of Baghdad with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Three vehicles in the convoy were damaged in the attack.
On the northern outskirts of Baghdad, a gasoline tanker arriving from Turkey was hit by a Molotov cocktail thrown from a passing car. The Turkish driver jumped from his truck when the engine caught fire and was unharmed.
Soldiers who complained on camera about conditions in Iraq may be punished for their remarks. Military rules forbid criticism of superior officers. General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, says it`s up to the soldiers` direct commanders to decide if they`ll be punished.
Retired General Jay Garner has told a House panel that American troops are engaged in a guerrilla war in Iraq. The former administrator of the U.S. reconstruction team in Iraq says the U.S. has no choice but to stay the course. He says if the U.S. should pull out now, and Saddam Hussein is still alive, there`s no doubt he would return.
A U.S. intelligence official says a new audio tape of a man claiming to be Saddam Hussein is probably authentic. On the recording, which surfaced this week, the man criticizes the new Governing Council of Iraq -- which was formed Sunday.

URANIUM CONTROVERSY
The White House has released parts of an intelligence assessment on Iraq compiled last fall. It says there was "compelling evidence" that Saddam Hussein was trying to revive a nuclear weapons program. And it included unsubstantiated reports that he attempted to buy uranium in Africa. That claim has now been discredited.

BRITAIN-WEAPONS
British police searched the home of a weapons expert Saturday for clues to a death which has plunged Prime Minister Tony Blair`s government deeper into controversy of the intelligence used to justify war in Iraq. An eight-member police search team entered the home of former U.N. weapons inspector David Kelly, a day after he was tentatively identified as the man found dead. Blair has promised a full inquiry.

TROOPS RETURN
About 175 members of the 23rd Fighter Group`s 75th Fighter Squadron have returned home from Iraq. The pilots and air crews arrived at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina about 5 a.m. after spending about five months supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. The squadron was replaced at Tallil Air Base in Iraq by the 74th Fighter Squadron from Pope.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Patriot Act I wurde am 25.10.01 beschlossen. Nun Kommt Patriot Act II . On Jan. 10, 2003, he(Ahscroft) sent around a draft of PATRIOT II; this time, called "The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003."

Get Ready for PATRIOT II

By Matt Welch, AlterNet
April 2, 2003

The "fog of war" obscures more than just news from the battlefield. It also provides cover for radical domestic legislation, especially ill-considered liberty-for-security swaps, which have been historically popular at the onset of major conflicts.


The last time allied bombs fell over a foreign capital, the Bush Administration rammed through the USA PATRIOT Act, a clever acronym for maximum with-us-or-against-us leverage (the full name is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism").


Remarkably, this 342-page law was written, passed (by a 98-1 vote in the U.S. Senate) and signed into law within seven weeks of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. As a result, the government gained new power to wiretap phones, confiscate property of suspected terrorists, spy on its own citizens without judicial review, conduct secret searches, snoop on the reading habits of library users, and so General John Ashcroft wants to finish the job. On Jan. 10, 2003, he sent around a draft of PATRIOT II; this time, called "The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003." The more than 100 new provisions, Justice Department spokesperson Mark Corallo told the Village Voice recently, "will be filling in the holes" of PATRIOT I, "refining things that will enable us to do our job."


Though Ashcroft and his mouthpieces have issued repeated denials that the draft represents anything like a finished proposal, the Voice reported that: "Corallo confirmed ... that such measures were coming soon."


You can read the entire 87-page draft here. Constitutional watchdog Nat Hentoff has called it "the most radical government plan in our history to remove from Americans their liberties under the Bill of Rights." Some of DSEA`s more draconian provisions:



Americans could have their citizenship revoked, if found to have contributed "material support" to organizations deemed by the government, even retroactively, to be "terrorist." As Hentoff wrote in the Feb. 28 Village Voice: "Until now, in our law, an American could only lose his or her citizenship by declaring a clear intent to abandon it. But – and read this carefully from the new bill – `the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct.`" (Italics Hentoff`s.)



Legal permanent residents (like, say, my French wife), could be deported instantaneously, without a criminal charge or even evidence, if the Attorney General considers them a threat to national security. If they commit minor, non-terrorist offenses, they can still be booted out, without so much as a day in court, because the law would exempt habeas corpus review in some cases. As the American Civil Liberties Union stated in its long brief against the DSEA, "Congress has not exempted any person from habeas corpus – a protection guaranteed by the Constitution – since the Civil War."



The government would be instructed to build a mammoth database of citizen DNA information, aimed at "detecting, investigating, prosecuting, preventing or responding to terrorist activities." Samples could be collected without a court order; one need only be suspected of wrongdoing by a law enforcement officer. Those refusing the cheek-swab could be fined $200,000 and jailed for a year. "Because no federal genetic privacy law regulates DNA databases, privacy advocates fear that the data they contain could be misused," Wired News reported March 31. "People with `flawed` DNA have already suffered genetic discrimination at the hands of employers, insurance companies and the government."



Authorities could wiretap anybody for 15 days, and snoop on anyone`s Internet usage (including chat and email), all without obtaining a warrant.



The government would be specifically instructed not to release any information about detainees held on suspicion of terrorist activities, until they are actually charged with a crime. Or, as Hentoff put it, "for the first time in U.S. history, secret arrests will be specifically permitted."



Businesses that rat on their customers to the Feds – even if the information violates privacy agreements, or is, in fact, dead wrong – would be granted immunity. "Such immunity," the ACLU contended, "could provide an incentive for neighbor to spy on neighbor and pose problems similar to those inherent in Attorney General Ashcroft`s Operation TIPS."



Police officers carrying out illegal searches would also be granted legal immunity if they were just carrying out orders.



Federal "consent decrees" limiting local law enforcement agencies` abilities to spy on citizens in their jurisdiction would be rolled back. As Howard Simon, executive director of Florida`s ACLU, noted in a March 19 column in the Sarasota Herald Tribune: "The restrictions on political surveillance were hard-fought victories for civil liberties during the 1970s."



American citizens could be subject to secret surveillance by their own government on behalf of foreign countries, including dictatorships.



The death penalty would be expanded to cover 15 new offenses.



And many of PATRIOT I`s "sunset provisions" – stipulating that the expanded new enforcement powers would be rescinded in 2005 – would be erased from the books, cementing Ashcroft`s rushed legislation in the law books. As UPI noted March 10, "These sunset provisions were a concession to critics of the bill in Congress."


I wouldn`t be writing this article today had an alarmed Justice Department staffer not leaked the draft to the Center for Public Integrity in early February. Ashcroft, up to that point, had repeatedly refused to even discuss what his lawyers might be cooking up. But if 10,000 residents of Los Angeles had been vaporized by a "suitcase nuke" in late January, it is reasonable to assume that the then-secret proposal would have been speed-delivered for a congressional vote, even though Congress has not so far participated in drafting the legislation (which is, after all, its Constitutional role).


As a result of the leak, and the ensuing bad press, opposition to the measure has had time to gather momentum before the first bomb was dropped on Saddam`s bunker. Some of the criticism has originated from the right side of the political spectrum – a March 17 open letter to Congress was signed not only by the ACLU and People for the American Way, but the cultural-conservative think tank Free Congress Foundation, the Gun Owners of America, the American Conservative Union, and more.


One does not have to believe that Ashcroft is a Constitution-shredding ghoul to find these measures alarming, improper and possibly illegal. Glancing over the list above, and at the other DSEA literature, I can see multiple ways in which a Fed with a grudge could legally ruin my life. Removing checks and balances on law enforcement assumes perfect behavior on the part of the police.


Safeguarding civil liberties is an unpopular project in the most placid of times. Since Sept. 11, the Bush Administration has shown that it will push the envelope on nearly every restriction it considers to be impeding its prosecution of the war on terrorism. This single-minded drive requires extreme vigilance, before the fog of war becomes toxic.


Detailed critiques of the Patriot II draft have been prepared by the ACLU and the Center for Public Integrity. The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights also has a useful 98-page report on post-Sept. 11 civil liberties, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center maintains an outstanding PATRIOT-related site.


Matt Welch is the Los Angeles correspondent for the National Post, and an editor of the L.A. Examiner. He also maintains a weblog about current events.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15541

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Er war wohl jemand, der diesen Druck von allen Seiten nicht aushielt.

The Kelly affair
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Kelly`s family: `Events made David`s life intolerable`
Widow`s sad journey

Jason Burke, chief reporter
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

The grieving family of David Kelly, the Ministry of Defence scientist who, police said, committed suicide by slashing his wrist and bleeding to death, appeared last night to blame both the Government and the BBC for the events leading to the tragedy.

In their first public comments shortly after formally identifying the body of Dr Kelly, 59, the family issued a statement saying the actions of all parties in the affair had driven him to suicide.

`Events over recent weeks made David`s life intolerable and all those involved should reflect long and hard on this fact,` the statement said. The family said they were `utterly devastated and heartbroken` by the death of `our husband, father and brother`.

`We loved him very much and will miss his warmth, humour and humanity... A loving, private and dignified man has been taken from us all. Those who knew him will remember him for his devotion to his home, family and the community and countryside in which he lived,` the statement said.

`David`s professional life was characterised by his integrity, honour and dedication to finding the truth, often in the most difficult of circumstances. It is hard to comprehend the enormity of this tragedy.`

The family - Kelly is survived by his wife Janice and three daughters - issued the statement hours after Superintendent David Purnell of Thames Valley police stood outside Wantage police station and said the scientist killed himself by cutting a wrist with a knife, possibly after taking powerful painkillers.

Kelly killed himself hours after sending an email to an unnamed journalist in which he told of `many dark actors playing games`.

The words appeared to refer to officials at the Ministry of Defence and the UK intelligence agencies with whom he had sparred over interpretations of weapons reports, the New York Times reported.

The message gave no indication that he was depressed, and said he was waiting `until the end of the week` before judging how his appearance before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee had gone.

It also emerged last night that Kelly took his life 24 hours after being called to give evidence in private to the the Intelligence and Security Committee at Westminster.

The disclosures came after police confirmed that the body found in woodland two miles from the village of Southmoor on Friday was Kelly, who was suspected of being the BBC`s mole in the row over the threat posed by Iraq. Purnell said a knife and an open packet of Coproxamol tablets, a paracetamol-based painkiller, had been found at the scene.

Details from the post-mortem examination, completed yesterday morning after the identification of the body at Oxford`s John Radcliffe Hospital by his widow ended the mystery over how, if not why, the microbiologist died.

Purnell stressed there was `no indication any other party was involved`, although investigations were continuing.

Kelly left home last Thursday, having told his wife he was going for a walk. It appears likely that he took the knife and pills from the house. One witness who encountered Kelly in fields close to his home described him as amiable and smiling.

The quietly spoken scientist made his way to an isolated, hilltop copse and cut his wrist with a knife, probably after taking a quantity of the prescription-only painkillers.

The drug could have moderated pain or diluted blood. Either way, taking them was a mark of the meticulous attention to detail for which he was known. Police forensic officers could be seen checking the gardens and courtyard of Kelly`s eighteenth-century farmhouse in Southmoor yesterday. Supt Purnell refused to say if Kelly left any suicide note.

The family statement asked that they be given `privacy to grieve in peace and to come to terms with our loss`.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
The Kelly affair, für alle, die ganz genau wissen wollen.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/0,12239,753696,00.html

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Iraq row over fate of seized scientists
Red Cross urges US to clarify status of three dozen prisoners held in unknown conditions near Baghdad

Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

American efforts at finding top Iraqi scientists who can attest to Saddam Hussein hiding weapons of mass destruction have turned out to be as fruitless as the search for the weapons themselves.

The continued detention of leading Iraqi scientists and other officials by US forces is swiftly turning into a major human rights row.

Washington officials hoped that, with Saddam`s removal, the people who had intimate knowledge of Iraq`s secret arms industry would give a different story from the denials given while he still held sway.

But as pressure intensifies on President George Bush and Tony Blair to prove Iraq had WMD, the inability to produce a single scientist from the former regime to confirm the assertions about an alleged threat is becoming an embarrassment.

Helma al-Saadi, a German who cuts an elegant figure sitting in her Baghdad home, last saw her husband Amer more than three months ago. She has written two letters to Paul Bremer, Iraq`s US administrator, but her pleas for a visit have been ignored and she has been given no official word of his whereabouts or condition.

Under Saddam, Iraqi wives all too often saw husbands taken to unknown detention centres and held indefinitely and without visiting rights. While secret detentions are not so frequent under US rule, the anxious wait is no less grim. `I don`t want to aggravate the Americans or make them feel provoked, but I`ve had no official notification of why he is being held or what charges he`s facing,` Helma al-Saadi said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, with an internationally recognised mandate to inspect detention centres around the world, has been urging the US to clarify the status of the three dozen Iraqi scientists and officials it holds. The authorities have given no details of their whereabouts and, unlike Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, the place where they are held has not been shown to journalists.

Some detainees are believed to be imprisoned in solitary cells or in swelteringly hot tents near the vast US base at Baghdad airport.

With a British PhD under his belt, Amer al-Saadi took training courses at British weapons factories before returning to Baghdad in the1970s and becoming one of Iraq`s top military scientists. A Shia, he never joined the Sunni-led Baath Party and last met Saddam in 1995.

When the UN sent its inspectors back to Iraq last year, he was nominated by Saddam as main liaison.

A handsome, silver-haired man with fluent English, he appeared at press conferences in the weeks before the war, arguing, as he had with the UN inspection team, that Iraq had destroyed all its remaining WMDs after the 1991 Gulf War but acknowledging proper documentation had not been kept.

Al-Saadi was the first scientist to surrender to the US, on 12 April. `He wanted to make himself available to the coalition forces for questioning and co-operation,` his wife said.

`He thought he would be interrogated for three hours, but it became three days, three weeks, and now more than three months.

`I am sure he is continuing to say what he always said, which is that the weapons were destroyed years ago,` she told The Observer. Many believe al-Saadi has not been released because it would be an admission that claims of a secret weapons programme amounted to nothing.

Others call it a `vendetta by Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell` because al-Saadi had criticised them, describing the Secretary of State`s testimony to the UN Security Council as a `typical American show, full of stunts and special effects`.

Helma says their life under Saddam was always difficult despite a pleasant home and a good salary. Al-Saadi stopped travelling abroad in 1987 after three approaches by American and one by British intelligence to switch sides.

`This complicated his life, but he was always a patriot,` she said. The couple`s three children live in Germany `because he wanted a better life for them, in liberty and free of coercion`.

Al-Saadi became a national hero during the war with Iran for developing long-range missiles which turned the tide and forced a ceasefire in 1988. His scholarship to Britain came from the Iraqi Defence Ministry and he had been obliged to make his career in it on his return.

As acting Minister of Oil he played a large part in getting the country`s power and electricity up and running again after the Gulf War, in contrast to the inefficiency of the US now, his wife said.

Around 30 other Iraqis in the `pack of cards` are being held in similarly secret conditions. Like al-Saadi and the former Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, many were professionals with no connection to the torture machine of the Interior Ministry or the state security organisation.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Don`t sell out to Uncle Sam
Until we decide whether we are part of Europe or an American protectorate, we will continue to flounder

Will Hutton
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

Imagine the media reaction if Mr Blair had flown to Brussels and pressed for relaxation of German and French rules on technology transfer to allow our largest defence contractor, BAE Systems, a better chance of being taken over by one of its leading companies. Imagine, too, that some weeks earlier, to give added spice, his Defence Secretary had said that he wanted to reform the command structures in the British armed forces so they slotted better into the command structures of the fledgling European rapid reaction force.

There would have been bedlam. You can see the front pages of the tabloids and the editorials in the Right-of-centre broadsheets. Yet, as Mr Blair did just this in Washington, running up the white flag over any attempt to sustain a defence infrastructure independent from the US and making a mockery of possible plans for Britain to participate in European collective security arrangements, there has scarcely been a peep.

The lack of debate, however, does not correspond to the importance of the moment. We are to become a satrapy of the Pentagon, with all that implies. BAE`s industrial dilemma as Britain`s largest manufacturer and biggest defence contractor employing 100,000 people - how to control the widening gap between the US defence industry and Europe`s as the Americans dramatically tighten their willingness to allow any form of technological transfer - is forcing an answer to the strategic question of whether Britain defines itself as European or American.

Until now, successive Prime Ministers have been able to avoid the choice. They have had access to high-level American technology such as the Trident and the Tomahawk missile systems as well as collaborating on European defence projects such as the Eurofighter. The US indulged us, regarding the risks of technological leakage as minimal; BAE could, thus, be a big player on both sides of the Atlantic. Not any more.

The Bush administration was determined on the unilateralist militarisation of American foreign policy even before 11 September and, intent on widening US defence leadership, clamped down on even the slightest risk of its technological leadership being accessed by others, even the loyal British.

Thus, when BAE became a subcontractor to build the new American jet-fighter, the F-35, with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in 2001, the Government had to accept that it would not have automatic access to the key codes allowing us to adjust the plane`s weapons systems to changing future threats. We are to put £2 billion up to share the development costs of the aircraft, but can only adapt its use if the US agrees.

The rules on the Trident and Tomahawk were tough, but the rules on the F-35 are even tougher. The Pentagon and the conservatives on the key Congressional committees want to go further. BAE faces the prospect of getting work from the Americans that cast it as a technological pygmy. Unless it can become a trusted contractor in its own right to the Pentagon, it believes it might as well throw in the towel. European defence spending is growing at a fraction of the rate from a lower base. If BAE wants to secure its future, it believes it must merge with one of the American companies, as Mike Turner, BAE`s chief executive, openly argues and, he hopes, as an equal partner.

Fat chance. Boeing, touted as the most likely partner and with whom BAE has had talks about talks, is four times its size. It would be swallowed up whole. BAE`s investment, research and employment policies would be dictated from Boeing`s new HQ in Chicago, but only after close consultation with the Pentagon. Contracts and development work from Europe would dry up. Britain`s armed forces would operate largely with American kit. And, as Geoff Hoon has signalled, their command structures would be adapted to permit American battlefield direction and control.

The argument is that as America`s and Britain`s foreign and security ambitions are identical, and that as there is little prospect of being in any significant conflict where the Americans are not fighting as well, we should have compatible military equipment and command structures. We should simply ride the technological coat-tails of the US, accept its draconian rules for technological transfer and cede 100,000 British jobs and defence capability to whichever American company is prepared to buy BAE. Doubtless, if the terms are right, members of the BAE board will make a small fortune through their share options. Blair, Hoon and Straw are signed up to the cause.

This, I think, is the gravest betrayal of our national interest. The argument turns on two false premises. British and American interests are not always and everywhere identical, as should be obvious after Iraq, where we are committed to a long-term, expensive and potentially murderous engagement for precious little gain and without UN support.

The object of American foreign and defence policy is to sustain US hegemony. The object of British foreign policy is to sustain multilateralism and the rule of international law; where we don`t, we risk another Iraq.

As a result, we are highly likely to want to commit to military interventions to enforce either UN or EU will, and to have to do so without the US or, even occasionally, in the teeth of its hostility. To wreck our capacity to act in this way because our weapon systems are all masterminded by US codes and built by US contractors is the height of folly.

It is also a kick in the teeth for any hopes of developing a distinctive EU defence and security capacity of which Britain is part - and with whose interests Britain is more closely aligned. The EU needs to develop the military capacity to intervene in today`s short wars and the difficult job of peacekeeping, a very different and complementary capacity to the US.

The air, naval and ground requirements are distinctive and need to be supported by an appropriately customised defence manufacturing infrastructure. To become part of the US defence complex serving very different needs is lunacy, even if it enriches BAE directors and gives a short-term fix to redressing the company`s technological weakness.

You would have thought that pro-European Mr Blair would see these arguments - and first-term Blair certainly did. Half-way through his second term, he seems to have lost his bearings. Curiously, entering the euro is more reversible than abandoning our capacity for autonomous military action to deliver our security and our interests. We may want access to American technology, but let`s not sacrifice our integrity as a country to gain it.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Observer Comment Extra: The World Today Essay
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At war for freedom
The former Director of the CIA says that America should make no apology for its robust response in the "war on terrorism". And if that makes other states nervous, so much the better

James Woolsey
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

America and the western world are at war with `fascist` Middle East governments and totalitarian Islamists. The freedoms we stand for are loathed and our vulnerable systems under attack. Liberty and security will be in conflict as we line up behind the new march of democracy.

This is about the war we are in, whom it is with, how we have to fight it inside our own countries and how we have to fight it abroad. The war is, essentially, similar to the Cold War. This is the origin of the phrase World War IV, which Professor Eliot Cohen came up with in America shortly after September 11 2001, to characterise the parallels between this war and what he called World War III - the Cold War.

Those parallels are: that it will last a very long time - decades; that it will sporadically involve the use of military force, as did the Cold War in Korea for example; but that an important component would be ideological. I would add that, just as we eventually won the Cold War - and when I say `we` here, I always mean Britain, the United States, the democracies, our allies - it was in no small measure because, while containing the Soviet Union and its allies militarily and with nuclear deterrence, we undermined their ideology.

We undermined it over a long period by convincing the Lech Walesas, the Vaclav Havels, the Andrei Sakharovs, the Solidarities, that this was not a clash of civilisations, not even a clash of countries, but a war of freedom against tyranny, and that we were on their side.

To exactly the same degree, we will surely be successful in this long war if we convince the hundreds of millions of reasonable and decent Muslims around the world who do not want to be terrorists, who do not want to live in dictatorships, that we are on their side and they on ours.

Fascists and Islamists

There are really three movements in the Middle East that are essentially at war with the west, with modernity, with western Europe and the United States and our allies. They are, first of all, the fascists, a term that I use advisedly because the Arab nationalist movements of Syria - until recently Iraq and Syria - and Libya and other such groups in the Middle East are effectively modelled on the fascist parties of the 1920s and 1930s. They are structured like them, and are similarly anti-semitic. They are fascists and there is no reason to mince words.

The other two movements are both Islamist, and I use that term to denote precisely totalitarian movements masquerading as portions of a religion. The mullahs in Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and those with him, and Al Qaeda and its supporters - one on the Shi`a side of the Islamic divide and the other on the Sunni side - are effectively totalitarian movements disguised as religions, in much the same way that Tomás Torquemada and the Dominicans around him who operated the Spanish Inquisition were a totalitarian movement in the guise of a portion of Christianity.

The Islamists on the Shi`a side of the divide, in Tehran, are massively unpopular in their own country. Even according to their official public opinion polls, a substantial majority of Iranians would like to have dealings with the US and, whenever given an opportunity to vote, have supported reformist candidates and President Mohammad Khatami.

From around 1996 to 1998 a number of us were optimistic about the possibility of internal reform in Iran as part of governmental procedures. However, beginning in 1998-1999, the murder of dissidents, and the imprisonment of newspaper editors and the rest, pushed the situation to one in which - though occasionally American spokesmen and those elsewhere call it a democracy - it is a democracy in exactly the same sense that the old Soviet Union was. Iran has a constitution, political parties, and elections; they just do not mean anything.

The struggle that is now going on is one in which the mullahs have lost the support of the students - and half of the country is aged nineteen and younger; the women; the reformers; the brave newspaper editors being tortured in prison; and, increasingly and importantly, their own clergy.

Ayatollah after ayatollah is turning against the mullahs who control the instruments of power; not only brave Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been opposed to them for years, but also conservatives, such as Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, the prayer leader in Isfahan, who denounced them last year as un-Islamic for sponsoring terror, torture and the rest. And of course, he is absolutely right.

Long-lasting

The third movement, the Islamists from the Sunni side of the divide - Al Qaeda and those who support them, fund them and provide their ideological fervour, which involves many who are encouraged by the Wahhabi religious conservatives in Saudi Arabia - is likely to be the longest lasting. In his new book, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbit calls Al Qaeda a virtual state, and there is a good argument to that effect. It is a virtual state chiefly because of its access to resources. As long as it receives economic assistance from prosperous Saudis, from the wealth of the Gulf, and its intellectual sustenance from the Wahhabi sect, it will be with us for a long time.

If you put these three movements together, particularly the latter, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we will be in this war for many years, quite probably for decades. Eliot Cohen`s original characterisation of this as World War IV - in the sense that it has certain parallels to the four and a half decade-long Cold War - is fair and accurate.

Hated for freedoms

If that is whom we are at war with, why? There are two reasons, an underlying one and a temporal one. The underlying one was best stated to me a little over a year ago by a taxi driver in the District of Columbia. I absolutely hate reading articles about public opinion polls, which I find intensely boring and a waste of time. Instead, since I spend a lot of time in taxis, I talk to the drivers, which in America at least I find a much better finger on the pulse of the country than opinion polls.

I was in a taxi a year ago last February, the day after former President Bill Clinton gave a speech in Washington in which he said that September 11 was a payback in part for American slavery and the treatment of the American Indian. I saw right away that the newspaper on the front seat was open at that article and that the driver was one of my favourite substitutes for polls - a black citizen of the District, wearing his Redskins cap, a guy of about my age, who had probably been driving a cab for a long time.

So I asked him what he thought about Clinton`s speech. He said: `Those people don`t hate us for what we`ve done wrong; they hate us for what we do right.` I would submit that is the essence of the matter.

We and you are cordially loathed for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, open economies, equal - or almost equal - treatment of women, and so on. It is not what we have done wrong that is creating the problem; it is what we do right.

If that is true, then this is not a war that will end with an Al Qaeda Gorbachev; it will not end with an arms control agreement. It is a war to the death, like the war with the Nazis, and we should understand that it will have to be fought that way.

Kick me

The other side of this is why, temporally? Why did they choose to do this now? I cannot speak for Britain or other countries but in the case of America, for something like a quarter of a century, for all practical purposes we hung a `kick me` sign on our backs in the Middle East.

First, we convinced many people there that we did not give a damn about the people in the region and that we cared principally about its oil; that it was a filling station for our large sport utility vehicles. Secondly, we convinced them that we were a wealthy, feckless country that would not fight.

Starting in 1979, when our hostages were seized in Tehran, we tied yellow ribbons around trees. In 1982-1983, our embassy and marine barracks were blown up in Beirut and we left. Throughout the rest of the eighties, there were various terrorist attacks against us, mainly sponsored by Iran, and we prosecuted a few terrorists here and there - we sent the lawyers, basically - and we would occasionally lob in a bomb or a cruise missile from afar.

In 1991 in the course of the Gulf war, we encouraged the Kurds and the Shi`a to rebel against President Saddam Hussein, then we signed a ceasefire agreement which left the Republican Guard and their armed helicopters intact, and the bridges intact. We stood back and watched the Republican Guard massacre the Kurds and Shi`a whom we had encouraged, thereby convincing all and sundry that once the Americans and their allies had secured the oil of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they did not give a damn about the people of the Middle East.

In 1993, Saddam tried to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. The best response that Clinton could come up with was to launch two dozen cruise missiles into an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night, thereby presumably responding effectively to Iraqi cleaning women and nightwatchmen, but not particularly effectively to Saddam.

In 1993, our helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, our rangers were killed and again, as a decade earlier in Beirut, we left. Throughout the rest of the nineties, with the USS Cole and East Africa embassy bombings and the like, again we prosecuted a few terrorists and occasionally launched a cruise missile or a bomb at a tank or a surface-to-air missile site.

No doubt if you were in al-Qaeda, in Iraqi intelligence, or one of Khamenei`s advisers assessing things at the end of the twentieth century, you would have had to say that the Americans - from this wealthy, feckless, spoiled country - would not fight. You would have had some evidence for that. Now, just as that was the assessment of us by the Japanese at the beginning of the 1940s, and just as they were somewhat surprised after Pearl Harbour, after September 11 both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and now the Ba`athists in Iraq, are somewhat surprised. However, there is still a long way to go.

Liberty and security

If that is who is at war with us and why, what do we need to do about it, both inside our own countries and in the Middle East? Inside the US, during the Cold War and the decade of the 1990s after it, we became very used to the proposition that liberty and security do not conflict, that we do not need to worry about that. Liberty we had plenty of, or as much as almost any reasonable, modern society could, and security was something that the navy, the Central Intelligence Agency and so on dealt with overseas. September 11 rather changed that.

The US at least has to understand that for a number of years we will have to face conflicts between liberty and security that did not occur before. We really did have people who were legally in the United States training in aircraft simulators to work out how to kill thousands of Americans. There really were terrorist cells in places like Lackawanna, Pennsylvania.

So we are going to do things that are effective against terrorism, and which may involve steps like special scrutiny of Wahhabi-backed charities, for example, that would not have happened prior to September 11. We also have to realise who we are. We are not a race or a culture or a language. We are creatures of fourth US President James Madison`s Constitution and his Bill of Rights. We can never forget that.

These two conflicting concerns - security and liberty - are going to be with us for a long time. They will conflict in ways they did not appear to before September 11. We have to choose wisely and remember both. We cannot forget the need to be effective, not just politically correct, in the way we deal with the real threats to us. We also cannot forget the Bill of Rights.

Vulnerable networks

In addition - and this is what I spend most of my day job working on - we have to start looking at all the networks that serve our modern society so effectively: electricity grids, oil and gas pipelines, the Internet, food production and delivery, and so on. We have to realise that in the post-September 11 world, these networks have been put together - in Britain, Japan, Australia, the United States - by very bright and able people, business people, sometimes government regulators, engineers. They are constructed to be responsive to the public, to be open, easily accessed, easily maintained, fully utilised to spread overheads, and the like. All these characteristics are quite reasonable in the context of peace.

In the context of war on one`s own soil, however, things look very different. Take `just in time` delivery: many American factories have components for four or five days` work, which is fine in most circumstances. It means you do not have to maintain big inventories. You can change model characteristics quickly, whether manufacturing computers, cars or whatever. It saves costs.

It is an excellent idea, until someone puts a dirty bomb - say caesium or strontium packed around high explosives - inside a container shipped in from somewhere in South Asia, for instance. With a simple detonator it goes off in an American city and makes a large portion of that city effectively uninhabitable for a long time, because of the increased risk of cancer. This would not be a nuclear explosion but one that spreads radioactive material.

Then the fifty thousand containers a day that cross American borders will start having to be inspected. We now inspect two per cent. If we inspect them all, it will not be long before those four or five days` worth of components in factories are no longer there and they will have to begin shutting down.

The whole set of networks that we have constructed has the functional equivalent of flimsy cockpit doors. The flimsy doors made it possible for aeroplanes to be taken over and turned into giant cruise missiles to be flown into buildings killing thousands of Americans, rather than `merely` blown up or crashed causing the death of the people on board.

Because of the doors, thousands more could be killed. There was a network vulnerability that could be exploited to turn a portion of it into a weapon. With respect to our electricity grids, oil and gas pipelines, food production and delivery, there are many such weak points that we need to work together to fix.

Democracy on the march

My most controversial point may be about what needs to be done to fight this war in the Middle East. We will have great difficulty bringing peace to the region without changing the nature of governments there - without bringing democracy.

If one starts out from the proposition that this is a task for America, Britain or others to accomplish principally with military forces, we will fail. We have to take a much longer view, and, for example, pay attention to the brave newspaper editors - such as one in Saudi Arabia who recently took on the religious police and got himself fired by the Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz. There are similar brave reformers in Egypt and other countries who are effectively the green shoots springing up through the pavement, indicative of a growing approach, a growing openness in much of the Muslim world to democracy and liberty.

Some people seem to think that this is a hopeless task. Two points: first, the substantial majority of the world`s Muslims live in democracies - Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Mali, the Balkans. They may not be perfect democracies but they are democracies nonetheless. I am the Chairman of Freedom House, the oldest human rights organisation in America. Freedom House says that there are a hundred and twenty one democracies, eighty nine of them free - that is, they have parliamentary elections plus the rule of law. Another thirty two are partly free, like Russia or Indonesia, say, with substantial difficulties with respect to the rule of law, but nonetheless regular elections.

In the eighty-nine years since the guns of August 1914, the world has gone from ten or twelve democracies to over a hundred and twenty, and those ten or twelve in 1914 were democracies only for the male portion of the populations. Nothing like that has happened within a single lifetime in world history before. Anyone eighty nine years old has seen democracies multiply tenfold.

Most of those came about not through military force, but in all sorts of ways. During and after the Cold War, for example, in Iberia, the role of the German Social Democrats was important in working with their socialist colleagues to steer Spain and Portugal away from communism and totalitarianism and towards democracy. In the Philippines, it was people power. In Mongolia, Mali and countries all over the world, democracy has become a way of life.

These are places where, year after year, the smart, self-appointed experts have said, `X will never be a democracy`. They said that the Germans would never be able to run a democracy, the Japanese would not, Catholic countries would not - because in the 1970s, Iberia and Latin America were non-democratic. They said it about people from a Chinese cultural background, yet the Taiwanese seem to have figured it out; maybe China will too. They said it about the Russians; after all, they missed the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment - how could they run a democracy? But they seem to be getting started.

All along, the smart money has been wrong on this subject. It is not that there are no retrograde steps. There are in Venezuela and elsewhere, and in the Arab world, a portion of the Muslim world, there are some two hundred-plus million Arabs who live without democracy. This is an area where the transition will be difficult for a series of historical, cultural and religious reasons, many to do with the influence of the Wahhabis.

Nonetheless, it is not hopeless. It is the best path to peace, since democracies do not fight one another. They fight dictatorships and dictatorships fight each other, and democracies sometimes preempt against dictatorships, but they do not fight one another.

If we want to be successful in this long war, we will have to take on this issue of democracy in the Arab world. We will have to take on the - and I would use the word `racist` - view that Arabs cannot operate democracies. We will need to make some people uncomfortable.

As we undertake these efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere, occasionally by force of arms but generally not, generally by influence, by standing up for brave students in the streets of Tehran, we will hear people say, from President Hosni Mubarak`s regime in Egypt or from the Saudi royal family, that we are making them very nervous. And our response should be, `Good. We want you nervous. We want you to change, but realise that now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, the democracies are on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear: your own people.`

· James Woolsey is former Director of Central Intelligence. This is an edited version of his address to the Political Risk conference at Chatham House last month.

About The World Today essay

This article is published in the August/September 2003 issue of The World Today, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. An essay from The World Today is published online in Observer Worldview each month. Previous World Today Essays

can be read here.

The World Today provides expert analysis on current international issues. For more information and an online sample issue of The World Today, please go to www.riia.org. Please contact Michelle Mannion at [e-mail] if you would like more information.

About Observer Worldview

Observer Worldview contains a selection of the best of The Observer`s international commentary and reporting, including exclusive online comment and analysis each week. The online pieces are also trailed in the newspaper. Email [e-mail] with comments on articles or ideas for future pieces.


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Observer Worldview Extra: The World Today Essay
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The weakness of al-Qaeda
All terrorist groups are weak, and Al Qaeda is no exception. It is the west`s response to the fundamentalist threat which risks undermining our democratic freedoms

Conor Gearty
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

As we head towards the second anniversary of September 11, it may seem eccentric to emphasis how weak the Al Qaeda organisation headed by Osama Bin Laden is - indeed, how weak it has always been.

Clearly, the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were unprecedently savage, both in terms of impact and the number of fatalities. It is also perfectly true that there has never been a terrorist act to match it, before or since. But consider the various things that have not happened since that terrible event. And consider too the nature of the response: is it threatening our fundamental freedoms?

First, and most importantly, since September 11 2001 there has been no systematic terrorist campaign against the United States and its allies. Of course the US has been thrown into a series of `terrorist` panics, concerning potential threats, poisonous substances in the post, determined killers at large and the like, but none of this has been connected to Al Qaeda.

It might have been thought that the US attack on Afghanistan would have been the ultimate provocation to an organisation sheltered by that country`s then Taliban government, but no repeats - or even pale imitations - of the World Trade Center assault followed. The invasion of Iraq, at least partly based, in the United States if nowhere else, on alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, has likewise been consequence-free, so far, in terms of terrorism attacks in the US.

It is entirely possible that the police and intelligence authorities have foiled a number of attacks in America, and it is certainly the case that there have been occasional atrocities, and many warnings about potential incidents abroad, Bali being the most terrible example.

But if this really were a war on terrorism, and there really was a coherent, determined, well-organised enemy out there committed to asymmetrical strikes, then the main warrior-nation would surely have expected the first dramatic engagement of this supposed war to have been followed up, even if the agents of terror operate on their own more deliberate timescale.

Daydream

Secondly, the generalised Arab revolt, hoped for and incited by Osama Bin Laden, has not occurred. The wishful thinking of Al Qaeda in this regard represents a kind of daydream that is common in revolutionary thinking. Terrorism has often been engaged in by organisations that are convinced a single strike will be enough to cause the revolutionary zeal of the people to flare afresh, bringing down whatever structure of government it is that the subversives judge unacceptable.

The many attempts on the lives of the Tsars in nineteenth-century Russia were driven by this kind of simplistic reasoning, though the one successful action merely precipitated increased repression. This is exactly what has happened in Bin Laden`s target Muslim nations. Instead of revolution there have been a series of clampdowns, some accompanied by great brutality, all imposed without the popular reaction on which Al Qaeda strategists pinned their hopes.

Rootless

Thirdly, Bin Laden and his cohorts have been unable to retain any part of the globe that they can truly and safely call their own. Having been obliterated in Afghanistan, they may be able to wander about in the outbacks of that country or in the remoter regions of Pakistan. But they can never again rest or throw down roots, developing indigenous community support, as they once did in Sudan and Afghanistan, and as Islamic radicals are doing so successfully at present in Palestine. Deprived of the local, their global reach lacks all conviction, the organisation resembling a displaced person pretending to be an international business traveller.

Weak

All terrorist groups are weak, and Al Qaeda is and always has been no exception. This kind of subversive organisation turns to isolated political violence of the type we now describe as terrorism not out of choice but because they believe they have no military alternatives, and in this they are usually absolutely right.

US President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon do not need to resort to terrorist violence because they have at their disposal two of the most powerful and effective military forces the world has ever seen, securely garrisoned in countries in which they are widely accepted. That is not to say that their forces do not deploy the weapon of political terror, merely that in doing so they are not described as terrorists.

Guerrilla organisations, of the type we have seen in places like Sri Lanka and Algeria in recent years, may not be as strong as national armies but they resemble them more that they do the classic terrorist group. They control areas of land within hostile nation states, can operate more or less openly, and enjoy support that extends beyond their membership to embrace elements of an existing or potential civil society.

What makes guerrilla campaigns so worrying to governments everywhere is that they look like governments in waiting. This is the case even if they engage in occasional, or even frequent, acts of terror; it is sadly the case, as millions of the world`s civilians have found to their cost, that the killing of innocents for political purposes is something that states do far more efficiently and bloodily than any subversive organisation can. It follows that such violence is not something that is any kind of bar to a government`s political legitimacy.

At the bottom of the militant political food chain are the terrorists, organisations with neither armies nor strong popular support to hand, who have neither the inclination nor, in many cases, the opportunity patiently to build political structures as an alternative to subversive violence. For such groups, terrorism presents a tempting route to action for the sake of action, a way of being seen without the burden of having to think seriously about outcomes and consequences.

Al Qaeda fits this description well. Its ability to use contemporary gadgetry and to manipulate industrial machinery to deadly effect should not blind us to its antiquated, pre-modern ideology. The commitment is to a fantasy version of the past that is entirely unrealisable in the future.

Forsaken by the people it claims as its own, and incapable of any action apart from a sporadic fling at the defenceless passer-by, it is to be feared as the playground bully is feared: noisy anger and flailing about hiding, but only barely, pathological vulnerability.

Like the Russian anarchists whose terrorism ushered in repression, and the 1960s South American radicals whose violent subversion precipitated opportunistic state killings on a horrible scale, the enduring legacy of Al Qaeda might well lie in the depth and nature of the response that it has stimulated, mainly from America, but also right across the industrialised world.

It has already been the sole reason for the invasion and effective colonisation of one country - Afghanistan - and a major impetus behind the seizing of another: Iraq. It has led to a rush of anti-terrorism legislation across the world, giving greatly enhanced powers to domestic security agencies.

Military governments, for whom counter-terrorism has long been an alibi for repression, draw strength from the decline in the freedom of the peoples from whose governments they have faced the sharpest criticisms. The human rights model of western civilisation is being openly questioned by those who see security of the realm rather than dignity of the person as the central political objective of our time.

Tensions surface

These are pretty extraordinary consequences for an organisation like Al Qaeda to have brought about, and of course that organisation is not solely responsible for them. Rather, the events of September 11 have brought into the open tensions that have long been inherent in the way that advanced industrial society is organised.

It is often forgotten quite how tentative the acceptance of democratic forms of government has been by the forces of liberal capitalism. Throughout the democratic era, various wars have challenged the democratic model in a way that has produced a truncation of civil liberties, or as we would call them today, human rights. Sometimes these wars have been hot, sometimes they have been cold.

The current `war` is against `terrorism`, and from the national security perspective it has many advantages over past conflicts. It is against an unseen enemy rather than one whose empirical strength can be objectively verified. The `war` is one in which no action is required: if an atrocity occurs then there is clear evidence of the war, but if nothing happens then the fear of the possible, of what might happen, is sufficient to keep the `conflict` ongoing.

Finally, and most ominously, it is a war without any obvious means of being brought to an end. There is no country to be occupied, no army to be broken up, no despot to depose. Instead there is an invisible enemy whose incoherence means it can never be fully brought to book.

The implications of this new `war` on terrorism are serious. Internally, the industrialised nation-states may be about to enter a period when the gains of the democratic era are once again put up for grabs, with a rival governing model based on the rhetoric of the free market and a counter-terrorist-inspired liberal authoritarianism challenging the assumptions of representative democracy which have enjoyed dominance for decades.

Externally, the perceived necessity for action again terrorism is likely to lead to even more hypocrisy and brutality in international affairs while nations - led by the United States - place force and self-interest above earlier Kantian models of international cooperation: if reason doesn`t count in the world, then double standards - a creature of rational thought - no longer matter.

It is still possible to avoid a decline of this type. Democratic values in general and social democracy in particular have proved very robust in the past, and there is no reason to believe that they will simply vanish without a fight. But this political battle needs to be waged in all democratic countries and on all fronts. Otherwise there is a risk that Bin Laden, acting as the unwitting ally of the forces of reaction in western democratic culture, will have succeeded in seriously battering our proud pluralism and draining us of much of our freedom.

· Conor Gearty is Professor of Human Rights Law and Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics.

About The World Today essay

This article is published in the August/September 2003 issue of The World Today, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. An essay from The World Today is published online in Observer Worldview each month. Previous World Today Essays

can be read here.

The World Today provides expert analysis on current international issues. For more information and an online sample issue of The World Today, please go to www.riia.org. Please contact Michelle Mannion at [e-mail] if you would like more information.

About Observer Worldview

Observer Worldview contains a selection of the best of The Observer`s international commentary and reporting, including exclusive online comment and analysis each week. The online pieces are also trailed in the newspaper. Email [e-mail] with comments on articles or ideas for future pieces.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Is eGovernment full of holes?

New Labour is getting government online. But will it make any difference to our lives?

John Naughton
Sunday July 20, 2003

Question: what`s the difference between Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and Emmentaler cheese? Answer: both are full of holes, but at least you can eat the cheese. On the day when the US Department of Homeland (In)Security had decided - in a zillion dollar deal - that all its computers would run Windows (on Dell hardware), it was revealed that Polish hackers had blown a huge hole in the software. `This is one of the worst Windows vulnerabilities ever,` a security expert told CBC News. Until Windows junkies had installed the security `patch` issued by Microsoft, he warned `it will be Swiss cheese - anybody can walk in and out of their servers`. To cap it all, Windows Server 2003 was the first Microsoft product sold under the `Trustworthy Computing` intitiative launched last year by Bill Gates, who hailed it as a `breakthrough in terms of built-in security and reliability`.
Who said satire was dead? It only goes to show that anything connected with computers and government is fraught with difficulty.

When our own dear Administration wanted to get its `gateway` web site up and running, it turned in desperation to Microsoft (and Dell) as the only way of getting the job done this side of eternity. And the site was duly operational on the appointed day, much to the satisfaction of the preposterously named `e-Envoy`. The only problem was that in its first manifestation it could only be properly accessed by citizens using Microsoft`s browser. (And before the Envoy - who is touchy on the subject of Microsoft - complains, I should point out that the gateway`s early preference for Redmond software has now been rectified.)

New Labour came to power determined to `modernise` Britain`s government. The Administration`s formative years coincided with the dot-com boom, and some of the frenzy rubbed off on ministers. This had two consequences. The first was an unreflective linking of information technology with modernity and reform. The second was a predilection for windy rhetoric. Britain would be transformed into the country most congenial to e-commerce. Every school child would have an email address. Every school would have broadband. All government services would be online by 2005. And so on.

Well, we`re now 18 months away from 2005, so how is Blair`s eGovernment project doing? Last week, a provocative new iSociety report - `SmartGov: Renewing Electronic Government for Improved Service Delivery` by Noah Curthoys and James Crabtree (available from www.theworkfoundation.com) - argues that more has been achieved than Britain`s technophobic media acknowledge, but frets that the overall eGovernment project needs a new infusion of political commitment if it is to make any lasting change in the way Britain`s rulers and their subjects interact with one another. It also recommends that some categories of citizen ought to be compelled to use online services when dealing with the government.

The nightmare stalking the report`s authors is not that New Labour`s targets for putting government online will not be achieved, but that hitting the targets might make very little difference on the `modernisation` front. Already, for example, over 50 per cent of services are online, but only ten per cent of the population have ever used them. The Inland Revenue has built a magnificent system for online filing of tax returns, but only 70,000 people (out of a possible 8 million) use it.

Critical media coverage of failures of government IT projects (think DSS, passport office) reinforces public scepticism about eGovernment. And the problem is exacerbated by the fact that those people who have most need to interact with the state (because of being poor, elderly or ill) are precisely the groups who feel most uneasy about using unfamiliar, online, channels. The battle to put government online has been won. But the battle to put citizens online has only just begun.

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How Blair hit turbulence and landed in a storm
The PM was entitled to his celebratory glass of red wine on his flight to Tokyo. In a single day he`d wowed Congress, seen off the BBC, played tough with Bush. Now he was ready to deliver front page-making news on the euro. Then his Boeing 777 hit rough weather and the satphone rang ... Andy McSmith and Donald Macintyre report
20 July 2003
http://www.independent.co.uk/

The ancients believed that rough weather represented the anger of the Gods. The Japanese word "kamikaze" - literally "divine wind" - refers to a sudden storm which sweeps your enemies away. In other cultures, fearsome weather is a portent of disaster rather than victory.

On Thursday night, as Tony Blair slept fitfully aboard a Boeing 777 bound from Washington to Tokyo, he was rocked by turbulence which one of the BA stewardesses described as the worst she had ever experienced. Had the Prime Minister been a superstitious man, he might have seen this as warning that political events - which had gone so well throughout that day - were about to take a new and terrible turn.

It should have been a weekend of crowning success for Mr Blair. As he left Washington, he had every reason to think that his government had finally turned a corner, and that an extremely difficult parliamentary term had ended on a high note.

After his triumphal speech to the houses of Congress, with its 17 standing ovations, the Prime Minister had a 20-minute meeting with President Bush, and a group of senior officials including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice in the Oval Office before a joint press conference and dinner with the President.

At this meeting, Mr Blair apparently extracted from the Americans an agreement to suspend proceedings against two British prisoners held by the US military in Guantanamo Bay. Although this is only a holding position, it was a very welcome concession which spared Mr Blair from a rising wave of protest in the UK.

After he boarded his Boeing 777 in bright Washington sunshine, Mr Blair will have been told of yet more good news from home. There was the wholly unexpected defeat of Mick Rix, who was standing for re-election as leader of the train drivers` union, Aslef. Mr Rix was regarded in Downing Street as the most dangerous of the new breed of "awkward squad" union leaders, and this was the first significant union election in five years in which the winner was the candidate who was identifiably pro-Blair.

More importantly, the foreign affairs committee had come out with an extraordinary attack on the BBC defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, branding him an "unsatisfactory witness". To Mr Blair`s advisers, that was a major advance in their campaign to reclaim public trust by disposing of the BBC`s allegation that they had doctored intelligence reports to buttress the case for war in Iraq.

So in one day, Mr Blair appeared to have defeated the BBC, improved relations with the unions, proved that he was not a "poodle" of the American President and shown off his stature as a world figure. Unsurprisingly, his entourage enjoyed a celebratory drink aboard the plane - Blair had red wine - and talked over the day for about an hour before most of the party, Blair included, went to get some sleep.

But at around 7am London time, after that kamikaze had rattled his aircraft, the Prime Minister was given the terrible news that David Kelly was missing. The message came from No 10 to the travelling duty clerk using a special secure phone - a black box with a suction cap fixed to the window in order to receive a clear satellite signal. Mr Blair`s reaction, according to one official, was one of "shock".

In the hectic series of phone calls, both on the secure phone and on the British Airways satellite phones which followed, he spoke - twice - to Sir Kevin Tebbit, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Mr Kelly`s ultimate boss and now clearly a pivotal figure in the drama.

He also spoke to Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence and the man with overall responsibility for the several days of interrogation of Dr Kelly which followed his admission that he had spoken to the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. And Mr Blair talked to several other people, certainly including - even though No 10 would not confirm this yesterday - Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, both of whom he had allowed to go home after the Washington leg of the trip.

In Tokyo, the Prime Minister looked strained and gaunt. Whether deliberately or not, he chose a moment when no reporters were present - only a Sky TV camera crew - to make what he intended to be his sole and definitive statement on the tragedy. "I am profoundly sad for David Kelly and his family," he said. "He was a fine public servant. He did immense service for his country and I am sure he would have done so in the future. There is now however going to be a due process and a proper independent inquiry. I believe that it should be allowed to establish the facts. We should set aside speculation, claims and counter-claims and allow that due process to take its proper course; and, in the meantime, all of us, politicians and media alike, should show some restraint and respect. That`s all I`m going to say."

In London, his Downing Street staff were equally constrained, conscious of the real possibility that Mr Campbell could lose his job in the fall-out from Dr Kelly`s death. Privately, they are hoping that Lord Hutton will extend his inquiry to look into whether the BBC, and the journalists who besieged Dr Kelly`s Oxfordshire home, contributed to his state of mind.

Meanwhile, if Mr Blair was hoping for "restraint and respect" from British journalists at his press conference with Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, at the spa resort of Hakone later in the day, that hope was put to bed by a Mail on Sunday reporter who shouted at him: "Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign?"

Ironically, in any other circumstances but these, the speech he went on to give in the New Otani`s Tachibana Room would have been front-page news. In an attempt to persuade putative Japanese investors put off by prevarication over the single currency, the Prime Minister went the furthest he has yet gone in talking up the prospects of British euro-entry.

For the first time he said unequivocally of the measures outlined in the Chancellor`s June euro statement to secure greater convergence: "We are not looking for completion of the impact of reform in all areas for recommending entry."

He backed up this thinly coded - and, to many, incredible - message that entry could happen, if not in this parliament, very shortly after the next election, with the most bullish statement of the benefits of the single currency he has ever given. The "magic of compound arithmetic", he declared, meant that after 30 years the annual benefit to the UK of euro-entry would be between 5 and 9 per cent of GDP - the equivalent of what Britain now spends on health care, or on pensions and education combined.

And on the problem of volatility in the housing market - cited among many sceptics on euro-entry, the Chancellor included - as a reason for caution, he said pointedly that the very latest figures showed that more than 50 per cent of new housing loans were now fixed-rate mortgages - by implication removing yet another barrier to euro-entry.

But his delivery was flat, and the applause decidedly perfunctory. Oddly, he skipped one especially effective passage in the written speech where he castigated opponents of euro-entry for saying that we should "distance ourselves from the European market because of the perceived rigidities of our trading partners".

The passage added: "This is a strange way of casting the national interest; since when did a successful businessman withdraw from a market because he feared that his rivals would not compete?" This was especially significant in that the Chancellor - at least before his June speech - had himself made much of European rigidities as a reason for not yet joining the euro.

And Mr Blair did say the words that followed in the text: "Provided there is sufficient convergence and flexibility between the UK and the eurozone we could enjoy a period of superior growth because of our superior flexibility - not the greatest disaster that can befall a nation."

As the Blairs` hectic programme continued, it was not quite the "business as usual" proclaimed by his aides. Yes, he went with his wife to open Tokyo`s new Pizza Express restaurant. But, no, he did not, as planned, design his own "celebrity pizza" to be auctioned for charity. That would have been a photo-opportunity too far.

There was also an unscripted exchange with Carlos Ghosn, the very pro-euro head of Nissan, during a private meeting with Japan`s leading motor manufacturers. Mr Blair told him "I need to look after you because you are so important to my constituents." As he was leaving, Mr Ghosn replied meaningfully, "I hope you are Prime Minister for a very long time", adding that he would be much less keen to have one "who produced 1,700-page reports on the euro". Blair replied briefly that he hoped he would be around for a long time too.

It is hard to imagine an exchange that went more closely to the heart of the political crisis Blair now faces, for it has never looked more likely that Brown`s time could be near.

Last night, the Blairs were staying at the Prince Hotel in Prime Minister Koizumi`s favourite hill resort of Hakone. Sited on the banks of Lake Ashi with spectacular views, on a clear day - which yesterday, ominously, was not - of Mount Fuji, it would in other circumstances be the perfect resting place. The Blairs were not expected to immerse themselves in the onsen - the resort`s three hot-spring baths.

But there would be plenty of time to consider many of the questions it will now be Lord Hutton`s job to answer - like whether it was wise to prolong the row with the BBC by dragging in David Kelly. And it would provide time to contemplate one of Mr Koizumi`s favourite sayings of Confucius: "If the people have no faith in their leaders, they cannot stand."
20 July 2003 10:13
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Bush ready to wreck ozone layer treaty
US slips in demand to drop ban on harmful pesticide
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
20 July 2003


President George Bush is targeting the international treaty to save the ozone layer which protects all life on earth from deadly radiation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

New US demands - tabled at a little-noticed meeting in Montreal earlier this month - threaten to unravel one of the greatest environmental success stories of the past few decades, causing millions of deaths from cancer.

The news comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who pressed the President in their talks in Washington last week to stop his attempts to sabotage the Kyoto Protocol which sets out to control global warming: one of the few international issues on which they differ.

Now, instead of heeding Mr Blair, Mr Bush is undermining the ozone treaty as well, by seeking to perpetuate the use of the most ozone-destructive chemical still employed in developed countries, otherwise soon to be phased out. Ironically, it was sustained pressure from the Reagan administration, in which Mr Bush`s father served as vice-president, that ensured the treaty was adopted in the first place. It has proved such a success that environmentalists have long regarded it as inviolable.

The ozone layer - made of a type of oxygen so thinly scattered through the upper atmosphere that, if gathered all together, it would form a ring around the earth no thicker than the sole of a shoe - screens out the sun`s harmful ultraviolet rays which would, otherwise, wipe out terrestrial life. As it weakens, more of the rays get through, causing skin cancer and blindness from cataracts.

The world was shocked to discover in the 1980s that pollution from man-made chemicals had opened a hole the size of the United States in the layer above Antarctica, and had thinned it worldwide. Led by the US, nations moved with unprecedented speed to agree the treaty, called the Montreal Protocol, in 1987 - which started the process of phasing out use of the chemicals.

The measures have been progressively tightened ever since. Scientists reckon that they will eventually prevent 2 million cases of cancer a year in the US and Europe alone. But President Bush`s new demands threaten to throw the process into reverse.

They centre on a pesticide, methyl bromide, now the greatest attacker of ozone left in industrialised countries. The US is responsible for a quarter of the world`s consumption of the chemical, which has also been linked with increased prostate cancers in farmers.

Under an extension to the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1997, the pesticide is being gradually phased out and replaced with substitutes; its use in the West is due to end completely in 2005. Nations are legally allowed to extend the use of small amounts in "critical" applications, but the US is demanding exemptions far beyond those permitted, for uses ranging from growing strawberries to tending golf courses.

It is also pressing to exploit a loophole in the treaty - allowing the use of the chemical to treat wood packaging - so that, instead of being phased out, its use would increase threefold.

The demands now go to an international conference in Nairobi this autumn. Experts fear that, if agreed, the treaty will begin to fall apart, not least because developing countries - which are following rich nations in phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals - could cease their efforts.

"The US is reneging on the agreement, and working very, very hard to get other countries to agree," said David Doniger, a former senior US government official dealing with ozone issues, who now works for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If it succeeds, it threatens to unravel the whole fabric of the treaty."

Dr Joe Farman, the Cambridge scientist who discovered the Antarctic ozone hole, added: "This is madness. We do not need this chemical. We do need the ozone layer. How stupid can people be?"
20 July 2003 10:15


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Al-Qa`ida trained over 100,000 terrorists at Afghanistan bases, says US intelligence
By Paul Lashmar
20 July 2003


Al-Qa`ida could have trained more 100,000 terrorists in its camps in Afghanistan, according to senior American intelligence officials.

According to the report of a high-level inquiry into the September 2001 attacks, which is due to be released this week, between 70,000 and 120,000 terrorists were trained in Afghanistan before the coalition invasion in 2002. The figure, based on testimony by senior US intelligence officials to a joint inquiry by the US Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees, is at least three times higher than previous estimates.

The hearings were told that the al-Qa`ida recruits came from more than 70 countries and were trained in skills from bomb-making and weapons use to foreign languages. Many are believed to have escaped capture and are lying low around the world.

One of the authors of the report, Senator Bob Graham, said the estimate suggests that al-Qa`ida remains the main threat to the West. The Bush administration "lost focus" when it turned its attention to war with Iraq, in his view.

"We allowed al-Qa`ida to regroup and regenerate," said Senator Graham. "They`ve conducted a series of very sophisticated operations, thus far none in the United States, but seven Americans were killed in Saudi Arabia. We have to assume that as those people were placed around the world, some were placed inside the US. Some of them are in the US today."

The British security services estimate that some 600 people trained in the Afghan camps now live in the UK, according to one Whitehall source. But MI5 believes that many have returned to normal life, sickened by their experiences of the Afghan civil war.

Senator Graham, a Democratic presidential candidate and the senior Democrat on the senate intelligence committee, also criticised the Bush administration for delaying release of the report. Nearly 900 pages long, it is due to be published on Thursday after months of delays caused by secrecy arguments.

After nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions last year, the inquiry`s report was completed in December. A limited summary was released then, but the full report has been under review by the FBI and CIA, which were concerned that the release of some of their evidence was a risk to national security. Senator Graham said the administration had approved inclusion in the final report of the estimate of the total number of terrorists trained by al-Qa`ida, mostly in Afghanistan between 1995 and 2001.

One official told The New York Times last week that counter-terrorism officers frequently complained about the absence of human intelligence from the Afghanistan camps, saying that analysts had to rely on reports from foreign intelligence services, satellite imagery and intercepted communications, none of which detected any advance sign of the impending attacks.

"We had amazing satellite pictures of them having graduation ceremonies at the camps, but we never had a clue what they planned to do when they left Afghanistan," the official said.

Nearly an entire section has been removed from the final report at the insistence of the intelligence agencies. It describes the actions of foreign governments, including Britain and Saudi Arabia, before the attacks. Unlike most other official publications on intelligence, the report will have sections blacked out, making it possible to see how much of it has been deleted.

Apart from the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the question of whether he is still alive, other mysteries remain in the wake of 9/11, says the inquiry team. One is how 19 young men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, could conspire to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon without the knowledge of the Saudi government.
20 July 2003 10:18

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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July 20, 2003

Leader: Spinning to death

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-750881,00.html

The tragedy of Dr David Kelly’s suicide will leave most people in Britain with a sense of sadness mixed with anger and disgust. A hard-working public servant, who in his work as a United Nations inspector did as much to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction as any posturing politician, should have had much to live for, including the wedding of one of his daughters in the autumn and his own impending retirement. But Dr Kelly, an honourable and private man, chose instead to end his life by slitting his wrist, a gruesome end to a distinguished career. He was, it seems, driven to the blackest despair by being the unwilling pawn in a game being played between Downing Street and the BBC. Until last Friday that game was all about reputations. Now it has become a matter of life and death and all those involved — Downing Street, the Ministry of Defence (MoD), an unusually hostile foreign affairs select committee and the BBC — should be ashamed.
Tony Blair, who was in Tokyo yesterday, expressed regret for Dr Kelly’s death but refused to be drawn further. He was asked — but declined to answer — whether he had blood on his hands. The facts, he said, would be determined by the “full and independent inquiry” into the events surrounding Dr Kelly’s suicide by Lord Hutton, a senior law lord. That helps to explain Downing Street’s alacrity in announcing the inquiry when news came through of the tragedy. What appeared at first to be a genuine search for the truth was also a good way of clamping a lid on the issue until the Hutton inquiry has run its course. Then, hopes the government in a well-worn phrase, “events may have moved on”.

The inquiry will need answers to several key questions, from both the government and the BBC. In particular we need to know:

<li>How much pressure was Dr Kelly put under by his MoD bosses when he came forward to admit that he had met Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter? Was he threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act or loss of pension?

<li>Was he assured, when he did come forward, that his name would not be released to the media?

<li>What was the role of Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, and Alastair Campbell, the No 10 communications director, in the release of his name?

<li>Was Dr Kelly groomed by officials before his appearance in front of the foreign affairs select committee last Tuesday?

<li>What was said to Dr Kelly, by either the MoD or Downing Street, after his testimony to that committee? The committee concluded after his evidence that he was not the BBC’s source. Was he attacked and further pressured for having failed to back the government’s case?

<li>In the case of the BBC, was Dr Kelly the source given in private by Mr Gilligan to Richard Sambrook, the corporation’s head of news? If he was not, the BBC should say so. If he was, the BBC, with its subsequent reporting, has a great deal to answer for.

Lord Hutton, in seeking to get to the bottom of this murky tale, has much digging to do. One thing, however, is already clear. Dr Kelly’s death will serve as a constant reminder of a series of events that have done deep and lasting damage to the prime minister. Mr Blair, who might have been expecting to enjoy a post-Iraq triumph — much like the US Congress gave him on Thursday with 19 standing ovations — is in a mess and he knows it. Dr Kelly’s death will have left him deeply troubled, the more so because he will know that he is in large part culpable. He authorised Mr Campbell to go on the offensive against the BBC over suggestions by Mr Gilligan — in an interview, not a news report — that Downing Street had “sexed up” last September’s dossier on Iraqi weapons. Had Mr Campbell not done so, the stories about government doctoring of that dossier would have faded away, rather than dominating the news agenda for the past seven weeks. And had Mr Campbell not done so, with Mr Blair’s authorisation, Dr Kelly would still be alive today.

The government says that it was obliged to defend its reputation. The prime minister has said that there is no more serious charge than to accuse him of taking the country to war under false pretences. There was a danger, Mr Blair’s supporters say, of such claims escalating. They had to be stopped firmly in their tracks. That, however, merely shows the extent of the miscalculation. So far the evidence has fallen neither in favour of Downing Street nor the BBC. Most people now believe the government made the best of what was, in many instances, thin intelligence. The fact that Downing Street chose to use other sources for its second “dodgy” dossier earlier this year tends to confirm that. So does the failure to discover any weapons or evidence of their manufacture in Iraq. There is also a suspicion, as with the contentious evidence on alleged Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger, that the government was particularly keen to impress our American allies with the quality of British intelligence in the run-up to war.


That backfired and the US administration has publicly disowned that evidence. Since the end of the war the government has been misfiring on all cylinders. A cabinet reshuffle involving big constitutional changes, including the abolition of the office of lord chancellor and the Scottish and Welsh secretaries, was appallingly botched. The prime minister lost a loyal and effective health secretary in Alan Milburn and finds himself more deeply embroiled in party rows over public sector reform than at any time since he became prime minister. After scraping through a Commons vote on foundation hospitals which he would have lost without the support of Scottish and Welsh MPs, Mr Blair faces an even bigger battle over tuition fees. The government’s great achievement, ensuring that the public finances were healthy enough to allow a big relaxation of government spending, is in jeopardy. Gordon Brown warned the cabinet last week that the good times are over.

Individually these setbacks look like the usual mid-term squalls that affect all governments. Collectively they add up to a government in deep trouble. When combined with the mess that it has got into over Iraq’s weapons, much of it self-inflicted, the dangers to Mr Blair go deeper. He swept into office on the basis of trust. After the sleaze and incompetence of the Tory years he offered a fresh face and approach. But that trust is evaporating fast and the lines on Mr Blair’s face betray the strain he is under. The prime minister’s own credibility is on the line. Mr Blair may not have blood on his hands but he does have a great deal to answer for. And voters are no longer prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[Joerver]

July 20, 2003

Comment: David Cracknell: A day that changed everything for Blair

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-750879,00.html

On Tuesday evening, one of the warmest evenings of the year, Tony Blair and his Downing Street staff retired to the rose garden of No 10 for the annual staff party. Basking in temperatures higher than in California, they could have been forgiven for thinking that the prime minister’s troubles were fading in the summer heat.
Cabinet ministers concede that a usually sure-footed prime minister has been uncharacteristically clumsy in the past few weeks, with a dreadfully botched reshuffle, a big Commons rebellion on foundation hospitals and what even some of Blair’s close allies saw as an unnecessary row with the BBC over the Iraq dossier. Some, in private, have begun to contemplate life beyond Blair.

But on Tuesday, at No 10 at least, all this was forgotten. The “finishing line” of the long summer recess was in sight. There would be a fresh start in the autumn, but for now it was time to relax. Alastair Campbell appeared on the balcony to play his bagpipes for charity. Cherie Blair joined her husband in a raffle of signed bottles of whisky and teddy bears. Scores of officials, Blair’s brightest and best, chatted over sauvignon blanc and posh nibbles.

Blair, as anybody who has seen him in recent weeks knows, has had his toughest and stickiest six months. He expected the run-up to the war with Iraq to be politically and physically challenging, and it was. By the time it started he was drained. What he had not reckoned on was how hard it was going to be afterwards. As one Whitehall observer put it to me: “I’ve never seen any politician so badly in need of a holiday.”

For the prime minister, though, there was one last tour of duty before the beaches of Barbados beckoned. When he boarded the plane to Washington on Thursday, after chairing his last cabinet meeting until the autumn, he might have expected to have put his domestic troubles behind him.

That was how it seemed when he addressed both houses of Congress, only the fourth British prime minister to do so. After the first of 19 standing ovations, he joked: “It is more than I deserve and, frankly, it’s more than I’m used to.” He meant it.

The speech, well judged and well received, combined resolute support for America with mild criticism. He urged the United States not to split from Europe — and Congress, and George W Bush, listened. That was not the only success. In normal circumstances his concession from the president, the suspension of military tribunals for two of Britain’s Guantanamo Bay detainees, would have been a minor triumph. The rest of the trip, to the Far East, looked plain sailing.

But events, as the prime minister has discovered, have a way of slapping you back down just as you think you are on the way up. At the very moment when Blair was rehearsing his lines for Congress, David Kelly had embarked on his last, desperate walk.

British prime ministers, it seems, always have their biggest domestic crises when they are abroad. The now legendary scenes of Margaret Thatcher in Paris, barging her way into a BBC news bulletin during a European security summit, have become synonymous with her departure from office. John Major, attending another summit, finally got fed up with being asked about his leadership and launched his own leadership contest when he returned, telling his critics to “put up or shut up”.

Blair is not at that stage yet but, despite his refusal to take questions on the subject yesterday, he faces a grim few days on the remainder of his trip.

Make no mistake, this is serious. As one minister put it: “A death changes everything.” Compared with this, Blair’s previous crises — the storms over Labour donations, Cherie’s private dealings with an Australian conman and the row over the Queen Mother’s funeral — seem minor. Early in the Iraq dossier row, one MP said this was new Labour’s Watergate. That looked like hyperbole then. It does not now.

When Campbell stepped off the plane from Washington on Friday morning, it was after urgent messages from Downing Street had told him of Kelly’s disappearance. He has told friends that he felt “totally sick” on hearing of the death — a telling reaction. Whatever his role in the affair turns out to be, he knows the question is not if, but when, he goes.

It is hard to see how Blair can ever recover without jettisoning Campbell, the symbol of this government’s culture of spin and bullying. Campbell is said to have been choosing his moment, probably after the summer when he can leave with reputation intact and honour satisfied. His best hope might be to slip away before any further damage is inflicted.

Blair, doing his best to maintain diplomatic niceties on his trip, had no choice but to announce an independent inquiry. I am told it took barely a nanosecond to make the decision. But members of his close circle were yesterday still reeling from shock. The people he relies on — Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan — were not at his side in his moment of need.

One adviser suggested that a fog would now descend until Lord Hutton’s inquiry is completed. “In these frenzied times it is always difficult to predict where things will go,” he said.

“The whole focus of politics will depend on the outcome of this inquiry. It will be difficult for us to mount any sort of counterattack on our critics until this is out of the way.”

A cabinet minister accepted that it was bad for Blair, but said he hoped the prime minister would pull through: “We know we have trouble ahead and that all those who want to hit us will use this as a stick, even if it is proved we didn’t do anything.”

Blair may now be pining for simple troubles such as backbench Labour rebellions. Philip Gould, the prime minister’s private pollster, has warned the cabinet that even before the Kelly affair the government was facing a crisis of trust, thanks to Iraq and the failure to find weapons.

There are other problems. In the past few days there have been three blazing rows in which Blair has sided with cabinet colleagues in disputes involving the chancellor: over school funding, over-the-counter medicines and patient choice. People close to Blair have also identified a dangerous tendency to revert to old ways. “We have returned to the politics of tribalism,” said one.

Gordon Brown may be squeaky keen, but his friends have been causing trouble — the “Thomas Becket syndrome”, as one cabinet minister put it. Hence last week’s strike by Brown allies in the New Statesman, owned by the chancellor’s ally Geoffrey Robinson. The magazine declared that the prime minister “looks a rather dangerous, unpredictable figure” and questioned his sanity.

That attack now looks ill-timed and unnecessary. And yesterday the prime minister’s allies were clinging to the belief that the Hutton inquiry will clear the government of any undue pressure on Kelly. They may well win on technicalities, but rescuing Blair’s reputation will require much more than that.



Ferdinand Mount is away

[Joerver]

July 20, 2003
U.S. Air Raids in `02 Prepared for War in Iraq
By MICHAEL R. GORDON


LAS VEGAS, July 19 — American air war commanders carried out a comprehensive plan to disrupt Iraq`s military command and control system before the Iraq war, according to an internal briefing on the conflict by the senior allied air war commander.

Known as Southern Focus, the plan called for attacks on the network of fiber-optic cable that Saddam Hussein`s government used to transmit military communications, as well as airstrikes on key command centers, radars and other important military assets.

The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government.

Indeed, one reason it was possible for the allies to begin the ground campaign to topple Mr. Hussein without preceding it with an extensive array of airstrikes was that 606 bombs had been dropped on 391 carefully selected targets under the plan, General Moseley said.

"It provided a set of opportunities and options for General Franks," General Moseley said in an interview, referring to Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then head of the United States Central Command. While there were indications at the time that the United States was trying to weaken Iraqi air defenses in anticipation of a possible war, the scope and detailed planning that lay behind the effort were not generally known.

The disclosure of the plan is part of an assessment prepared by General Moseley on the lessons of the war with Iraq. General Moseley and a senior aide presented their assessments at an internal briefing for American and allied military officers at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada on Thursday.

Among the disclosures provided in the internal briefings and in a later interview the General Moseley:

¶New information has shown that there was not a bunker in the Dora Farms area near Baghdad, where American intelligence initially believed Mr. Hussein was meeting with his aides. The site was attacked by F-117 stealth fighters and cruise missiles as the Bush administration sought to kill Mr. Hussein at the very onset of the war. Still, Iraqi leaders were believed to be in the Dora Farms area, General Moseley said.

¶Air war commanders were required to obtain the approval of Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed, and all of them were approved.

¶During the war, about 1,800 allied aircraft conducted about 20,000 strikes. Of those, 15,800 were directed against Iraqi ground forces while some 1,400 struck the Iraqi Air Force, air bases or air defenses. About 1,800 airstrikes were directed against the Iraqi government and 800 at suspected hiding places and installations for illicit weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles.

¶Allied commanders say precision-guided weapons made up a greater percentage of the strikes than in any previous conflict. But the military experienced great difficulty in obtaining reliable battle damage assessment about attacks against Iraqi ground forces. There were also differences between Army and Air Force commanders about the best procedures for carrying out the strikes. As a result, airstrikes against Iraqi forces that fought the Army were not as effective as commanders would have liked.

The air campaign began as a response to the Iraqis, who deployed additional surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery south of Baghdad beginning in the late 1990`s. Their maneuvers thickened the defense of the Iraqi capital. The air defense systems had the range to hit allied planes that were patrolling some portions of the southern no-flight zone.

Gen. Charles Wald, General Moseley`s predecessor as the top American air commander in the Middle East, proposed a major attack to disable the beefed-up Iraqi defenses in early 2001. But the newly inaugurated Bush administration was not looking for a confrontation with Iraq at that time, and General Wald`s recommendation was not approved.

After General Moseley assumed command toward the end of 2001, however, the American strategy began to change. General Moseley and General Franks believed that the American military needed a plan to weaken the Iraqi air defenses, initially because of the threat to the allied patrols and later to facilitate an offensive.

The first step was to use spy satellites, U-2 planes and reconnaissance drones to identify potential targets.

One major target was the network of fiber-optic cable that transmitted military communications between Baghdad and Basra and Baghdad and Nasiriya. The cables themselves were buried underground and impossible to locate. So the air war commanders focused on the "cable repeater stations," which relayed the signals. From June 2002 until the beginning of the Iraq war, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq and attacked 349 targets, including the cable stations.

"We were able to figure out that we were getting ahead of this guy and we were breaking them up faster than he could fix them," General Moseley said of the fiber-optic cables. "So then we were able to push it up a little bit and effectively break up the fiber-optic backbone from Baghdad to the south."

During that period before the war, American officials said the strikes were necessary because the Iraqis were shooting more often at allied air patrols. In total, the Iraqis fired on allied aircraft 651 times during the operation. But General Moseley said it was possible that the Iraqi attacks increased because allied planes had stepped up their patrols over Iraq. "We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more," he said. "Then the question is whether they were shooting at us because we were up there more. So there is a chicken and egg thing here."

The air campaign also provided an opportunity for American war commanders to try new military technologies and tactics.

One experiment involved arming Predator reconnaissance drones with Stinger antiaircraft missiles so they could engage in dogfights with Iraqi planes. A few months before the war, an Iraqi MIG-25 jet fighter fired two missiles at a Predator in one engagement and managed to shoot it down.

The remotely controlled Predator also fired two missiles before it was destroyed. It also transmitted video of the engagement. American officers were impressed that the Iraqi pilot was able to attack such a small target and did not turn away after he was fired upon.

As full-scale war approached, the air war commanders had five goals. They wanted to neutralize the ability of the Iraqi government to command its forces; to establish control of the airspace over Iraq; to provide air support for Special Operations forces, as well as for the Army and Marine forces that would advance toward Baghdad; and to neutralize Iraq`s force of surface-to-surface missiles and suspected caches of biological and chemical weapons.

Once the war began, air war commanders adopted an aggressive posture to keep up the pace of the attack. Unarmed refueling tankers and radar planes flew into Iraqi airspace early on, and combat search and rescue teams set up bases inside the country. For the first three weeks of the air war, there were never fewer than 200 aircraft aloft.

According to the internal briefing, 73 personnel were rescued who would have died if they had not been extracted.

Problems in obtaining reliable bomb damage assessment, the fast pace of the Army advance and differences between the Army and the air war commanders about the best way to provide air support limited the effectiveness of the strikes carried out on behalf of the Army`s V Corps, according to internal assessments.

Improving bomb damage assessment, coming to a common understanding with Army commanders about the best procedures for providing air support and increasing the capacity to provide digital information to aircraft on targets would improve the performance of air power in future conflicts, air war commanders say.

The American air campaign had a vulnerability that the Iraqis failed to exploit: a four-mile-long line of fuel trucks outside one Persian Gulf base. They were in a region in which Al Qaeda was believed to operate but they were never attacked.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

July 20, 2003
In Sketchy Data, Trying to Gauge Iraq Threat
By THE NEW YORK TIMES


This article was reported and written by James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON, July 19 — Beginning last summer, Bush administration officials insisted that they had compelling new evidence about Iraq`s prohibited weapons programs, and only occasionally acknowledged in public how little they actually knew about the current status of Baghdad`s chemical, biological or nuclear arms.

Some officials belittled the on-again, off-again United Nations inspections after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, suggesting that the inspectors had missed important evidence. "Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," Vice President Dick Cheney said last August, before the inspections resumed.

In the fall, as the debate intensified over whether to have inspectors return to Iraq, senior government officials continued to suggest that the United States had new or better intelligence that Iraq`s weapons programs were accelerating — information that the United Nations lacked.

"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more," President Bush declared in a speech in Cincinnati last October. "And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

"Clearly, to actually work, any new inspections, sanctions, or enforcement mechanisms will have to be very different," he added.

Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military`s navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in `98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you`re heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush`s national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.

"To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam`s motives or give him the benefit of the doubt," she said.

In a series of recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the United Nations inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.

President Bush has continued to express confidence that evidence of weapons programs will be found in Iraq, and the administration has recently restructured the weapons hunt after the teams dispatched by the Pentagon immediately after the war confronted an array of problems on the ground and came up mostly empty-handed.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered a nuanced analysis to Congress last week about the role that American intelligence played as the administration built its case against Mr. Hussein.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq`s pursuit of weapons of mass murder," he said. "We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11."

Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired C.I.A. officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least.

Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war, the first war itself and then the inspections process," Mr. Kerr said. "We had a rich base of information," he said, and, after the inspectors left, "we drew on that earlier base."

"There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with W.M.D. were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Mr. Kerr said, using the shorthand for weapons of mass destruction.

Even so, just days before President Bush`s State of the Union address in January, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up-to-date.

"It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites and our ability to intercept communications, but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing."

George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in February expressed confidence in much of the intelligence about Iraq, saying it "comes to us from credible and reliable sources."

It was Mr. Cheney who, last September, was clearest about the fact that the United States had only incomplete information. But he said that should not deter the country from taking action.

It is in the American character, he said, "to say, `Well, we`ll sit down and we`ll evaluate the evidence; we`ll draw a conclusion.` " He added, "But we always think in terms that we`ve got all the evidence. Here, we don`t have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don`t know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

But within the White House, the intelligence agencies, the Defense Department and the State Department, the shortage of fresh evidence touched off a struggle. Officials in the National Security Council and the vice president`s office wanted to present every shred of evidence against Mr. Hussein. Those working for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and some analysts in the intelligence agencies, insisted that that all the dots must be connected before the United States endorsed the evidence as the predicate for war.

That struggle, several officials said, explains the confusion about how the administration assembled its case, and how some evidence could be interpreted differently in public presentations before the war.

New Evidence Grows Scarce


An internal C.I.A. review of prewar intelligence on Iraq, recently submitted to the agency`s director, Mr. Tenet, has found that the evidence collected by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies after 1998 was mostly fragmentary and often inconclusive.

In a series of interviews, officials said both the Bush administration and Congressional committees were aware of the decline in hard evidence collected on Iraq`s weapons programs after 1998.

In part, the officials said, that was a result of the embarrassment of 1991, when it turned out that the C.I.A. had greatly underestimated the progress Mr. Hussein had made in the nuclear arena. Mr. Cheney often cited that experience as he pressed for firmer conclusions. So has President Bush, who recalled that intelligence failing again on Thursday, as, in a news conference with Britain`s prime minister, Tony Blair, he defended his decision to go to war.

Analysts say the cost of overestimating the threat posed by Mr. Hussein was minimal, while the cost of underestimating it could have been incalculable.

The arguments over evidence spilled into public view during the debate about whether the United Nations inspectors should be sent back to Iraq at all. Mr. Cheney had declared in August that returning them to Iraq would be dangerous, that it would create a false sense of security. When the inspectors returned in November, senior administration officials were dismissive of their abilities.

They insisted that American intelligence agencies had better information on Iraq`s weapons programs than the United Nations, and would use that data to find Baghdad`s weapons after Mr. Hussein`s government was toppled. In hindsight, it is now clear just how dependent American intelligence agencies were on the United Nations weapons inspections process.

The inspections aided intelligence agencies directly, by providing witnesses` accounts from ground level and, indirectly, by prodding the Iraqis and forcing them to try to move and hide people and equipment, activities that American spy satellites and listening stations could monitor.

Several current and former intelligence officials said the United States did not have any high-level spies in Mr. Hussein`s inner circle who could provide current information about his weapons programs. That weakness could not be fixed quickly.

According to Mr. Kerr, the former C.I.A. analyst, "It would have been very hard for any group of analysts, looking at the situation between 1991 through 1995, to conclude that the W.M.D. programs were not under way." Once the inspectors left, he added, "it was also hard to prove they weren`t under way."

Powell`s Caution


By the time Mr. Powell arrived in the conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday, Jan. 31, three days after the State of the Union address, the presentation he was scheduled to make at the United Nations in just five days was in tatters.

Mr. Powell`s chief of staff had called his boss the day before to warn that "we can`t connect all the dots" in the intelligence on Iraq`s weapons programs. Mr. Powell`s staff had discovered that statements in intelligence assessments did not always match up with the exhibits Mr. Powell had insisted on including in his presentation.

Apart from some satellite photographs of facilities rebuilt after they were bombed during the Clinton administration in 1998, the only new pieces of evidence indicating that Mr. Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program focused on what he was trying to buy.

While the National Intelligence Estimate, which was published in October and declassified on Friday, clearly stated that Mr. Hussein "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," Mr. Powell`s own intelligence unit, in a dissenting view, said "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was pursuing what it called "an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

So Mr. Powell wended a careful path, focusing on Iraq`s acquisition efforts for centrifuge parts, needed to turn the dross of uranium into the gold of nuclear fuel. But when discussing, for example, the aluminum tubes Iraq had ordered in violation of United Nations penalties, he did not go as far as Ms. Rice, who said in September that the equipment was "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." (She was more cautious in later statements.)

Mr. Powell, at the United Nations, acknowledged that the findings about the tubes were disputed. But he did not quote his own intelligence unit, which in that same dissent in the National Intelligence Estimate wrote that it "considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."

Curiously, as he prepared for his presentation, Mr. Powell rejected advice that he hold up such a tube during his speech. Asked about that decision in a recent interview, he joked that the tube would block his face, and then said, "Why hold up the most controversial thing in the pitch?"

Similarly, Mr. Powell was more cautious than Mr. Bush was in describing Mr. Hussein`s meetings with what the president, in his Cincinnati speech, had called Iraq`s "nuclear mujahedeen." Mr. Powell was urged by some in the administration to cite those meetings, and to illustrate it with a picture of one of the sessions.

"Now tell me who these guys are," he asked a few nights before his presentation, when the C.I.A. showed him the picture, a participant in the conversation recalled.

"Oh, we`re quite sure this is his nuclear crowd," came the response.

"How do you know?" Mr. Powell pressed. "Prove it. Who are they?" No one could answer the question.

"There were a lot of cigars lit," Mr. Powell recalled, referring to the evidence. "I didn`t want any going off in my face or the president`s face."

The C.I.A. also had scant new evidence about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but specialists began working on the issue under the direction of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy. Those analysts did not develop any new intelligence data, but looked at existing intelligence reports for possible links between Iraq and terrorists that they felt might have been overlooked or undervalued.

An aide to Mr. Rumsfeld suggested that the defense secretary look at the work of the analysts on Mr. Feith`s staff. At a Pentagon news conference last year, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "I was so interested in it, I said, `Gee, why don`t you go over and brief George Tenet?` So they did. They went over and briefed the C.I.A.. So there`s no — there`s no mystery about all this."

At the C.I.A., analysts listened to the Pentagon team, nodded politely, and said, "Thank you very much," said one government official. That official said the briefing did not change the agency`s reporting or analysis in any substantial way.

Several current and former intelligence officials have said analysts at the C.I.A. felt pressure to tailor reports to conform to the administration`s views, particularly the theories Mr. Feith`s group developed.

Once the war began, some suspected that Iraq might use chemical weapons, but again the intelligence was sketchy. Just days before American-led forces captured the Iraqi capital, military commanders were warned that Mr. Hussein might have drawn "red lines" around the approach to Baghdad that, when crossed, would prompt Iraqi forces to launch artillery or missiles tipped with chemical or germ weapons.

Senior administration and intelligence officials now confirm that they had a single informant on what was not so much a circle but a series of landmarks — literally, dots that could be connected to outline a potential danger zone.

In their public statements on the red lines, both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Powell said the intelligence was unclear. "We knew how little we knew," said one official who was briefed on the intelligence report.

"Intelligence doesn`t necessarily mean something is true," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news briefing after major combat ended in Iraq. "You know, it`s your best estimate of the situation. It doesn`t mean it`s a fact. I mean, that`s not what intelligence is."


William J. Broad and Don Van Natta Jr. contributed to this article.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 20, 2003
A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein`s Weapons
By JUDITH MILLER


On paper, the Pentagon`s plan for finding Iraq`s unconventional weapons was bold and original.

Four mobile exploitation teams, or MET`s, each composed of about 25 soldiers, scientists and weapons experts from several Pentagon agencies, would fan out to chase tips from survey units and combat forces in the field. They would search 578 "suspect sites" in Iraq for the chemical, biological and nuclear components that the Bush administration had cited time and again to justify the war. The Pentagon said the weapons hunters would have whatever they needed — helicopters, Humvees in case weather grounded the choppers, and secure telecommunications.

But the "ground truth," as soldiers say, was this: chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among various military units, and shortages of everything from gasoline to soap plagued the postwar search for evidence of Iraq`s supposed unconventional weapons.

To this day, whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown. It is the biggest mystery of the war and a thorny political problem for President Bush. His administration has expanded the hunt and has urged patience, expressing the belief that some weapons may still be found. Others believe that to be increasingly unlikely.

Interviews with soldiers and government officials over three months with the Pentagon`s 75th Exploitation Task Force, known as the XTF, identified a number of problems that might explain why the search has produced so little. The flaws are serious enough, according to some participants, that the searchers might indeed have overlooked weapons or their components — if they were there to be found.

Some participants said the Bush administration used flawed intelligence to plan and conduct the search. They said planners had assumed that either chemical or biological weapons would be used against American forces in the field, proving their existence to the world. Or they assumed that if the armaments were not used, they would be easy to find.

Some said that promising sites were looted — or cleared of evidence — before Americans could search or secure them.

"Because we arrived at sites so late, so often," said Capt. J. Ryan Cutchin, the leader of the team known as MET Bravo, "we may never know what was there, and either walked or was taken away by looters and Baathist elements under the guise of looting."

A senior Iraqi military intelligence official, a source some of the weapons hunters considered their most promising find, said Mr. Hussein had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons, continuing the destruction up until a week before the war.

Several officials asserted that bureaucratic rivalries were partly to blame. There was strife between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon`s Defense Intelligence Agency, and arguments between the MET weapons-hunting units and their commander; and some said that Special Operations forces alienated potential Iraqi sources through midnight raids and other harsh tactics.

Underlying those problems, experts and soldiers said, was the Pentagon`s reluctance to make the mission an urgent priority as the risky occupation of Iraq unfolded.

"Though it may be now, I don`t sense that this was much of a priority," said Fred C. Ikle, an under secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

By the middle of June, according to weapons experts and administration officials, the searchers had interviewed only 13 scientists among some 200 people on the government`s black list of "high-value targets" or among the thousands of midlevel people on the so-called gray list. Collectively, those people could have had extensive knowledge of Iraq`s unconventional weapons programs.

Only after the administration came under political fire for failing to find the weapons and was accused of distorting intelligence to build a case for the war did the White House put David Kay, a former international weapons inspector and envoy from the C.I.A., in charge of invigorating a task force that had already been restructured once.

Several analysts said that although the task force`s weapons-hunting teams were highly motivated and innovative, the Pentagon initially erred in putting a field artillery brigade in charge of the hunt.

"Unlike Marine or infantry units, field artillery units are full of procedures, lists and box-checking," said a veteran military analyst. "They are not known for flexibility."

Col. Richard R. McPhee, 47, a West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, said he learned only in late December that his brigade had been selected to lead the search, leaving him only a month to prepare.

Drawing Up the Plan


The plan for the hunt, drawn up mainly by United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., with the Defense Intelligence Agency, put too much emphasis on site searches, officers said. In September, defense planners, former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, and officials from several Pentagon offices, including Central Command, had concluded in a secret session at the Pentagon-run National Defense University that while compiling a definitive list of suspect sites to be surveyed was important, recruiting Iraqis involved in unconventional weapons programs was the key to success.

They also agreed that financial and other incentives, like lenient treatment, should be offered to induce cooperation from wary Iraqi scientists and military officers. Finally, participants said, they agreed that former inspectors from Unscom, especially those who had interviewed Iraqis involved in the program, should be involved in the hunt.

But the task force had virtually no inspectors and few analysts who knew Iraq or its weapons programs well, said Richard Spertzel, a former weapons inspector who had helped assemble a list of more than 20 former American inspectors who were ready to help. No financial incentives for cooperation were offered until recently.

The number of MET teams hunting for unconventional weapons was reduced to two from four before the war was even over, lowering the number of active weapons hunters to fewer than 50 from 100, far fewer than the 200 United Nations inspectors.

"To seize and secure facilities took time and manpower, and they did not want to do it," said Master Sgt. Thomas Boon, a weapons hunter traveling with the Third Infantry Division. By the time Sergeant Boon`s team reached Karbala in late April, the soldiers had turned up nothing at the 38 sites they had surveyed, sometimes hastily, as the maneuvering forces pressed on to Baghdad, team members said.

Most sites had already been heavily looted by the time the forces arrived, Sergeant Boon said.

Interviews vs. Searches


Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, the head of MET Alpha, said in a recent interview that he became convinced of the need to concentrate on human sources, rather than site visits, after his unit secured the cooperation of two senior Iraqi participants in Iraq`s unconventional weapons programs.

One of them, Dr. Nissar Hindawi, a leading figure in Iraq`s biological warfare program in the 1980`s, said in an interview in April that the explanations he and other scientists had continued giving the United Nations about Iraq`s efforts to produce poisons and germ weapons were lies. He said, for instance, that he told inspectors that he was the head of a single-cell protein plant which, he said after the war, actually had made botulism toxin and anthrax.

Administration officials said MET Alpha`s second source — a man who originally identified himself as a scientist but who turned out to be a military intelligence officer who said he oversaw part of Iraq`s chemical weapons program — remained one of the highest-ranking Iraqis to volunteer to help the United States government in its search for unconventional weapons. Col. McPhee called his recruitment a "turning point" for the task force.

According to officers and officials interviewed in Baghdad and Washington, the Iraqi asserted not only that stockpiles of banned weapons had been destroyed from 1995 to a few days before the war, but also that the weapons programs were devised to continue research and development after the chemical stockpiles were gone. Military experts and administration officials who confirmed that the military spent hours debriefing the Iraqi said similar claims had also been asserted by other deposed Iraqi officials now in detention. But they declined to comment on what proportion of the stockpiles he said had been destroyed early on or why the intelligence agencies did not know of the stockpile destruction.

On April 24, less than a week after the Iraqi met with American officials in Baghdad and White House officials were given a report about his claims, President Bush said publicly for the first time that the military might not find Iraqi unconventional weapons stockpiles because they they might have been destroyed.

A White House spokesman declined comment on whether Mr. Bush`s statement was a result of the Iraqi source`s assertions, but officials in Iraq and Washington confirmed that White House officials had hotly debated the Iraqi`s assertions, which they said had startled them.

"The Iraqi remains a cooperating source whose life would be endangered were his identity known in Iraq," a senior administration official said.

Despite the discovery that Iraqis like the military intelligence officer were willing under the right circumstances to cooperate, the MET units were ordered to stick to searching the list of suspect sites.

"We said this is useless," said Captain Cutchin of MET Bravo. "It`s toilet paper for us."

Faulty Leads and Frustration


The intelligence on sites was often stunningly wrong, one senior officer agreed.

"The teams would be given a packet, with pictures and a tentative grid," he said. "They would be told: `Go to this place. You will find a McDonald`s there. Look in the fridge. You will find French fries, cheeseburger and Cokes.` And they would go there, and not only was there no fridge and no McDonald`s, there was never even a thought of ever putting a McDonald`s there. Day after day it was like that."

Throughout their mission, MET units members expressed frustration that they were not permitted to discuss with Iraqi scientists and security officials either the amnesty for war crimes or the sizable monetary rewards that had been authorized to offer in exchange for cooperation, despite the Iraqis` obvious reluctance to participate as long as Mr. Hussein might be alive. Then the MET units were sent home two months before a normal rotation, though they had volunteered to stay.

Officials charged with cultivating Iraqis as sources remained unhappy with raids by Special Forces on their potential sources` homes in the dead of night. "Knocking down a scientist`s door at 3 a.m., putting a bag over his head, and flex-cuffing his family while you search for hidden weapons or documents is hardly a way to induce his cooperation," one weapons expert said.

On Friday, Colonel McPhee said he was proud that his teams had inspected more than 350 sites "without getting a single soldier killed" and had provided a smooth transition for the 75th XTF, which was merged into a larger, supposedly more agile task force known as the Iraq Survey Group. The number of weapons hunters and support troops has grown to more than 1,500 from 1,000. Once expected to be operating in May, officials said the new group would not be fully operational until August.

But MET Alpha`s final mission underscores the continuing problems that plague the hunt. Sent to Basra to investigate what senior Iraq Survey Group intelligence and weapons experts called highly suspicious equipment that could be components for a nuclear weapons program, the team collected what turned out to be oil production equipment and a handful of large, industrial-scale vegetable steamers. The contents of the crates containing the suspect equipment were all clearly marked, in Russian.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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July 20, 2003
The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link
By DANIEL BENJAMIN and STEVEN SIMON



WASHINGTON
In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush`s State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq`s supposed links to terrorists.

The invasion of Iraq, after all, was billed as Phase II in the war on terror that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But was there ever a credible basis for carrying that battle to Iraq?

Don`t misunderstand — we should all be glad to see the Iraqi people freed from Saddam Hussein`s tyranny, and the defeat of Iraq did spell the demise of the world`s No. 4 state sponsor of international terrorism (Iran, Syria and Sudan all have more blood on their hands in the last decade). But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the organization that made catastrophic terrorism a reality, seems more uncertain than ever.

In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden`s followers over the years, there was no strong evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade`s worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.

In the 14 weeks since the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces have not brought to light any significant evidence demonstrating the bond between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Uncovering such a link should be much easier than finding weapons of mass destruction. Instead of having to inspect hundreds of suspected weapons sites around the country, military and intelligence officials need only comb through the files of Iraq`s intelligence agency and a handful of other government ministries.

Our intelligence experts have been doing exactly that since April and so far there has been no report of any proof (and we can assume that any supporting information would have quickly been publicized). Of the more than 3,000 Qaeda operatives arrested around the world, only a handful of prisoners in Guantánamo — all with an incentive to please their captors — have claimed there was cooperation between Osama bin Laden`s organization and Saddam Hussein`s regime, and their remarks have yet to be confirmed by any of the high-ranking Iraqi officials now in American hands.

Indeed, most new reports concerning Al Qaeda and Iraq have been of another nature. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two highest-ranking Qaeda operatives in custody, have told investigators that Mr. bin Laden shunned cooperation with Saddam Hussein. A United Nations team investigating global ties of the bin Laden group reported last month that they found no evidence of a Qaeda-Iraq connection.

In addition, one Central Intelligence Agency official told The Washington Post that a review panel of retired intelligence operatives put together by the agency found that although there were some ties among individuals in the two camps, "it was not at all clear there was any coordination or joint activities." And Rand Beers, the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council who resigned earlier this year, has said that on the basis of the intelligence he saw, he did not believe there was a significant relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The Congressional oversight committees evaluating the administration`s use of intelligence on Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction have said they will also examine whether the administration manipulated information regarding Iraq`s involvement in terrorism. The terrorism issue must not be given short shrift because of the current controversy over claims of Iraq`s unconventional weapons. The truth is, we knew for decades that Iraq had nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs — yet it was only after 9/11 that these programs were viewed as an intolerable threat that necessitated a regime change.

This is not only a question of political accountability — it also bears on our nation`s fundamental approach to security. United States policy changed dramatically when the Bush administration, lacking compelling evidence of an Iraq-Qaeda link, decided to base the Qaeda part of its pro-war argument on a hypothetical situation. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in October. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

But this scenario is extremely unlikely. For years now the world`s leading state sponsors of terrorism have had no confidence that they could carry out attacks against the United States undetected. That is why this brand of terrorism has been on the wane.

After it became clear to Libya that the United States could prove its responsibility for the 1988 attack on Pan Am 103 — and United Nations sanctions were imposed — it got out of the business of supporting attacks on Americans. After American and Kuwaiti intelligence traced a plot to kill former President George H. W. Bush in 1993 to Baghdad, the Iraqi regime also stopped trying to carry out terrorist attacks against America. And when the Clinton administration made clear that it knew Iran was behind the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, Tehran ceased plotting terrorist strikes against American interests.

Because of America`s intelligence and law enforcement capacities, the world`s outlaw states know that they will pay a high price for sponsoring terrorists act against us — and an overwhelming one should they assist in attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. That is why Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and some 20 other countries with chemical and biological weapons have never, as far as we know, given one to terrorists.

Of course, the return of state-backed terror against America cannot be ruled out. And we are right to be concerned that North Korea, the world`s most unpredictable regime, might sell a nuclear weapon to terrorists. But this much is clear: all states, even rogue ones, have a strong conservative impulse for self-preservation.

American policy must recognize this clear division between the old state-sponsored terrorism, which we have shown we can deter, and the new, religiously motivated attacks. First, we should think long and hard before seeking regime change as a means of behavior modification. Those who chafe to topple the mullahs in Iran, for example, court unforeseen consequences that may ultimately damage America`s interests.

If we were to confirm that extreme elements like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are harboring Qaeda operatives, we would need to press hard diplomatically, economically and even be prepared to threaten military action. But a concerted effort to upend the regime could well backfire, ending the slow but nonetheless clear evolution of Iran into a genuine democracy.

Second and most important, the Bush administration should focus more on Al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that poses an imminent, undeterrable danger. New instability in Afghanistan and the continued spread of jihadist ideology in the Islamic world mean that the prospects for another 9/11 are growing. America has been fortunate in capturing some high-ranking terrorists, but we still lack a comprehensive program to deal with a growing global insurgency and the long-term threat of radical Islam, for which intelligence and law enforcement will not suffice.

Rogue regimes are bad for the world and worse for the people forced to live under them. Over time, we can use diplomacy — including coercion — and deterrence to bring about change. For now, however, the direst threat to Americans comes not from the mullahs of Tehran, but from the mass-murderers of Al Qaeda.


Daniel Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Steven Simon, an analyst at the Rand Corporation, are authors of ‘‘The Age of Sacred Terror.’’



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 20, 2003
Let`s Blame Canada
By MAUREEN DOWD


They were wrong, of course. Soldiers should not go public in the middle of a conflict and trash-talk their superiors or ask for the resignation of the secretary of defense.

But it was inevitable that their gripes would bubble to the surface. Many American troops in Iraq are exhausted, and perplexed about the scary new guerrilla war they`re caught up in. And they have every right to be scared, because the coolly efficient Bush commanders have now been exposed as short-term tacticians who had no strategy for dealing with a war of liberation that morphed into a war of attrition.

The Third Infantry Division, which spearheaded the drive to Baghdad and has been away from home the longest, has had its departure date yanked away twice. Last week, some soldiers from the Third in Falluja — a treacherous place where many Americans have been killed by guerrillas, including one on Friday — griped to the ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman. One soldier said, "If Donald Rumsfeld was here, I`d ask him for his resignation."

The complaints infuriated some in the Bush administration, and the new Tommy Franks, Gen. John Abizaid, suggested that field commanders might mete out "a verbal reprimand or something more stringent."

Somebody at the White House decided not to wait. Matt Drudge, the conservative cybercolumnist, told Lloyd Grove, the Washington Post gossip columnist, that "someone from the White House communications shop" told him about the ABC story and also about a profile of the Canadian-born Mr. Kofman in The Advocate, a gay publication. Mr. Drudge quickly linked the two stories on his popular Web site, first headlining the Advocate piece, "ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINTS STORY — OPENLY GAY CANADIAN." Eight minutes later, he amended the headline to read, "ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINTS STORY IS CANADIAN," leaving readers to discover in the body of the story what the Bush provocateur apparently felt was Mr. Kofman`s other vice.

Now that the right wing`s bête noire, Peter Jennings, has gotten his American citizenship, conservatives may have needed another ABC Canadian to kick around. And the Christian right is still smarting over the Supreme Court`s telling police they could no longer storm gay bedrooms in search of sodomy.

Scott McClellan, the new Bush press secretary, said that if Mr. Drudge`s contention about his source was true, it would be "totally inappropriate." He added, "If anyone on my staff did it, they would no longer be working for me." He said he had no way to trace an anonymous source.

But Bush loyalists regularly plant information they want known in the Drudge Report. Whoever dredged up the Advocate story was appealing to the baser nature of President Bush`s base, seeking to discredit the ABC report by smearing the reporter for what he or she considers sins of private life (not straight) and passport (not American). Let`s hope the fans of Ann (Have you no sense of decency?) Coulter aren`t taking her revisionist view of McCarthyism too seriously and making character assassination fashionable again on the Potomac.

What we are witnessing is how ugly it can get when control freaks start losing control. Beset by problems, the Bush team responds by attacking those who point out the problems. These linear, Manichaean managers are flailing in an ever-more-chaotic environment. They are spending $3.9 billion a month trying to keep the lid on a festering mess in Iraq, even as Afghanistan simmers.

The more Bush officials try to explain how the president made the bogus uranium claim in his State of the Union address, despite the C.I.A. red flags and the State Department warning that it was "highly dubious," the more inexplicable it seems. The list of evils the administration has not unearthed keeps getting longer — Osama, Saddam, W.M.D., the anthrax terrorist — as the deficit gets bigger ($455 billion, going to $475 billion).

After 9/11, this administration had everything going for it. Republicans ruled Congress. The president had enormously high approval ratings. Yet it overreached while trying to justify the reasons for going to war.

Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they`re under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they`re losing their marbles.




Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Es war einmal bei Starbucks.

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Plans To Enlist Iraqis in Operations
Civil Force Is Intended To Quell Resistance

By Thomas E. Ricks and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A01


CAMP AS SALIYAH, Qatar, July 19 -- U.S. military commanders plan to train and arm thousands of Iraqis to conduct military missions alongside U.S. and British troops in an effort to restore security and quell resistance by forces loyal to ousted president Saddam Hussein, the new head of U.S. military forces in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East said today.

"The Iraqis want to be in the fight," Army Gen. John P. Abizaid said in his first interview since taking over U.S. Central Command this month. "We intend to get them in the fight."

Plans to create a militia-like civil defense force signal a new approach to the task of establishing order in postwar Iraq, where 36 U.S. troops have been killed in attacks since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

In the wake of the Iraqi military`s defeat at the hands of U.S. and British forces, Abizaid said, it "will take years" to create a new, professional Iraqi army. "In the interim, we need civil defense forces that can operate with coalition forces, and eventually alone," he said.

Speaking at Central Command`s regional headquarters here in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, Abizaid also said that he plans to alter the structure of U.S. forces in Iraq but that the current level of 148,000 U.S. troops will have to be maintained for at least 90 days.

In addition, Abizaid said that U.S. military operations against Hussein loyalists and remnants of his Baath Party are only beginning. After six weeks of offensives in the restive "Sunni triangle" north and west of Baghdad, "I think we are beginning to learn" about the nature of the resistance in Iraq, he said. "I think that we`re at the beginning of a process, not the end of it, and it`s a long process."

Unlike an Iraqi-staffed private security organization that was announced this week, which would guard banks and other key sites, the civil defense units described by Abizaid would be actively involved in joint military missions with occupation forces.

Initial U.S. plans call for raising about 10 battalions of about 350 Iraqis each in the coming weeks, a senior Central Command official said. Each battalion would be "sponsored" by a U.S. division or regiment, which would train the Iraqi recruits and operate in tandem with them.

Iraq`s new 25-member Governing Council discussed the creation of an Iraqi civil defense force at meetings this week and broadly supported the concept, according to council members. The idea of forming such a force was advocated by former exiles. Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of political groups that had opposed Hussein`s government from exile, said it would help to meet demands from both Iraqi civilians and U.S. commanders to reduce the presence of American troops on the streets of Baghdad and other large cities.

"It`s very important to reduce the number of army troops in our cities, whether they are American or British," said Ghazi Yawur, a tribal leader and a member of the Governing Council. "This security force will be a way to do that."

"We need a force that is stronger than the police, but is something other than the new army, to guard our country," said Entifadh Qanbar, a senior official of the Iraqi National Congress. Qanbar said the force should not be affiliated with Iraq`s new military, to avoid setting a precedent of using regular army units for domestic security. "But it also needs a level of authority and training that is lacking with the police," he said.

Qanbar said well-armed and -trained Iraqis would be better suited than foreign troops to restore order to Iraq`s cities. "An American soldier from Wisconsin doesn`t know the difference between a Baghdadi and a guy from Basra," he said. "It will be very useful to have Iraqis taking the lead role with security. It will reduce the killings of Americans."

By the same token, he said, forces opposed to the occupation "are using the killing of Americans to generate controversy among the people. If they start killing Iraqis, it will be more problematic for them."

Even as an Iraqi paramilitary force is created, Abizaid said he also wants to change the composition of U.S. forces to better fight Iraqi foes who have become "more sophisticated" in the way they operate and attack U.S. troops. Starting in about a month, he said, "we will change the configuration of forces so that it becomes lighter, mobile, more agile against the enemy that we face."

That does not mean, however, that troop reduction is about to begin, he added. "For the next 90 days," he said, "the current numbers are about the same."

Abizaid, who on Sunday is scheduled to travel to Iraq for the first time since becoming the senior U.S. military officer in the Middle East, has a reputation among his Army peers for being extremely aggressive and believing that battles and wars are won by constantly pushing and keeping the adversary off balance. He is expected to use his trip this week to encourage U.S. commanders in Iraq to use every means possible to attack Baath Party remnants and other U.S. foes.

He said he is bringing two clear orders from Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: "Number one is take the fight to the enemy, and number two is, stay the course."

In recent weeks, he said, U.S. military operations have made progress in suppressing resistance by Hussein loyalists "in terms of understanding the cellular structure, understanding the cellular leadership . . . and figuring out how to interdict them . . . and either arrest, capture or kill the leaders."

Occupation forces have moved from apprehending former leaders who were close to Hussein to targeting somewhat lower-level members of the Baath Party who are directly involved in fighting the U.S. presence -- "the people that are causing us damage," Abizaid said. Hundreds of those people have been captured recently, and there are now 3,800 Iraqis in detention, of whom about 1,200 are believed to be hard-core Baathists or die-hard elements of the old Iraqi military, a Central Command official said.

The U.S. offensives conducted since the beginning of June north and west of Baghdad have resulted in a casualty rate of about one American death every day or two, and Abizaid declined to say whether the U.S. determination to continue pressing the offensive meant that that casualty rate could be expected to continue. "It wouldn`t be appropriate to say anything about [future] casualty levels," he said.

He added that as U.S. forces "achieve political successes -- also as we achieve military successes -- casualties will go up." For example, he said, gaining new intelligence on a previously undetected large concentration of enemy fighters would be a sign of progress -- but a resulting raid could cost American lives.

So, he said, "casualties are never a good way to measure success or failure."

Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Iraqi soldiers ran from former president Saddam Hussein`s principal palace in Baghdad after U.S. troops took control of the complex on April 7. The city fell two days later, with Iraqi forces having failed to mount the anticipated defense.

Photo Credit: Faleh Kheiber -- Reuters
washingtonpost.com
A Foe That Collapsed From Within
Former Iraqi Officers Say Internal Divisions, Ineptitude Ensured Defeat

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD -- At 8:30 p.m. on April 7, two days before the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi Col. Abdul Kareem Abdul Razzaq assembled his remaining soldiers and looked into their heartbreakingly tired, dispirited faces, he recounted in an interview last week.

"The [U.S.] Air Force is bombing, there`s a huge American Army coming we can`t fight, we are losing control," he told them. "We`ve been ordered to continue fighting. What do you think we should do?"

The men -- only 600 of his original 1,500 soldiers had not deserted or been killed during the battle for Baghdad`s airport -- were nearly unanimous in their decision to take their Kalashnikov rifles and go home.

"I gave the order to retreat," Abdul Razzaq said, his face contorted by deep furrows and an anguished grimace. "If I had given the order for my soldiers to stay, they`d all be killed."

In the final days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, this country`s armed forces collapsed from within, with soldiers deserting in droves and commanders of even the most elite units refusing to push their last fighters toward inevitable slaughter by a technologically superior U.S. force, former Iraqi military leaders said.

The rapid disintegration was largely preordained, Iraqis said. The Iraqi military was composed of disparate and competing armies with no central command authority, top generals inexplicably ordered some units not to fight, and security precautions left officers unable to communicate or to coordinate battle plans, according to interviews with more than two dozen former general officers and other field commanders serving in the regular army and special military units.

By the time the war began, most of the Iraqi air force`s fighter planes had been disassembled and hidden, many air defense units were under orders not to turn on their radars and artillery batteries were operating at 50 percent capability, military leaders said.

In the end, former president Saddam Hussein was undercut not only by the destruction wrought by the Americans but by an Iraqi regular military that felt little loyalty to a leader who paid his special armies better salaries and intimidated generals into lying about the dilapidated state of his armed forces, the senior officers said.

Though it is impossible to independently verify the accounts provided by the officers interviewed over the past week, the close parallels among experiences described by military leaders from field units, headquarters divisions and special forces assigned to a wide variety of locations buttressed their credibility. Only a handful of the officers requested that their names be withheld.

Every commander interviewed said that despite the anxiety of U.S. officials, no Iraqi military unit had been issued chemical or biological weapons.

And while U.S. military leaders had also feared a bloodbath in the streets of Baghdad, all the commanders said their men were not under orders to fall back into the capital and wage urban warfare. Rather, they said, their men deserted or retreated with the aim of self-preservation. Some commanders said they ordered their soldiers to defend their homes and families, but did not tell them to take offensive action against Americans.

Today, the more than 400,000 officers and soldiers of the former Iraqi military are among the country`s most disenfranchised and disillusioned citizens. For senior officers who dedicated a lifetime to a once-respected institution and reaped honorific and financial benefits for battles won in past wars, the ignoble demise of the armed forces has been excruciating.

"I cried after the collapse of Baghdad," said Gen. Mohammad Ali Jasim, 51, a 31-year veteran whose infantry division was assigned to the southern city of Basra during the U.S. invasion. "I didn`t even cry when my son was killed in an accident when he was young. But I cried when we lost Baghdad."

His voice faltered and his deep-set eyes welled with tears. "We are ashamed. We are military officers."

Weakened by Divisions
Brig. Hassen Jabani, 46, a career officer with a prominent mole on his left cheek and a mouthful of chipped teeth, commanded a tank division in the Republican Guard, a vanguard of the Iraqi military with better equipment and soldiers than the regular army.

Twelve days into the war, he said, when U.S. generals were warning of fierce battles with the Republican Guard on the outskirts of Baghdad, he had already lost communication with his leadership.

His soldiers began deserting in waves on April 3, the day before U.S. fighter jets turned his T-72 tanks into burning hulks of blackened metal.

"Seventy percent of my soldiers went home," said Jabani, whose rank is equivalent to a one-star general in the U.S. military. "I saw we had no chance to win. I let them go. We retreated without any fighting. It was no use. . . . Everybody knew we`d lose to the Americans."

The rapid collapse of Iraq`s premier fighting forces surprised American and Iraqi military commanders alike. But Iraqi officers from both the regular army and the special forces said the breakdown was due not only to U.S. bombardment but to the hollowness at the core of a military built on mistrust, deception and abuse.

Since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Hussein had been reconstructing his armed forces to prevent just such a debacle. After the failed Shiite Muslim uprising in southern Iraq after the Gulf War, he became distrustful of his regular army, which included many Shiite soldiers and officers. He began building specialized forces that operated outside the control of the regular army, according to Iraqi commanders.

"Saddam created small armies to protect his tribe, his interests, his family," said Col. Abdul Razzaq, who spent most of his 23-year career in the infantry. "He was afraid the regular army might rise up against him."

Hussein formed the Special Republican Guard, with an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers, and put his son Qusay in charge. In 1995, he created the feared Fedayeen paramilitary force -- tens of thousands of men originally trained to quell internal uprisings and demonstrations. The Fedayeen answered to Hussein`s more ruthless son, Uday. And just after the Palestinian uprising against Israel began in the fall of 2000, Hussein built the Al-Quds Army, a specialized military force that bore the Arabic name for Jerusalem and was ostensibly geared toward fighting the Israelis.

"There was no coordination between these armies -- they hate each other," said Brig. Rasheed Islam Joubouri, 56, who spent 34 years in a regular-army infantry unit.

During the war, the lack of communication and coordination hastened the defeat of the Iraqi forces. A regular-army general in charge of an air defense unit in Baghdad said he was ordered not to activate his weapons because the Republican Guard was responsible for the city`s defense.

The favoritism heaped on the special militias widened the gap between them and the regular army, whose soldiers received one-third as much pay, whose officers were accorded much less respect and whose units received inferior equipment, commanders said.

"We didn`t work for Saddam Hussein, we worked for the country," said Col. Jamal Salem, 41, who headed operations at a major supply base about 15 miles outside Baghdad. "It was our job. I loved the army."

As a result, he said, "we had no fight with the Americans. When we heard they were in Baghdad, it was over for us."

Even in the regular army, divisiveness was rampant. Hussein routinely doled out new cars, Rolex watches and cash to senior generals, according to several general officers who acknowledged receiving such gifts.

"The army was fed up and tired of fighting after three wars," said Col. Abu Ala Zuhairi, 45, who served 23 years in infantry missile defense units. "The commanders received many presents, but the soldiers were starving."

In the final days of war, with his equipment destroyed, his leaders in disarray and his comrades deserting, Capt. Ahmed Hassan, 38, whose infantry unit was responsible for defending the northern city of Kirkuk, said he simply had no incentive to fight.

"I asked my commander, `Why should I stay? The people behind me are retreating,` " Hassan recalled. "I took off my high ranks and said goodbye to everything I`d known for 13 years."

Afraid to Tell the Truth
Hussein`s system of rewards also spawned an atmosphere of deceit that deluded the president into believing his armed forces went into the war far better equipped and militarily capable than they really were, senior officers said.

Gen. Yasin Mohammad Taha Joubouri, an artillery specialist with 38 years in the regular army, said he was summoned to a meeting with the president in 1999, who ordered him to help the Defense Ministry build one of the largest artillery pieces in the world.

The army, with assistance from specialists, designed a cannon with a barrel 210 millimeters -- more than eight inches -- in diameter, a weapon so cumbersome that Joubouri and the other specialists knew it could not work. Still, Joubouri helped build a full-scale model and drafted fake performance records to convince the president that the project was progressing.

"No one could tell him it couldn`t work," said Joubouri, who said he was still working on the cannon when he left the army six months ago. "He was giving us awards and presents."

On the morning of March 16, four days before U.S. forces launched the war, Gen. Kareem Saadoun, a tall, hawk-faced air force commander with 25 years in the armed forces, was among 150 senior officers ushered into an underground auditorium outside Baghdad.

Hussein stood on a stage. His son Qusay occasionally stepped to his side to light his cigars as Hussein exhorted his generals in a rambling pep talk and tirade against the United States, Saadoun recalled.

When Hussein opened the floor to comments, Saadoun stepped forward. "We are ready to fight for our land," said Saadoun, whose rank is equivalent to that of a two-star general in the U.S. military. "We hope there will be no war, but if it comes, we would be willing to die."

Saadoun said he and every other regular army officer in the room who testified to their fighting ability that morning were lying. They were afraid of telling the president the truth: Their aircraft, tanks and other weaponry were far too old and decrepit to take on U.S. forces.

"We knew there was no way to fight the Americans," he said. "We knew we`d lose the war."

Before the generals left the room, Hussein`s aides handed each one a gift of 1 million Iraqi dinars -- about $5,000 -- in cash. Saadoun thought the president looked pale, his face tired and yellow. He was not the same smiling, joking Hussein that Saadoun had seen during a similar audience in 2001 when the gift for each attendee had been the equivalent of $20,000.

In late February, the air force was ordered to disassemble its planes, according to Saadoun and other air force officers and pilots. The aircraft were stripped of their wings -- a drill every air base had conducted each month since the end of the Gulf War -- and hidden in farm fields and urban neighborhoods. Saadoun said the mechanics had become so proficient they could dismantle the wings of a MiG-21 fighter in two hours.

Iraq had already lost much of its air force in 1991, when U.S. forces destroyed Iraqi fighter jets in the air and on the ground and Iran refused to return more than 100 planes that Iraqi pilots had flown to the neighboring country to avoid American attacks.

As this year`s war began, air force officers, pilots and troops hunkered down.

"We had no orders," said Col. Diar Abed, 36, a wing commander at Rashid air base in southern Baghdad. "We just stayed in the bases and waited. I thought, `I am losing my country. Why don`t they give us orders?` The leaders at the base didn`t know anything."

Most air bases had virtually no defenses, said Saadoun, who was also stationed at Rashid air base. "They just gave us Kalashnikovs, not even antiaircraft weapons. We asked, `Could you give us [rocket-propelled grenade launchers]?` They said no."

Two weeks before Baghdad fell, the air base lost communications with its command center a few miles away. Every two days, officers arrived with handwritten messages and verbal reports on the status of the war, Saadoun said. The last messenger arrived two days before Baghdad fell.

No Heart for Fight
"We were prepared to fight," said Abdul Razzaq, the colonel whose men voted to flee rather than defend Baghdad`s airport. A pudgy 43-year-old with a mat of graying hair that hugs his scalp like a helmet, Abdul Razzaq has spent 23 years -- more than half his life -- in the Iraqi armed forces.

Twenty days before the United States attacked Iraq, his men and equipment moved from military bases to warehouses, schools and private homes.

Unlike most other commanders interviewed, Abdul Razzaq said his soldiers had been well equipped, with heavy artillery, antitank missiles and mortars for major combat, and RPGs and Kalashnikovs in case the battle moved to the city`s streets.

"Even so," the colonel said, "no one expected Bush to invade. We expected all the Arab countries to stand against Bush and stop the war."

Abdul Razzaq said he commanded a regular army unit of 1,500 men; neighbors said the colonel had been selected about two years ago to lead a group of Hussein`s Fedayeen.

His unit`s mission was to protect a major highway interchange on the edge of Baghdad, one of the positions generally assigned to the trusted, more elite Iraqi forces during the war. Discussing the combat action, Abdul Razzaq frequently referred to the role of the Fedayeen.

In the first days of fighting, the news from the south heartened his men, Abdul Razzaq said in an interview in his spacious home in a walled Baghdad neighborhood.

"All the news was very good. We were stopping the American forces," he said. "Spirits were high among the soldiers in Baghdad. They were motivated to defend the city."

But soon after the Americans battled their way into the airport, Abdul Razzaq said, men began deserting. About half of his remaining men deserted the unit; the other half hid in abandoned buildings lining the airport road.

"Some of the generals fled," he said. "That made me upset. It was frustrating for us. The Republican Guard was not fighting."

On the night of April 7, he received his final command: Continue fighting against the enemy.

His reply, "Yes, we`ll do it."

"We weren`t convinced. We didn`t do it," said Abdul Razzaq, who then collected his men and allowed them to make the final decision. "Everyone went home."

Last Wednesday, the once-respected colonel stood in line for five sweltering hours, waiting for a $100 handout from U.S. military forces, the token payment the Americans began distributing last week to the thousands of unemployed senior military officers across Iraq. Lower-ranking officers and soldiers will receive their payments over the next several weeks, U.S. officials said.

Abdul Razzaq said he now lives in fear of retribution, not only from Americans but from Iraqis, because of his role in the military. He has covered the address on his house and installed double bolts and locks on his gates and doors.

"I feel ashamed and humiliated," said the father of twin boys and two girls, wiping sweat from his face. "As [an] officer, I couldn`t reveal how I felt to the soldiers. Even now I can`t describe it. It`s too painful."

Special correspondent Souad Mekhennet contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Die richtige Zahl der liegt im Gesamten bei über 230 und ~100 nach dem 1. Mai. 80 Tote bei Verkehrsunfälle sind unwahrscheinlich.

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Two U.S. Soldiers Killed in Northern Iraq



Reuters
Sunday, July 20, 2003; 3:26 AM



BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two U.S. soldiers were killed early Sunday when they were ambushed by guerrillas firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades near the northern city of Mosul, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said.

The soldiers, from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, were killed in the town of Tall Afur, west of Mosul, he said. Another soldier was wounded and there were no reports of any casualties among those who attacked them.

The U.S. forces occupying Iraq have suffered almost daily attacks since they ousted Saddam Hussein in April. The latest two deaths brought to 37 the total number of troops killed by hostile action since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1.

In all, 151 American soldiers have died at enemy hands since they invaded on March 20, more than the 147 killed in the 1991 Gulf War. U.S. officials have blamed hard-liners loyal to Saddam, who is believed to be in hiding in Iraq and issuing taped messages urging supporters to attack the Americans.


© 2003 Reuters

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Empire On A Shoestring


By Niall Ferguson

Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page B01


The motto of America`s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, is simple and to the point: "Always Low Prices. Always." Piling them high and selling them cheap is as much a principle of American life as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But should it also be the basis of American foreign policy?

Back in April, administration officials talked as if the reconstruction of Iraq would somehow be self-financing. That seemed optimistic at the time; today it is simply incredible. What we are witnessing is not so much "Empire Lite" -- in Michael Ignatieff`s catchy phrase -- as "Cut-Price Colonization." Americans need to realize now that nations cannot be built the way Wal-Mart sells patio sets: on the cheap.

Without jobs and wages, many of the young men of Iraq will find the temptations of violent crime and guerrilla warfare impossible to resist. But for economic recovery to take place, three things are urgently needed: first, the effective imposition of law and order; second, the repair and restoration of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, telephones); and third, substantial expenditure on reconstruction to modernize the dilapidated oil fields and stimulate economic activity in other sectors.

There are two reasons these things seem unlikely to be achieved anytime soon. The first reason is that the United States is attempting "nation-building" -- the fashionable euphemism for empire-building -- on a shoestring. This may surprise some readers who were shocked to hear last week that the Defense Department had almost doubled its estimate of the cost of occupying Iraq, to $3.9 billion a month. That certainly sounds like serious money. If you accept retired general Tommy Franks`s projection that U.S. forces will need to remain in the country for four years, that would add up to a total bill of $187 billion.

Serious money, no doubt, when the total defense budget this year amounts to around $370 billion. But these sums cover only the costs of military occupation. Not a penny will go toward either aid or reconstruction.

Just how much foreign money does the Iraqi economy need for reconstruction (as opposed to short-term humanitarian aid)? Estimates range from $6 billion over two years (according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies) to $593 billion over five years (according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, another Washington think tank). But even if the figure is somewhere in the lower end of this huge range -- say, $100 billion, as estimated by economics professor William Nordhaus of Yale University -- it is hard to imagine the Bush administration paying more than a tiny fraction of it. This, after all, is the government that admitted last week that the budget surplus of $334 billion which it forecast for this year back in 2001 has -- thanks to a combination of recession, war and tax cuts -- become a deficit of $455 billion.

And this is the government that has so far spent next to nothing on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, where nation-building has supposedly been underway for a year and a half. According to New York University`s Center on International Cooperation, just $1.6 billion has so far been disbursed by the international community for Afghan reconstruction. Barely a tenth of this sum has been spent on projects that are now completed. As of May, the United States had paid out just $5 million directly to the post-Taliban government it called into existence.

The second reason Iraq`s recovery will be delayed -- if not bungled altogether -- is the United States` dogged refusal to cede any responsibility for the occupation to the United Nations. As a result, there is very little prospect of substantial financial contributions to Iraqi reconstruction from other countries. Last week both Chris Patten, the European Union commissioner for external relations, and French President Jacques Chirac made it plain how reluctant the Europeans are to subsidize an Anglo-American occupation they sought to prevent.

This matters because the United States is unlikely to spend as much money on either aid or reconstruction as the Europeans would. Official figures suggest that EU member states allocated $19.7 billion dollars to foreign aid in 2001, compared with an American figure of $10.7 billion. But according to recent figures from the Center for Global Development in Washington, European aid to developing countries is worth three times more when adjustment is made for conditions, costs and interest payments.

Is it possible to run an empire on the Wal-Mart principle of "always low prices"? Maybe. But that was not the way it was done in West Germany and Japan after World War II. And since those are President Bush`s favorite examples of successful nation-building, he will only have himself to blame when the hoped-for economic miracle in Iraq becomes an economic debacle.

Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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White House Didn`t Gain CIA Nod for Claim On Iraqi Strikes
Gist Was Hussein Could Launch in 45 Minutes

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A01


The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government`s use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain`s public "dossier" on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable.

The White House embraced the claim, from a British dossier on Iraq, at the same time it began to promote the dossier`s disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.

Bush administration officials last week said the CIA was not consulted about the claim. A senior White House official did not dispute that account, saying presidential remarks such as radio addresses are typically "circulated at the staff level" within the White House only.

Virtually all of the focus on whether Bush exaggerated intelligence about Iraq`s weapons ambitions has been on the credibility of a claim he made in the Jan. 28 State of the Union address about efforts to buy uranium in Africa. But an examination of other presidential remarks, which received little if any scrutiny by intelligence agencies, indicates Bush made more broad accusations on other intelligence matters related to Iraq.

For example, the same Rose Garden speech and Sept. 28 radio address that mentioned the 45-minute accusation also included blunt assertions by Bush that "there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq." This claim was highly disputed among intelligence experts; a group called Ansar al-Islam in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who could have been in Iraq, were both believed to have al Qaeda contacts but were not themselves part of al Qaeda.

Bush was more qualified in his major Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati, mentioning al Qaeda members who got training and medical treatment from Iraq. The State of the Union address was also more hedged about whether al Qaeda members were in Iraq, saying "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."

Bush did not mention Iraq in his radio address yesterday. Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), delivering the Democratic radio address, suggested that the dispute over the uranium claim in the State of the Union "is about whether administration officials made a conscious and very troubling decision to create a false impression about the gravity and imminence of the threat that Iraq posed to America." Levin said there is evidence the uranium claim "was just one of many questionable statements and exaggerations by the intelligence community and administration officials in the buildup to the war."

The 45-minute accusation is particularly noteworthy because of the furor it has caused in Britain, where the charge originated. A parliamentary inquiry determined earlier this month that the claim "did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source." The inquiry also concluded that "allegations of politically inspired meddling cannot credibly be established."

As it turns out, the 45-minute charge was not true; though forbidden weapons may yet be found in Iraq, an adviser to the Bush administration on arms issues said last week that such weapons were not ready to be used on short notice.

The 45-minute allegation did not appear in the major speeches Bush made about Iraq in Cincinnati in October or in his State of the Union address, both of which were made after consultation with the CIA. But the White House considered the 45-minute claim significant and drew attention to it the day the British dossier was released. Asked if there was a "smoking gun" in the British report, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on Sept. 24 highlighted that charge and the charge that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.

"I think there was new information in there, particularly about the 45-minute threshold by which Saddam Hussein has got his biological and chemical weapons triggered to be launched," Fleischer said. "There was new information in there about Saddam Hussein`s efforts to obtain uranium from African nations. That was new information."

The White House use of the 45-minute charge is another indication of its determination to build a case against Hussein even without the participation of U.S. intelligence services. The controversy over the administration`s use of intelligence has largely focused on claims made about the Iraqi nuclear program, particularly attempts to buy uranium in Africa. But the accusation that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack on a moment`s notice was significant because it added urgency to the administration`s argument that Hussein had to be dealt with quickly.

Using the single-source British accusation appears to have violated the administration`s own standard. In a briefing for reporters on Friday, a senior administration official, discussing the decision to remove from the Cincinnati speech an allegation that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger, said CIA Director George J. Tenet told the White House that "for a presidential speech, the standard ought to be higher than just relying upon one source. Oftentimes, a lot of these things that are embodied in this document are based on multiple sources. And in this case, that was a single source being cited, and he felt that that was not appropriate."

The British parliamentary inquiry reported this month that the claim came from one source, and "it appears that no evidence was found which corroborated the information supplied by the source, although it was consistent with a pattern of evidence of Iraq`s military capability over time. Neither are we aware that there was any corroborating evidence from allies through the intelligence-sharing machinery. It is also significant that the US did not refer to the claim publicly." The report said the investigators "have not seen a satisfactory answer" to why the government gave the claim such visibility.

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Two Shiite clerics confer outside the offices of Moqtada Sadr in Najaf. Sadr, a popular cleric, has criticized Iraqis who cooperate with U.S. authorities and called on his followers to form their own Islamic "army."

Photo Credit: Pamela Constable -- The Washington Post
Es ist schon seltsam wie unterschiedlich auch Korrespondenten Siruationen beurteilen. Hier ein Ausschnitt aus der N.Y.Times auch von heute:
Mr. Wolfowitz was greeted enthusiastically by people in the town, where the marines say they have worked closely with civic and religious leaders in what American military officials call the Shiite heartland. There are still fuel, electricity and water shortages, but the main streets of Karbala and Najaf bustled with activity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial…


washingtonpost.com
Rumors Spark Iraqi Protests As Pentagon Official Stops By


By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A20


NAJAF, Iraq, July 19 -- A goodwill stopover in Iraq`s Shiite Muslim heartland today by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz nearly turned into a confrontation, when followers of a Shiite leader became convinced that U.S. military forces had arrived here to arrest him. In Baghdad thousands of angry Shiites marched in protest after rumors spread that U.S. troops had briefly surrounded the cleric`s house.

In a sermon delivered here Friday, Moqtada Sadr denounced members of Iraq`s newly established Governing Council as American puppets and announced plans to form an independent Islamic army. Sadr, 30, leads the Hawza Shiite movement, a position he inherited when his father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, was assassinated in 1999.

Unlike more traditional Shiite leaders, Sadr advocates political activism and has strongly condemned the American occupation. He refused to consider participating in the Governing Council when it was assembled recently by U.S. officials.

This morning, turbaned clerics and students in Sadr`s movement poured in and out of his headquarters on a shabby alley in this sweltering desert city, signing up for his new army and discussing plans to form an alternative governing council headed by Sadr or other Hawza leaders.

"We all want to register in this army, to bring rights and freedom," said Jamil Abdul Jizani, 19, a Hawza student. "America is our number-one enemy. They came as liberators, but now they are occupiers, and their Governing Council does not represent the people. We want it to collapse so we can elect our own president, our own religious leaders to run the country."

Fifty yards away, pilgrims filed into the shrine of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and one of Shiite Islam`s most revered figures. They came to the shrine in wheelchairs and on crutches, they carried cheap wooden coffins to be blessed, they fell prostrate in grief for Ali`s death nearly 1,400 years ago and wept as they touched his tomb inside a glittering crystal rotunda.

Just after midday, the pious mood shifted. Rumors began circulating that U.S. troops were surrounding Sadr`s house on the other side of Najaf, and he was rushed to safety inside the Hawza headquarters.

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite TV network that covers Iraq intensively, began broadcasting bulletins about a U.S. "siege" of Sadr`s house. Demonstrations erupted in Baghdad, 90 miles north of here, and one cleric in Najaf received calls on his cell phone from Shiites in four different cities asking if the reports were true.

At about 3 p.m., a new rumor swept the alley outside Sadr`s headquarters: The U.S. military and the CIA were coming to get Sadr. Everyone rushed out to look, and there, pulling up to the blue-tiled shrine of Ali, was a heavily guarded American convoy.

Out popped a shirt-sleeved Wolfowitz, surrounded by armed Special Forces troops, smiling and nodding as he was shown a bulletin board in front of the shrine. Less than a minute later, the convoy moved on. The bulletin board, on closer inspection, featured a Hawza movement newspaper with an Arabic headline calling for Sadr to become president of Iraq.

Wolfowitz, regarded as the Pentagon`s main intellectual architect of U.S. policy toward Iraq, arrived in the country Friday and spent today touring several southern cities in his armed convoy. In a brief interview in front of the Najaf shrine, he said he was "very pleased" with what he had seen so far on his tour.

But shortly after his convoy left, loudspeakers began calling Sadr`s followers to the shrine to denounce the American presence in Najaf and protect their leader from attack. "No, no America! No, no Israel! No, no occupation! No, no colonization!" people chanted as the crowd swelled to nearly 1,000.

Shopkeepers pushed a foreign reporter into a barbershop in the alley and locked the door, fearing she would be attacked by the emotional crowd.

Ahmed Abdul Asim, 26, a religious bookseller and Sadr follower from Baghdad, wrapped himself in a white death shroud as he joined the protest. He said he had already signed up to join the new army, named after the Mahdi, the long-awaited imam whom Shiites believe will one day return to lead them.

"We want an Islamic government. We don`t care about death," Asim declared. "We are not terrorists, we are peaceful people, but we are waiting for Mahdi to come back and lead our army to save humanity." If U.S. troops dare to arrest Sadr, he said, "I will shoot the American soldiers down from their tanks."

Then, at the urging of the speakers, Sadr`s followers poured out of the shrine and began marching across the city to his house, vowing to protect their leader and stopping rush-hour traffic as they went.

Neighbors and shopkeepers near the house said two U.S. military vehicles were stationed there for about 90 minutes early this afternoon and that they had seen a guarded convoy pass at about the same time. But they said there was no sign of a siege in the area and that the U.S. military had arrested no one.

Sadr remained in seclusion at his headquarters this evening, but several of his aides elaborated on his political plans, saying he intends to create an alternative governing council, in consultation with other Shiite leaders. They called for free national elections but said only the Hawza movement is qualified to lead the country.

"The Governing Council was not elected, and we do not believe in it," said Sayed Mustafa, a top aide to Sadr. "We need to have elections, but they should be supervised by the Hawza." The purpose of the new army, he said, is to defend Sadr, the Hawza movement and "the whiteness of Islam against any enemies."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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The War After the War
Soldiers` Battle Shifts From Desert Sands to Hospital Linoleum

By Anne Hull and Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A01


First of two articles

The taxicab pulls up to the curb of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Pfc. Garth Stewart slides into the back seat. A nurse stows his duffel bag in the trunk, offering her last advice. "Move your leg around on the flight," she says.

The American flag hangs slack on the flagpole. Garth lays his crutches across his lap. The lanky 20-year-old soldier from Minnesota rubs the place where his leg was amputated. The throbbing alternates with jolts that feel like electrical shocks. Two Percocets are in his pocket for the plane ride home.

As the cab cuts through Rock Creek Park, Garth rolls down the window to smell the forest. After weeks of hospital food and disinfectant, he breathes deeply. He rips the plastic hospital ID bracelet from his wrist and crumples it in a ball.

The bed that Garth left behind on Ward 57 will be filled by day`s end. Even though major combat operations in Iraq are over, the wounded keep arriving. Twice a week, transport planes land at Andrews Air Force Base, bringing fresh casualties. Accidents, ambushes, pockets of resistance. Nearly 650 soldiers have passed through Walter Reed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than half of them since the conflict was officially declared over.

On TV, the war was a rout, with infrared tanks rolling toward Baghdad on a desert soundstage. But the permanent realities unfold more quietly on Georgia Avenue NW, behind the black iron gates of the nation`s largest military hospital.

Here, the battle shifts from hot sand to polished hallways, and the broad ambitions of global security are replaced by the singular mission of saving a leg. Ward 57, the hospital`s orthopedics wing, is the busiest. High-tech body armor spared lives but not necessarily limbs.

The night President Bush declared the end of major combat, the soldiers on Ward 57 slept, unaware of victory.

Garth Stewart was curled in a miserable ball of blue pajamas.

First Lt. John Fernandez, the West Point graduate, was beginning married life from a wheelchair.

Pfc. Danny Roberts was wishing for Faulkner instead of a glossy guide about adapting to limb loss.

Their war was not yet over.

Walter Reed has been treating wounded soldiers since the beginning of the century, expanding and contracting with the rhythms of war. During World War I, the number of patient beds grew from 80 to 2,500 in a matter of months. Three generations later, the soldiers from Operation Iraqi Freedom arrive, some so fresh from the battlefield they still have dirt and blood beneath their fingernails.

Each morning, across the sprawling grounds of the 147-acre compound, reveille is sounded at 6. But up on the hospital`s fifth floor on Ward 57, the fluorescent dawn is indistinguishable from the fluorescent night. Two long halls flank the nurse`s desk, the command center of the ward. Doctors begin their morning rounds at dawn.

In Room 5714, Garth Stewart is sleeping when three doctors arrive. One of them reaches for a light switch, and before Garth can shield his eyes, his room is flash-blasted in white.

"Can we take a look at the leg?"

Garth flips back the bedsheet. His desert tan has gone sallow. His GI buzz cut is a woolly disgrace. Even in this condition, he wishes for a decent soldier`s haircut. The drugs have made his stomach cramp so much that he stays curled on his side. Now, with the doctors hovering, he tries to straighten out his 6-foot-4 frame. His amputated leg won`t lie down. It trembles in midair.

A doctor works quickly, unwrapping the bandage and then the white gauze. Garth watches as they probe the black caterpillar of sutures on his bulbous stump. He moans. The stump begins to shake violently. "I`m gonna get sick," he says.

"You want your bucket?"

Garth reaches for the container. "I can`t do this much longer," he says, holding his hand over his eyes.

"We`re almost finished," the doctor tells him.

"No," Garth says, "not that, everything. I can`t take it any more."

They leave him in darkness, with his bucket. Only four weeks earlier, Garth was a mortar man with the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. "You get out of high school and you join the Army, or you get out of high school and live in your parents` basement," he says. He chose Fort Benning over Stillwater, Minn.

For someone who signed up for four years of regimen and order, Garth was unusually iconoclastic. Tattooed on his chest was a line from the novel "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." And yet he loved the discipline of Army life. At Fort Benning, he competed on the martial arts team. Because he was a Minnesotan who called sodas "sweet fizzies," some of the guys nicknamed him "Sweet Fizzies, King of Fighters."

Garth was so eager for the fight in Iraq that he bought a high-powered custom scope for his rifle. He used it only once, to shoot out some factory windows. But Iraq turned out to be messier than he thought. He saw charred bodies, and a grotesque assemblage of dead Iraqi soldiers who had barreled their car into an American tank.

On April 5, his unit was on the Karbala highway when some of the guys stopped to pose for a picture in front of a sign that said "BAGHDAD." Garth and a buddy decided to inspect a nearby bunker. The explosion blew both of them down. Garth`s left boot was a wreck, and a chunk was missing from his lower leg. His other leg had a softball-size hole in the calf. A medic told him he`d probably lose a big toe.

He had surgeries in Kuwait and Germany, each time losing more of his foot. At Walter Reed, the orthopedic team decided that his leg needed to be amputated at mid-shin so he could fit into the highest functioning prosthesis.

Now, Dilaudid drips through his intravenous line, along with so many other drugs that he is too sick to eat anything but crackers.

Scenes from the war drift through his head. When he was in Iraq, an Army general came up to his company and said, "Man, we gotta stop Saddam. He boils little girls in acid." The statement struck Garth as "hilarious propaganda."

But lying in bed, he can`t stop remembering all the Iraqi people who came out of their houses to shake the hands of the American troops.

Garth tries to make sense of things. "Any beautiful and scornful poem you read about war, it`s about the horrible randomality of war," he says. The same Special Forces medic who treated Garth and his buddy after they stepped on the land mine was shot by a sniper two days later south of Baghdad. Now that same medic is on Ward 57, minus his right leg.

Ironies of War
Even with the war officially over, Ward 57 is filled to capacity. Officers are forced to share rooms with enlisted soldiers. "I`ve got a full-bird colonel in with a private," the charge nurse says one morning, scanning the room assignments with frustration. "Out of respect, he should have his own room."

"Oh, cry me a river," another nurse says.

The famous POW, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, is in a private room at the end of a hallway on 57, with a military police officer seated outside her door. In the rest of the ward, doors are open, visitors flowing in and out. All day long, soldiers buzz the intercom at the nurse`s station.

Yeah, when you get a chance, I just spilled something over me.

Yes, ma`am, I need a Percocet.

Uh, can I have a blanket, please?

Yes, ma`am, I was using the urinal and . . . I need a new pair of pants.

In his room, Danny Roberts squints through eyeglasses that survived Iraq without a scratch. The aspiring English teacher in him has to appreciate such irony, same with the half-finished copy of William Faulkner`s "As I Lay Dying" he had in his truck the day his feet got blown to pieces. Reading helps break the boredom now. Danny props himself against the pillows and jots reminders in a green spiral notebook: Call bank to replace the ATM card blown up in Iraq with his wallet; order tickets for the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert; get checked for anemia.

He`s always been pale and skinny, not the brawny soldier pictured on recruiting posters. Still, he loved the Army so much he had a replica of his dog tags tattooed around his neck after leaving active duty and going to the reserves. Civilian life was a tough adjustment. Danny managed a band for a while, then moved to Hollywood, then New Orleans, partied too hard, went home to Wisconsin and started tending bar and going to college part time. Then his reserve unit was activated, and 26-year-old Danny was en route to Iraq.

He was part of a supply convoy, hauling food and water. He went through his brief war listening to New Age music on his headphones to tune out the ugliness around him. There were wild dogs, that searing white heat, enraged Iraqi boys who would mob the slow-moving convoy, hurling bricks at the hated American faces. Danny never so much as chambered a round in his own weapon. And then one afternoon, he stepped on a land mine.

At Walter Reed, surgeons operated four times just to clean out the wounds. Danny`s right heel had been torn off and was replaced with a metal plate. Two toes were missing on his left foot, and the others had to be amputated. As he was healing from that surgery, doctors delivered more bad news: The explosive had destroyed tendons, too, causing the left foot to flop uselessly. He would never be able to walk on it, and it would lose circulation and eventually have to come off anyway. A prosthesis would give him far more mobility. It was up to him whether to amputate now or wait it out. Go ahead, Danny told them, then wept alone in his room that night.

Danny is now the model patient, always chipper and polite. Thank you so much, he tells the nurse bringing pain medication. "Awesome work," he congratulates his surgeon. He urges the bleary-eyed residents to get some sleep.

One morning, an intern unwraps his bandages, causing Danny to grip the bed rails in pain. "Oh, Danny Boy," she begins to sing, trying to distract him. He manages an appreciative smile even as he winces.

The Honeymooners
By the time he reached Walter Reed, John Fernandez had made a vow. "I`m not going to feel sorry for myself," he swore. Not when three men around him, including the gunner he tried to save, came home in body bags. "I`m here and I`m alive and I`m going to walk out of this place."

His hospital room is the first home he and his 22-year-old wife, Kristi, have shared as husband and wife. Kristi has moved a cot into his room. They hold court bedside, John recounting his story to visiting dignitaries, buddies and hospital staff. "I don`t have any problems talking about it," he reassures the curious. His 13th Field Artillery unit was pushing toward Baghdad when an explosion blew John from his cot as he slept by his Humvee the night of April 3, less than 20 miles from the Iraqi capital.

"I woke up. My legs were numb," he recalls. "I took off the sleeping bag and I screamed." His feet were bloody pulp. The Humvee was in flames, spewing fuel. Patches of fire burned around the wounded soldiers. "I crawled away, calling for my gunner. He called back. His legs were bad, pretty much blown off. So I threw my flak vest down on him, put my M-16 on his chest and started dragging him." Help arrived, and the gunner was carried off. Two more soldiers -- just kids, John thought -- appeared through the smoke. The Humvee exploded, throwing all of them to the ground again. His rescuers began to panic.

"Calm down, it`s okay," John remembers telling them. "Just grab my legs, not my feet." At the mobile Army hospital, one of the senior sergeants burst into tears. "Don`t worry about it," John heard himself saying. "I`m okay."

Arriving at Walter Reed, feet swathed in thick bandages, he figured he was in for some serious reconstructive surgery.

But the wounds were grievous, and infection set in.

Twelve surgeries later, John Fernandez is a double amputee.

Surgeons sawed off one leg just below the knee, the other a couple of inches above the ankle. His wife of three months insists that nothing has changed between them, and talks about dancing together at the big wedding postponed by war. The surgeons agree: Anything is possible. People climb mountains, ski, run marathons on state-of-the-art artificial legs. John had always been an avid athlete -- lacrosse, basketball, soccer, hunting, fishing, you name it.

Kristi had been waiting at the curb when they unloaded John`s stretcher at Walter Reed. She remembers seeing his smile first, running to kiss him, to say "I love you" over and over through happy tears.

The honeymooners in Room 5711 quickly became the darlings of Ward 57. Encamped in the small room, they crack jokes in their Long Island accents and beg visitors from back home to bring fresh bagels. They draw a cartoon of John on the nurse`s dryboard, with the proclamation: "I am the Spanish Thunder." That was his nickname as captain of the Army lacrosse team. John used to have legs like tree trunks.

The swelling is going down on his two stumps, and doctors hope to start fitting him for artificial limbs soon. The rehabilitation specialist, Jeffrey Gambel, says that John should eventually be able to bear weight on the longer stump, which will mean he won`t have to put on both prostheses to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. "It will be very hard to walk on," Gambel cautions, "like a cone."

"Like a pirate," John suggests. He and Kristi burst into laughter, sharing the same ludicrous thought:

"Halloween!" they hoot almost simultaneously. No need to worry about a costume this year.

Celebrity City
America is sending cookies and Hickory Farms baskets to Ward 57. Orioles tickets and NASCAR passes arrive. Sheryl Crow brings her guitar and sings for each soldier. Michael Jordan is as fast on hospital linoleum as he is on the basketball court: Here`s an autographed cap and whoosh, he`s gone. Kelsey Grammer pulls up a chair bedside. They are too young to remember Bo Derek; ("What`s `10`?" a soldier asks after being introduced to the movie star.) But they thoroughly appreciate Jennifer Love Hewitt.

The staff on 57 worries about the attention being showered on the soldiers. What happens when they are no longer in the spotlight? Gambel watches as country singer Chely Wright and her entourage give each soldier a yellow rosebud. "They are told they`re heroes, and they get home and they don`t feel like heroes," Gambel says. "They feel like some dumb guy who stepped on a land mine."

So many celebrities and politicians arrive that a 28-year-old Special Forces medic whose left leg was amputated hangs a NO VISITORS sign on his door. The phrase "Thank you for your sacrifice" has lost its meaning, he says. "It`s like someone saying `Happy Birthday` or `Merry Christmas.` "

One Sunday afternoon, the nurse`s station on 57 gets word that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is coming for a visit. Counters are scrubbed, a hot rod magazine on the front desk gets stashed and nurses patrol the halls, making sure patients and rooms are presentable. An hour later, Rumsfeld cancels. He has a cold.

Salvation
Of all the specialists who puzzle over Garth Stewart, of all the expensive drugs dripping into his veins, nothing brings relief. The stomach cramps and constipation persist. Instead of getting better, he`s getting worse. And then his magic bullet arrives.

The remedy comes from an unlikely deliverer known as the Milkshake Man. Jim Mayer is a veteran who lost both legs in Vietnam. Several times a week, he brings McDonald`s milkshakes to the amputees on Ward 57. The visits are just an excuse to talk and counsel. Mayer arrives this Saturday afternoon but Garth refuses the shake. Too rich. Any chance of a Mountain Dew, he asks. Mayer heads downstairs to the commissary.

The super-caffeinated soda does it. Caffeine! The next day, Garth is sitting up in bed. His blinds are open. "Mountain Dew saved my goddamn life," he says, his voice deep and robust. Suddenly, he is ravenous. "Domino`s keeps showing this commercial for Cinna Stix," he says. "You dip them in icing. Man, I want some."

When six Washington Redskinettes push through the double doors of Ward 57, wearing maroon sparkle bras and hot pants, Garth is waiting. "You guys are so cute," he practically shouts. One of the cheerleaders touches his stump. Garth says, "So many people look at this as you are less of a man. You should see the dignity of the guys who come in here to visit me. They roll up pants, and they are standing on plaster."

A day after the Redskinettes visit, Walter Reed`s highest commanders come to bestow military honors. After the VIPs leave, Garth sits in bed, a gold medal pinned to his pajama top and an empty delivery box on the sheet beside him.

"Quite a day, man," he says. "Pizza and a Purple Heart."

The next morning, he`s wide awake when the doctors arrive for rounds. Freshly barbered, he looks like a soldier again, which is what he wants to be as soon as he can escape the captivity of Walter Reed. He has one question: "When can I get out?"

"I think a week is certainly feasible," a physician, Ken Taylor, says, checking for signs that the skin flap is healing.

Garth says how badly he wants to rejoin his unit in Iraq. "This is something I`m really serious about, doc."

Taylor stays focused on Garth`s stitches. "An amputation is not a death sentence as far as the Army`s concerned," he says. "We`ve got two four-star generals with amputations. It`s hard for me to say if you`d be a ground-pounder again, an infantryman, but I don`t rule it out."

Garth continues to press. "I mean, if someone came and got me, could the Army stop me from leaving?"

Taylor pauses, holding the gauze in his hand. The 37-year-old Army major is unshaven. He has worked all night, and his long day in the operating room starts in 45 minutes. But he remains calmly intent on Garth. "You`re itching to get out of here, and I`m itching to launch you," he says. "The fact that you`re even saying that is fantastic. You were this guy curled up in a ball two days ago who didn`t want the light turned on."

"You`re on the fence right now," he says gently. "I can`t pop your hood and look inside and tell you what`s going on today to know what I have to do to get you out of here. The human condition is not like that. We`re on your side. You buyin` what I`m sayin`?"

Garth folds his hands behind his head. "Yeah."

When Taylor leaves, Garth comes up with the idea to buy his own plane ticket back to Iraq. He can`t stand the idea of the 3rd Infantry Division over there without him.

Trip to the Mall
Danny`s little green notebook is full of his scrawled reminders now. There`s a lot to think about, plans to make. He and his girlfriend, Mindy, will need a new apartment, ground floor. And transportation -- he sold his beater of a pickup truck before going off to war. Will a wheelchair fit in Mindy`s Kia? He fantasizes about buying a bass guitar once he gets home to Green Bay, too.

In the haze of painkillers and too many different people trying to brief him on Army policy, the economics of being a disabled reservist confuse Danny. There are forms to complete, boards to convene, hearings to go through before the Army decides what his status will be and what kind of compensation he will get. The process can takes months. His head hurts. He thinks it must be the meds.

"I`m not one to gouge the system," he says, "but everyone`s told me I already paid a big price and deserve what I can get."

His mother, Nancy, arrives from Green Bay with Mindy, a blur of hugs and held-back tears. Nancy brings her son`s favorite chocolate chip cookies, homemade.

Mindy Bosse, a 20-year-old juggling two waitressing jobs and college, has final exams back home and can only stay the weekend. She`ll start hunting for a new place for them to live, but Danny needs to get money for the security deposit out of his Wisconsin bank account, and the bank doesn`t seem to understand that his ATM card and identification are now confetti in the Iraqi desert.

Danny remembers what happened to him April 9 with the kind of vivid detail so common among wounded soldiers that doctors have a term for it: flashbulb memory.

His convoy was exploring an abandoned Iraqi air base. Danny kept finding souvenirs: an Iraqi beret emblazoned with an eagle, a gas mask, the blouse from an Iraqi uniform. Best of all, there was a hardcover book with an autographed photo of Saddam Hussein inside.

Wow, he thought, this is my lucky day.

Two hours later, he was having a cigarette with a few buddies. He kept bouncing the heel of one combat boot off the toe of his other boot, an old habit. He figures now that this mindless motion set off the land mine beneath him. Three others were hurt, none as badly as Danny. He can still see the speckles of blood on a buddy`s shirt. "It was my fault," he would later sob to doctors, who noted the crying jags in his chart as they transferred him from Kuwait to Germany to Walter Reed.

Now he is getting a fresh cast on his shattered heel.

"Ankle up, ankle up, ankle up," the technician says.

"I`m trying," Danny apologizes. The procedure causes pain not only in the heel but also in the severed nerves that have gone haywire on the opposite stump, where his left foot was amputated just above the ankle. He squeezes his eyes tight and grimaces, but doesn`t complain.

He massages his stump.

"Your body gets used to pain," the cast tech offers.

"I`ve definitely gotten used to pain."

He scores a day pass, and he and his mother head to the nearest mall, in Wheaton. But that first excursion outside the cocoon of Walter Reed leaves Danny depleted physically and emotionally. The wheelchair they have given him was clearly intended for a large and husky man; Danny is neither. Maneuvering through crowds of shoppers, and up and down inclines, is a lot trickier than a hospital`s wide, level halls. And then there are the stares. The adults quickly avert their eyes, but the kids ask straight-out what happened to his foot. Accustomed to living in a ward full of amputees, Danny didn`t think to cover up the raw red stump when he ventured out.

He returns to Walter Reed bone tired. Nothing to write in the green notebook today. In a small voice, he asks everyone -- his mom, the social worker, the nurses -- to leave him alone for a while.

It`s too hard to concentrate, and these headaches won`t go away. Worried doctors schedule him for a battery of tests.

Discharge
Across the ward, John Fernandez is packing up. His orthopedist, Donald Gajewski, is so pleased with the way John`s wounds are healing, and how well John has managed on his day passes outside the hospital with Kristi, that he offers a deal: Discharge to Fisher House, a small inn on the hospital grounds for patients` families. But they need to return for daily dressing changes and physical therapy. The prosthetics lab will be able to start casting John for artificial limbs once his swelling has gone down.

"Take it easy," Gajewski cautions, "you`re still healing."

The nurses cluster around as they leave, offering a round of applause.

At Fisher House, they are in the dining room eating lunch when John`s grandparents arrive from Long Island.

"Gramps!"

"Johnny, Johnny." Frank Fernandez, 81, is a veteran himself, a Navy man who survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor and then had two torpedoed ships sink beneath him. He spent 33 hours in the water and won`t go swimming to this day.

Mary Fernandez, 74, bustles through the door.

"I brought cookies from New York!" She kisses John. "How you feel? You`re still pale."

"No, I`m great. I`m fine."

"Your eyes. You always have lively eyes. Your eyes are pale."

Frank agrees.

"You need more color," he concludes. "Color, color, color. That`s the name of the game. Color! Before you know it, you`ll be shootin` baskets. You know, why not?"

John smiles.

"Right now it still hurts," he tells them.

"It has to hurt," his grandmother clucks.

"Let it heal, John," his grandfather says softly. "Let it heal."

John and Kristi excuse themselves for a nap, and only after they leave the room does his grandmother`s smile begin to tremble. Tears slip down her face.

New Arrivals
Nighttime on Ward 57. The rooms are quiet except for the beep of morphine pumps and the sound of a lone TV.

Downstairs, the triage room is bracing for an influx of new casualties. An hour ago, another medevac plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base.

A gallery of photographs from Walter Reed Army Medical Center by Washington Post staff photographer Michael Lutzky and a video report on Marines recovering from their injuries at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda can be viewed at www.washingtonpost.com/nation.

NEXT: Reconstruction



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

Afghan border police climb a mountain trail to take up positions in Nangahar province near the border with Pakistan. Afghans say that Pakistani troops are setting up outposts in Afghan territory under the guise of pursuing terrorists.

Photo Credit: Photos April Witt -- The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
Afghan, Pakistani Forces Intensify Fighting Along Contested Border


By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A15


YAQUBAI, Afghanistan -- Afghan police climbed through a narrow cleft in the mountains, threading their way past hidden stockpiles of rocket-propelled grenades to man Afghanistan`s new front line: its border with Pakistan.

"Any time they shoot, we`ll start firing," said Gen. Mustafa Ishaqzai, 34, a commander of the Afghan border police in Nangahar province. "We don`t worry. All the young boys you see here are ready to kill themselves for their homeland."

Along Afghanistan`s rugged eastern border, Pakistani soldiers have made dramatic advances toward -- and possibly into -- Afghan territory in recent weeks, according to interviews with both sides and an inspection of portions of the border. The Pakistanis, who say they are searching for terrorists allied with al Qaeda, have established forward military posts, dug trenches and aimed heavy artillery at villages that Afghans say belong to them.

Angry Afghan border guards, who contend that Pakistan has invaded and occupied Afghan soil in a thinly disguised land grab, say they have clashed repeatedly with Pakistanis over the past three weeks, overrun some Pakistani military camps and forced minor retreats.

Pakistan has been under growing international pressure to seal its porous border with Afghanistan and hunt down remnants of al Qaeda and its onetime Afghan host, the radical Islamic Taliban movement. Before the United States and its allies toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Pakistan supported the repressive movement and was one of the few countries that recognized it as Afghanistan`s legitimate government.

Since then, some U.S. and Afghan officials have complained that Taliban and al Qaeda remnants have found refuge in Pakistan and are slipping easily across the border to attack coalition troops in Afghanistan and destabilize the administration of President Hamid Karzai.

In recent weeks, the Afghans` complaints have focused more on the Pakistani mobilization along the border than on their prior inaction. In Yaqubai, Pakistanis and Afghans exchanged fire on 14 of the past 18 days, Mustafa said. At times the fighting has been intense and protracted, with Afghans firing about 300 mortar rounds at Pakistani troops and Pakistanis firing an estimated 3,000, he said. Mustafa`s figures could not be independently verified. But some of his posts are piled high with empty mortar cases and surrounded by scorched earth as if they had also been fired upon.

The dispute has reignited a century-old disagreement over the so-called Durand Line, drawn by the British Empire in the 1890s to demarcate Afghanistan from the portion of British India that became Pakistan in 1947. The revived controversy has sparked anti-Pakistani protests in Afghanistan`s capital and threatens to escalate into wider conflict, further destabilize war-battered Afghanistan and undermine U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism here.

"All the people of Afghanistan, even the women, are ready to fight those Pakistanis," Assistant Border Cmdr. Said Rahman said. "After nearly 30 years of war, even our children know how to use Kalashnikovs."

Afghan officials, Pakistani diplomats and worried Western mediators are scrambling to find and compare conflicting maps of a rocky, arid border where the harsh terrain is littered with the stinking carcasses of Pakistani cattle that died of thirst on the way to Afghan markets.

Pakistan`s ambassador to Afghanistan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said that if it turns out that Pakistani troops encroached on Afghan territory while searching for terrorists, it was an innocent mistake and they will pull back.

"This is a dotted-line border," the ambassador said. "It has not really been demarcated. So what happens is that the soldiers, not knowing where the exact border would lie, they trespass into Afghanistan territory or Pakistan territory by 100 meters or 200 meters for a better location. These things happen."

Some Western diplomats, however, accuse Pakistan of using the international battle against terrorism as cover to assert territorial claims over its impoverished neighbor by establishing military outposts.

"It`s very politically charged," a Western diplomat in Kabul said. "The American complaint is that . . . the Pakistanis have . . . sent troops to the border in places where they didn`t necessarily need troops on the border. They sent troops to places where they wanted to assert their sovereignty vis-à-vis the Afghans, but not necessarily places where there is a real concern about a Taliban and al Qaeda presence."

A commission with high-ranking military and diplomatic representatives from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States was recently created to help promote better relations between the two neighbors and negotiate border policing. Commission members held an emergency meeting Tuesday in Kabul and agreed to send investigators to the border immediately to assess whether Pakistan had overstepped its boundaries.

Pakistan`s ambassador was unable to attend the meeting; he said it wasn`t safe for him to leave the embassy compound, which was recently ransacked by an Afghan mob furious over what protesters called Pakistan`s invasion of Afghanistan. "We are under siege," the ambassador said.

More than 100 miles east of Kabul, at the foot of the mountain that locals call Baba Daub in the village of Tutkai, people say that they, too, are under siege.

Abdul Ghani, a farmer, said residents of Tutkai and at least four nearby villages, many armed with antique hunting rifles, battled Pakistani soldiers at the top of the mountain more than two weeks ago. "We fought them 15 days and didn`t let them come farther," the farmer said this past week. "They tried to capture this area, but we didn`t let them. They shot heavy artillery."

He said there were no terrorists in his village, just angry Afghans. He also said he has never before seen Pakistani soldiers near his village. "Even my father didn`t see Pakistanis so close," he said.

On a ridge near the highest peak of Baba Daub, Pakistani soldiers had pitched several dirty white tents, dug trenches and established at least one artillery position in an area they called the Salana Pass.

"Welcome to Pakistan," said a Pakistani soldier who identified himself as Sgt. Muyassar.

Pakistani forces had come to this ridge to find terrorists, not fight Afghans, he said. "These are our areas. This is our border," the sergeant said before his commanding officer stopped the interview and briefly confiscated one Western journalist`s camera and passport. "It was the choice of our government to seal our border and stop the terrorists and have good relations with other countries and with our neighbors."

In recent weeks, Pakistan has posted 1,200 men -- half from the Pakistani army, half from its frontier corps -- between the Salana Pass and Yaqubai, the sergeant said.

Afghan border police said that immediately before the Pakistanis established checkpoints in some key locations, U.S. soldiers swept into the area, established their own posts, stayed a few days and left. Then the Pakistanis moved in, several border police commanders said.

In response, Cmdr. Zahir Qadir of the Nangahar border police sent a much smaller number of soldiers to establish Afghan checkpoints along the same line. At Yaqubai, the Afghans are defending their position from one-man trenches shaped like coffins.

Whatever the intent of the Pakistani deployment, the effect is clear: Pakistan`s border with Afghanistan has been militarized.

Afghan border guards patrolling the contested areas this past week said that they are both sick of war and ready to fight.

"Afghanistan is like our wife," said Shir Mohammad, a member of the Nangahar border patrol. "The Pakistanis coming here is like a violation."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Uranium Claim Was Known for Months to Be Weak
Intelligence Officials Say `Everyone Knew` Then What White House Knows Now About Niger Reference

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page A22


The White House repeated a familiar retort last week to defend itself against allegations that President Bush used discredited information in his State of the Union speech about Iraq shopping for uranium oxide in Africa: "If we knew [then] what we knew today, we wouldn`t have done it," as a White House official, demanding anonymity, said to a roomful of reporters Friday.

But recent revelations by officials at the CIA, the State Department, the United Nations, in Congress and elsewhere make clear that the weakness of the claim in the State of the Union speech was known and accepted by a wide circle of intelligence and diplomatic personnel scrutinizing information on Iraqi weapons programs months before the speech.

"Everyone knew" the letters purporting to prove Iraq`s effort to acquire uranium in Niger "were not good," said one senior administration decision-maker who otherwise supported the president`s decision to go to war in Iraq. "The White House response has been baffling. This is relatively inconsequential. Why don`t they tell the truth?"

Inconsequential or not, even the Italian journalist who gave the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome nine months ago told reporters yesterday that when she returned from a trip to Niger to check them out, she told her editor that "the story seemed fake to me" and published nothing on it.

Elisabetta Burba, a foreign correspondent for the Italian news magazine Panorama, said in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, "I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that`s exactly why I was very worried. If it turned out to be a hoax, and I published it, I would have ended my career."

For the past weeks, White House efforts to explain how that hoax, and other information about African uranium purchases, ended up in government releases and speeches have contradicted information from other U.S. officials involved in verifying the president`s remarks before he speaks.

For instance, on Friday the White House briefer said that the only statement CIA Director George J. Tenet had successfully persuaded deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to take out of the president`s Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati was a reference to "over 500 tons of uranium." He said that was removed because it was "single-sourced" intelligence.

But yesterday, a senior administration official with knowledge of the Tenet-Hadley conversation disputed the White House version. "The line he asked to take out wasn`t about 500 tons of uranium or a single source. It was about Africa and uranium," the official said. Even the broader assertion about Africa "wasn`t firm enough. It was shaky."

Technically, the Niger documents were publicly declared to be forgeries on March 7 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. agency that had monitored Iraq`s nuclear-related activity and had received the documents from U.S officials a month earlier, on Feb. 5.

But "long before the journalist came up with the documents," said the senior administration official, "there were broader concerns that the government couldn`t verify."

Those concerns dated from late 2001, when U.S. intelligence officials obtained information "from two western intelligence sources" and other overt sources, according to an April 29 letter to Congress from the State Department "on behalf of the President."

In February 2002, the CIA dispatched former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a 23-year career diplomat with postings in Africa and Iraq, to check out those reports. He returned unconvinced, and the CIA cabled his doubts around the intelligence community and to the National Security Council on March 9, 2002. While not definitive, Wilson`s assessment fit with the skepticism already existing on the subject. Wilson`s report was "not memorable" because it confirmed previously held doubts, said several U.S. officials.

In September 2002, the story of Iraq`s interest in uranium from Africa was first made public in a British government dossier on Iraq`s weapons program. Tenet and top aides, who appeared days later before two congressional committees, were asked about the British claim.

Tenet told lawmakers that there were reports of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium but that there were doubts about the reports` accuracy. Not a week later, the CIA circulated a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. Neither allegation -- that Iraq sought uranium in Africa or Niger -- made it into the document`s "key judgments" section, according to portions of the NIE made public Friday.

On page 25, however, the NIE stated that a foreign government had reported that Niger "planned to send several tons of pure uranium (probably yellowcake) to Iraq. . . . We do not know the status of this arrangement." On the same page, it cites reports indicating Iraq`s approaches to Somalia and Congo. "We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources," the NIE stated.

On page 84, the State Department`s intelligence bureau, in a dissenting analysis, said "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are . . . highly dubious." No references to Iraq seeking yellowcake from Niger, Congo, Somalia or anywhere else appeared in the NIE that was publicly released on Oct. 4.

One reason for the public omission was the widespread skepticism about the claims, described by the senior official as "so much for so long."

Days after the Italian journalist Burba handed the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on Oct. 11, intelligence officials had nearly completely discounted their substance, which mirrored the reports Wilson and others had discounted eight months earlier. In fact, when the State Department`s intelligence branch distributed the documents on Oct. 16 to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it included a caveat that the claims were of "dubious authenticity."

Similar caveats were included by the U.S. Mission to the IAEA in Vienna when the documents were turned over there on Feb. 5, said an official familiar with documents submitted.

Four months later, in June, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted that the White House had been unaware of these previous doubts. "We wouldn`t have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now," Rice said. "I can assure you that the president did not knowingly, before the American people, say something that we thought to be false. It`s outrageous that anybody would claim that."

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Squandering Capital


By Madeleine K. Albright

Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page B07


Now would not be a bad time to start worrying. Tens of thousands of American troops will be in Iraq, perhaps for years, surrounded by Iraqis with guns. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says this is not a quagmire; I pray he is right. But the practical problems faced by the talented American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and by U.S. soldiers trying to maintain order without a clear way of separating enemies from friends are daunting.

It would help greatly if we had more assistance from the international community, but in fairness, the war was an Anglo-American production; it`s unlikely we will get substantial help without yielding significant authority, something the administration is loath to do. Meanwhile, U.S. credibility has been undermined by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and by the inclusion of dubious information in the president`s State of the Union address.

Among other things, the war in Iraq was supposed to reduce the dangers posed by al Qaeda terrorists and prompt resumed progress toward peace in the Middle East.

Time will tell whether the former was achieved, but reports of a rush of new al Qaeda recruits are not encouraging. As for the latter, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has indeed made progress in negotiations -- with Chairman Yasser Arafat. Despite a welcome cooling in rhetoric and upcoming visits to Washington by Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the Middle East road map has yet to be unfolded.

In the Far East, the North Koreans may be building nuclear weapons or may not; we don`t know. They could have a half-dozen by the end of the year. If the administration has a strategy for responding, it is not telling, but it seems to be relying on China to pressure North Korea effectively. Relying simply on China? As I say, it is a worrisome time.

Overall, the outlook for preventing the spread of potentially destabilizing weapons systems is bleak. The administration, openly allergic to treaties and arms control, has made no effort to promote restraint in developing arms as a normative ethic to which all nations have an interest in adhering. Instead, it has decided to fight proliferation primarily through military means and threats. Is this adequate?

Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified recently that "new alliances" are pooling resources "to deter or offset U.S. military superiority." Globalization has made the technology and resources necessary to develop sophisticated weapons more widely available. "Some 25 countries," Jacoby warns, "possess or are actively pursuing WMD or missile programs. The threat to U.S. and allied interests will grow during the next decade."

While in Africa this month, the president raised expectations that the United States will help stabilize Liberia, a noble mission that would help repair the administration`s thoroughly battered image overseas. At the same time, there is a risk that the Pentagon -- already stretched thin -- will try to get by in Liberia on the cheap, investing American prestige but insufficient clout. We have seen this movie before -- in Somalia. If we do go into Liberia, we must be prepared to do the job right.

I am an optimist with immense faith in the ability of U.S. leadership to mobilize world opinion on behalf of democracy, justice and peace.

Leadership is not possible, however, without resources. It takes money to secure borders, defeat terrorists, safeguard nuclear materials, build democratic institutions, create educational systems in which tolerance is valued, and help nations recover from conflict. So when I see that the combined federal budget deficit this year and next will approach $1 trillion, I have to wonder. The president has made a lot of promises about "draining the swamp" in which terrorists thrive, combating AIDS, promoting development and meeting commitments to nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Liberia. Will the White House and Congress be able to meet those commitments when police, firefighters and schoolteachers must be laid off at home on account of budget cutbacks? If we do renege on the president`s promises, what further damage to U.S. credibility will result?

Three years ago, America had vast diplomatic capital based on the goodwill we enjoyed around the world, and vast financial capital based on our international economic leadership and a record budget surplus. Now our capital of all kinds has been dissipated and we are left with more intractable dilemmas than resources or friends.

As someone who has served in positions of responsibility, I know it is much harder to devise practical solutions from the inside than to offer theoretical solutions from the outside. The nature of today`s world, not the Bush administration, is responsible for the majority of problems we face. I would be less concerned, however, if I thought the administration was learning as it went along -- learning how to attract broader international support for its policies, make better use of neglected diplomatic tools, share responsibility, be more careful with the truth, finish what it starts and devise economic policies consonant with America`s global role.

The quickest way to a more effective national security policy is to acknowledge the need for improvement; until that happens, we will continue to slide backward toward ever more dangerous ground.

The writer was secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Getting to Know the Iraqis


By Jim Hoagland

Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page B07


AL TURABAH, Iraq -- Lionized by conservatives and denounced by liberals as the architect of the second Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz sits cross-legged in the blowing dust of a hall made of reeds and perspires visibly as a tribal sheik pleads for support. Wolfowitz`s blue blazer and red tie add to his discomfort; but the U.S. deputy defense secretary insists on showing respect to a people he has almost certainly helped save from extinction.

Watching him in the fiery 115-degree heat and the blinding glare of a parched wasteland that stretches far beyond the horizon, you know that there is nowhere else in the world Wolfowitz would rather be.

We have flown by helicopter 100 miles northeast of Basrah and descended into a man-made inferno on the eastern edge of what once were Iraq`s lush and productive marsh lands.

Today, that territory is a salinated desert, the product of Saddam Hussein`s wrath against the half-million people known as Marsh Arabs.

For more than a decade, the Iraqi tyrant drained and diverted water from their lands. His genocidal campaign here was even more devastating than his serial wars on the Kurds in northern Iraq. An estimated 300,000 Marsh Arabs perished. Forcibly resettled in what is as close to Hell as I ever want to experience, the survivors here have re-created a traditional gathering hall that Wolfowitz is visiting.

On this five-day fact-finding trip that began in Baghdad Thursday, Wolfowitz has made a point of putting Hussein`s victims rather than himself in the spotlight. Also on his schedule is a visit to a mass grave in the Shiite heartland and a stop in Kurdistan. At each station, he talks repeatedly -- his critics might say obsessively -- about the Baathist regime`s crimes against humanity.

Isn`t he concerned, I ask later, that he seems to be dwelling on the past when Iraq needs to secure its future? Is he seeking to justify a regime change he pursued relentlessly for two decades by raking up deeds that are monstrous but overtaken by the vast new problems of liberated Iraq?

For once, Wolfowitz does not pause to reflect judiciously before responding to a question. Trained as a professor of international relations, he has become passionate about the need for and possibilities of change in Iraq and the Arab world at large. That passion today drives much of the Bush administration`s policy in the greater Middle East.

"It is important to offer firsthand testimony about things I have only read in books until now," the 59-year-old defense intellectual says.

"That part of history I am observing -- the destruction, the fear and trembling that the old regime induced in its subjects -- is still alive in the minds of many Iraqis. We have to be aware that things could go backwards here if we do not put to rest that part of their history."

Wolfowitz continues: "I plead guilty to optimism -- but not excessive optimism -- that these are remarkable people who can achieve a change in their lives that will also mean much for the whole region, even if there is more unease than I would have hoped to see at this stage."

This grueling trip has confirmed rather than shaken the long-distance vision of Iraq that Wolfowitz began to develop in 1979 when, as a junior policy analyst at the Pentagon, he identified Iraq as a regional challenge for the United States. This was, he recalls, "when others pooh-poohed" the idea.

"You can be elated that these people are free but still remember how much they suffered and how much of that suffering was unnecessarily prolonged," Wolfowitz says, referring indirectly to the premature ending of the Gulf war in 1991 by the first Bush administration.

"At least there was still a Marsh Arab civilization capable of being preserved. They would not have lasted another 12 years."

Critics who cast him as the leader of a neo-conservative, pro-Israeli cabal that has seized control of the administration`s Middle East policy deride him as Wolfowitz of Arabia. But such critics ignore Wolfowitz`s deep intellectual interest in Arab society and his firm belief that it can reform itself, especially if given encouragement from outside.

In his spare time, Wolfowitz reads Arab writers such as Egypt`s Alifa Rifaat, whose collection of short stories, "Distant View of a Minaret," graphically portrays the frustration of women in purdah and other restrictions they face.

"It is important for Iraqis to show what Arabs can do when they live in freedom," he says to the local leaders gathered here. He has arranged to meet them in the company of Britain`s Baroness Emma Nicholson, the redoubtable human rights campaigner who has championed the Marsh Arabs in the European Parliament.

"What we are seeing," Wolfowitz tells me later, "eliminates any moral doubt about whether this was a war against Iraq, or a war for Iraq. This was a war for Iraq."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Finish Winning the War


By Richard Hart Sinnreich

Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page B07


Newly appointed Centcom commander John Abizaid`s frank acknowledgment Wednesday that Iraqi resisters "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us" has prompted a rash of media commentary, most of it focused on what Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin calls the "g-word."

Many, including Rubin, contrast Abizaid`s use of the term "guerrilla" with earlier administration insistence that assaults on coalition troops and cooperating Iraqis were no more than isolated manifestations of lawlessness. The really ominous word in Abizaid`s comment, however, isn`t "guerrilla." It`s "campaign."

In military parlance, the term "campaign" has a very specific meaning. A campaign implies strategic purpose, operational coordination and tactical direction.

Above all, it implies deliberate planning. One can mount guerrilla warfare without a campaign. History offers plenty of examples, most unsuccessful.

But a true guerrilla campaign is another animal altogether. In such a campaign, the apparent randomness of violence is wholly spurious. It`s simply a tactic, protecting the insurgent even as it deceives his adversary.

Beneath the apparent randomness is a deliberate pattern. It`s that pattern, not the violence, that makes such a campaign so dangerous, the more so if the adversary can be persuaded to foolishly ignore it until the insurgency has firmly embedded itself in the disputed society.

In Iraq the pattern is not yet clear. But acknowledging that it exists is the first prerequisite to dealing with it, and in that respect, Abizaid has done the administration a favor, if only his political masters will listen. For if the insurgent pattern is not to solidify and expand, it must be ruptured quickly and permanently.

This is neither a police problem nor a "hearts and minds" problem. It`s a military problem, one we have faced before. If we learned anything at all from that earlier experience, it is that attacking the problem piecemeal is a guaranteed prescription for frustration and failure.

A guerrilla campaign can be defeated only by a better organized, more determined counter-guerrilla campaign. Economic rehabilitation, reestablishment of civil government and police and so on all have a part to play. But none will succeed in conditions where the very Iraqis on whom we are counting for eventual social stability face a mounting threat of violent death at the hands of their unreconciled compatriots. In circumstances such as these, playing defense is a losing strategy.

What we require instead is an offensive effort, and a massive one at that.

Iraq`s porous borders must be sealed. Populated areas still largely devoid of a visible coalition military presence must be saturated. Weapons must be seized and destroyed, and no nonsense about one weapon per household. (Can anyone imagine granting such a privilege in defeated Nazi Germany in 1945?)

Civil disobedience must be suppressed and its instigators incarcerated. And senior Baathist leaders still at large, including Saddam Hussein and his progeny, must be caught and killed or captured.

In short, before we can win the peace, we must finish winning the war. On current evidence, that will require increasing force levels in Iraq and revisiting the rules of engagement under which those forces operate. It won`t be pretty. War never is. But the alternative is much, much uglier.

It can be expected that myriad voices will be raised against any such effort.

They are the same voices that always have objected to the harsh realities of war. In every case in which they have prevailed, the result has been a more prolonged, more devastating and, in the end, too-often-unsuccessful debacle.

If U.S. and coalition leaders are to be believed, Iraq is only one battleground in a much larger fight, the consequences of which will be felt well beyond Baghdad and its environs. Defeat in the one might not necessarily produce defeat in the other, but it certainly would make victory in that larger contest more difficult, uncertain and expensive.

That isn`t a risk we want to take. Historians and political critics can and will argue the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place. Intelligence issues apart, there are plenty of grounds for debate.

For Abizaid and his people, however, that debate is moot. They have a war to win. They need to be given the wherewithal and freedom of action to win it.

Richard Hart Sinnreich writes regularly for the Lawton (Okla.) Sunday Constitution.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Yellowcakegate

Mathias Bröckers 20.07.2003

Was kommt nach Bush? Die Frage mag verfrüht erscheinen angesichts der immer noch guten Umfrageergebnisse, aber er hat es sich mit der CIA verscherzt - und das ist noch keinem US-Präsidenten bekommen

John F. Kennedy wurde nicht erschossen, weil er sich mit der Mafia oder den Gewerkschaften angelegt hatte, sondern weil er die von den Geheimdiensten jahrelang vorbereitete Schweinebucht-Invasion scheitern ließ, keinen militärischen Großangriff auf Kuba starten wollte und die geplante "Operation Northwood" stoppte, die zur Lieferung eines Kriegsgrunds u.a. die Versenkung eines amerikanischen Passagierschiffs durch "kubanische Terroristen" vorsah.


Yellowcake (Ammoniumdiuranat). In eingedickter getrockneter Form enthält es 70 bis 80 Prozent radioaktives Uran

Richard Nixon wurde nicht aus dem Amt gejagt, weil zwei tolle Investigativjournalisten so gut recherchiert hatten, sondern weil er mit dem Aufbau einer ihm unterstehenden "Drug Enforcement Agency" (DEA) der CIA ihre lukrativste Einnahmequelle, die "Kontrolle" (sprich: verdeckte Durchführung) des internationalen Drogenhandels wegnehmen wollte. Eine Wiederwahl wurde ihm noch gestattet - während man versuchte, die Schlüsselpositionen der DEA mit CIA-Leuten zu bestücken -, um dann den Watergate-Einbruch auffliegen zu lassen und die entscheidenden Infos zwei unverdächtigen Reportern zu stecken.

Nur die Spitze des Eisbergs

Nun hat aber doch CIA-Chef Tenet letzte Woche sein "mea culpa" gehaucht und die gelogenen "16 Worte" über Saddams uranhaltigen "Yellowcake"-Kauf auf seine Kappe genommen - ist dann nicht alles in Ordnung ? Keineswegs, denn die heiße Debatte um diese 16 Worte in Bushs Rede an die Nation und die Frage, wer für sie verantwortlich ist, sind nur ein mediales Ablenkungsmanöver.

Entscheidend ist, dass das erfundene Argument einer bedrohlichen Nuklearkapazität des Irak von der Bush-Regierung schon vor einem halben Jahr benutzt wurde, um vom Kongress ein Votum für den Krieg zu bekommen - und dass die Niger-Geschichte schon damals weder von der CIA noch von den Geheimdiensten des Verteidigungsministeriums (DIA) oder des State Departments (INR) bestätigt werden konnte. Dafür wohl aber von einer Art Sonder-Geheimdienst [1], einem "Büro für Spezialpläne" (Office for Sepcial Plans, OSP), in dem im Auftrag von Cheney, Rumsfeld und Wolfowitz zeitweise über 100 frisch angeheuerte "Experten" damit befasst waren, die Erkenntnisse der offiziellen Dienste so zu manipulieren, dass sie zum Kriegsstrategie des Weißen Hauses passten.

"Sie sammelten Daten und pickten sich heraus, was passte. Die ganze Sache war bizarr. Der Verteidigungsminister hat diese große Defence Intelligence Agency, aber die umging er." - Ein ehemaliger Mitarbeiter im Nachrichtendienst des State Department gegenüber dem "Guardian"

Genauso wie die CIA und die anderen Geheimdienste, um sich stattdessen von einem privaten Think-Tank - bestückt mit Falken [2] des ultrakonservativen "Project for a New American Century" - "Geheimdiensterkenntnisse" nach Maß fabrizieren zu lassen. Dass die gesamten US-Medien bis hinunter zum Propagandasender "Fox News" in den letzten Wochen umgeschwenkt sind und nicht mehr aufhören kritische Fragen stellen, hat damit zu tun, dass die 16 Worte in Bushs Rede ganz offensichtlich nur die alleroberste Spitze des Eisbergs sind.

Wie ernst die Lage ist, zeigt der offene Brief [3] der "Veteran Intelligence Professionals" an Bush, in dem sie wegen dieser Vorfälle die umgehende Absetzung Vize-Präsident Cheneys fordern. Da Militärs und Geheimdienste der Loyalität verpflichtet sind und ihren Unmut gegenüber der Regierung öffentlich nicht kundtun können, sind in Krisenfällen solche verdienten Ehemaligen-Vereinigungen oft ihr Sprachrohr - und was die CIA-Senioren in ihrem Papier und in zwei lesenswerten Interviews [4] (und hier [5]) vom Stapel lassen, deutet das ganze Ausmaß der Verwerfungen zwischen dem Weißen Haus und der CIA an.

Und so scheint es kein Zufall, dass die große Wulitzer-Orgel der Massenmedien jetzt angesprungen ist. Sie wird von den Diensten mit Munition versorgt, und es steht zu erwarten, dass es nach dem Durchsickern des Yellowcake-Fakes zu weiteren Lecks kommen wird. Nicht nur seitens der CIA, sondern auch des britischen MI 6, wo die Empörung nach dem mysteriösen Tod [6] des Waffeninspektors David Kelley ebenfalls überkocht.

Den Giftküchen der Spindoktoren, die das Lügengebräu züchteten, mit denen Bush und Blair ihre Völker zum Krieg trieben, droht nun der Kammerjäger - öffentliche Hygiene, Ausmisten der Propagandaställe, ist angesagt. Doch Bush und seine Berater scheinen das noch nicht erkannt zu habe und setzen ihr blamegame [7] mit der CIA am Wochenende fort, mit dem ungewöhnlichen Schritt, Auszüge aus einem geheimen CIA-Dossier zum Irak zu veröffentlichen. Dort seien die nuklearen Anstrengungen Saddams sehr wohl bejaht und der Widerspruch der Dienste gegen die Urankäufe nur in einer Fußnote verpackt gewesen - die aber hätten W. und Condy dummerweise übersehen: "Sie lesen nicht die Fußnoten in einem 90-seitigen Dokument."

Uuuuh, das klingt nicht gar nicht gut und wird dem zum Idiotenhaufen degradierten mächtigsten Geheimdienst der Welt überhaupt nicht gefallen. So dürfte es nicht überraschen, wenn in den nächsten Tagen bekannt würde, dass es außer dieser "Fußnote" noch Weiteres gab, das im Weißen Haus geflissentlich übersehen und ungehört blieb - weil man sich statt auf "seriöse" Berichte auf die des ominösen "Büros für Spezialpläne" verließ.

Dass dieser Schattengeheimdienst mit einem Pendant bei der israelischen Regierung korrespondiert haben soll, der Präsident Scharon, am Mossad vorbei, mit kriegsfördernden "Erkenntnissen" versorgte, gibt dem Ganzen eine weitere pikante Note - die ebenfalls gefälschte Behauptung, bestimmte im Irak gefundene Aluminiumrohre seien zur Nuklearwaffenproduktion bestimmt, soll [8] auf diesem Weg Eingang in das amerikanische Bedrohungsszenario gefunden haben.

Wie geht es weiter?

Prognosen sind immer schwierig, vor allem, so Mark Twain, "wenn sie die Zunkuft betreffen". Insofern gilt es vorsichtig zu sein, doch die Zeichen, dass die Bush-Regierung mit Yellowcakegate in eine Watergate 2- Falle [9] getappt ist, scheinen deutlich.

Offenbar hat der Aufsichtsrat beschlossen, den Geschäftsführer Bush loszuwerden, der mit Patriot Act, Homeland Security, Total Information Awareness und der Doktrin vom präemptiven Krieg die Struktur des Unternehmens USA völlig umgekrempelt und seine Schuldigkeit getan hat. Ihn jetzt als Lügner Nixon-artig aus dem Amt zu jagen, "Glaubwürdigkeit" wiederherzustellen, Sauberkeit zu simulieren,- ideale Bedingungen für einen neuen "demokratischen" Kandidaten.

Die einzige Schwierigkeit wird sein, diese "Selbstreinigung" auf die Irak-Lügen zu begrenzen und den viel größeren Hammer - die 9/11-Lügen ( Gut versichert gegen Terror? [10]), die die obige Umstrukturierung erst möglich machten - weiter unter dem Teppich zu halten. Kein Grund zum Jubeln also, zumal, was den Nachfolger betrifft, nach wie vor die Mahnung Gore Vidals gilt: "Wir haben ein Einparteiensystem mit zwei rechten Flügeln."

Links

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4714031,00.html
[2] http://www.brotherjames.net/story/2003/6/3/135929/6528
[3] http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0714-01.htm
[4] http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8367
[5] http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtml
[6] http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=42…
[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13744-2003Jul…
[8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4714031,00.html
[9] http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/071503_watergate_I…
[10] http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/13380/1.html

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/co/15258/1.html

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-…

Lessons From Basra May Help the Recovery in Baghdad
In Basra, the mostly Shiite population has generally cooperated with British troops. A semblance of normality has returned; recovery is well underway.
By Terry McDermott , Times Staff Writer

1:40 AM PDT, July 20, 2003

BASRA, Iraq -- The main Baghdad offices of U.S. administrators in Iraq are on the grounds of one of the largest of Saddam Hussein`s palace complexes. The compound is the size of a small city and has the feel of a place under siege. Sandbagged machine-gun emplacements and razor wire ring the perimeter walls. From the outside, one can`t even see most of the buildings where the country`s new rulers sit, and no one is allowed inside without an invitation.

The counterpart headquarters for the British administrators in Basra who run Iraq`s four southern provinces are in a three-story, pale-yellow brick building on an anonymous side street. The building`s entrance is a dozen steps from the exterior gate, which is protected by a pair of Iraqi guards.

Throughout the city, despite the presence of foreign troops, the security people one sees most often here wear the blue-and-blue of the new Iraqi police.

The British are determined to hand off much of the work of protecting Iraq to Iraqis. That they have actually begun doing it is one measure of the distance today between the southern and central portions of the country.

Down south, where Shiite Muslims oppressed under Hussein`s government make up the majority of the population, there is no curfew. Teenage boys sit on street corners teasing and killing time until all hours of the morning. In the daytime, the markets are full, and at night the restaurants and cafes are open again. The populace has been told to expect electricity 24 hours a day soon, although judging from current performance, that seems an optimistic estimate.

Basra is not Disneyland. There are shredded buildings, piles of rubble and plenty of other reminders throughout the city that this was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the recent war. And while street-sweeping crews in blue jumpsuits are busy throughout the city, they seem remarkably able to sweep up the dust and leave mounds of trash untouched.

The postwar looting here was as rampant as that in Baghdad, and in a Human Rights Watch report, the British were heavily criticized for failing to provide sufficient security in the first weeks after Hussein`s fall. Shops were emptied. Hospitals, schools and even scientific labs were stripped of everything, including materials of little conceivable use to anyone. Crime — Iraqi against Iraqi — remains persistent and is proving difficult to combat.

Given all that, it is nonetheless evident that the British-administered southland is much farther along the road to recovery than is Baghdad and its hinterlands. The lessons learned here could prove valuable to the Americans to the north.

"It`s easy to say things work here because we`re here, but it`s more than that," said Ian Pickard, spokesman for the southern office of the Coalition Provisional Authority. "This is the Shia south. These people have been mistrusted, repressed and suppressed for decades. If there was anyone glad to see the backside of Saddam Hussein, it was them. From Day One, it was a different environment here. That underlies everything."

Those differences are starkest in the interactions between soldiers and Iraqis in both theaters. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander of ground forces in Iraq, repeatedly tells whoever will listen that his troops are still at war. In central Iraq, there is no reason to doubt that assessment. American troops patrol the cities in armored vehicles and Humvees bristling with weapons. They have conducted a series of aggressive sweeps through towns and rural areas in the Sunni Muslim heartland around Baghdad.

The sweeps have yielded hundreds of weapons and arrests but have created enormous local hostility. U.S. commanders concede that the sweeps might have provoked some of the almost daily attacks against them.

Those attacks have claimed 35 American lives since President Bush declared major combat over May 1.

In contrast, there has been barely any violence directed against the British troops apart from a single incident in which six British military police officers were killed near Amarah last month. In Basra itself, there has been only a single British casualty of any kind — an infantryman shot in the leg while on patrol.

The patrols are significantly different as well. The British patrol on foot in squads of six to eight soldiers. They are well armed but carry their weapons almost casually. They are greeted with a constant string of "hello misters" and smiles. The biggest problem they face appears to be negotiating the vast pool of Iraqi children that gathers about them.

They stop and chat with the children and anyone else who approaches. Each patrol has an interpreter along, and commanders say they receive a constant flow of information volunteered to the troops. That information is the basis for the only sort of raids the British do — those based on specific information about specific individuals engaged in anti-coalition or criminal activity. There are none of the broad sweeps the Americans perform.

"Operations only take place when we have that information," said Maj. Charlie Mayo.

The sorties nonetheless are clearly military operations. On one recent patrol through old Basra`s central market area, soldiers confiscated half a dozen AK-47 bayonets from a street vendor. He protested vociferously, calling the soldiers "Ali Babas," local slang for thieves, but to no avail. The knives were seized, and Pvt. Steven Wilkinson warned him that he should consider himself lucky not to be arrested.

What was most notable about the incident was how little reaction it drew from anyone else in the crowded market. In Baghdad under similar circumstances, U.S. troops have been surrounded by threatening crowds.

The biggest danger to British troops is getting caught between warring local groups, of which there are many.

Although the south is often regarded as a Shiite monolith, it is anything but. Because of its access to the sea and the proximity of the Iranian border just minutes to the east, and the Kuwaiti and Saudi borders not that much farther to the south, this region has long been a commercial crossroads and it has the sort of population diversity that often accumulates in such places.

Shiites are the large majority, but they are riven by tribal factions and ancient feuds. There are least 130 tribes, and many pay no attention to any authority but their own.

"This is the real problem, the tribal problem," said Col. Ali Abdallah Najam, commander of the central Basra police station. "If the police is doing his job chasing a looter or a carjacker and the criminal is affiliated with a tribe, as soon as we arrest him, the chiefs come and threaten us."

Najam said he was contemplating what he regarded as the most serious action he could take against renegade tribes. "We`ll have to arrest the chiefs," he said. "Start from the head. Immediately without negotiation."

Pickard, the Coalition Provisional Authority officer, said there might be less provocative means of dealing with such issues.

Everybody in the region — as in the rest of Iraq — is dependent on the occupying authority`s effort to restore basic services such as power, water and sewers. Most of this work has been contracted to large American companies, the largest being Bechtel Group Inc.

Pickard suggested using this reliance as a bargaining tool.

"We`ll punish those who support it," he said of the tribal rebelliousness. "We`ll say to Mr. Bechtel, that`s a bad tribe. They get no fresh water."

With such basic issues yet to be worked out, it seems safe to say that the normalization of southern Iraq, though progressing, is closer to the beginning than to the end of the process. Especially at night, Basra echoes with small-arms fire.

But unlike in Baghdad, when coalition troops arrive, the shooting stops. What matters most — and has yet to be resolved — is what happens when they leave.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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MIDDLE EAST


A Blurred Vision
The U.S. failure to articulate a coherent policy toward Iran works against the goal of democratic change
By Abbas Milani, Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul
Abbas Milani, Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul are fellows at Stanford`s Hoover Institution.

July 20, 2003

STANFORD — No country in the world today is as ripe for democratic regime change as Iran. Societal discontent with the conservative clerics who rule the country has been building for years and now pervades the society. This broad disaffection has produced splits within the ruling regime. Periodic outbursts of public discontent, like the student protests last month, are putting extreme pressure on the government. The regime`s legitimacy is spent.

Still, the future is far from certain.

In the late 1990s, the policies of gradual political liberalization pursued by Iran`s elected president, Mohammad Khatami, seemed the only viable strategy for progressives. Today, with thousands of demonstrators shouting in the streets, the Iranian people are no longer content with gradual change. They want democracy now. The clerics, who still control the army and the police, have reacted by clamping down, with new policies both at home and abroad that signal desperation. Out of this dangerous brew, some predict a velvet revolution, others civil war.

So what is the U.S. doing to help Iran find its path during this moment of both peril and opportunity? Not much.

The administration lacks a clear strategy for promoting democratic regime change in Iran, despite a strong rhetorical commitment to that goal. The absence of a clear game plan has allowed opportunists — in both Iran and Washington — to fill the void with their own interpretations of American policy. The result has been a dangerous confusion.

One group of Washington-based pundits and exiled Iranians wants to push the United States into increasingly hostile and direct confrontation with the Islamic regime, using coercive diplomacy and even military pressure if necessary. This group also wants to encourage demonstrators inside Iran to rise up and confront the regime as quickly and boldly as possible, even if this would prompt violence, revolution or civil war. Some members of this group — following in the footsteps of the Iraqi exiles and U.S. policymakers who favored installing exiled banker Ahmad Chalabi as leader of Iraq — are determined to handpick Iran`s next leader. Their choice is Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the last shah to rule in Iran.

A second group in Washington is pushing for a completely different U.S. policy toward Iran: détente. Increasingly, Iranian hard-liners have hinted that they might be willing to restrain Islamic radicals based in Iran who are stirring things up in Iraq. But in exchange, they`ve suggested, they would want guarantees that the U.S. will not support opponents of the Iranian regime. Desperate to hold onto power, Iran`s leaders seem suddenly willing to deal with the U.S. in exchange for stability.

These proponents of engagement inside Iran have allies in the U.S. Since Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected president of Iran 15 years ago, a group of U.S. scholars, retired diplomats and businessmen (especially oil company executives) has acted as de facto lobbyists for the Islamic regime. They considered Rafsanjani to be Iran`s great hope: a "moderate mullah" who wanted rapprochement with the West. When reformer Khatami was elected to replace him in 1997, they changed horses, but not their recommended strategy of engaging with the existing regime.

Neither of these plans serves the long-term interests of the United States or the cause of Iranian democracy.

The first, confronting Iran, is an empty threat, since the U.S. does not have the military means and the American people do not have the will to invade Iran. The threat of American military intervention, therefore, only helps the conservative mullahs to rally people around the Iranian flag.

The second plan, engagement, might enhance U.S. security objectives in Iraq in the short run, but it would exacerbate an even greater threat to American security — an Islamic regime bent on obtaining nuclear weapons.

Even if the U.S. had the capacity to bring about regime change in Iran through coercion, an American effort to choose the next regime would backfire, because the Iranian democratic movement is too developed and sophisticated to need or allow the U.S. to impose a government there.

It seems likely that key policymakers in the Bush administration see the dangers in each of these strategies and will steer clear of both. The problem is that few in Iran know this. Rather, President Bush`s failure to articulate a clear U.S. strategy on Iran allows for all sorts of wild interpretations of U.S. motives and intentions.

Every time the hard-liners shut down another newspaper in Tehran or their thugs go on another spree of violence, rumors spread through the city about an imminent U.S. "deal" with the mullahs. Recent U.S. actions in Iraq to limit the activities of the Moujahedeen Khalq — an Iranian opposition movement dedicated to the armed overthrow of the Islamic Republic — has further fueled the nation`s rumor mill about a new era of détente. Conversely, every time an opinion piece with a Washington byline argues for U.S. intervention in Iran, conservatives there shrill against American imperialism and warn of the coming imposition of autocratic rule under the shah`s son.

The Iranian people deserve clarity. Bush should deliver a major speech on Iran, outlining his objectives there and his strategy for achieving them. He should make clear that while we don`t plan to invade Iran and overthrow the current regime, neither do we want détente with it. Instead, the U.S. should support peaceful democratic change in Iran. Our strategy should be to provide moral and political assistance to the internal movement for democracy in Iran, not to anoint a future leader.

There are modest but tangible things we should do to aid Iranians` struggle for democracy. We should accelerate the flow of independent and accurate information, and of democratic ideas and theories, through international broadcasting. We should support Iranian reformers intellectually and practically as they ponder options for constitutional reform in Iran. We should confront the regime — both directly and in international forums — on its nuclear weapons program and its violations of human rights.

But most of all, we should make clear to the mullahs — and thus to the anxious and hopeful people of Iran — that there will be no lifting of the embargo and no geopolitical deals with a repressive, unrepresentative, irresponsible regime. The U.S. will negotiate, but only with an Iranian government that is chosen by the people in truly free, fair and open elections.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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THE MILITARY


Of Troops -- and the Truth
By Dan Smith
Dan Smith, a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

July 20, 2003

WASHINGTON — President Bush conceded recently that bringing stability to Iraq will take time — and manpower. And the commander of allied forces in Iraq, Gen. John P. Abizaid, noted last week that American troops might well be required to serve yearlong tours of duty in Iraq, or double the usual length of time. These acknowledgements are a good start, but the administration has yet to answer one simple question: How many troops will be needed to bring that country under control? The American public — as well as tens of thousands of military families — deserves to know.

Even before the war was launched, the issue of postwar deployment numbers was controversial. On Feb. 25, then-Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki told Congress that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed to secure postwar Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz took sharp exception to Shinseki`s estimate, calling it "wildly off the mark." But as conditions in Iraq have continued to deteriorate, often due to a lack of manpower and resources, the deployment question has resurfaced with a vengeance.

It`s clear that things are deteriorating in Iraq. Between June 9 and 22, the Pentagon logged 131 "incidents" involving U.S. troops there, including 41 attacks on U.S. compounds, 26 attacks on sentry or observation posts, and 26 on convoys. The next 24-hour period saw an additional 25 incidents. And the pattern of violence continues unabated.

Considering these circumstances, how might appropriate deployment numbers be calculated? Traditional military doctrine estimates that a conventional army requires a 10-to-1 size advantage to defeat a persistent insurgency. But it is not clear that this method is relevant for calculating numbers in the current situation, in part because the size of the insurgent force is unknown. More recent scholarship offers an alternate approach.

Military analyst James Quinlivan, writing nearly 10 years ago in the Army War College`s quarterly, Parameters, suggested that force requirements should be based on the need for both population control and local security. In other words, the deployment needs to be large enough to "win hearts and minds," which requires a force proportional to the population as a whole.

So what`s an appropriate force ratio? Quinlivan looked historically at what kinds of force it took in different situations, and his analysis may have relevance for today`s situation. For ordinary policing, he estimated a need of between one and four security personnel per 1,000 population. The U.S. Constabulary force in post-World War II Germany, for example, was staffed at a little more than two troops per thousand individuals in the population. Its responsibilities there included enforcing public order, combating black markets and performing other police functions. But the force faced no organized guerrillas.

In more volatile situations, Quinlivan estimated a need for four to 10 troops per thousand in the population. When the U.S. intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965, aiming to prevent civil war and restore order in a highly unstable situation, it used a force ratio of six security personnel per 1,000 population.

In situations that are even more volatile, the ratio goes higher still. In Northern Ireland during the height of the unrest, the British and the Royal Ulster Constabulary employed more than 10 security personnel per 1,000 population, and at times as many as 20. The situation they encountered there is much like what the Americans are seeing in Iraq today, with organized resistance intent on ousting "occupying" security forces.

So how do these various ratios translate to our presence in Iraq? If we took the German model as our guide, then something like 50,000 troops would be required to maintain order. But Germany was an utterly defeated, broken country where the main task was maintaining public order. Iraq is still a country at war, saturated with weapons and becoming more and more restless under the occupation. So a two per thousand ratio is unlikely to suffice.

A ratio of six per 1,000 population, as was deployed in the Dominican Republic, would require nearly 150,000 troops — or roughly the number the U.S. and its allies have in Iraq today. Judging by our inability to restore order or to isolate militants intent on engaging U.S. troops, this force level seems inadequate.

To match the British ratio in Northern Ireland of 10 to 20 soldiers per 1,000 population, deployment numbers would skyrocket to between 240,000 and 480,000. The latter number is the total authorized strength of the active U.S. Army and would clearly be impossible to sustain considering that the equivalent of five of the Army`s 10 active divisions already are engaged in Iraq.

Whatever the numbers, Americans deserve an open discussion of these issues. The notion of achieving "peace through war" is a murky one. But now that we have waged war, we have a responsibility to restore peace. And that demands a discussion of how many troops we need to commit.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL

Yes, Beg Allies for Iraq Help

July 20, 2003

The United States admitted a mistake last week and installed an Iraqi council as the public face for the occupation government. That was a good political move, but weeks late. Now Washington needs to admit another error: freezing out the United Nations.

It`s past time to get that organization`s experienced peacekeepers and nation-builders into Iraq in substantial numbers. A large U.N. presence does not guarantee success — the formation of a broadly representative, independent Iraqi government within a few years. But without major help from the U.N. and from other nations, the U.S. could end up stationing more than 100,000 vulnerable troops in a hostile land for years longer than planned and at enormous cost, in blood and treasure.

On April 8, the day before U.S. troops pulled down Saddam Hussein`s statue in Baghdad, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that "the United Nations has a vital role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq." The next day, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, "The U.N. is very important to the process."

But three months later, the U.N. is largely invisible in a land where it is sorely needed. Powell said last week that he was talking with other countries about winning "more of a mandate from the United Nations." Bush administration concessions are overdue to get help from a body that opposed the war.

India demonstrated the stakes last week when it declined to send 17,000 troops to Iraq without U.N. authorization. Other countries also have demurred.

Thousands of 3rd Infantry Division soldiers who were expecting to be back home at Ft. Stewart in Georgia by September were told their Iraq stay would be extended indefinitely.

Greater security isn`t the only requirement in the land where U.S. troops are attacked daily and more than 30 have been killed since May 1. Iraqis need power, water and functioning oil fields to generate revenue to rebuild a nation crippled by decades of war and dictatorship. There`s no U.S. monopoly on the talent to get those jobs done.

Minxin Pei, a Carnegie Endowment scholar, said that of 16 U.S. attempts at nation-building in the 20th century, only four resulted in a democratic country 10 years later. Washington knows how to win wars, not build free countries.

Richard Haass, who left a top State Department job last month to head the Council on Foreign Relations, says Iraq needs "muscular policing," not by combat troops but by police and peacekeepers adept at dealing with civilians — and all the better, for perception`s sake, if they are Muslims.

Getting others` help makes not just military but economic sense. The Pentagon`s recent admission that military operations in Iraq are costing $3.9 billion a month — nearly double the previous estimate — shocked Congress. The news should push lawmakers to demand that the administration go to the U.N. and big allies like France and Germany for assistance.

Before the war, several think tanks offered postwar plans. The administration ignored the advice. Last week, five experts at those think tanks who toured Iraq for 11 days — the Pentagon sensibly asked them to visit — concluded that improving security was the top priority.

Also needed: international recruitment of civilians to help restart the economy; more money to get factories back up and give people jobs; and a much expanded coalition with countries uninvolved in the war.

These are the realities that many warned about for months; these are the realities that led this page and others to oppose a U.S.-led war.

There is no going back. That`s why the Bush administration can`t continue to substitute wishful thinking for facts. It must stop resisting the obvious: In Iraq, the United States needs all the help it can get.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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BBC confirms dead scientist was source for disputed Iraq story
BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003
©2003 Associated Press

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/20…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/20…


(07-20) 05:58 PDT LONDON (AP) --

The British Broadcasting Corp. said Sunday that David Kelly, a Ministry of Defense scientist whose suicide intensified a fierce debate over intelligence used to justify war in Iraq, was its main source for a story at the center of the dispute.

"Having now informed Dr. Kelly`s family, we can confirm that Dr. Kelly was the principal source" for a radio piece in which reporter Andrew Gilligan quoted an anonymous official as saying the government exaggerated claims of Iraqi weapons, the network said in a statement.

"The BBC believes we accurately interpreted and reported the factual information obtained by us during interviews with Dr. Kelly," the statement continued.

The statement said Kelly, an internationally respected weapons expert, had also been the source for a piece by reporter Susan Watts on the BBC`s "Newsnight" analysis program.

Kelly had told a Parliamentary committee he spoke privately to Gilligan but did not recognize his claims in the reporter`s piece and believed he was not its main source.

The soft-spoken, bearded microbiologist took his own life Thursday, slitting his left wrist in the woods near his Oxfordshire home. The BBC and the government had been engaged for weeks in an angry public battle about Gilligan`s story -- with Kelly at the center of the political firestorm.

The reporter quoted his source as saying the government had "sexed up" its evidence on Iraqi weapons in order to justify war and insisted on publishing a claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy some chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, despite intelligence experts` doubts.

Gilligan later said the source had accused Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair`s communications adviser, of insisting the 45 minutes claim be included in a government dossier on Iraqi weapons. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee cleared Campbell of that charge.

"I believe I am not the main source," Kelly told the committee Tuesday. "From the conversation I had, I don`t see how (Gilligan) could make the authoritative statement he was making."

He said the same to his Ministry of Defense bosses when he came forward voluntarily to tell them he`d met with Gilligan.

The BBC report helped prompt two Parliamentary probes into government weapons claims, and Blair aides have angrily demanded a retraction and an apology from the broadcaster.

Blair, who is on a whirlwind trip through east Asia, said through a spokesman that he was "pleased that the BBC has made this announcement."

"Whatever the differences, no one wanted this tragedy to happen," the spokesman quoted him as saying. "I know that everyone, including the BBC, has been shocked by it."

He urged all those involved in the debate to demonstrate "respect and restraint, and no recrimination."

The BBC statement said the network would cooperate fully with a judge appointed to head an inquiry into the events leading to Kelly`s death. It said it would provide full details of its two reporters` contacts with Kelly, including their notes.

"We continue to believe we were right to place Dr. Kellys views in the public domain," the statement said. "However, the BBC is profoundly sorry that his involvement as our source has ended so tragically."

Blair also said he would testify in the inquiry.

Days after his name was leaked -- reportedly by the Ministry of Defense -- as the suspected source for Gilligan`s May 29 report, Kelly was grilled last week by the Parliamentary committee. Two days later, on Thursday, his family reported him missing, adding a dark twist to a bitter political debate.

Police found Kelly`s body Friday in a wooded area a few miles from his home in the rural village of Southmoor, 20 miles southwest of Oxford, his left wrist slashed and a partly empty package of painkillers nearby.

Throughout the bitter row, the BBC had refused to say whether Kelly, who was a top United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, had been its source.

"Over the past few weeks we have been at pains to protect Dr. Kelly being identified as the source of these reports," the BBC statement said. "We clearly owed him a duty of confidentiality. Following his death, we now believe, in order to end the continuing speculation, it is important to release this information as swiftly as possible."

The statement said the BBC had waited until Sunday to make the announcement at the Kelly family`s request.

Kelly`s family said in a statement issued Saturday that "events over recent weeks have made David`s life intolerable, and all of those involved should reflect long and hard on this fact."

"A loving, private and dignified man has been taken from us all," they added.

©2003 Associated Press

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Irak

Annan fordert Abzug von Briten und Amerikanern

An diesem Dienstag wird die Uno über den Irak beraten. Generalsekretär Kofi Annan plädiert in seinem Bericht für einen Abzugsplan der britischen und amerikanischen Truppen. Die US-Administration hält sich bedeckt.


New York - Ein "klarer Zeitplan" für einen schrittweisen Rückzug der amerikanischen und britischen Besatzungstruppen aus dem Irak sei notwendig, so Annan. Zugleich sprach sich der Uno-Generalsekretär in seinem Lagebericht für eine stärkere Rolle der Vereinten Nationen aus. Zahlreiche Iraker hätten gegenüber Uno-Vertretern in Bagdad erklärt, ihrem Land könne "Demokratie nicht von außen aufgezwungen werden". Am Dienstag soll der Uno-Beauftragte für den Irak, Sergio de Mello, sowie Vertreter des neuen irakischen Selbstverwaltungsrates Bericht erstatten. In Washington scheint die Bereitschaft zuzunehmen, der Uno eine bedeutendere Rolle im Irak zu geben. Vergangene Woche sprachen US-Präsident George Bush, Außenminister Colin Powell und Uno- Generalsekretär Annan über die Möglichkeit einer neuen Resolution des Sicherheitsrates. Von der Administration wurde bisher die Ansicht vertreten, dass die Resolution 1483 vom 22. Mai, in der den USA und Großbritannien die Verantwortung für den Irak übertragen und der Uno nur eine beratende Funktion zugestanden worden war, ausreiche, die Truppenentsendung weiterer Länder abzudecken. In der Resolution wurden alle Uno-Mitgliedsländer aufgefordert, beim Wiederaufbau des Iraks mitzuwirken.

Keine klare Haltung in US-Regierung

Powell hat inzwischen deutlich gemacht, dass Washington bereit ist, über eine weitere Resolution zu verhandeln, wenn sie Ländern die erwünschte Deckung gibt, um Truppen in den Irak zu schicken. Zuvor hatte sich die US-Regierung bei mehreren Regierungen eine Absage für die Entsendung von Truppen geholt - unter anderem auch in Indien, das angeblich mit 17.000 Mann aushelfen soll. Die Hilferufe aus Teilen der gemäßigten US-Administration scheint allerdings im Lager um Vizepräsident Dick Cheney auf keine große Gegenliebe zu stoßen. Der Sprecher Powells, Richard Boucher, hatte hingegen vergangene Woche erklärt, die Administration sehe einer Sitzung des Sicherheitsrates am Dienstag mit Interesse entgegen.

Für die Sitzung präsentiert Generalsekretär Annan einen 21-seitigen Bericht. Darin werden die USA und Großbritannien nicht nur aufgefordert, den Übergang der Macht an die Iraker zu beschleunigen und einen Zeitplan für ein Ende der Besatzung vorzulegen. In dem Bericht werden zudem auch Klagen von Irakern zitiert, nach denen die US-Truppen irakische Gefangene misshandelt hätten und bisher nicht in der Lage gewesen seien, die Lebensbedingungen in Bagdad und anderen Städten zu normalisieren.

Allerdings weist Annan auch Kriminellen, Plünderern und Saboteuren Schuld zu. Diese hätten die internationalen Anstrengungen untergraben, Stabilität im Irak herzustellen. Die Anregung verschiedener Regierungen, eine Polizeitruppe unter der Aufsicht der Uno in den Irak zu entsenden, wies der Generalsekretär zurück. Dadurch würde nur ein paralleles Polizeisystem geschaffen.


© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

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Das ist die erste Zeitung aus dem mittleren Westen, bei der ich so einen Artikel gefunden habe. Der Kansas City Star gehört zu den KNIGHT RIDDER OPERATIONS Daily Newspapers 30 Tageszeitungen über alle Staaten und 20 Wochenblätter.http://www.knightridder.com/


Posted on Sat, Jul. 19, 2003


As anxiety, criticism mount, some ask whether Bush is politically vulnerable

By DAVID GOLDSTEIN
The Kansas City Star

WASHINGTON - Buffeted by bad news about Iraq and the economy, the patriotic Teflon protecting President Bush from criticism since Sept. 11, might be starting to corrode.

For more than a week, the White House has been under siege about the intelligence Bush used to justify the war and, specifically, why a discredited line found its way into his State of the Union speech in January.

Thousands of families are growing frustrated that U.S. soldiers are not returning faster from Iraq, where the casualty list grows almost daily.

Meanwhile, unemployment is climbing, and the deficit is ballooning far beyond previous predictions.

Overcoming their reticence about criticizing the president on foreign policy and even homeland security, many Democrats have sharpened their attacks.

Bush, however, is still very popular in his own party, among independents and even with many Democrats. And he`s expected to break his own records in fund raising.

But his poll numbers have dropped in recent weeks amid rising anxiety and criticism over the war. Could Bush be approaching the political "tipping point" where the weight of bad news begins to weaken his popularity and chances for re-election in 2004?

"I`m not sure we`re at that point yet, but I do think we have crossed the line just short of a collapse, the line where things really go south in a big way," said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential expert at the University of Texas at Austin. "But I think where we are is, people are likely to stop looking at the administration as politically invulnerable."

The tipping point is a concept that describes how a series of small changes creates a critical mass, leading to upheaval when one more change "tips" the system.

"The tipping point concept means small things occur and then the dam breaks," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. "I`m not sure we`ll see the dam break. But we`ve already seen the general direction of movement."

Bush`s job approval has plunged to 53 percent, the lowest since the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to a Zogby poll on Friday. Perhaps more worrisome to the White House, more likely voters said they would prefer someone other than Bush.

The key question, Mellman said, is whether Bush`s popularity continues to drop, and "if so, how low does it go?"

Democrats and presidential experts cautioned that the sudden capture or death of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden would instantly send Bush`s political stock soaring again. But in the meantime, the White House has lately found itself in the unfamiliar position of not being in control of events.

The president is hip-deep in a growing controversy over why he said in the State of the Union speech that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Africa to help build nuclear weapons, even though key administration officials knew that the information was suspect at the very least, if not wrong altogether.

The controversy has grown into a metaphor for a host of questions about the administration`s credibility on the reasons it used to justify the war. Full-page ads placed by the liberal group Moveon.org in The New York Times depict Bush as the misleader on Iraq, as well as the environment.

In its search for whom to blame about the uranium allegation, Bush and his aides have pointed fingers at the Central Intelligence Agency and Great Britain. They`ve also tried to minimize its importance.

"It is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on CNN last weekend.

Presidential aides also have said it was time to "move on," but the issue gets reworked daily, partly because of conflicting statements from an administration once famous for staying on message.

New missteps are adding fuel to the bonfire. Bush said this week that Hussein had "a chance to allow the (United Nations) inspectors in, and he wouldn`t let them in."

That`s at odds with the facts. Hussein allowed the U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq, but Bush was against extending their deadline because he didn`t think they had been successful.

Presidential experts said Bush is treading on dangerous ground.

"President Bush has maintained high public approval ratings because people think he is authentic and trust him with the covenant he made with America when he picked up the bullhorn and spoke amid the rubble of downtown Manhattan," said Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans.

"There was a feeling that this guy`s good for his word. If that word gets proven to be tarnished in a kind of blame game and not taking responsibility as chief executive, things are going to continue to start haunting him."

Bush had basked in stratospheric approval ratings since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when his strong image and tough talk rallied a nervous and grieving nation.

But macho rhetoric can have a downside, such as his recent taunt directed at the Iraqi resistance, which has been attacking U.S. troops. "Bring `em on," Bush said. Nearly 10 Americans have been killed since he said it.

Overall, nearly three dozen Americans have died in combat since May 1 when Bush declared that major combat was over.

More than half the country found the level of casualties to be "unacceptable," according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. The number of people who believe the United States is in control in Iraq has dropped sharply since April, from 71 percent to 45 percent, according to a CBS News survey.

If all that`s not enough to keep Bush`s political brain trust busy, the economy, perhaps the key barometer of a president`s re-electability, refuses to play ball.

"Ultimately, that will be the deciding factor," said Tony Feather, a Missouri Republican strategist who was the political director for Bush`s 2000

campaign in Missouri. If the economy doesn`t improve by the end of the year, he said, "We`ve got a horse race for a campaign. It`s going to be a long, hard fought-out battle to retain the White House."

Unemployment rose again last month, from 6.1 percent to 6.4 percent. That`s 9.4 million Americans out of work.

Meanwhile, the budget deficit will be 50 percent higher than the White House predicted earlier this year, up to $455 billion.

"I think you`ve got the convergence of a perfect storm," said Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, one of nine Democrats campaigning for president. "Every day you have increasingly bad economic numbers and you have questions surrounding (the administration`s) honesty and dealings with Iraq."

Republicans were generally confident in the president`s ability to weather the current ill winds.

Republican pollster David Winston said that in the post-Sept. 11 world, most voters aren`t looking to cast blame, but want to be assured that the president is on top of things. The public is patient, he said, but only up to a point.

"This is a moment when the president has to be particularly clear in what he is doing," Winston said. "He`s got to be very clear and very focused in terms of explaining to the American people what steps he is taking. As long as people feel he is making a clear and positive effort, that should leave him in good stead."

To reach David Goldstein, Washington correspondent, call [phone], or send email to [e-mail]

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/news/politics/6…

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[Joerver]

Heute ein neues Flash Video von `Too Stupid To Be President` Viel Vergnügen! Dubya als Pinocchio.

http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/shockwave/pinocchio.ht…


.

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Follow the Yellowcake Road
By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.com/news/941433.asp?0dm=s119k

Did it start with a break-in? On the morning of Jan. 2, 2001, Italian police discovered that the Niger Embassy in Rome had been ransacked. Not much was reported missing--only a watch and two bottles of perfume--but someone had apparently rifled through embassy papers, leaving them strewn about the floor.

SOME MONTHS AFTER the break-in, the Italian intelligence service--the SISME--obtained a stack of official-looking documents from an African diplomat. Signed by officials of the government of Niger, the papers revealed what purported to be a deal with the Devil. Agents of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, it appeared, were angling to purchase from the cash-starved, mineral-rich African nation some 500 tons of yellowcake, the pure uranium that can be used to build nuclear bombs. Excited by their intelligence coup, the Italians quickly notified the CIA and British intelligence.
A bombshell in the war on terrorism? More like an exploding cigar. The documents, a series of letters dated from July to October 2000, were actually crude forgeries. They referred to Niger agencies that no longer existed and bore the signature of a foreign minister who had not served in the post for more than a decade. Italian investigators, who only last week reopened the case, have theorized that the thieves who broke into the Niger Embassy had come looking for letterhead stationery and official seals that could be copied to create bogus documents.

It was the sort of flimsy scam that could have been exposed by a two-hour Google search (and eventually was). Somewhat implausibly, however, the break-in at a small African embassy in Rome has set off a chain reaction that has erupted into a full-fledged Washington summer scandal, serious enough to shake President George W. Bush`s poll ratings. Democrats and much of the press are in full cry, accusing the White House of hyping, if not outright fabricating, intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. With American soldiers dying at the rate of about one a day in Iraq, a growing number of Americans are beginning to wonder if the war was worth the cost.

AWAITING THE FINAL ASSESSMENT
Last week Bush defiantly insisted that the United States would find WMD in Iraq, but privately, according to a White House source, the president was more circumspect with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose own government is wobbling under charges that Blair grossly overstated the Iraqi threat. Bush and Blair are awaiting word from former U.N. arms inspector David Kaye, who has been sent to Iraq to hunt for WMD and is expected to report back in September. As the two world leaders stood on the Truman Balcony last Thursday evening, Bush said to Blair that Kaye`s analysis would be the final assessment, as the president guardedly put it, one way or the other.

A break-in, forged documents; in England, even a corpse. Last week David Kelly, a biological-weapons expert, questioned by Parliament for possibly leaking to the BBC, was found dead, his wrist slashed, probably a suicide but sure to be inspiration for endless conspiracy theories. Who was to blame for intelligence on Iraq`s WMD that was exaggerated or, as the BBC story put it, "sexed up"? The intrigues and backstabbing at the highest levels have some of the qualities of a John le Carre spy story. For a moment, it looked as if CIA Director George Tenet might have to offer himself as a noble sacrifice in a Greek tragedy. On the other hand, the bungling involved seems more reminiscent of a rerun of "Get Smart."

The White House communications shop, normally a smooth-running operation, made matters worse by initially dismissing the fracas as a passing storm, then offering up confusing and conflicting versions. Finally, last week the Bush administration was forced to reveal declassified excerpts of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus summary from the nation`s various intelligence agencies. The document makes clear that the CIA strongly believed that Iraq "has chemical and biological weapons," and "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Some old hands at the CIA charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president`s office had "pressured" agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam`s capabilities and intentions. "Crybabies," scoffed one top Defense Department official. In truth, the tension between policymakers and intelligence analysts is built in. Intelligence analysts, dealing with fuzzy scraps of information and guesswork, are naturally reluctant to connect the dots. Policymakers have no choice; they have to decide.

LESS THAN PRECISE
The more serious issue is the quality of intelligence. In an age when American policy is to strike first, before the enemy can strike the American homeland, intelligence needs to be very precise. In real life, it rarely is. Intelligence officials say they are careful to weigh and double-check tips and leads. But the behind-the-scenes story of the handling of the bogus documents about Saddam`s attempts to buy uranium in Africa, pieced together by NEWSWEEK, does not present a reassuring picture.

The report from Italy`s SISME--that Iraq was trying to buy 500 tons of pure yellowcake uranium from Niger--made it into the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. But the CIA did not bother to first examine the documents. An Italian journalist turned the papers over to the American Embassy in Rome that same month, but the CIA station chief in Rome apparently tossed them out, rather than send them to analysts at Langley. At a congressional hearing last week, the CIA`s Tenet was unable to explain why. "The CIA dropped the ball," said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. (Incredibly, the Italian press, which doesn`t let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, appeared to have higher standards than the CIA. The Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, worked for Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by Italy`s conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. She went to Niger and checked out the documents but declined to use them because she feared they were bufala--fraudulent--and she would lose her job.)

Tenet did have qualms about using the Niger information in a presidential speech. The DCI warned deputy national-security adviser Steve Hadley not to include a reference to Niger in a speech delivered by President Bush on Oct. 7 in Cincinnati. But according to a top CIA official, another member of the NSC staff, Bob Joseph, wanted to include a mention of Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Niger in the president`s State of the Union speech. According to this CIA official, an agency analyst cautioned him not to include the Niger reference. The NSC man asked if it would be all right to cite a British intelligence report that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from several African countries. The CIA official acquiesced. Though the British have not backed off that claim (a British official told NEWSWEEK that it came from an East African nation, not Niger), CIA Director Tenet publicly took responsibility for allowing a thinly sourced report by another country to appear in the State of the Union. (The White House last week denied that the Niger reference had ever shown up in an SOTU draft.) What Bush said in his address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

TRUTH IN GOOGLING
It wasn`t until February, several days after the State of the Union, that the CIA finally obtained the Italian documents (from the State Department, whose warnings that the intelligence on Niger was "highly dubious" seem to have gone unheeded by the White House and unread by Bush). At the same time, the State Department turned over the Italian documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been pressing the United States to back up its claims about Iraq`s nuclear program. "Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries," one IAEA official told NEWSWEEK. How did they do it? "Google," said the official. The IAEA ran the name of the Niger foreign minister through the Internet search engine and discovered that he was not in office at the time the document was signed. The FBI is investigating the whole affair, NEWSWEEK has learned, trying to determine if the documents were just a con job by a diplomat looking for some extra cash or a more serious attempt by Iraqi nationals to plant a story. In any case, the FBI will be, in effect, investigating the CIA, a sure script for more acts in the long-playing production of Intelligence Follies.

With Tamara Lipper and Richard Wolffe in Washington, Carlo Bonini and Barbie Nadeau in Rome and Carla Power in London



© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

MSNBC Terms, Conditions and Privacy ©2003



Für alle, die sich über den Bankrott Kaliforniens informieren wollen die Coverstorie:
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Es gibt noch weitere Artikel zu dem Thema.

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:20 a.m. EDT July 20, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

Two more American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq. They were part of a 101st Airborne Division convoy that came under attack early today in northern Iraq. Another soldier was wounded. In Baghdad, another soldier was killed in a vehicle wreck near the airport.
A U.S. soldier guarding a bank in Baghdad was killed by small arms fire early yesterday just as military officials were wrapping up two operations that netted hundreds of arrests and thousands of weapons.
The top American official in Iraq has returned to the U.S. for consultations. Paul Bremer is to appear on the Sunday talk shows and is expected to be in Washington for about a week.
The commander of coalition troops in Iraq says he`s setting up a 65-hundred-member Iraqi civilian defense force. General Ricardo Sanchez sys the Iraqis will be armed and will patrol alongside U.S. troops. He says they`ll work with the Americans as translators in hopes of reducing misunderstandings between U.S. forces and the Iraqi people.
About four-thousand Shiite Muslims marched on the U.S. headquarters in the southern city of Najaf (NAH`-jahf) today to protest America`s presence in the holy city. They voiced support for a hardline cleric who has criticized the country`s new Governing Council and threatened to raise his own army.
Military officials say if international forces are ready to take over their areas of responsibility as expected, all 18-thousand Marines in Iraq could be out of the country by September first.
The military says it has wrapped up Operation Ivy Serpent and Operation Soda Mountain. Some 12-hundred people were detained in the two sweeps, including 112 suspected of close ties to the former Saddam Hussein regime.
An influential Shiite Muslim cleric is condemning Iraq`s U.S.-picked Governing Council as made up of "non-believers" and vows to create a rival body. The cleric (Muqtada al-Sadr) also calls on Iraqis to volunteer for an independent Shiite army. But he condemns recent attacks on U.S. troops, saying that "right now" they are not condoned by Shiite leaders.
Soldiers who complained on camera about conditions in Iraq may be punished for their remarks. Military rules forbid criticism of superior officers. General John Abizaid (AB`-ih-zayd), head of U.S. Central Command, says it`s up to the soldiers` direct commanders to decide if they`ll be punished.
Retired General Jay Garner has told a House panel that American troops are engaged in a guerrilla war in Iraq. The former administrator of the U.S. reconstruction team in Iraq says the U.S. has no choice but to stay the course. He says if the U.S. should pull out now, and Saddam Hussein is still alive, there`s no doubt he would return.

IRAQ-WEAPONS

The BBC says the scientist who apparently committed suicide last week was its main source for a story at the center of the growing dispute over the Blair government`s Iraq policy. The BBC story charged the government inflated claims about Iraqi weapons in the runup to the war.
A journalist for an Italian news magazine has come forward, saying it was she who gave U.S. diplomats some documents purportedly showing that Iraq wanted to buy uranium from Niger. The documents turned out to be forgeries. An Italian newspaper (Corriere della Sera) quotes Elisabetta Burba as saying her source "in the past proved to be reliable."
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Veterans tell Bush: `Gulf war will be worse than Vietnam`


http://www.sundayherald.com/np/32159

1000 US servicemen and women warn military action will wipe out cities and breed terrorism
By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor



MORE than 1000 US servicemen and women have told President George Bush that they oppose war against Iraq and warned him that any conflict with Saddam Hussein will become another Vietnam.
The American soldiers, sailors and aircrew have written a letter to the President, signed by two vice-admirals, a brigadier-general, 14 colonels and hundreds of other high-ranking officers, asking Bush to meet with the leaders of the anti-war `Veterans for Common Sense` group.

The letter, signed by men and women who fought in the second world war, Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf war, represents the biggest backlash yet delivered to the Bush administration from the US military. The letter says: `We are patriotic citizens and veterans ... we feel duty-bound to share with you our serious concerns regarding issues of national security [and] the appropriate use of military strength.`

It goes on: `We strongly question the need for a war at this time ... We are not convinced that coercive containment has failed or that war has become necessary. Our own intelligence agencies have consistently noted both the absence of an imminent threat from Iraq and reliable evidence of co-operation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Again, we question whether this is the right time and the right war.`

The veterans fear that war in Iraq `would likely involve protracted siege warfare, chaotic street-to-street fighting in Baghdad and Iraqi civil conflict. If that occurs, we fear our own nation and Iraq would both suffer casualties not witnessed since Vietnam. We fear the resulting carnage and humanitarian consequences would further devastate Iraqi society and inflame an already volatile Middle East and increase terrorism against US citizens`.

It adds: `The scale of the crisis would be so large that the international community would be unable to prevent widespread suffering. For these reasons and more, it remains in our nation`s best interest to avoid another war.`

One of the key signatories, vice-admiral Ralph Weymouth, said he feared that the Bush administration `wants a military force which no other country or region could rival, and refuses to countenance any challenge to its pre-eminence`. Weymouth, a sailor for 35 years, was a navy pilot in the second world war and fought in Korea and Vietnam. He has one of the highest decorations in the US military, the Navy Cross.

`We can`t interpret the actions of the government as anything other than an attempt to establish global hegemony,` he told the Sunday Herald. `They appear to want to run the world. We are on the wrong path and it frightens me a lot. We are promoting a clash of civilisations.`

He says he knows that his views will be met with dismay in Washington DC, but he insists he is an American patriot . `The debate about the war in the US is utterly stifled. We veterans are making our worries public in order to get the public to think, listen and understand,` he added.

`Too many people in America are automatically supporting their leaders, and the media is denigrating any form of protest and taking part in a form of self-censorship. I want to publicly oppose this US administration. `

He said he viewed the Bush administration`s policy of pre-emptive action as `terribly dangerous for the world`, adding: ` We are a great country, but we are arrogant with the entire world.`

Weymouth said war with Iraq would cause `inconceivable problems` in the Islamic world, could create chaos in Israel and Palestine and breed `terrorism without limit`. He also said he felt `business interests` were tampering with foreign policy.

Weymouth wants the American government to understand that modern warfare could mean `whole cities being wiped out`, adding: `We have super-weapons today, but as our experience in Kosovo, where we bombed the Chinese embassy, shows we really don`t know how to use these weapons. I certainly fear for large civilian casualties. We have to remember that in Vietnam the civilian to combatant ratio of casualties was 100 to one. This could well be worse.`

Referring to the US-UK special relationship, Weymouth said: `It should be about co-operation. I don`t understand why Tony Blair is following this route. `

He called on the US government to work with the UN, saying: `The United Nations is the single institution which the world can look to at the moment. It may be imperfect, but it`s all we`ve got. The current administration is trying to strangle it.`

Weymouth also said he `doubted` that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Charles Sheehan-Miles, who was decorated in the Gulf war after saving four of his comrades from a burning tank and is co-founder of Veterans For Common Sense, said: `No-one has been able to get through to the president. We hope he may listen to military veterans.

` I`m very concerned that we are about to start world war three, but this time we are the aggressors. `

One signatory to the letter is Kris Kristofferson, the actor and Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter. He is a former 82 Airborne helicopter pilot.


The full letter and details of the signatories can be found here

16 March 2003

Full text of the letter signed by 1,000 war veterans questioning President Bush`s rush to start a war against Iraq




March 10, 2003
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500



Dear Mr. President:

We, the undersigned veterans who have served our country in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War and other military conflicts, respectfully request an opportunity to meet with you about the threat of war between the United States and Iraq.


Mr. President, we are patriotic citizens and veterans who respect the office of the President and the ethics and values binding us together as Americans.


As such, we feel duty-bound to share with you our serious concerns regarding issues of national security, the appropriate use of our military strength, and the health and welfare of our active duty soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. Those of us who are veterans of the 1991 Gulf War can offer particular insight into the ongoing troubles in the Middle East, and the

likely consequences of another war in that volatile region.


A dozen years ago, we helped liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, and in the course of combat operations came face to face with brutality and the consequences of modern warfare. We learned how unpredictable the nature of war can be. And we learned that war-related losses are not simply experienced on the battlefield.


Following the 1991 Gulf War, we collectively failed to prevent Saddam Hussein`s violent repression of a popular uprising and the unprecedented refugee flight that ensued. As a result, tens of thousands of innocent civilians died. In addition to those deaths, the war and immediate post-war conditions resulted in the excess deaths of 46,900 children under the age of

five, according to the New England Journal of Medicine (September 24, 1992).


Over the long term, the 1991 Gulf War has had a lasting, detrimental impact on the health of countless people in the region, and on the health of American men and women who served there. Twelve years after the conflict, over 164,000 American Gulf War veterans are now considered disabled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. That number increases daily.


The possibility of large-scale war between the U.S. and Iraq looms before us once again. For this urgent reason we would like to meet with you to discuss steps the United States and its allies can take to protect U.S. soldiers, allied forces, and Iraqi civilians from known and suspected hazards that would result from military operations.


We understand the risks that come with war and that there are times when such risks are necessary. However, we strongly question the need for a war at this time. Despite Secretary of State Colin Powell`s report to the Security Council and the testimony of others in the administration, we are not convinced that coercive containment has failed, or that war has become

necessary.


Our own intelligence agencies have consistently noted both the absence of an imminent threat from Iraq and reliable evidence of cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Again, we question whether this is the right time and the right war.


Further, we believe the risks involved in going to war, under the unclear and shifting circumstances that confront us today, are far greater than those faced in 1991. Instead of a desert war to liberate Kuwait, combat would likely involve protracted siege warfare, chaotic street-to-street fighting in Baghdad, and Iraqi civil conflict. If that occurs, we fear our own nation and Iraq would both suffer casualties not witnessed since Vietnam. We fear the resulting carnage and humanitarian consequences would further devastate Iraqi society and inflame an already volatile Middle East, and increase terrorism against U.S. citizens.


Our concerns about the potential human and material costs of a military conflict in Iraq are well substantiated. In the event of a war, the UN warns that 1.26 million children under the age of 5 in Iraq will be at risk of death. Within the initial weeks of conflict, the World Health Organization estimates 500,000 Iraqis would need immediate medical attention. Ten million Iraqis would need immediate humanitarian assistance and over 2 million Iraqis would be made homeless.


The scale of the crisis would be so large that the international community would be unable to prevent widespread suffering. For these reasons and more, it remains in our nation`s best interest to avoid another war. The risk of excessive civilian casualties like those predicted by the UN pose a grave risk to our national security, making the U.S. more of a target of

retaliatory attacks by terrorists.


Mr. President, as our Commander-in-Chief, we recognize the immense responsibility you have to protect our homeland and keep our nation secure. As veterans who honorably served our nation in its wars, we believe that our perspectives, knowledge and expertise can aid you at this crucial time, as you continue to deliberate on whether or not to commit our nation to war.


We therefore request a meeting at your earliest possible convenience. We look forward to any opportunity to come together with you to discuss the matters we have raised.

Sincerely,
1000 Namen
http://www.sundayherald.com/np/32186

Mehr Artikel aus dem Archiv des Sunday Herald:
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US Says Kills Up to 24 Attackers in Afghanistan
Sun July 20, 2003 02:12 PM ET
By Saeed Ali Achakzai
SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Sunday its forces had killed up to 24 fighters who attacked a coalition convoy in southern Afghanistan.

The convoy came under fire from unknown attackers on Saturday near the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border, but no soldiers were hurt, U.S. spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Lefforge said.

"The coalition forces drove through the kill zone, requested close air support and engaged the enemy forces, killing approximately five enemy and pursuing the remaining forces into the surrounding hills," he said in a statement.

AH-64 Apache attack helicopters had strafed the area, killing 17 to 19 more enemy fighters, he said.

Lefforge said the attack took place near the U.S. firebase at Spin Boldak. Two rockets landed near the base on Friday night but caused no casualties, the military said.

Earlier, Afghan officials said U.S. aircraft struck positions of Taliban guerrillas after they attacked a government checkpoint six km (four miles) east of Spin Boldak on Saturday night.

Spin Boldak District Commissioner Sayed Fazaldin Agha said two government soldiers were killed in the attack, but witnesses reported seeing four dead.

Speaking by telephone from an unknown location, Taliban official Mullah Abdul Rauf said at least 20 government soldiers were killed in the fighting, which involved 200 guerrillas.

"One of our comrades was also killed," he said. "The Taliban fighters later left the area."

BLOODIEST CLASHES SINCE JUNE

The accounts of the fighting suggested they were the bloodiest since June, when government forces reported killing 40 Taliban fighters in the Spin Boldak area.

Khalid Khan Achakzai, a senior local official with the Foreign Ministry, said Saturday`s fighting lasted about five hours and U.S. forces had sent armored vehicles in support.

Achakzai said the clash involved at least 75 Taliban fighters led by a former minister, Mullah Abdul Razzaq, commander Hafiz Abdur Rahim, and Rauf, a former provincial governor. He said the guerrillas came from the Pakistani side of the border.

Rauf said Taliban fighters had also attacked a U.S. base, but it was unclear how much damage had been inflicted. He said the attacks were planned in a meeting three days ago with the shadowy leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar.

An official with Pakistan`s border security force, Major Shaukat, said Pakistan had beefed up security along its border.

On Friday, eight government soldiers were killed in the southeastern province of Khost in a suspected Taliban attack.

More than 100 Afghan soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded across the south since the start of the year.

Afghan officials say most of the strikes have been organized by the Taliban and allied militants based in Pakistan, although Islamabad says it is doing its best to seal the border.

Elsewhere in the country, four Italian soldiers and their Afghan translator were wounded on Sunday in a missile attack on their convoy, a local source and Italian officials said.

Amanullah Zadran, a former minister in the U.S.-backed government, said the attack on the Italians took place on a road to the southeastern town of Gardez. The wounded were evacuated in U.S. military helicopters.

It brought to nine the number of troops from the 11,500-strong coalition wounded since Friday.

Foreign troops have been in Afghanistan since 2001, when a U.S.-led force overthrew the fundamentalist Taliban which had sheltered Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda network. Al Qaeda is blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

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Comment
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An uncertain ending for Blair`s role
Peter Preston
Monday July 21, 2003
The Guardian

The jolliest, most wryly perceptive movie of the summer is out this week. Goodbye Lenin, in which an East German mum lies comatose through the eight months that destroyed the squalid wall and awakes asking for her old loves - pickled gherkins and ersatz coffee. It`s terrific - which means an automatic hunt for a Goodbye 2. How about Goodbye Blair?

Let`s suppose the coma began eight months ago, in October 2002, and the last newspaper piece mum read before her heart attack was Polly Toynbee in the Guardian: "This is the best government Britain has ever had - by far." Ah, yes, we remember it well. Now, July 2003, comes the wake-up stir. And the world has changed utterly.

For peace, harmony and progress, read bitter chaos. "Dame" Glenda Jackson is baying for Blair`s head. A media dawn chorus from Canary Wharf to Shepherd`s Bush wants Alastair Campbell`s first. Labour`s backbenches are seething and heaving and revolting. Iain Duncan Smith takes the lead in some polls. An awful event in an Oxfordshire wood is the apotheosis of everything Harold Macmillan knew could knock good governance off the rails. Events, dear boy, events.

What`s happened? Why has "best" turned to "worst"? So you sit on the end of mum`s bed and try to explain.

Some things that inspired Polly`s confidence - like Estelle Morris`s calm competence at education - were gone, unpredictably, a couple of weeks later. Carole Caplin and Alan Milburn, in their various ways, weren`t much help. But really, from beginning to end, this is all about the war.

Did we win? Yes, mum: easily. Did hundreds of thousands die? Some thousands, yes - but far below many forecasts. Is Saddam gone? As far as we can tell. And did he use his weapons of mass destruction on our boys? No, mum: he doesn`t seem to have had any. Not even that 45-minute rocket that could wipe out Cyprus I was reading about when I had my turn? No, mum, not even that.

And what, pray, does our re-awakened lady say then? Does she snarl with fury and talk about official deceit - or does she heave a sigh of relief? No gas, no dirty bombs or long-range missiles, no anthrax, no nothing... Is that an "Oh, good!" or an "Oh, no!"?

The problem with trying to explain thus, with trying to put the last eight months in a context, is that you can`t quite explain.

You can say, of course, that some people were keen on the war and some weren`t, and that hindsight and self-justification always rule, OK. You can say George Bush is a demon-dunce of a figure here, an oily ogre. You can say that intelligence - mainstream or confected - has been playing its usual miasmic game. You can stress the great unknowns - why Campbell went ape with the BBC, why Dr David Kelly talked to so many journalists quite so commodiously, what misty circumstances contrived to turn a bad situation tragic.

But you still can`t make everything fit. And nor can you quite stop the pervasive charades. I was, and am, against the war - but I never believed either dossier, dodgy or otherwise, and nor did any other opponent of war I encountered. Some Labour MPs might have used the stuff as a flimsy shield to fend off irate constituents, but they weren`t misled. Excuses, excuses. The people who believed were the leaders who wanted to believe, not the never-were-and-never-could-be convinced.

Why chuck extraneous mud when it isn`t necessary? Tony Blair is our most avowedly religious PM in recent history. We knew that when we elected him. He has convictions we can`t all share. Good thing, bad thing? On the one hand, it seems, he stands for nothing, a hollow shell of a man unmasked. But eight months back, he was Polly`s hero - and on that other hand, he still stands for better education and health in a Britain where reforming things happen, where vested interests can occasionally be confronted, where the army we pay for can sometimes be used to stop some savagery far away. He is, in short, not a man without conviction - but one unhinged and perhaps undone by conviction.

It may be that, some unexpected day soon, he`ll be gone. There`s only so much pounding one man can take. But what will that avail us? Will those so furious with Blair over his euro timidity fare better with Gordon Brown - or even Duncan Smith? Will those who resent America`s influence do better with either of them? (Tell that to our Cape Cod-loving chancellor.)

The war was a mistake, mum. A terrible, self-deluding, self-destructive mistake. It may be the kind of mistake you never recover from. Bush is sinking fast in the polls - a majority on the Zogby survey last weekend don`t want him as president next time round. The bloody nightmare of attacks in Iraq goes on and on. Political truth and political consequences.

But pause before you swallow too many pat theories, as peddled by all the usual suspects. People are still human beings, no matter what they do. My best BBC friend thinks Campbell is genuinely outraged about the coverage; and he may be right. My best political friend thinks Blair a true believer. And for the rest, for the details, the motivations, the private desperations, we just don`t know. Repeat: don`t know.

Goodbye Blair? Perhaps. But the script still needs a lot of work - and there`s one transplant from Goodbye Lenin to hang on to. There, for a while, the Honecker past, its vinegary gherkins and Stasi communality, comes bathed in a wistful nostalgia. There the departed regime seems suddenly cuddly, just like the old Labour of long ago. And, maybe soon, the New Labour of love finally lost.

· [e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Blair accepts military trial for Britons
US warnings shift view on Guantanamo Bay prisoners

Nicholas Watt in Seoul and Julian Borger in Washington
Monday July 21, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair indicated yesterday that two of the British men being detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba will still stand trial before a US military court because national security would be at risk if they were returned to Britain.

With the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, expected to start talks today in Washington about the fate of the two men, Mr Blair hinted that their best hope would be a slight loosening of the military tribunal`s rules.

Meanwhile, Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has represented the British inmates at American hearings, said he had been told by US government sources that a deal had been done before Lord Goldsmith even arrived in the country. The only significant concession would be to lift the threat of the death penalty.

The news will infuriate supporters of Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, whose hopes were raised last week when George Bush authorised a temporary halt in the legal proceedings to allow Lord Goldsmith to travel to the talks.

Speaking to Sky television during his trip to the far east, Mr Blair hinted that President Bush had handed him intelligence warning of the dangers of returning the men to Britain, where they would almost certainly be set free.

"We have got to look at a whole range of considerations, not least our own national security," he said.

His remarks show he has been persuaded by US concern that Mr Begg and Mr Abbasi would be free to return to Pakistan if they were repatriated because legal experts do not believe they could be charged with any offence in Britain.

In his first public comment about the men since a White House dinner with Mr Bush on Thursday, Mr Blair indicated that he now supported a military trial as he called on people to give the US credit for the tribunal. "Any military commission that [the Americans] have is subject to rules that I think would be regarded as reasonably strict by anyone."

But he said the Americans would have to go some way to observing legal norms. "Obviously if we have our own nationals tried in that way we would want to make sure that every single aspect of this was consistent with the proper rules."

Britain has expressed "strong reservations" about the trial, which would be conducted by a military judge and prosecution. The men would be entitled to appoint their own defence team but the lawyers would have to pass a strict vetting procedure, for which the lawyers themselves would have to pay.

The prosecution would be able to present as evidence testimony gained under duress and unsworn statements, and the tribunal has the power to impose the death penalty.

Mr Blair`s remarks indicate that President Bush has agreed to loosen the rules, but a normal criminal trial on the mainland, along the lines of the trial of the Californian supporter of the Taliban, John Walker Lindh, has been ruled out.

Mr Blair qualified his remarks by saying that Lord Goldsmith would discuss two options in Washington - repatriating the two men to face trial in Britain or amending the rules of the US tribunal to bring them more into line with the British legal system.

But Mr Blair`s warning about national security, and his praise for the "strict" rules governing the tribunal, indicated that he is prepared to face down a row by agreeing to a trial at Guantanamo Bay.

"Unfortunately, I am informed by the Americans that the `fix` is in, and that the result of your visit has already been determined," Mr Stafford Smith wrote to Lord Goldsmith yesterday.

"I understand that the only concession that President Bush will make is that the British will not be subject to the death penalty. Again, this would be no concession at all, since there is no evidence to date that our citizens committed any act that would justify a death sentence."

The men`s supporters are likely to be angered that Mr Blair came close to endorsing Mr Bush`s description of the two as "bad men". Mr Blair told Sky: "These cases all arise out the situation in Afghanistan where people were supporting al-Qaida, the terrorist network and the Taliban against British and American forces ... it is just worth pointing out that this came out of a situation of huge danger for ourselves and our armed forces."

Asked whether he agreed with Mr Bush`s controversial remarks, Mr Blair said: "I think what he was meaning by that was the situation in terms of people going over and supporting al-Qaida and the Taliban ... some of the discussion of this in the past few weeks has rather forgotten the context in which this arose."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Secret nuclear plant detected in North Korea
Signs point to second plutonium processor

Jonathan Watts in Tokyo and Julian Borger in Washington
Monday July 21, 2003
The Guardian

North Korea may have secretly built a second nuclear reprocessing plant to produce weapons-grade plutonium, according to evidence found by US intelligence agencies.

The installation may be hidden inside a mountain.

The news, reported in yesterday`s New York Times, complicates the diplomatic attempts to resolve the nine-month nuclear stand-off and raises fresh questions about the information gathering abilities of the CIA.

Earlier this month North Korea said it had completed reprocessing 8,000 nuclear fuel rods, enough to make six to eight bombs.

But US officials played down the claim as a possible bluff, because satellites had detected no signs of activity at Yongbyon, the only confirmed nuclear plant in North Korea.

Furthermore, the monitoring equipment along the border did not immediately pick up heightened emissions of krypton 85, a gas given off during reprocessing.

White House officials confirmed yesterday that high emissions of krypton 85 had now been observed.

But press reports citing American and Asian officials say that computer analyses of the wind direction suggest that the gas was coming not from Yongbyon but from another source, possibly hidden inside a mountain.

The information, which has been shared with Tokyo and Seoul, seems to back up reports from a South Korean agent that the North has a second plant north-east of Yongbyon.

But after the debacle of the Iraq dossiers and previously misleading satellite intelligence on North Korea, the White House has responded cautiously.

The New York Times quotes an unnamed senior official as saying that the evidence was "very worrisome, but still not conclusive."

Tony Blair, who was in South Korea yesterday on the second leg of an Asian tour, said North Korea was a "real threat and danger."

He ruled out military action, but said an "awful lot of pressure" should be put on Pyongyang to comply with its international obligations.

Last week Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, described North Korea as the "most immediate and serious threat to the nuclear non-proliferation regime".

The former US defence secretary William Perry said that the situation was drifting towards war, possibly before the end of the year.

But in a way exactly opposite to its approach to Iraq, Washington has gone out of its way to avoid recognising North Korea`s claims to possess a powerful deterrent.

This is largely because the military options are so dreadful. The North`s million-strong army, which is within artillery range of Seoul, has long been believed to possess chemical and biological weapons, as well as one or two atomic bombs.

During the last crisis, in 1994, the Pentagon drew up plans for a surgical missile strike on Yongbyon, but that would be of little use if a second reprocessing plant, its whereabouts unknown, has already produced a new stock of nuclear weapons material.

A second plant also makes a diplomatic solution more difficult.

The previous crisis was averted when North Korea allowed the IAEA to keep watch over Yongbyon.

This time, the US is demanding a verifiable and irreversible end to Pyongyang`s nuclear weapons programme.

But a monitoring, inspection and destruction arrangement will be much harder for both sides if doubts remain about secret facilities.

South Korea is already beginning to accept a nuclear fait accompli by its neighbours.

Senior officials in Seoul say privately that they have little choice but to live with North Korea`s atomic bombs, and the US will probably be willing to do the same as long as the weapons are not exported.

North Korea, one of the world`s most impoverished and militarised states, has consistently managed to outwit its more powerful enemies, although at the expense of its starving and isolated population.

But with no independent confirmation of the reports, Pyongyang`s reprocessing claims and Washington`s reports of a second nuclear plant could be a game of bluff and double-bluff as China tries to bring the two sides back together for negotiations.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Iraq war `began last year`

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday July 21, 2003
The Guardian

The Iraq war began in mid-2002 with intensive air strikes under the guise of enforcing the southern no-fly zone over the country, a senior US officer admitted in remarks published yesterday.
Lieutenant General Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said that the previously secret plan, Operation Southern Focus, was launched last summer - before President Bush took his case against Baghdad to the United Nations.

The operation involved dropping 606 precision-guided bombs on 391 targets, in an effort to destroy Saddam Hussein`s air defences.

"It provided a set of opportunities and options for General [Tommy] Franks" so that the coalition commander would not have to launch a "preliminary war effort" at the start of his campaign, Gen Moseley told the New York Times and Washington Post, at a meeting of top brass in Nevada.

The air force general said Operation Southern Focus paved the way for the use of special forces early in the war, and the decision to begin the ground war earlier than planned with offensives by marines and regular infantry.

The admission raises further questions about US intentions in the build-up to war, at a time when the administration is scrambling to explain its reliance on shaky intelligence in making the case for war.

It is also under increasing pressure over the almost daily attacks on US troops in Iraq.

Two more US soldiers were killed yesterday and a third was wounded in an ambush west of Mosul, bringing to 37 the number of US troops killed since President Bush declared the war over on May 1.

US civilian administrator Paul Bremer said yesterday that the attacks were being organised by a small band of "professional killers" in an area that was probably harbouring Saddam Hussein.

[Joerver]

Sense and sensitivity
Iraq`s legacy confronts Blair in Korea

Leader
Monday July 21, 2003
The Guardian

Visiting South Korea yesterday, Tony Blair was back on his favourite subject: the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, in this case by North Korea. Mr Blair said that in this instance, unlike Iraq, "special sensitivity" was required in pursuing a "peaceful and constructive dialogue".

It is odd that Iraq, which denied having nuclear weapons or programmes and now appears to have had none, was attacked while Mr Blair rules out military action against a North Korea that flaunts its nuclear ambitions. That he does so is welcome, of course. It would indeed be foolish and dangerous to attempt forcible regime change in Pyongyang. It is a great pity that the prime minister was not so sensitive about Iraq. It would have saved him and the world much grief - and not a few lives.

Mr Blair`s difficulty is only too evident. This policy contradiction is not of his own making - but he is bound by it. It is his friend George Bush who has decided, for now at least, for his own political reasons, to play down North Korea. Mr Blair is so closely identified with Washington on the WMD issue that it has become all but impossible to pursue an independent line.

Thus if Mr Bush decides at a later date that force is the only way to achieve his declared aim of dismantling all North Korean WMD facilities, Mr Blair may be more or less obliged to eat his words and back him. That much was implicit in his remarks to Congress last week. This is a truly desperate position for a British prime minister to be in. Britain has forfeited its freedom of action. This is part of the Iraq legacy. By Koreans and others, Mr Blair will be seen, fairly or not, as Washington`s mouthpiece. What he says matters to the global audience only in so far as it may reflect current US thinking.

Yet so debilitating is Mr Blair`s credibility problem on the WMD issue that it is even doubtful whether almost anything he says on this matter will be believed in future, at home or abroad. He might do better to pipe down altogether and concentrate instead on clearing up the very considerable, now bitterly tragic mess he has made of things over Iraq.

Speaking of wider, unintended and unwished-for consequences, the US-British pre-emptive action against Iraq appears to have made the already serious Korean proliferation problem far worse. Like Iran, North Korea has accelerated its nuclear arms-related activities in the past 12 months. A major calculation for both countries must be the need to ensure that they do not share Baghdad`s fate.

North Korea`s leaders took Mr Bush`s "evil axis" threats to heart. They seem to be deeply convinced they face potential military aggression - and who is to say they are wrong? Their primary, oft-repeated demand in any discussion of nuclear disarmament is for American security guarantees. Likewise, the US-British willingness to bypass the UN and block its weapons inspections in Iraq hardly inspires confidence in Pyongyang in the benefits of international collaboration or provides it with an incentive to allow the banished IAEA nuclear inspectors to return.

Mr Blair and Mr Bush notwithstanding, worries about North Korea`s nuclear plans have not been sexed up. They are real and well-founded. Weekend reports that the North may have a second, secret plutonium plant and its recent boasts about weapons-related reprocessing, in the context of a decade of proliferation activities and missile sales, underline the urgent need for the multilateral, regional dialogue that China is now commendably promoting. Mr Blair, descending on Beijing today, should confine himself to offering quiet encouragement.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Prime Minister says dossier was genuine and WMD `programmes` will be found
By Donald Macintyre in Seoul
21 July 2003


Tony Blair moved to convince the public and his party yesterday that evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would still be found even if it took until after the next general election to do so.

Mr Blair, speaking after the death of Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert who spoke to the BBC before the corporation claimed that last September`s WMD dossier had been "sexed up"to help justify the war, again insisted that the evidence in the dossier was genuine as well as being undoctored when it was published.

He denied that he was "surprised" weapons had not yet turned up and repeated that Saddam Hussein had mounted an "organised programme of concealment" before the war. "This is exactly what he did before," he told Sky Television in an interview yesterday.

He said that when the UN weapons inspectors had gone into Iraq "they didn`t find the full biological weapons programme for four or five years". He added: "Now I don`t believe that will happen this time because [the Allies` Iraq Survey Group] are beginning to get the co-operation of Iraqi experts and so on. But the point is that the concealment of these weapons programmes was a very important part of the strategy."

Mr Blair`s switch to talking of "programmes" instead of weapons has been taken as an indication that he could be resigning himself to the possibility that the finds could be confined to paperwork, moulds and computer print-outs pointing to some future resumption of a weapons project rather than lethal arms for immediateuse.

In his interview he talked of "programmes and the product" ­ saying that "it does not surprise me in the least that it will require proper interviews with the people engaged in these programmes in order to discover where the programmes and the product are".

His remarks could add to public confusion after commentshe made in his congressional speech in Washington last week when he appeared to be preparing the ground for weapons not being discovered. He suggested that "history would forgive" the war in Iraq even if the link between WMD and terrorism was not proved.

Mr Blair said that in much of recent criticism there was "an assumption running that actually the whole issue to do with Saddam and weapons of mass destruction ... was just a strange invention of the CIA or British intelligence. It certainly was not. The intelligence we had was real ... and I believe that intelligence to be genuine."

At the same time, Mr Blair, who is on a tour of the Far East and has North Korea`s nuclear ambitions high on his agenda, also widened his remarks to react to reports of findings of enriched uranium in Iran. Insisting that he was not envisaging war with Iran or North Korea, he nevertheless declared: "If states such as these acquire a nuclear weapons capability, this is a huge threat to the region they are in and it is extremely important we deal with it ... it is important that we keep up the pressure on those states to comply with their international obligations."

In the United States, where President Bush also stands accused of exaggerating the Iraqi WMD threat so he could wage war, the political row deepened further. Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, challenged Mr Bush to tell Americans whether his State of the Union speech, in which he mentioned the British Government`s claim that Iraq had attempted to smuggle uranium from Niger, was accurate.
21 July 2003 09:24


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

July 21, 2003

Agony of the longest weekend
By Melissa Kite in Seoul



GAUNT, jetlagged and bereft of his closest aides, Tony Blair has travelled 12,000 miles but can still feel the heat of the fires ranging back home about the suicide of David Kelly.
Yesterday he sought sanctuary and comfort from perhaps his longest weekend at a Roman Catholic church in South Korea.

However, there was little peace to be found there. Arriving at Myongdong Cathedral in Seoul, Mr Blair was confronted by two Koreans waving a banner which asked: “Who killed David Kelly?” On Thursday night, the Prime Minister had said goodbye to righthand men such as Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, then bounded up the steps of his aircraft at Andrews Air Force base in Washington. His ears were still ringing with the acclaim of 19 standing ovations at the United States Congress.

By the time he landed in Tokyo, he was clinging to Cherie’s hand and the whole world knew that Dr Kelly’s body had been found in an Oxfordshire wood. His entire Far East tour is being overshadowed. A speech on the euro to Japanese business leaders suddenly mattered nothing.

A press conference with the Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, ended with the shouted question from a British reporter hanging in the air: “Have you got blood on your hands Prime Minister?” After a night on a traditional Japanese futon on top of a straw tatami mat, there was a flight to South Korea, where he went to Sunday afternoon Mass with his wife and opened a Tesco store.

But at an evening press conference with the South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun in the gardens of his Spring House residence, Mr Blair finally let his weariness show.

As he thanked the President for his hospitality, his voice was hoarse and at one point he seemed close to a coughing fit.

But then the mood lightened. There were jokes about baseball and soccer. He already knew the BBC was about to confirm that Dr Kelly had been its source. Perhaps the worst was over, for the moment.

[Joerver]

Das bedeutet Unruhe bei den Schiiten in Najaf, der Heiligen Stadt im Süden von Baghdad.

July 21, 2003

Leave town or face death, angry mob tells troops
From James Hider in Najaf



THOUSANDS of supporters of a firebrand Shia cleric sidelined from Iraq’s coalition-backed Governing Council massed outside a US Marines base in the southern city of Najaf yesterday, threatening insurrection and suicide bombings unless American forces left town.
As the American death toll rose in the Sunni Muslim centre of Iraq, tempers ran high in the normally sleepy holy town of Najaf as 10,000 Iraqis loyal to Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, son of a renowned cleric murdered by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen, were ferried by bus to march on the base. They accused American forces of trying to arrest their leader for an angry speech in which he denounced Iraq’s coalition-sponsored government as “non-believers”.

Near the town of Hilla, a United Nations driver was killed when his vehicle came under fire from gunmen and crashed into a bus, the first attack on the UN since it returned to Iraq after the US-led war.

Two US soldiers were killed and another wounded near the northern city of Mosul when guerrillas hit their vehicle with machinegun fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Al-Hausa school, an Islamic institution in Najaf that draws huge loyalty from Iraq’s majority Shia population, is represented in the Governing Council by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This has infuriated Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, 26, who is suspected of involvement in the murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a moderate cleric, in Najaf soon after the war ended.

Yesterday, as men shouting their willingness to die for Hojatoleslam al-Sadr drew to the Marines’ base, troops were ordered to fix bayonets. A tense stand-off lasted for two hours. The crowd stood within 30 yards of a line of 40 Marines, with Shia imams trying to prevent their supporters advancing on the row of bayonets.

“We are human bombs — we are ready to die for Moqtada al-Sadr,” a demonstrator proclaimed. “Today we are peaceful, but tomorrow we will attack the Americans.”

In an impressive display of leadership, US Marine commander Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Conlin stepped out from beyond his troops to negotiate directly with leaders of the mob, as thousands of Iraqis punched the air and chanted all around him. The commander addressed the crowd by loudspeaker, calling them “blasphemers” for bringing violence to the holy city and warning them to disband. The crowd, which demanded an apology for an alleged incident in which Hojatole- slam al-Sadr’s house was surrounded by US troops on Saturday, pulled back, urged on by clerics mindful of the threat of bloodshed.

Lieutenant-Colonel Conlin refused, accusing Hojatoleslam al-Sadr of inventing the incident to whip up flagging support and of being “out of control”.







http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2711-752276,00.htm…

[Joerver]

Jetzt werden nur noch Programme gesucht. Fast schon Satire.

July 21, 2003

Weapons evidence will be revealed within six months
From Stephen Farrell in Baghdad



THE head of the task force hunting for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has indicated that he expects to begin to disclose evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes within six months.
In a rare public appearance, David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector appointed by the CIA to oversee the search, claimed that he had found enough evidence to convince him that Saddam had been operating such programmes.

“I think in six months from now we will have a considerable amount of evidence, and we’ll be starting to reveal that evidence,” Dr Kay told the NBC television network.

Pressure on President Bush and Tony Blair increased last week after a House Intelligence Committee report based on Dr Kay’s briefings concluded that evidence so far “does not point to the existence of large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons”.

However, asked if he believed that their strongest case would eventually cover nuclear, biological or chemical material, Dr Kay, 63, who was installed last month as Special Adviser for Strategy on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), said: “I think we’ll have a very strong case on all of those. I think we’ll have a strong case on missiles as well.”

The Pentagon’s 1,300-strong Iraq Survey Group now provides “direct support” to him. After predecessors’ claims of supposed “major” biological or chemicals “finds” that were later discredited, the cautious Dr Kay is determined that none of the findings should be leaked, despite the intense political spotlight on WMD.

The team is understood to fear that such disclosures could tip off former Baathist officials about the investigation’s progress or direction and compromise existing or potential informants.

The Iraq Survey Group has a staff of American, British and Australian military and intelligence experts and is based within the top-security perimeter around Baghdad international airport. There, data is collated and Iraqi scientists, detainees and witnesses are questioned. It has offices in Washington and a base in Qatar, where much of the recovered material is analysed.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-752084,00.html

[stockmarketbull]

Wenn Zwänge das Leben einengen


Eine Szene aus dem Alltag von Frau K.
Gerade ist hinter Frau K. die Haustür ins Schloss gefallen, als sie voller Panik wieder aufschließt und die Treppen hinaufstürmt. Ist der Herd auch wirklich abgedreht, der Stecker des Föns aus der Steckdose gezogen? Sie muss es einfach nochmals überprüfen, obwohl sie diese Zeremonie heute schon dreimal hinter sich gebracht hat. Es wird immer schlimmer. Anfangs genügte es, einmal zu kontrollieren. Jetzt kommt sie erst zur Ruhe, wenn sie viermal in die Wohnung zurückgekehrt ist. Sie braucht immer länger, bis sie morgens im Büro ankommt. Sie weiß, dass ihr Verhalten nicht normal ist, doch alle Willenskraft scheint nicht ausreichend, den Kreislauf zu durchbrechen. Zweifel quälen sie, eines Tages wirklich verrückt zu werden. Deshalb setzt sie alles daran, ihr merkwürdiges Verhalten vor der Umwelt zu verbergen.

Marotten und etwas ungewöhnliche Eigenheiten kennen die meisten Menschen in irgendeiner Form. Sie glauben an Glückszahlen, klopfen auf Holz, brauchen eine bestimmte Ordnung am Schreibtisch.

Wir sprechen von einer Krankheit, wenn

die Betroffenen stark unter ihrem Verhalten leiden,
sie in ihrem Alltagsleben stark beeinträchtigt sind,
sie sehr viel Zeit und Energie durch dieses Verhalten verlieren,
sie ihr Verhalten als sinnlos und unbeeinflussbar ansehen.
Man unterscheidet zwischen Zwangsvorstellungen,
Zwangsgedanken und Zwangshandlungen

Neben dem Zwang, wie Frau K. etwas kontrollieren zu müssen, treten Zwangsgedanken sehr häufig auf. Herr L. bekommt beispielsweise die Idee nicht mehr aus dem Kopf, dass er seine Frau mit einem Messer umbringen könnte. Er ist ein friedliebender Mensch und deshalb erschreckt ihn diese Vorstellung ganz besonders. Um seine Frau nicht in Gefahr zu bringen, schließt er die Messer nachts ein, geht Messern und Scheren, so gut es geht, aus dem Weg. Eine andere Variante der Zwangsgedanken sind Grübelgedanken. So malt sich Frau J. beispielsweise immer wieder aus, dass sie an Aids erkranken und jämmerlich sterben wird. Herr W. quält die Phantasie, er könnte mit dem Auto jemanden überfahren und es nicht bemerken.

Wer bekommt eine Zwangserkrankung?

Bisher sind die Ursachen für Zwangserkrankungen noch ungeklärt. Sicher ist, dass die Erfahrungen in der Kindheit eine Rolle spielen. Wenn ein Mensch als Kind hohe Anforderungen an Leistung, Perfektion oder Sauberkeit erfüllen muss, aber nur Kritik und Vorwürfe zu hören bekommt, kann er als Erwachsener sehr verunsichert sein. Er hält dann das gesamte Leben für gefährlich und misstraut den Menschen. In einer Krise, z.B. ausgelöst durch Überforderung, Tod eines nahen Angehörigen oder Trennung des Partners, neigt er dann dazu, sich gegen alle möglichen Gefahren absichern zu wollen. Die Ordnung, die er in der Welt vermisst, versucht er durch Rituale und starre Handlungsabläufe zu schaffen. Ist der Zwang erst einmal entstanden, bleibt er von selbst weiter bestehen. Da der Betroffene glaubt, wenn er sein Ritual aufgeben würde, würde Schlimmes passieren, behält er es bei.

Welche Hilfsmöglichkeiten gibt es?

Manchmal genügt die Anleitung zur Selbsthilfe, um den Zustand zu verbessern. Manchmal, abhängig von der Art, Schwere und Langwierigkeit der Erkrankung, ist eine Psychotherapie unerlässlich. Der wirkungsvollste Therapieansatz in der Behandlung der Zwänge ist die Verhaltenstherapie.

Der Betroffene muss lernen, mit den Situationen, die seine Ängste und Zwangshandlungen auslösen, wieder normal umzugehen. Er muss sich unter Anleitung des Therapeuten nach und nach den Situationen stellen. Das erfordert viel Durchhaltevermögen. Manchmal wird die Therapie für eine befristete Zeit auch durch Medikamente unterstützt. In den meisten Fällen ist eine wirksame Hilfe möglich und der Betroffene kann seine Zeit wieder mit Handlungen verbringen, die ihm Spaß machen.

Mehr darüber, wie Zwänge entstehen und überwunden werden können, erfahren Sie in dem Ratgeber des Zwangsexperten Dr. N. Hoffmann Wenn Zwänge das Leben einengen.

[Joerver]

July 21, 2003

A decent man caught up in someone else`s war
William Rees-Mogg



ONE only had to see Tony Blair’s face as he walked off the aircraft in Tokyo to know that the death of David Kelly has changed British politics. It is one of those events which mark an era, or perhaps the ending of an era. It is a personal tragedy for Dr Kelly’s family, and the public is very fully aware of that. But it is also an event which ought not to have happened, the destruction of a decent man as part of a political power game. It is not merely a political event, it is a moral event, and it has made people feel not only sad, but ashamed.
Dr Kelly was caught in the crossfire of three different battles. One was the bureaucratic struggle to avoid blame for the intelligence failures of the Iraq crisis. Both in Britain and the United States, the war was justified by the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons were said to be ready to be deployed “in 45 minutes”. That statement cannot have been correct, as no such weapons which could be accessed and activated so quickly have yet been found. The intelligence community blames the politicians for “sexing up” their intelligence: the politicians blame the intelligence community for providing unreliable information.

The second battle was the internal struggle for power inside the Labour Party, which has led to resignations of several ministers, including Robin Cook and Clare Short, on the issue of the war. For the first time, Tony Blair’s grip on his party has been seriously threatened. The Labour Party has always had a pacifist tradition, going back through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the prewar campaign against rearmament and conscription. Two Labour leaders, George Lansbury in the 1930s and Michael Foot in the 1980s, were outright pacifists. The opposition to a Labour war in alliance with a neo-conservative American President extended well outside the Labour Party.

The third battle was between the Government, particularly the Downing Street information office, and the BBC. Throughout the Iraq crisis, BBC broadcasts were increasingly critical of the Government’s international diplomacy, and then of the war. This criticism has continued down to the present time. Those who watched the Prime Minister’s speech to Congress last week saw it as a tour de force, a complex speech, making some implied criticisms of his hosts, but received with great enthusiasm. For the next 12 hours, on the television news, on Newsnight and on the Today programme, the BBC ran a belittling critique which no opposition party would have dared to attempt.

On the other side of that battle, Alastair Campbell became obsessed by the desire to prove the BBC wrong, and particularly to knock down Andrew Gilligan, the BBC’s defence correspondent. In certain respects Gilligan’s key story on May 29 was wrong. It now seems clear that Alastair Campbell did not add the fatal “45 minute” error to the September intelligence dossier, although he did recommend certain other changes. The BBC has never been willing to admit that Gilligan could not prove his most striking assertion.

These were all legitimate political issues, up to a point. The intelligence community did feel that its information had been hardened up and therefore exaggerated in making the case for war. Yet Mr Blair undoubtedly believed what he was saying. His difficulty was that the Labour Party was very reluctant to support the war which he thought — in my view rightly — was essential to remove a genocidal tyrant. The graveyards of murdered Iraqis, Iranians and Kuwaitis have proved the genocide, even though the weapons of mass destruction have not been found. Similarly, the Labour critics of the war felt genuine outrage. Some are virtually pacifists; others, such as Robin Cook, took the Franco-German line. They argued that diplomacy had not been exhausted. From the Prime Minister’s point of view, these critics of the war seemed to be screening Saddam Hussein and dividing Britain from our necessary ally, the United States. These were national issues, which provided entirely legitimate grounds for argument. Fleet Street joined in on both sides.

The BBC’s strong line raised many questions. Was the BBC sufficiently willing to examine its own journalism? Was Gilligan right in his assertion that Campbell had added the “45 minutes” claim? Did the BBC reports show a proper impartiality, or had the corporation become a partisan to the dispute over the war? Should the BBC Governors have justified Gilligan’s sources, when they did not know what they were?

Given that the BBC has now admitted that Dr Kelly was Gilligan’s principal source, how does one account for the conflict between Gilligan’s and Kelly’s evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee? Did Gilligan let out information which led to the identification of Dr Kelly as his source? How much weight should one give to the views of the Governors when they were acting as judge in their own cause?

These are serious questions, but they do not go to the root of the matter. The BBC plainly shares the responsibility for the events which brought Dr Kelly to despair, but it was not its sole responsibility. Under these pressures, Dr Kelly seems to have been left to take care of himself by his employers, the Ministry of Defence, by the BBC, to whom he had given valuable information, by the Downing Street press operation, which saw him as a useful tool in its war against the BBC, and by the Foreign Affairs Committee which interrogated him. The cross-examination by Andrew Mackinlay, the Labour MP for Thurrock, was a pompous exhibition of bullying and bluster.

Someone, whose identity will be for Lord Hutton’s inquiry to determine, decided to throw Dr Kelly to the wolves. He had volunteered the information that he had met Gilligan and might be his informant. Dr Kelly did not volunteer to be made a public scapegoat. He did not want to be named, but his name was leaked and the Ministry of Defence confirmed it. He did not expect to be put before a Commons committee or to be insulted when he got there.

Political tragedies often crystallise around particular individuals, but they emerge from more powerful underlying forces. From the beginning, when he first became leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair has been an anomalous leader. He abolished Clause Four, which committed the Labour Party to national ownership, but he could not abolish the party’s emotional commitment to state socialism. He committed himself to post-Thatcherite reforms of welfare, health and education. These reforms have been blocked for six years; Blairite ministers have been frustrated. Even now the party is fighting against foundation hospitals and university fees because they do not fit old Labour beliefs. Tony Blair won elections but lost his battles for reform.

He has also proved to be an interventionist in foreign affairs; he was the leading partner of the United States, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. His domestic policies and his foreign wars both went against the grain of his party. He could not have pursued such policies at all without the support of his chief propagandist, Alastair Campbell, of his alliance with Gordon Brown — who always had a veto — and of close discipline over the party. The conflict between Blairism and Labourism could be managed only by ruthless enforcement of Blair’s will.

On domestic policy, public opinion has usually been on Blair’s side against old Labour. The election victories reflect that. But the wars alienated many progressive middle-class people who still voted solidly for Labour in 2001. As he has become more isolated, he has become more dependent on his few loyal enforcers, and particularly on Alastair Campbell.

This pressure was expressed in its most emotional form in the row between Campbell and the BBC. In that conflict Dr Kelly found himself trapped. Because it affected real issues of power, by which Labour was being torn apart, that dispute was exceptionally bitter. Dr Kelly could not deal with those pressures. To judge by his expression in Tokyo, Tony Blair recognises that he may not be able to deal with them either. His great discovery was that he could win landslide elections as the right-wing leader of a left-wing party. Unfortunately, the divided party provides no basis for effective government.


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July 21, 2003
Officials Debate Whether to Seek a Bigger Military
By THOM SHANKER


WASHINGTON, July 20 — The strains on American ground forces as the Bush administration extends their global missions are prompting new debates on Capitol Hill and within the Pentagon over the question of whether the military needs more troops worldwide.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior military officers spent time over the weekend considering how to assign enough soldiers to fill the long-term mission of stabilizing Iraq while simultaneously fulfilling other overseas commitments and providing security against terrorism at home and abroad.

Mr. Rumsfeld has been telling Congress in recent days that before the Pentagon takes the major step of asking for money to enlarge the military, he hopes to cut back on less urgent foreign assignments, to move people in uniform out of administrative tasks and back into combat units and to change the balance of assignments between active-duty forces and those in the National Guard and Reserves.

A senior adviser to the defense secretary said that while it was easy enough to identify how many Army or Marine Corps troops the Pentagon needed for the global campaign against terror and for extended tours of duty on the ground in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld made no final decisions over the weekend. He waits for a larger blueprint from the military that would make new troop rotations more predictable.

"We are not fighting in a knife fight here — we`re looking out long term," said one Pentagon official involved full time in planning force rotations for Iraq.

But the military is struggling with what another Pentagon planning official called "the tyranny of fixed numbers," which is especially critical for the Army.

Of the Army`s 33 active-duty combat brigades, only three are described as free now for a new mission: the Stryker Brigade Combat Team at Fort Lewis, Wash., built around a new, lightly armored vehicle called Stryker; a brigade of the First Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kan.; and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division that returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., from Afghanistan six months ago.

Twenty-one brigades are now assigned overseas — 16 of them in Iraq. Of those not abroad, most are already earmarked as replacement forces for other missions, like the one in Afghanistan, are rebuilding their ranks or are on emergency standby in case of a crisis with North Korea.

Officials said the National Guard and Reserves, which as of Wednesday had 201,099 members on active duty, would probably have to shoulder some of the burden of any additional missions as well.

The Marine Corps could also be asked to share long-term peacekeeping duties, which traditionally have fallen to the Army.

On Capitol Hill, two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — one a Republican, and one a Democrat — have been driving the debate, and both predicted in interviews last week that Congress would support a request to expand the military`s personnel roster, even with the growing budget deficit.

"I was much more comfortable with end-strength during the cold war than I am today," said the Republican, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. He said reducing the size of the military after the collapse of communism left America`s ground force "in near crisis" as it was stretched to deal with expanding global commitments in the battle against terrorism.

The Democrat, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, said, "I think we need to make a decision very quickly, within weeks, about whether we need to increase the end-strength of the Army."

While he agrees with Mr. Rumsfeld that efficiencies can be found in the "tooth-to-tail ratio" of combat forces to administrative and support functions, Mr. Reed said, "We are going to be committed in Iraq in a way that we did not anticipate," adding that the Afghan mission will require years to complete and the North Korean threat dictates "a continued, forceful military complement."

Some of the steps urged by Mr. Rumsfeld to reduce the long-term strain on the troops were included in a confidential memorandum dated July 9 to the service secretaries and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting that they move to "rebalance" the active and reserve components.

In the memorandum, a copy of which was provided by a senior aide to Mr. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary wrote, "The balance of capabilities in the Active and Reserve components today is not the best for the future."

Describing it as "a matter of the utmost urgency," Mr. Rumsfeld said that by July 31 he expected several proposals. They include how to reduce the need for the involuntary mobilization of the Guard and Reserves, how to restructure the active and reserve forces "to correct imbalances that result in lengthy, repeated or frequent mobilization," and how to make the mobilization and demobilization process more efficient.

Even so, Pentagon officials drafting plans for the long-term Iraq mission said proposals were under review to mobilize two Army National Guard "enhanced separate brigades," which train with the active-duty force and receive the most modern equipment. They would still need extensive training before going to Iraq. Officials said that a nine-month tour would require a yearlong activation and a yearlong deployment would require 15 months of service.

In his most recent testimony this month on Capitol Hill, Mr. Rumsfeld said that if national security required increasing force levels, particularly in the Army or Marine Corps, "Obviously, we would come to Congress and make that request." But "at the moment," he added, "we do not see that that`s the case."

Mr. Rumsfeld did not say so expressly, but the concept of increasing troop numbers — and costs — contradicts a basic tenet of his goal for military transformation, which is to rely on new technology and rewrite doctrine to allow smaller forces to attack with greater speed and deadliness.

Before asking for more troops, Mr. Rumsfeld said, the Pentagon is trying to reduce commitments in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as in Sinai, and may reconfigure the way American forces are assigned in Germany and South Korea.

Pentagon officials who deal with personnel have also identified 300,000 jobs done by people in uniform that could be turned over to civilians, he said.

One Pentagon planner said the Army was also considering whether to fill the needs in Iraq not with traditional brigades under their standard division structures, but to cobble together smaller units — battalions and companies — in new combinations.

The debate is really one about balancing risks — the risk that there will not be enough soldiers to carry out diverse missions or that current troops will not re-enlist after repeated, exhausting assignments that degrade their quality of life and do not leave enough time for training. The risk that money spent on personnel will not be available for important new technology and for modernizing the current arsenal must be weighed against those.

At present, about 370,000 Army troops are deployed in 120 countries, from a total active-duty force of about 491,000, according to Pentagon statistics. Army reservists and National Guard members on active duty this month total 136,835, out of a force of about 550,000.

The Marine Corps has a total force of about 176,000, and about 20,000 of its reservists are now on active duty as well, from a pool of 39,000. About 9,000 marines are now in Iraq.

As of last week, marines were also stationed in Afghanistan, Japan and the Horn of Africa and were conducting exercises in Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Australia, Pentagon officials said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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Die Türken am besten in den kurdischen Teit, dann ist es dort auch wieder mit der Ruhe vorbei. Das sind doch Verzweiflungstaten.

July 21, 2003
Turkey Says U.S. Wants It to Send Troops to Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS


ISTANBUL, July 20 — The Bush administration has asked Turkey`s leaders to send troops to Iraq to help stabilize the country, the Turkish prime minister said today.

Such a request, if confirmed, would come during a period of exceptional tension between the two longtime allies. Earlier this month, American soldiers detained 11 Turkish troops in northern Iraq on the suspicion that they were trying to kill an American-backed Iraqi official.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today in a speech that the United States had asked the Turks to send soldiers into Iraq as part of a proposed multinational force to help the Americans maintain order there.

Mr. Erdogan offered few details of the request or whether his government might grant it. Hurriyet, a leading daily newspaper here, said today that the Americans had asked the Turks to send 10,000 troops to Iraq. It cited unidentified sources.

An American official in Ankara, the capital, would not confirm Mr. Erdogan`s assertion but said the two countries had discussed the issue during a visit by senior American military officers here last Friday.

The Bush administration has been searching for allies to pick up some of the burden there. Last week, the government of India said it would not send peacekeeping troops to Iraq unless they operated under the auspices of the United Nations. France rejected a similar request.

Relations between the United States and Turkey, which have been NATO allies since 1952, have been through their roughest spell in years. In March, Turkey rejected an American request to allow thousands of troops to use the country as a base from which to launch a northern front against Saddam Hussein.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Das Ereignis kann die Situation im Irak noch verschärfen.

July 21, 2003
In Najaf, a Sudden Anti-U.S. Storm
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR


NAJAF, Iraq, July 20 — The cleric and the lieutenant colonel stood just inches apart under the broiling noon sun today, white turban to camouflage helmet, trading invective about the deployment of American troops in this holy city.

Behind the American officer, a line of about two dozen marines stood vigilant, their bayonets newly fixed to their rifles. Behind the cleric, a sweep of thousands of demonstrators, most of them trucked in from Baghdad, chanting slogans like "No Americans after today" and "No to America, no to colonialism, no to tyranny, no to the Devil!"

So lies the suddenly uneasy state of relations between the United States forces and the younger, more militant clergymen of Iraq`s majority Shiite community.

Until now, interactions between the Americans and the Iraqis in Najaf have been calm, free of the random violence rampant in the country`s Sunni heartland.

But a sudden storm erupted on Saturday after Moktada al-Sadr, the scion of a clan of beloved clerics and the most vocal supporter of Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, asserted that American forces were encircling his home. They were bent on arresting him, his aides announced, after an incendiary sermon on Friday in which he rejected the American-appointed Governing Council and called for the formation of an Islamic army.

It was, said Lt. Col. Christopher C. Conlin, the commanding officer here, a deliberate misunderstanding.

There had indeed been Apache helicopters clattering overhead and extra troops on the streets, but that was to provide security for a visit by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Colonel Conlin said.

The temporary ramping up of the United States presence could not be explained in advance for security reasons, and afterward the American officer relied on members of Najaf`s City Council to pass the word. He wished the demonstrators would take their complaints to the new City Council.

The abrupt storm this weekend underscored a point made by a review of the Iraq reconstruction effort released last week by a panel from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The lack of Iraqis involved in the reconstruction at all levels, widespread unemployment and woefully inadequate means of communicating what is happening to the country`s 24 million people have combined to fuel an ever-higher level of frustration and anger about the American presence.

Men like Mr. Sadr and his followers, determined to harness that frustration to wrest a greater say in Iraq`s future, are stepping into the void.

"They used to think that they could marginalize the Shiites, that we would accept anything," said Sheik Khalid al-Khatami, an aide to Mr. Sadr, standing on a balcony beneath the gold dome of the tomb of Imam Ali, the founder of the Shiite sect, as the clerics whipped up the crowd. "That is a false impression. Neither the Americans nor any of the foreigners know how strong we are."

Najaf is the home to four respected ayatollahs, the senior Shiite leaders to whom the faithful look for guidance on virtually all aspects of daily life. The ayatollahs and their supporters were conspicuously absent from today`s events, because they view Mr. Sadr and his followers as little more than young hotheads determined to make a name for themselves by stirring up violence against the occupation.

Mr. Sadr`s father, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was an outspoken defender of the Shiites before being gunned down in 1999 in a killing attributed to Saddam Hussein`s henchman.

Out of respect for his father and not wanting to increase the younger cleric`s allure, the ayatollahs and other Shiite political groups have mostly remained silent in public about the situation.

"Moktada Sadr and his supporters are trying to drag us into this kind of confrontation, this kind of division between Shiites on the street," said a spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most established Shiite group and a participant in the Governing Council.

But even the local Supreme Council office had apparently not gotten word that the American military movements on Saturday were not reacting to Mr. Sadr`s Friday sermon. "The American policy should be calmer; they should not react so hastily to what he said," the spokesman added.

He and others say that much of the new militancy in the Shiite community is being pushed by former Baathists, happy to find any channel they can to create unrest.

Support for the demonstrators came from Iran, too. The protest opened with a message of support from Ayatollah Kathim al-Husseini al-Haeri, an Iraqi clergyman in the holy Iranian city of Qum. Members of the Governing Council were all American agents, he said in a message read aloud to the crowd, and the clerics were the legitimate rulers.

Random comments on the street appeared to show little support for the demonstration on Saturday among the people in Najaf itself, and even two clergyman wandering through the shrine were wondering what all the fuss was about.

"What do we need an Islamic army for?" said Riad Abu al-Awady, a 23-year-old Najaf resident. "Many members of my family fought in Saddam`s wars and they are all dead. What Iraqis need is water, electricity, security, and we want to work."

Outside the headquarters of the United States forces here, on the old university campus, a young clergyman named Aws al-Khafaji, a member of Mr. Sadr`s circle, made fiery speeches against the American military. He said the Americans were ruling through a "sissy" council, despoiling the holy city of Najaf with their presence, and spreading Western corruption.

Then he and a few others walked forward a few times to confront Colonel Conlin, at one point handing over a list of demands — including one that American forces leave the city immediately.

"He is frustrated because this city is peaceful and he has a low support base here," the officer said about Mr. Sadr. "This is the city of ayatollahs, and this is just a young, inexperienced guy."

But the young guy had deployed thousands of angry demonstrators on the Americans` doorstep. Colonel Conlin brought up a loudspeaker system of his own, addressing the crowd through an interpreter. His soldiers did not try to surround Mr. Sadr`s house, he said, and they had no interest in arresting him.

The colonel said the unruly demonstrators were blaspheming in the city of Abraham, and he warned that they must disband or be considered a threat to the American forces.

Much of what the officer said was lost in the chanting of the crowd, and some of the translation was poor — the Arabic version suggested that the crowd must show respect or be considered a threat.

But the clergymen, after reluctantly agreeing that both sides would air their viewpoint before the city`s most prominent ayatollah, took their supporters home. There would, they said, be another demonstration on Monday.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 21, 2003
A Bloody Peace in Iraq

Germany and Japan were not transformed into prosperous democracies overnight after World War II, and it would be unrealistic to expect miracles in Iraq. Yet as the weeks pass, it seems undeniable that the Bush administration grievously miscalculated the human and financial costs of the American occupation. That failure, which is starting to register with Americans of all political persuasions and promises to become an election issue, cannot be easily dismissed with glib assurances of better days to come or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s favorite refrain that the war ended just weeks ago. This exercise in American power is going to be a lot longer and bloodier than President Bush ever said.

This page opposed an invasion that lacked the endorsement of the United Nations Security Council, and it now seems clear the Bush administration exaggerated its central argument for the mission — the threat of Baghdad`s unconventional weapons. Nevertheless, establishing a free and peaceful Iraq as a linchpin for progress throughout the Middle East is a goal worth struggling for, even at great costs. We are there now, and it is essential to stay the course. But if Washington is to retain the public support needed to see the job through, it can`t pretend that everything is on track. The soldiers returning home every week in body bags make that plain.

Most of the administration`s critics predicted that Washington would win the war but botch the peace, and so far they have turned out to be disturbingly prescient. The administration seemed to think that when the war ended, Iraq`s government institutions, ranging from the army to the waterworks, could simply be placed under new leadership and returned to operation, providing order and basic services to a free Iraq. Everything about the American plan, including the size and composition of occupying military forces, was misconceived. Last fall, top Pentagon officials scoffed at Gen. Eric Shinseki when the Army chief of staff predicted that several hundred thousand American troops might be needed to control Iraq after a war. Today there are 150,000, and the number is expected to grow. Mr. Rumsfeld`s defense of the Pentagon`s reaction appears to be that it all depends on your definition of "several," and it has not been convincing.

There was also a naïve assumption that opposition would melt away once Saddam Hussein was displaced. Recently, with the American death toll mounting by the day, Gen. John Abizaid, the new American commander in Iraq, accurately described the continuing combat as a guerrilla war — a term that image makers at the White House and Pentagon had studiously avoided. The scale of combat is nothing like the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, but the conflict in Iraq promises to be protracted and expensive. The tab is currently running at close to $4 billion a month.

By invading Iraq without Security Council approval, Washington greatly complicated the task of enlisting foreign help during the postwar period. Secretary of State Colin Powell is now belatedly discussing a new Security Council resolution that would open the way for France, India and other countries to send peacekeeping forces to Iraq. That is critical to easing the burden on American troops.

It is not too late to set Iraq on a more promising course, but that will require the kind of staying power and cooperation with other nations that this administration has rarely shown much interest in mustering.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 21, 2003
Have Guns, Will Travel
By P. W. SINGER


WASHINGTON
It is often said that war is too important to be left to the generals. But what about the C.E.O.`s? The Pentagon`s plan to hire a private paramilitary force to guard sites in Iraq may have surprised many Americans, but it was really just another example of a remarkable recent development in warfare: the rise of a global trade in hired military services.

Known as "privatized military firms," these companies are the corporate evolution of old-fashioned mercenaries — that is, they provide the service side of war rather than weapons. They range from small consulting firms that offer the advice of retired generals to transnational corporations that lease out battalions of commandoes. There are hundreds of them, with a global revenue of more than $100 billion a year, operating in at least 50 countries.

Even the world`s most dominant military has increasingly become reliant on them. From 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military firms. Companies like Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney`s former employer, now provide the logistics for every major American military deployment. Corporations have even taken over much of military training and recruiting, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at more than 200 American universities. (Yes, private employees now train our military leaders of tomorrow.)

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the industry`s growing role than the campaign against Iraq. Private employees worked on everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining weapons systems like the B-2 bomber. Indeed, there was roughly one private military worker in the region for every 10 soldiers fighting the war (as opposed to one for every 100 troops in the 1991 gulf war).

And companies will play an even greater role in the occupation. In addition to the proposed security force, the new Iraqi military will be trained by corporate consultants. Washington has also contracted DynCorp, whose pilots have long helped the Pentagon destroy coca fields in Colombia, to train the new police force.

In many cases, privatizing war has allowed for greater military capacities and cost efficiency. A problem, however, is that while the industry has developed at a breakneck pace, governments and global bodies have responded at a bureaucratic crawl. There are almost no international laws or national regulations that have significant bearing on the industry.

This mix of profit motive with the fog of war raises several concerns. First, the good of private companies may not always be to the public good. All the normal worries one has with contractors (overcharging, overbilling hours, poorly trained workers, quality assurance) raise their ugly head; but in this case one is not dealing with a new plumber — lives are at stake. For example, a former DynCorp employee has accused the company of cutting costs by hiring former waiters and security guards to work as mechanics on Army helicopters.

Second, just like lawyers, some military contractors work only for ethical clients while others choose to make money from less savory types. As a result, some companies have helped save democratic regimes and aided humanitarian groups while others have supported dictators, rebel groups, drug cartels and terrorists.

In addition, foreign and military affairs are the government`s domain. Undertaking public policy through private means can mean that some initiatives that might not pass public approval — such as the increasing American involvement, outside Congressional oversight, in Colombia`s civil strife — still get carried out.

Also, privatized operations do not always go as planned. In 1998 the Colombian Air Force, working from intelligence supplied by an American company, mistakenly bombed a village, killing 17. In 2001 a plane carrying missionaries was shot down over Peru after private workers under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency alerted the Peruvian military that the plane seemed suspicious.

International and national laws must be updated so that governments gain some control over whom military firms are allowed to work with and can be certain the companies can be held accountable when things go wrong. Likewise, as governments come to rely more on private help, they must become more business-savvy, establishing good competition and oversight in their outsourcing. This is the only way to ensure that the public, not just the industry, enjoys the benefits of military privatization.



P.W. Singer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 20, 2003
Why Liberals Are No Fun
FRANK RICH
It wasn`t in prime time, and the ratings weren`t even on the charts. But in the 24/7 broadcasting arena of political talk, where liberals are on the losing side at least 22/7, they must take whatever scraps they can get. For them, it was a rare red-letter day when Al Franken, appearing on Book TV on C-Span 2, landed a rhetorical uppercut to the jaw of Liberal Nemesis No. 1, Bill O`Reilly, and left him even more senseless than usual.

The setting was a panel at the annual booksellers` convention in Los Angeles last month. Mr. Franken was on hand to hawk his fall book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Mr. O`Reilly, plugging his forthcoming "Who`s Looking Out for You?," was not overjoyed to find his face among the lying liars (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter) on Mr. Franken`s book jacket. It was downhill from there. After Mr. Franken took the mike to delineate the lies at issue, Mr. O`Reilly started calling his adversary an "idiot" and shouting "Shut up!" Such grace under fire was not so much Reaganesque as Baxteresque, after Ted Baxter, the preening local anchor of the late, great "Mary Tyler Moore Show."

But of course this liberal victory over a conservative blowhard was short-lived. Despite their domination of the entertainment industry, liberals barely have a foothold in the part of show business they are most exercised about. Barbra Streisand may have a contentious Web site, but Rupert Murdoch has an empire. As David Brooks put it recently in Mr. Murdoch`s Weekly Standard, Democrats are in "despair that a consortium of conservative think tanks, talk radio hosts and Fox News — Hillary`s vast right-wing conspiracy — has cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out." This week brought the news that Rush Limbaugh had even infiltrated ESPN`s "Sunday N.F.L. Countdown" as a new cast member. And so liberals plot and dream, with the undying hope that their own Rush or O`Reilly or Hannity might turn up as miraculously as Lana Turner supposedly did at the Schwab`s Pharmacy soda fountain.

Even as Mr. Franken was goading Mr. O`Reilly, he was talking with AnShell Media, a $10 million start-up financed by Chicago venture capitalists determined to create liberal talk radio programs for syndication. In late June, Time broke the story that Al Gore was recruiting other money men to help float a cable network that might offer some kind of an alternative to Fox News. Given Mr. Gore`s own TV track record during the 2000 debates — wearing more pancake makeup than Milton Berle in drag and talking incessantly about a "lock box" — this mission seems as quixotic as Al Sharpton`s presidential campaign, though considerably less entertaining. Sure, Mr. Gore is unlikely to be an on-camera personality in this enterprise, but even so, his show business résumé consists mainly of having not been an inspiration for "Love Story" while at Harvard.

How can Democrats be so ineffectual in the media in which they would seem to have a home-court cultural advantage? The talk-show playing field is littered with liberal casualties: Mario Cuomo, Alan Dershowitz, Phil Donahue. Why waste money on more broadcasting flops? The conventional wisdom has it that liberals will never make it in this arena because they are humorless, their positions are too complicated to explain, and some powerful media companies (whether Mr. Murdoch`s News Corporation or the radio giant Clear Channel) want to put up roadblocks.

Others argue that liberals are so down and out that they don`t even know what they believe any more. "The reason conservative media outlets work is that they have a mass audience united by a discrete ideology," says Tucker Carlson, who affably represents the right on CNN`s "Crossfire" and is one of those I`ve queried about this topic in recent months. "They believe in nine things. They all know the catechism." In Mr. Carlson`s view, Democrats are all over the ideological map in the post-Clinton era, and there can be no effective media without a coherent message.

But the case against liberal talk success isn`t a slam-dunk. After all, conservatives have their talk-show fiascos too, as evidenced by MSNBC, the lame would-be Fox clone that, as the comedian Jon Stewart has said, doesn`t "deserve all those letters" in its name. MSNBC`s just-canceled right-wing star, Michael Savage, drew smaller audiences on the channel than Mr. Donahue did. What`s more, there actually are liberals who retain a sense of humor (witness Mr. Franken, Mr. Stewart and Michael Moore), while conservative stars are not infrequently humor-free (witness Mr. O`Reilly).

Norman Lear goes so far as to argue that liberals are intrinsically funnier than conservatives. "Most comedy comes from those who see humor in the human condition," he says. "Most who traffic in the stuff could be called humanists. The far-right talk hosts spew a kind of venom and ridicule that passes for funnybone material with the program executives that hire them."

If humor doesn`t bring liberals talk-show success, is the problem that they lack rage? Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist and Fox host, speaks for many when he argues that "liberals don`t have the anger" that conservatives have stored up from their years in the political and media wilderness. But this, too, is changing: Pinch most Democrats these days, and they`ll vomit vituperation about President Bush as crazed as that of some Clinton haters of a decade ago. The catechism that liberals believe in is arguably more or less as rigid as the conservative catechism, too: a multilateral foreign policy, affordable health care, a progressive tax code, pro-environmental regulation, pro-choice, etc.

Nor is the political complexion of media moguls necessarily an index of what political ideas they promote or stifle. It`s Regan Books, an imprint of Mr. Murdoch`s HarperCollins, that published Mr. Moore`s best seller, "Stupid White Men." Meanwhile, it is a more progressive media gatekeeper, Bill Gates`s Microsoft, that is a co-owner of MSNBC, on which Mr. Savage told a "sodomite" caller to "get AIDS and die."

In the end, the line that separates those who succeed and fail in talk TV and radio may have nothing whatsoever to do with ideology and everything to with show business. "It`s hard to put a TV show together, let alone 24 hours of programming," Mr. Franken says. "Roger Ailes was a great hire for Fox. You need a showman. Fox had the idea you could do a cable news network that actually had an agenda, and no one had thought of that before."

It`s a good point, because while Mr. Ailes is mainly known among political types as a media handler for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he has equally telling roots in show-biz. He helped make a bland entertainment talk-show host, Mike Douglas, into a star in the 1960`s, and learned producing under the wing of the legendary Broadway impresario Kermit Bloomgarden, whose musical hit "The Music Man" could be read as the ur-text for the shameless showmanship of Fox News Channel. At Fox, Mr. Ailes invented not only agenda-driven news ingeniously branded "fair and balanced" but also "the whoosh": that sound that announces the arrival of a new headline. The whoosh may be idiotic, but TV wasn`t long ago christened the idiot box for nothing. Idiocy can be fun.

If showmen as shrewd as Mr. Ailes are rare, so are performers with the particular star quality suited to broadcast talk, says Harry Shearer, the liberal radio satirist ("Le Show"), "Simpsons" voice and Christopher Guest collaborator (most recently on "A Mighty Wind"). He argues that "based on sheer radio professionalism," even "a tribe of chimpanzees locked in a room would choose Rush Limbaugh over Jim Hightower," the Texas populist whose radio show has been an also-ran on the national charts.

"Hightower has a fine record as a left politician in Texas, which is not easy to do," Mr. Shearer says. "But he has a voice like a cat being wrung through a dryer at slow speed, and he has no show business chops. Rush Limbaugh didn`t start in politics. He was Rusty Limbaugh, playing the top-40 hits. He learned the craft of broadcasting first."

Al Franken, like Ann Richards, Molly Ivins and other entertaining liberals, is a polished performer without a deep history on radio. He says that were he to take on the job of talk host, it would take over his life, and even then, he could fill only a few hours of the broadcasting day. It`s not clear if any other performing talents are on tap to shoulder the rest. Tipper Gore`s past campaign against rock lyrics doesn`t augur well for Gore TV luring pre-A.A.R.P. talents or viewers. The best hope may be for Janet Reno to reconvene her "Dance Party" from "Saturday Night Live."

Then again, maybe the only real hope for liberals is just a cyclical change in the political environment. As the press keeps asking what President Bush knew about his own State of the Union speech and when he knew it, his approval rating has started sinking to its pre-9/11 level. The unemployment record on the administration`s watch keeps heading into Herbert Hoover territory. This may explain why Mr. Franken`s forthcoming book was at 550 in the sales rankings at Amazon.com when I checked it early this week, while Mr. O`Reilly`s was languishing at 24,574. Timing is everything in politics, just as it is in show business. Should this realignment continue, Bill O`Reilly might yet have to face down competition from a liberal talk-show host with an equally self-infatuated TV presence. "The Andrew Cuomo Factor," anyone?




Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Saddam`s Guerrillas
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/opinion/21SAFI.html
WASHINGTON

Saddam Hussein is waging "a classical guerrilla-type campaign," says Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command, which is "getting more organized" every day.

What can the deposed dictator hope to accomplish? How can he, with a ragtag force of Baathist criminals and imported killers with nothing to lose, possibly defeat 170,000 occupying troops?

Saddam outfoxed one President Bush and intends to outfox and outlast another. Facing the likelihood that his army would disintegrate under direct assault, he probably decided that the mother of all battles against a democracy is a war of attrition. We may assume his current strategy to be based on some of these assumptions:

1. Troop losses drove Clinton out of Somalia, Eisenhower out of Lebanon, Johnson and Nixon out of Vietnam. In occupied Iraq, only one death a day — sustained for months with pictures of bereaved families on television — would, in Saddam`s thinking, not only demoralize the occupiers but also increase political pressure in the U.S. and Britain to bring the troops home.

2. European and Muslim opinion, incensed at being ignored by a superpower, will continue to deny cooperation to the victors. Saddam assumes this would force Bush to turn over control of Iraq to the U.N., in which Kofi Annan has just said "democracy should not be imposed from the outside," and the blue helmets would run at the first Sunni uprising.

3. Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam`s victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of "quagmire."

4. Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam.

5. He presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.

6. Inside Iraq, with the Americans on the way out, the Shiite majority would split, and when the Sunni minority seizes power in Baghdad the troublesome Kurds would separate, thereby triggering a Turkish invasion of the north. In the ensuing anarchy, the strongman would emerge out of internal exile to exterminate the disloyal and lead the Arab world.

That`s his comeback strategy. Is it a homicidal maniac`s dream? If the taped voice is Saddam`s, as we believe, it means he has worked out a means of secret production and clandestine transmission to cooperative broadcasters just as cunning as the concealment of damning documents or recent traffic across borders of money and terrorist helpers.

How best to deny Saddam`s putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us?

Drop the premature conclusion that if we can`t yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That`s like saying because we haven`t found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.

Put sacrifice in perspective. The loss of one soldier`s life is individual tragedy, but the loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator would be national tragedy. The purpose of our armed forces is to protect us and that`s the costly mission our volunteers carry out every day.

Remember which nations had the courage to do right in timely fashion. Dissenters are free to argue about judgments of hard-to-read intelligence, but few will deny that the world is indisputably safer with the overthrow of a proven mass murderer and financier of suicide bombers.

This above all: to end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein and his ghostly crew. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.

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U.N. Chief Backs New Iraqi Council
Support Urged for Appointed Body

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 21, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, July 20 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has given a report to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them to endorse the new Governing Council created by the U.S.-led occupation authority in Iraq, calling it "a broadly representative partner with whom the United Nations and the international community at large can engage."

Annan`s recommendation, which was delivered to Security Council members Friday but is not to be released to the public until Monday, is an important show of support for the Governing Council, a 25-member body whose members were selected by the occupation authority to assume responsibility for numerous day-to-day tasks.

Many Iraqis, including an estimated 10,000 people who turned out to protest in the city of Najaf today, have dismissed the council`s members as puppets of the United States, and some of Iraq`s neighbors have been equally skeptical. But Annan`s recommendation could help to garner Security Council approval of the new Iraqi body, a key step in building international legitimacy and recruiting much-needed foreign aid. The Security Council is scheduled to hear a report Tuesday from Annan`s special representative in Iraq, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, and is likely to decide shortly after that whether to support the Governing Council.

As the Governing Council began its second week today by addressing several thorny policy issues, two U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed when rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire struck their convoy near Tal Afar, a town about 240 miles north of Baghdad and west of Mosul, military officials said. A third soldier was injured in the early-morning incident, which took place far from the area around the capital where most attacks have occurred, the officials said.

The attack brings to 38 the number of U.S. military personnel killed in hostile acts since President Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.

Also today, a U.S. soldier was killed and two others injured when their vehicle crashed and flipped near Baghdad`s international airport, military officials said.

A two-car convoy carrying members of the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration was ambushed near the city of Hilla when a pickup truck pulled up alongside one of the cars and opened fire, U.N. officials said. One Iraqi working for the organization was killed and three were injured when one car collided with an oncoming bus, the officials said.

The assailants appeared to seek out the vehicles belonging to the migration organization, which is affiliated with the United Nations, a U.N. official here said. The gunmen drove around a World Health Organization convoy before firing at the migration organization convoy, which was clearly marked and painted the same shade of blue as other U.N. vehicles here, the official said.

"This is of immense concern to us," said Ahmed Fawzi, a U.N. spokesman in Baghdad. "Although we have no way of knowing whether we were deliberately targeted, we cannot discount the chances."

Annan`s report to the Security Council asks the body to consider the Governing Council equivalent to an interim government, called for in a recent Security Council resolution. "This is the interim Iraqi authority that Resolution 1483 urged," Fawzi said.

If the Security Council endorses the Governing Council, he said it would "clear the way" for foreign governments to start donating funds for Iraq`s reconstruction. Many countries have been reluctant to give directly to the occupation authority and have insisted on dealing with a U.N.-approved transitional government.

A U.N. endorsement also would give the Iraqi council "more authority and independence," Vieira de Mello said in a recent interview. "It would take away the stigma of being puppets of the Americans," he said.

Despite Annan`s backing, it is not certain that the Security Council will give the Governing Council an enthusiastic endorsement. Diplomats representing some nations on the Security Council, which passed a resolution in May allowing the United States and Britain to administer Iraq until it has a permanent government, have questioned whether the Governing Council will have sufficient power and enough independence from the U.S.-led occupation authority, which selected the members and will retain veto power over the council`s decisions.

Annan`s report echoes several arguments in support of the Governing Council made by U.S. officials, including the top U.S. civil administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. A copy of Annan`s report was provided to a reporter.

In an effort to win over Security Council members, the Governing Council dispatched a three-person delegation to New York that included Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, former foreign minister Adnan Pachachi and Akila Hashimi, a woman who had served as an Iraqi diplomat under Saddam Hussein`s government, members of the council said. Although Chalabi had pulled out of the trip late last week, U.N. officials said that he changed his mind over the weekend and agreed to join the delegation.

The Governing Council has been criticized by many Iraqis, foremost among them Moqtada Sadr, an influential Shiite Muslim cleric in Najaf, a center of religious scholarship 90 miles south of Baghdad. Thousands of Sadr`s followers marched for six miles to the U.S. government compound in Najaf, shouting slogans against the Governing Council and the Americans.

"Long live Sadr. America and the Council are infidels," the protesters chanted, according to an Associated Press report. "Moqtada, go ahead. We are your soldiers of liberation."

U.S. soldiers barricaded the headquarters building with Humvee vehicles, but the boisterous crowd dispersed after clerics read aloud an appeal by Sadr to end the demonstration. Earlier in the day, Sadr had read a statement inside a Shiite shrine urging U.S. forces to leave the city and allow Iraqis to deal with security.

Annan`s report also urges the United States and Britain to "set out a clear and specific sequence of events leading to the end of military occupation," and a "clear timetable leafing to the full restoration of sovereignty."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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At Homeland Security, Doubts Arise Over Intelligence
Unit Is Underpowered, Outmatched in Bureaucratic Struggles With Other Agencies, Critics Say

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 21, 2003; Page A12


The intelligence unit of the four-month-old Department of Homeland Security is understaffed, unorganized and weak-willed in bureaucratic struggles with other government agencies, diminishing its role in pursuing terrorists, according to some members of Congress and independent national security experts.

The vast majority of the department`s intelligence analysts lack computers that are able to receive data classified "top secret" and above. The department has only three experts on biological terrorism, a number that lawmakers said falls far short of expectations, given U.S. officials` grave concern about that kind of attack.

In passing the law establishing the department last year, Congress intended Homeland Security to be the focal point for handling intelligence to protect America from terrorists. The current controversy over its intelligence unit shows how elusive that goal has become since the Bush administration decided in January that the agency should not have the standing of the CIA or FBI in analyzing intelligence about terror threats.

Homeland Security officials acknowledged growing pains in their intelligence wing, citing the difficulty of creating a full-fledged member of the U.S. intelligence community from scratch. They also point out that the head of their intelligence section, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti, was sworn in only on June 26.

Libutti, the undersecretary in charge of the department`s information analysis and infrastructure protection unit, said that far from avoiding its key missions, the intelligence wing is "aggressively, crisply" acting on them. Critics of the department in Congress and outside government gave Libutti high marks for moving quickly to address the complaints in his first days on the job.

Frustration over the department`s performance in intelligence work boiled over June 5, when Paul Redmond, then the head of Homeland Security`s intelligence analysis unit, testified before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.

Redmond -- a storied 33-year CIA veteran who exposed some of the nation`s most notorious traitors -- angered committee members who said he seemed cavalier in describing the department`s limited progress in intelligence work.

Redmond testified that his office then had only 26 analysts and lacked the secure communications lines required to receive many classified CIA and FBI reports. Asked when this would change, he replied, "That will depend on us getting larger quarters and things like that."

Committee members said they had hoped the department would have several times that number of analysts by then, or at least a number closer to the several hundred CIA and FBI terrorism analysts.

Committee members from both parties were incensed by what they viewed as the intelligence office`s lethargy and lack of focus. "I`m going to be forgiving for a very limited amount of time," Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) said in an interview.

Rep. Jim Turner (Tex.), the committee`s ranking Democrat, told President Bush in a letter last month that "a disturbing hearing . . . revealed that there are serious problems" with the department`s intelligence unit. The department, he wrote, "is not remotely close to having the tools it needs to meet its critical mandate."

Redmond resigned three weeks after the hearing, citing his health. Members of Congress passed on their blunt observations to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who is hastening to address them, officials said.

Cox said he was most frustrated that Homeland Security officials have accepted an arrangement in which the CIA, the FBI and the new Terrorist Threat Information Center (TTIC) pass intelligence reports about possible terrorist threats to the department. Homeland Security, in turn, analyzes the information and transmits warnings to state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as U.S. industry.

Cox and a number of other members of Congress, such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), said that in last year`s Homeland Security Act, which established the department, Congress intended that it would be responsible for sifting through terrorism intelligence and ensuring it was acted upon around the country. But now TTIC does most of that, leaving the department with the smaller job of tightening security on Main Street, USA.

Last year the White House embraced the view of the CIA and the FBI, both of which argued that Homeland Security should not routinely thrust itself into the minutiae of raw intelligence. That position leaves Homeland Security whipsawed between its congressional overseers and the White House.

Libutti, who most recently ran the New York City Police Department`s 300-person counterterrorism squad, disputed the notion that his shop is a lightweight undertaking.

"Information analysis and infrastructure protection is the center of gravity of this entire department," Libutti said. He said he does not have the luxury of wishing the White House had settled old intelligence debates differently, adding, "TTIC is a fact on the ground."

Libutti also said he is swiftly recruiting intelligence analysts. Though there were 26 when Redmond testified last month, there are almost 50 now, a total that will double again in about seven months, Libutti said.

One ally of Ridge in the administration said the Cox panel has self-serving reasons to publicize a showdown with the department. Because some House leaders want Cox`s temporary committee terminated, the panel is "fighting for relevance," the Ridge ally said.

Some in Congress want Ridge to fight harder for his department. He cultivates an image in the Cabinet as a team player, and insiders said he has not struggled behind closed doors for more clout in intelligence matters.

"The department is damned if it does and damned if it doesn`t," said Richard A. Clarke, who was a top White House counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations until his recent departure to become a consultant.

"The people in Congress who wrote the legislation creating the department wanted a `Team B` analytical capability" that would reexamine every piece of terrorism intelligence assembled by the CIA and FBI, he said. But since the White House agreed with the FBI and CIA, he added, "that department is going to get squeezed and victimized."

Ridge has had a hard time recruiting people for the department`s intelligence jobs. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., who runs the secret U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency, initially agreed to be Ridge`s undersecretary for intelligence, but reversed himself after concluding the job lacked clout and resources, friends said.

At the same time, the department is competing for intelligence professionals with the higher-profile FBI, CIA and TTIC.

Libutti said he and Ridge are addressing another problem the Cox panel noted: Members of the intelligence team were crammed into offices so crowded they were not allowed to have many classified computer terminals. Offices handling sensitive material require spacious quarters that allow for thick walls and widely spaced computer terminals.

Libutti said that in coming days his unit will move into one of the biggest buildings at the U.S. Navy facility that the Homeland Security Department occupies in Northwest Washington. He said there will be space for 250 analysts and links to secure telecommunications lines.

Homeland Security officials also said they connect well with TTIC. Of TTIC`s 75 analysts, seven are from Homeland Security. Ultimately, the department will have 30 analysts there, out of 300. Libutti said they have access to all the classified data they need.

William H. Parrish, a retired Marine colonel who recently was named Redmond`s acting successor, said TTIC and Homeland Security meshed well in May, in the hours after al Qaeda suicide bombers attacked several western residential compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 34. Soon after the synchronized strikes, in which terrorists rammed security gates, Homeland Security analysts at TTIC prepared warnings about the gate-crashing that were transmitted to state and local authorities, he said.

"It`s one of our success stories," Parrish said.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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The Cost for the Clintons




Monday, July 21, 2003; Page A20


LAST WEEK the special court that oversees the now-defunct independent counsel law batted back a request by former president Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) for more than $3.5 million in legal fees associated with the Whitewater investigation. The old law allows the court to award fees to unindicted subjects of independent counsel probes when those fees would not have been incurred "but for" the investigation`s having been conducted by an independent counsel -- as opposed to any other federal prosecutor. The court awarded the Clintons $85,000 for the fees they incurred responding to the independent counsel`s final report. Yet all of the remaining fees, the three-judge panel quite absurdly ruled, would have been incurred even in the absence of Kenneth W. Starr`s long-running investigation: "We harbor no doubt that in the absence of the independent counsel statute the allegations surrounding the Clintons . . . would have been similarly investigated and prosecuted by the Department of Justice."

We doubt many readers can make it through that sentence without chuckling. For whatever the merits of the Whitewater investigation, there is simply no doubt that it was unlike other federal investigations. Mr. Starr himself has conceded that he saw his role as conducting a particularly thorough investigation aimed not merely at prosecuting cases as a normal federal prosecutor would but at garnering and reporting the full truth of the allegations behind them. Moreover, he reopened matters that his predecessor, a regulatory special prosecutor within the Justice Department, had already closed. The Clintons` request may have been excessive. Yet the court maintains, supplying virtually no specific argumentation at all, that they bore no additional investigative burden -- and consequent financial burden -- as a result of the independent counsel law.

We shed no tears over the Clintons` financial situation; the former president is pulling in millions as a speaker, after all, while his wife enjoys book best-sellerdom. But the decision is important for two reasons. First, its analysis will presumably also apply in cases involving lower-level witnesses swept up in the investigation -- people who have done nothing wrong yet who incurred significant expenses during the probe. Second, the court`s approach here is dramatically inconsistent with the way it handled fee requests during the Iran-contra affair, when it awarded fees liberally and openly clucked at the investigative choices of the prosecutors. The role of the special court and its presiding judge, David B. Sentelle, in the Whitewater affair have been controversial ever since the court appointed Mr. Starr back in 1994. That it barely pretends to employ the same standards for the Clintons as for past presidents can only increase skepticism as to its performance.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Homeland Security Sales Pitch


By William Raspberry

Monday, July 21, 2003; Page A21


The flap over how the falsehood about uranium purchases from Niger made it into the president`s State of the Union message should not obscure what for me is the most troubling fact: Key members of the Bush administration, convinced in their hearts that America needed to destroy Saddam Hussein, thought it reasonable to exaggerate the threat and deliberately stretch the facts in order to sell the American people on that necessity.

The cleanup, fix-up, coverup effort now underway is an attempt to say to the electorate: This was an aberration; we do trust you with the truth.

Except they don`t. The Justice Department is in the midst of a mighty campaign to blunt criticism of the Patriot Act, the key legislative response to 9/11 and, according to civil libertarians of various stripes, a major incursion on our constitutional rights.

The truth -- at any rate what I suspect to be the truth -- is that they believe it may be necessary for ordinary folks to give up some of their civil liberties (temporarily, of course) in order to facilitate the fight against terrorism.

But that`s not what they say. They are insisting that the Patriot Act -- in particular its controversial Section 215 -- is no threat whatever to Americans, and a threat to foreign nationals only to the extent that they are involved with terrorism or terrorists.

One provision under the section permits the government to go through your records -- medical records, business records, personnel files, library reading lists "or any tangible thing" (computer hard drives?) -- while bypassing the normal requirements for a criminal search.

Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, says you shouldn`t be alarmed. First, he told me, the provision is designed to protect against terrorists and spies and cannot be used against any "U.S. person" unless the authorities convince a judge the person is a part of a national security investigation.

"What the critics always leave out," Corallo said, "is that the regular criminal-justice system allows a grand jury to subpoena your library records, phone records, etc. -- anything the grand jury deems relevant to its inquiry, even hearsay. This is how they caught the Unabomber and the guy involved in the Gianni Versace murder. So this is no sweeping new power."

Tim Edgar, legislative counsel for the Washington American Civil Liberties Union, sees it a little differently. There is a provision for judicial endorsement, he agrees, but it isn`t clear that the judges have the right to go behind the Justice Department`s assertion that national security is involved. Moreover, he argues, in criminal cases a defendant can always move to quash a subpoena and at least get a hearing on the matter. Not under the Patriot Act, whose provisions also include an automatic gag order making it a criminal offense for a librarian, for example, to tell a library client that his reading records are being investigated.

Corallo, one of the more forthcoming of administration spokesmen, made a great deal of the fact that requests for inquiries into records are reviewed by an 11-judge court -- offering that as evidence that the Patriot Act isn`t the battering ram its critics make it out to be. Besides, as he noted, the act passed with only a single nay vote in the Senate and by 357 to 66 in the House.

Laura Murphy, who heads the ACLU`s legislative office here, remembers the vote well.

"When we found out the bill was being introduced," she told me, "we went to [Democratic Rep. John] Conyers and [Republican Rep. F. James] Sensenbrenner and begged them not to push it through in three days, as the attorney general was urging. They agreed, and their committee rewrote the bill to accommodate some of our concerns. The revised bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of 32 to zero.

"Then in the middle of the night -- it was reprinted at 3:30 a.m. -- the bill was rewritten again to get all the troublesome stuff back in. When the members voted the following day, hardly anyone except a few staffers had actually seen the bill they were voting on."

Why the stealth? I`m afraid there are people in the administration who are so sure that what they want to do is right that they are willing to stretch the facts and hide the truth in order to do it.

That`s dangerous business -- and it can be habit-forming.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Am 19.und 20. 07. sind 6 amerikanische Soldaten gestorben.

JULY 17, 2003
Media Underplays U.S. Death Toll in Iraq
Soldiers Dead Since May Is 3 Times Official Count

By Greg Mitchell

NEW YORK -- News Analysis

Any way you look at it, the news is bad enough. According to Thursday`s press and television reports, 33 U.S. soldiers have now died in combat since President Bush declared an end to the major fighting in the war on May 2. This, of course, is a tragedy for the men killed and their families, and a problem for the White House.

But actually the numbers are much worse -- and rarely reported by the media.

According to official military records, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq since May 2 is actually 85. This includes a staggering number of non-combat deaths. Even if killed in a non-hostile action, these soldiers are no less dead, their families no less aggrieved. And it`s safe to say that nearly all of these people would still be alive if they were still back in the States.

Nevertheless, the media continues to report the much lower figure of 33 as if those are the only deaths that count.

A Web site called Iraq Coalition Casualty Count http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx is tracking the deaths, by whatever cause, of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, based on official Pentagon and CENTCOM press releases and Army Times and CNN casualty trackers. Their current count is 85 since May 2.

Looking at the entire war, there was much fanfare Thursday over the fact that the latest U.S. combat death this week pushed the official total to 148 -- finally topping the 147 figure for Gulf War 1. However, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, the total number of all U.S. deaths, combat and otherwise, in Iraq is actually 224.

This Web site not only counts deaths, it describes each one in whatever detail (often sketchy) the military provides, along with the name and age and home town of each fatality.

An analysis of the 85 deaths by E&P reveals that nearly as many U.S. military personnel have died in vehicle accidents (17) as from gunshot wounds (19). Ten have died after grenade attacks and seven from accidental explosions, another seven in helicopter crashes. Six were killed by what is described as "non-hostile" gunshots, and three have drowned.

The vast majority of those killed -- at least 70% -- were age 18 to 30 but several soldiers in their 40s or 50s have also perished. Pentagon officials also disclosed that there have been about five deaths among troops assigned to the Iraq mission that commanders say might have been suicides. As inquiries continue, one official said the susupected suicides were not clustered in any single time period that might indicate a related cause.

The most recent non-combat death was Cory Ryan Geurin, age 18, a Marine lance corporal from Santee, Calif. "He was standing post on a palace roof in Babylon when he fell approximately 60 feet," the site said.

On July 13, Jaror C. Puello-Coronado, 36, an Army sergeant, died while "manning a traffic point when the operator of a dump truck lost control of the vehicle."

Another soldier, still officially listed as "Unknown," died on July 13 "from a non-hostile gunshot incident," according to the site.

Before that, on July 9, another Marine Lance Corporal, age 20, died in Kuwait "in a vehicle accident."

Many other deaths are only vaguely described as the "result of non-combat injuries." One recent death occurred in a mine-clearing accident. Others "drowned" or "died of natural causes," and still others lost their lives in a "vehicle accident."
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E&P welcomes letters to the editor: [e-mail].

Source: Editor & Publisher Online
http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/articl…

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Published on Friday, July 18, 2003 by PopMatters.com
No Question: The Media Is Right
by David Sirota

It used to be big news when leaders were dishonest. The media forced politicians of both parties to pay a price for even the slightest infraction. Just ask Al Gore, who was tarred and feathered for a few careless comments about the Internet. That has changed. The media now barely flinches when the truth is distorted. In just a few years, the same media that tenaciously attacked the last White House over the tiniest appearance of impropriety now barely reports when the current White House deceives, hides information and knowingly ignores hard facts.

Take the White House`s explanation of the deficit. On April 24th, President Bush said, "this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war." Then, a week later, he said, "we`ve got a deficit because we went through a recession." The White House and the media knows both of these explanations are dishonest — Bush`s own budget acknowledges that his tax cuts are the major cause of the deficits (see table S-3 of Bush`s budget where the White House acknowledges that without Bush`s tax cuts the nation would return to surplus by 2006, but with his tax cuts deficits will continue indefinitely). Nonetheless, despite the doubletalk, the media did not report the story that the President was being dishonest.

Or how about the White House`s assertion that "92 million Americans would receive an average tax cut of $1,083" under its economic plan? Again, the facts are seriously distorted in order to fool the public. In reality, 80 percent of taxpayers would receive less than $1,083, and half would receive $100 or less. The handful of millionaires who would get about $90,000 artificially inflates the average. The White House and the media know this, yet the misinformation continues unreported.

Why are these and countless other distortions swallowed by the media and fed to the American public without question?

First, in a post-9/11 world, the White House has effectively equated questioning of the Bush Administration with treason. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer threatened reporters after the attack, saying they "should watch what they say." More recently, Fleischer implied that reporters were being disloyal to the military by questioning why the President felt it necessary to hold a circus stunt photo-op on the deck of an aircraft carrier. "It does a disservice to the men and women of our military to suggest that the president, or the manner in which the president visited the military would be anything other than the exact appropriate thing to do", he said, just after admitting that he had been dishonest in saying the President actually needed to fly a jet to the ship.

But these tactics only go so far. What truly allows the White House distortions to go unreported — or reported as fact — is the Republican Party`s not-so-secret weapon: a 24-hour television, radio and newspaper advertisement, otherwise known as Fox News, Clear Channel radio and the Washington Times. These national "news organizations" are owned by Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, longtime GOP benefactors Tom and R. Steven Hicks, and Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, respectively. These men are right-wing ideologues who take their radical agenda as seriously as their bottom lines. Their news staffs reflect this disposition (Just look at Fox News, whose CEO and news director is Roger Ailes, who before entering journalism was a major Republican Party political operative, and who informally advised Bush on post-September 11th image polishing). These ideologues understand that, devoid of effective ideas, conservatives can win by playing dirty -- namely, by infiltrating non-partisan journalism with attack machines that use the pretense of objectivity as a cloak for pressing a radical right-wing agenda and diverting critical reporting away from the Bush Administration. As one Fox executive admitted a few months ago in Fortune Magazine: "[Murdoch] hungered for the kind of influence in the United States that he had in England and Australia. Part of our political strategy here was [sic] the creation of Fox News."

Thus, legitimate questions about the war become a news hook for Fox to attack questioners as traitors. Inquiries about whether the President is adequately protecting the homeland become a chance to question Democrats` patriotism. Suggestions that the Bush tax cut will expand the deficit are morphed into purported schemes to raise taxes. Republican tax cuts for the wealthy become altruistic efforts to "let people keep more of the money they earn", as one Fox correspondent reported. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle is hammered by the media for daring to question America`s diplomacy, while Newt Gingrich gets favorable coverage when he does the same. In short, the right-wing media promote stories that serve conservative interests and deflect attention from stories that do not. In the process, they make incessant yet baseless claims that other news outlets are "liberal", intimidating them into accepting this conservative viewpoint for fear of being further vilified. And in "pack mentality" news with fierce ratings competition, the result is a media establishment that now forsakes its watchdog role in a tectonic ideological shift to the right.

As the next election nears, honest reporters and editors do a disservice to the public by accepting this manipulation. Americans deserve Woodward and Bernstein journalism — not O`Reilly and Hannity propaganda. We need our media to have the guts to tell us when, why, and how our government is misleading us on the nation`s most pressing issues. Otherwise, our democracy suffers as Americans go to the polls without the knowledge required to cast an informed vote.

© 1999-2003 PopMatters.com
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0718-01.htm

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Posted on Tue, Jul. 15, 2003

CIA: Assessment of Syria`s weapons of mass destruction exaggerated

By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers


WASHINGTON - In a new dispute over interpreting intelligence data, the CIA and other agencies objected vigorously to a Bush administration assessment of the threat of Syria`s weapons of mass destruction that was to be presented Tuesday on Capitol Hill.


After the objections, the planned testimony by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a leading administration hawk, was delayed until September.


U.S. officials told Knight Ridder that Bolton was prepared to tell members of a House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee that Syria`s development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons had progressed to such a point that they posed a threat to stability in the region.


The CIA and other intelligence agencies said that assessment was exaggerated.


Syria has come under increasing U.S. pressure during and after the Iraq war for allegedly giving refuge to members of Saddam Hussein`s regime, allowing foreign fighters to cross into Iraq to attack U.S. troops and for backing Palestinian militant groups that were conducting terrorist strikes on Israel. After Saddam`s government fell, some Bush aides hinted that the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus might be the next U.S. target.


The objections by the intelligence community come as the Bush administration is defending itself over complaints that it embellished intelligence secrets to justify the war against Iraq.


Bolton`s planned remarks caused a "revolt" among intelligence experts who thought they inflated the progress Syria has made in its weapons programs, said a U.S. official who isn`t from the CIA, but was involved in the dispute.


He and other officials who provided similar accounts spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the issue`s sensitivity and because they aren`t authorized government spokesmen.


The CIA`s objections and comments alone ran to 35 to 40 pages, the official said.


Officials declined to provide more details of the disputes over the testimony, some of which was secret and scheduled to be delivered in closed session. The House panel is considering a bill that would toughen trade and diplomatic sanctions against Syria, which is on the U.S. list of terrorist-sponsoring nations.


Officials provided conflicting explanations of why the hearing was canceled.


A Bolton aide said it was because of a scheduling conflict - Bolton was called to a White House meeting Tuesday afternoon - and that the hearing had been reset for September. Others said it was because the bitter dispute couldn`t be immediately resolved.


A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the issue.


But other officials in the executive branch and on Capitol Hill said the White House Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates government officials` public statements, wouldn`t give final approval to the planned testimony.


The conflict appears to illustrate how battles over prewar intelligence on Iraq have spread to other issues and have heightened sensitivity among Bush aides about public descriptions of threats to the United States.


The White House acknowledged last week that it shouldn`t have included in President Bush`s January State of the Union address a dramatic contention that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa. Other administration claims about Iraq`s banned weapons program and alleged ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network are now in question.


Several officials said another reason for the cancellation of Bolton`s testimony was that he might have been subjected to sharp questioning about Iraq intelligence, a controversy the White House is trying to lay to rest.


There is more attention to "dotting I`s and crossing T`s," said a State Department official, adding that Bolton`s draft statement was the subject of "extensive edits."


Bolton set off a controversy in May 2002 when he asserted in a speech that Cuba has a biological warfare program. A State Department intelligence expert, Christian Westermann, recently told a closed-door Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that available intelligence data don`t support that assertion, U.S. officials have said.


The first U.S. official said that after months of complaining about pressure to skew their analyses, rank-and-file intelligence officials "have become emboldened" by the recent public debate over Iraq.


"People are fed up," he said.


Another official confirmed that the CIA had "a good deal of concern" over the classified portion of Bolton`s testimony.




In speeches and congressional testimony over the past year, Bolton has identified Syria among a handful of countries whose alleged pursuit of biological and chemical weapons makes them threats to international stability. His assessments attached more gravity to the danger that Syria poses than did a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment that covered the first six months of 2002.


In testimony in June before the House International Relations Committee, Bolton said U.S. officials are "looking at Syria`s nuclear program with growing concern and continue to monitor it for any signs of nuclear weapons intent."


A CIA report submitted to Congress in April contained more cautionary language. Noting that Syria and Russia have reached preliminary agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation, the CIA report said only, "In principal, broader access to Russian expertise provides opportunities for Syria to expand its indigenous capabilities, should it decide to pursue nuclear weapons."


In his June testimony, Bolton asserted that U.S. officials "know that Syria is pursuing the development of biological weapons." The CIA report said only that it`s "highly probable that Syria is also continuing to develop an offensive BW (biological weapons) capability."


Finally, Bolton told the congressional committee that "North Korean entities have been involved in aiding Syria`s ballistic missile development." The CIA reported that Syria was trying to build Scud-C ballistic missiles "probably with North Korean assistance."


CIA Director George Tenet, in an annual worldwide assessment of threats against the United States that he presented to Congress in February, referred to Syria by name only once, and that was in connection with its support for Palestinian extremist groups.


© 2003 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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The Milli Vanilli of Pennsylvania Avenue
The new definition of phony: George W. Bush and Tony Blair
By Jeff Koopersmith

July 18, 2003 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- Many of you will remember Milli Vanilli, the "twin" pop music sensations who garnered two Grammy Awards for their runaway hits years ago.

The only problem was that they were lip-synching the songs that sold 7 million albums that year and, in the end, had to hand those statuettes back.

Now we find President Bush and Tony Blair lip synching each other -- or is it Vice President Dick Cheney and his cabal of back room puppeteers who they parrot in frightened defiance?


As a patriot, I would like to believe that even this president has been victimized, rather than believing the worst but most logical option: that he is cooperating fully in the latest and poorest attempt at covering his Administration`s erroneous tracks upon which the foundation of our invasion and occupation of Iraq was based.

What is the death count today? Some estimate the Iraqi civilian death toll at between six and eight thousand thus far. Yet George W. Bush knows that the only count to watch is the American death tally, which appears to be increasing, one or two boys or girls a day, since the President declared an end to hostilities, only to be challenged by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who told the press that we are still at war.

Who could argue?

I listened to Tony Blair address a joint session of Congress yesterday afternoon, prior to his White House visit. It was stunningly creepy.

He offered a new number at the White House later -- Saddam had "murdered" 300,000 people -- and "this was reason enough to invade" was the message.

Was this a new defense for indefensible cheek?

Here was near-sycophant Blair chortling the concept of freedom through war and setting the stage for what seems to be the agreed upon eventual message: "There weren`t any weapons of mass destruction, but so what? Saddam was a tyrant." Blair received countless standing ovations and one might have thought one was witnessing a US annexation of Britain since the drivel was flying so fast and so furious.

When will Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush appreciate that Americans and the British are not focused primarily on the lies, or half-truths, or even the proven facts that laid the foundation for the war in Iraq?

When we will see that the anger -- now rising even from the very bowels of the intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic -- rise from the questioning the necessity to sacrifice even one of our young soldiers, let alone hundreds -- this year, right now, today.

Whatever the final case, it is clear now that there was no imminent threat to the United States of America or Great Britain, and that other courses were open to crush Saddam Hussein -- including assassination, kidnap, coup, or tactical assault.

Yesterday I spent much of the morning simply thumbing through the photographs of the boys and girls who have died in Iraq over the past few months. I looked at one hundred and seventy one of their pictures, and read the short descriptions of how they had suffered and where they were from.

I keep those pictures on the hard drive of my computer -- lest I forget the true price we are paying as a society.

I thought about Vietnam and what it would be like to view 58,000 such photographs and dossiers.

Some were shot in combat. Others were blown up by hidden bombs or unexploded ordinance. Others still were killed by friendly fire or simple car and truck crashes in the melee that is war.

I thought about the two hundred pairs of parents mourning their loss, the wives who would never again embrace their fallen husbands, the children who would never know their fathers, the friends who would miss each dead soldier at Christmas this year.

This afternoon I watched the leaders, Blair, and Bush, rush to each other`s sides -- their plans splintered, shoring up each other`s story like a set of two by fours propping a rotting wooden beam.

It was all too easy to see the two worrying about their political futures.

I wondered what their joint press conference would look like if the pictures of these dead soldiers were scrolling under their images as they waxed insolent to the searching questions of the press.

I watched Vice President Cheney, perched above Mr. Blair in the House of Representatives, looking smug and self-congratulatory-assured, nodding at the Prime Minster`s hogwash, even as Blair offered line after line that struck me as the precursor, the groundwork, for a terrible truth.

The translation of his remarks: "So what? So what if there were no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear threat, no chemical or biological weapons? We know what`s best. It`s all too confusing for you ordinary people to understand. Trust us."

I watched the ever-expanding and almost-always-silent Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and wondered if his progressive weight gain was from tension, from fear, or anxiety at having to preside over a body seemingly consumed with ravenousness.

And I wondered about the families of these boys and girls now lying in honored graves as they sat in living rooms across the nation in their easy chairs and sofas watching Blair and Bush. Were they fretful, a little uncomfortable -- pulled from the left and the right, considering the unbelievable -- that their babies did not have to die this year, not in Iraq?

Perhaps not. It is too much to ask those who loved someone to entertain the idea that he or she may have died for discourteous reason.

I have heard the defenders.

They snap back at the press.

"Are you suggesting that the President of the United States knowingly lied to the American people?"

I ask, "Would it be the first time?"

This is their weapon: they use our own patriotism, our pride in our country and that which it stands for, against us. How dare we suspect we`ve been lied to?

Mr. Bush was not pleased that Mr. Blair opened the door he was apparently instructed to unlock -- that the foundation for the Iraq war might have been a well-intended (or not) deception. He was quick, this President, in our White House, to tell us that he believed we would eventually find that all he told us was true.

He knew it in his heart.

What President Bush does not see is that it is too late.

Whether he finds these weapons, or plants them as some say he will, or never finds them at all, his legacy is ruined, his credibility destroyed.

We never believed him in the first instance.

Ninety nine percent of the leaders of the world didn`t believe him either.

We knew what he was up to. Our fear forced us to turn our doubts aside.

If President Bush lied, we enabled him to lie. We have only ourselves to blame.

Yet, the question remains, "With the out-and-out smorgasbord of rotten dictatorships on this earth to choose from, tell us why Iraq, and why today?"

There is no respectable, honest, or good answer.

http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030718Koop.html


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JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."

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9;s buck stops there

An editorial
July 17, 2003

Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read, "The buck stops here." It was Truman`s way of saying that, as president, he took responsibility for missteps by his administration.

George W. Bush has no such sign on his desk. And we know why: Bush is unwilling to take responsibility even for his own mistakes, let alone his administration`s.

Witness the current chief executive`s handling of discredited claims about supposed attempts by Iraq to purchase uranium from the African nation of Niger. Despite the fact that U.S. intelligence services had established early in 2002 that the claims lacked credibility, Bush included them in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address.

Most Americans would expect a president who was trying to make the case for invading a distant land to carefully weigh every word. But Bush did not bother to learn the basics about what he was saying, and he did not bother to ask questions about information that, just a few days later, his own secretary of state, Colin Powell, would reject as unreliable.

With the lives of young Americans, as well as combatants from allied countries and Iraqi civilians and soldiers at stake, Bush did not bother to practice due diligence. Rather than worry about getting things right, he was, in the words of a top aide, determined "to rally the country for war."

Now, as we learn how Bush let the country down, he is not man enough to take responsibility and admit his error.

Instead, he tried to point the finger of blame everywhere but the Oval Office. Finally, he settled on the Central Intelligence Agency, where director George J. Tenet dutifully fell on his sword. While there is no evidence to suggest that Tenet personally reviewed or approved the president`s remarks, Tenet declared, "I am responsible ... "

Some will suggest that Tenet is an honorable man for covering for his president. But there is no honor in taking the blame for misdeeds in which you did not participate - and that most evidence suggests he and his aides sought to prevent. Tenet is not acting as a servant of the American people or a defender of the public trust; he is acting as a political partisan in an effort to make a scandal go away for the Bush administration. And there is good reason to believe that Tenet has failed to tell the whole truth.

According to reports published in the New York Times, when an aide with Bush`s National Security Council contacted a CIA proliferation expert to discuss inclusion of the African uranium reference in the State of the Union address, the CIA man informed the Bush aide that the agency was not sure that the claim was correct. When the Bush aide tried to justify inclusion of the claim by noting that the British had produced a report referencing an Iraq-African uranium connection, the CIA man explained that his agency had already told the British it was uncomfortable with the claim.

This sounds a lot more like the truth than the too-carefully chosen words from the mouths of George Bush and George Tenet.

If George Bush was an honorable man, he would say he was wrong.

If George Tenet was an honorable man, he would tell the truth. But that would require him to detail how his agency tried to prevent the Bush administration from peddling discredited information to the American people.

But there is no honor among politicians who, in their determination to prevent the truth from coming out, will bend the facts to the breaking point. That`s what George W. Bush did on Jan. 28, when he delivered his factually inaccurate State of the Union address. And that`s what George Tenet did when he tried to cover for his boss.

Published: 11:18 AM 7/17/03

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-attacks2…


Defense Officials Profiling the New Enemy
Pentagon strategists say they have a plan to stop the Iraqi guerrillas who keep killing U.S. soldiers -- and test America`s tolerance for casualties.
By John Hendren
Times Staff Writer

July 21, 2003

BAGHDAD — Week by week, the guerrillas take their toll, killing Americans singly and in pairs, seeking to draw enough blood to undermine U.S. resolve to remain in Iraq.

Yet though the resistance has shown improved organization in the nearly three months since President Bush declared major combat over, it has failed to expand the scope of its onslaught, U.S. military strategists say. In an effort to crush the guerrilla forces before they expand into a broader movement, senior defense officials have crafted an updated profile of the enemy and a plan for dealing with it.

Pentagon strategists say they`re gaining a clearer picture of the resistance: The attackers are largely confined to the "Sunni triangle" of central Iraq, failing to draw in the nation`s majority Shiite Muslim population. They`re increasingly sophisticated, probably several thousand strong — including impoverished mercenaries who will kill an American for $1,000 — and well armed. One recent raid netted 11,000 rocket-propelled grenades.

The solution, according to Gen. John Abizaid, the new chief of the U.S. Central Command, is to involve Iraqis more closely in gleaning intelligence from sources on the guerrillas and then to send in a lighter, more agile force to find the fighters. And above all: Capture or kill Saddam Hussein.

U.S. military strategists acknowledge that they`ll have to act fast to halt a guerrilla campaign that is increasingly desperate.

"I think as we make political progress here we`ll see more violence, more desperation for a time, and it`s the nature of the enemy that we`re fighting. So we shouldn`t underestimate how hard they might fight," Abizaid told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday. "And they don`t think we have the staying power to stick around."

He spoke hours after guerrillas opened up on a U.S. convoy with small arms and rocket- propelled grenade fire, killing two soldiers. The attack occurred in Tall Afar, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad and far north of central Iraq, the epicenter of the recent attacks.

The attack brought to 151 the number of U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire since the war began March 20, eclipsing the 147 killed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Testing the U.S. tolerance for casualties is a strategy that Hussein once openly advocated, citing the 1993 U.S. pullout from Somalia following the deaths of 18 soldiers in two bloody days chronicled in the book and film "Black Hawk Down." Yet the American public`s tolerance for casualties appears to have risen since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and there have been no massive strikes against U.S. forces here.

"Unless the Shiites — which, after all, are more than 60% of Iraq`s people — turn against the U.S., then we`re talking about a localized threat which is still limited in terms of capability and experience," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former senior Pentagon official and military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

After months of Pentagon denials that the attackers were organized enough to merit the description, the U.S. military appears to have accepted them as guerrillas, a term Abizaid first used last week. The group consists of disgruntled mid-level leaders from Hussein`s now- banned Baath Party, Islamic extremists imported from Syria and elsewhere and terrorists drawn to American targets, Abizaid said.

The assailants, believed to include former intelligence officials, paramilitary fighters from Fedayeen Saddam and other Hussein loyalists, have made their goal obvious, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said during a visit to Iraq on Sunday: "Their aim is to restore the old regime."

The attacks are inspired but apparently not directed by Hussein, senior defense officials said. Just as his ability to elude capture has taunted U.S. forces, his apprehension would demoralize the growing movement.

"It`s important even to know if he`s alive or dead; and if he`s alive, it`s important either to capture or kill him," Abizaid said.

Two factors make the insurgents formidable, said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Marine who recently talked with U.S. military commanders in Iraq. The onetime regime leaders believed to be behind the attacks are desperate to avoid the retribution of fellow Iraqis, he said, and "they have lots of resources." These include the millions of dollars that have been buried or left around the country, and ample caches of arms.

"This place is a treasure trove of weapons," Reed said. "So if you have treasure, and you have weapons, and you have a motive, you`re dangerous. And that`s what I think we`re seeing."

The number of attacks has not increased in most areas and has dropped in the Sunni triangle city of Fallouja in the six weeks since the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division moved in. And the attackers have developed cautious tactics, firing from hundreds of yards away in the dark at American convoys and individual soldiers, then disappearing into the night, often with none being caught.

The guerrillas, operating in groups as large as 50, communicate with a complex series of whistles and track U.S. troops with red, green and white flares — with repeated red flares designating a "kill zone," officials said. Co-conspirators at electrical plants temporarily shut off power to villages to alert anti-U.S. confederates that troops are passing by.

"They have increased in sophistication, and I think that there`s a certain amount of regional organization going on, and I think they`re attempting to get more organized over time," Abizaid said.

Prisoners informed on confederates during interrogations that came after raids by the 4th Infantry Division in and around Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit. Still, the Americans have had only limited success in penetrating the guerrilla organization.

"Clearly our tactics have got to change as the military strategy changes," Abizaid said in calling for gradually improving intelligence and replacing some of the heavy divisions that rolled to Baghdad behind the protective armor of M-1A1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles with light infantry troops.

"It`s not a matter of boots per square meter," Abizaid added. "It`s a matter of focused intelligence and then troops that are agile enough to carry out missions in a manner that can cause surprise and take down the targets precisely."

The decision to enlist deeper involvement by Iraqis is behind a new plan, which Abizaid outlined to reporters, to create an Iraqi civil defense force to patrol with American troops and feed them intelligence.

The beginnings of an Iraqi army are expected to be visible in six months, with at least three full divisions of more than 10,000 soldiers each operating within four years, U.S. military officials said. But the civil defense force, a kind of "standing militia" separate from the army, would put 3,500 paramilitary fighters across the nation within 45 days, working under U.S. division commanders.

The Iraqi force could offer an intelligence bonanza, officials said. The strategy was borne out on a small scale during the war, when a wealthy Iraqi exile from San Francisco traveled more than 1,300 miles with the U.S. Army`s super-secret Delta Force, Wolfowitz said. "They could go into a village and talk to people and within an hour have a situational awareness that an American unit could not have at all," he said

In a nation where many residents seemed willing to tolerate Hussein`s regime as long as it kept the streets safe and factories operating, U.S. officials and outside analysts agreed that the fate of the U.S.-led occupation could depend largely on how quickly the Coalition Provisional Authority restores security, services and economic activity.

Nevertheless, Americans probably will endure a steady toll of troop losses in the short term, defense officials said.

"If we can`t be successful here, we won`t be successful in the global war on terrorism," Abizaid said. "That means it`s going to be long, it`s sometimes going to be bloody, and we just have to stick with it."

Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Baghdad, Paul Richter in Washington and Janet Stobart in London contributed to this report.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley2…
COMMENTARY


Naked Power, Arbitrary Rule
By Jonathan Turley

July 21, 2003

Washington is a city that strives to satisfy every tourist want, from faux pictures with the president to tours of our most cherished scandal locations. Before coming to town last week, however, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made it clear that he would not be satisfied with the usual knick-knack souvenirs. He wanted something a bit more tangible: two British citizens scheduled for trial before U.S. military tribunals. It appears that he succeeded, though President Bush may soon regret that he could not pawn off a couple of snow globes and a T-shirt instead.

For 18 months, Bush has rebuffed growing British demands for the right to try their own citizens — a serious blow to Blair, who faces an increasingly anti-American public and a recent motion by 200 members of Parliament, mostly from Blair`s own Labor Party, calling for the return of the men for trial in Britain.

Blair`s popularity is plummeting because of his steadfast loyalty to Bush and his support for the war in Iraq. The British fought bravely in Afghanistan and continue to lose soldiers in Iraq. They have asked only for the right to try their own citizens in their own courts.

In their private meeting, Blair finally convinced Bush to suspend proceedings against the two men — Moazzam Begg, 35, and Feroz Abbasi, 23 — pending further discussions and possible transfer of the men. Bush appears willing to fork over the men as a personal favor to Blair, but such a transfer would further erode the already thin justification for the U.S. tribunals.

If the British courts are adequate to try these two men, many in this country will ask why our courts are inadequate — particularly after convicting more than a dozen such terrorists (including Al Qaeda members).

Moreover, other countries will now presumably renew their requests for their own citizens. Some officials also are concerned that there is little real evidence against these men and that a civilian criminal trial in Britain could result in acquittals.

The British share the overwhelming worldview that the Bush tribunals are an affront to the rule of law: denying basic rules of evidence, allowing indefinite detention of suspects, barring access to the federal courts, permitting the introduction of statements derived from torture, barring the application of constitutional and federal laws and limiting the grounds for appeal.

Indeed, the British note that American legal organizations have warned lawyers that it would be unethical to participate in such abusive proceedings. These objections have been deepened by the continual references by Bush and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft to the detainees as guilty. It appears that the British still cling to the quaint notion that defendants should be presumed innocent until proved guilty.

When Bush`s past prejudicial statements were raised in a press conference with Blair on Thursday, Bush seemed to rush to fulfill the stereotype of cowboy justice by stating: "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people picked up off the battlefield aiding and abetting the Taliban." Of course, John Walker Lindh was taken off the battlefield for aiding and abetting the Taliban but was charged in a real court.

However, Bush has maintained that he is not required to be either consistent or logical: "I`m the commander I do not need to explain why I say things. That`s the interesting thing about being the president."

Given the fact that only six people are designated for tribunals and no more than 12 will reportedly be tried, the question is why the administration would incur such costs for so little benefit.

The answer has nothing to do with national security or any of these men.

Long before 9/11, many officials in the administration advocated the expansion of presidential powers — views that were often rejected as extreme and dangerous. With the attacks, these same officials saw the opportunity to re-create the presidency in a new and more autocratic image. By basing the tribunals on the "war against terrorism," the administration would create precedent that would effectively allow a president to assert such extreme powers at any time.

Like "wars" against illiteracy or drugs, the war against terrorism is merely an announced policy of the administration. Thus, if the tribunals are allowed, any president can simply declare a new threat as a justification to hold people indefinitely as enemy combatants or use their own court system for executions.

The president has repeatedly acted like an American Caesar, sending some accused terrorists to federal court while others are sent for tribunal justice. In the case of these two men, Bush will allow them a fair trial in Britain as a gift to a friend in political need while he arbitrarily denies such trials to others.

The message is clear and simple: Bush alone will decide the meaning and the means of justice. Ironically, in his actions since 9/11, Bush may have handed these defendants a victory that they could not have achieved alone. The terrorists sought to destroy the American system and to show that we are hypocrites who refuse to comply with rules that we apply to others.

It takes little to destroy buildings and to sacrifice innocent people. It takes a president to destroy a legal system and its underlying values. Like those he seeks to execute, Bush wants justice by his own definition and by his own hand.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevic…
COMMENTARY
a d v e r t i s e m e n t




The Long Battle Ahead
The United States has successfully fought guerrilla wars before, though at great cost.
By Andrew J. Bacevich

July 21, 2003

Mention guerrilla war to the average American, and Vietnam comes instantly to mind. Dense jungles and hit-and-run attacks, a daring enemy on his own turf using unconventional, unpredictable methods against an ill-prepared army. A "quagmire" surely, and, in the eyes of many, an unwinnable war.

But Iraq — which Gen. John Abizaid, the new U.S. Central Command chief, has now authoritatively described as a classic guerrilla war — is not Vietnam.

America`s lengthy experience with guerrilla war — a rich history, long predating our involvement in Southeast Asia — suggests that quagmire and defeat are not inevitable in Iraq, but that a long, complex and difficult war probably lies ahead.



During the American Revolution, rebels employed guerrilla tactics with considerable effectiveness in winning their independence. During the course of numerous Indian campaigns and in suppressing Philippine nationalists and Moro separatists after the Spanish-American War, U.S. troops took on guerrillas of various stripes, although seldom identifying them as such. In the 1920s, intervening in Nicaragua to put down Augusto Sandino`s insurgency, U.S. Marines fought an undeclared guerrilla war. The effort by federal troops to subdue the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction also qualifies as a counter-guerrilla campaign of sorts.

What does this wealth of experience suggest with regard to the ongoing conflict in Iraq? Five major points come to mind.

First, guerrilla wars tend to be long wars, measured not in weeks or months but in years. There`s a better-than-even chance that fighting in Iraq will still be going on when George W. Bush runs for reelection next year, with potentially large implications for that election`s outcome. In democracies, long wars tend to become unpopular wars.

Second, in guerrilla wars, defeating even a relatively weak enemy typically requires a large force. Putting down the Philippine insurrection between 1899 and 1903 absorbed 125,000 troops. A large country with a large population, Iraq does not promise to be less demanding. Fighter-bombers and aircraft carriers have their place, but beating the guerrilla requires boots on the ground.

About 150,000 U.S. troops are supporting the Iraq mission. Abizaid has indicated that if more forces are needed, he won`t hesitate to request them, suggesting that in the days ahead, the U.S. commitment may actually increase.

Before the war, another army general made himself unpopular with the Bush administration by predicting that occupying Iraq could require up to a couple of hundred thousand troops. Events may yet prove him correct. If so — and with 21 of the Army`s 33 active-combat brigades already in Iraq or serving elsewhere overseas — providing Abizaid with a continuous rotation of fresh troops could turn out to be the Pentagon`s toughest challenge.

Third, progress in counter-guerrilla operations is notoriously difficult to measure. Are we winning? When will the war be over? These become difficult questions to answer, especially when winning is not a matter of capturing ground or fighting big battles.

The key is more likely to be dismantling the enemy`s leadership one piece at a time or persuading the local populace to deny the guerrillas support. These are not the sort of achievements likely to impress impatient reporters demanding proof that victory is just around the corner — hence, a tendency develops to rely on statistical measurements such as dead bodies or captured weapons, which may or may not be meaningful.

Fourth, for soldiers assigned to flush out the elusive guerrilla or to provide security against hit-and-run attacks, combat can be especially frustrating. Frustrated soldiers do unfortunate things: All too often, innocent noncombatants end up paying the price. Long before My Lai, in places with names like Sand Creek and Samar and Bud Dajo, U.S. troops fighting guerrillas committed atrocities. All wars are ugly; guerrilla wars are uglier still.

Fifth, guerrilla wars tend to have ragged edges rather than neat endings. Even when formally concluded, they may smolder, later to ignite. When federal troops pulled out of the South, the Klan came storming back. In the Philippines today, the Moros that Americans pacified nearly a century ago — now labeled terrorists — are once again fighting against the government in Manila. Thus, even if Abizaid wins the unconventional war in Iraq as handily as his predecessor, Gen. Tommy Franks, won the conventional war against Saddam Hussein, some level of anti-American violence may well continue indefinitely.

None of this means that the U.S. is doomed to fail in Iraq. But history counsels patience. The costs in blood and treasure are likely to be significant — far higher than the Bush administration anticipated. And things could well get worse before they get better.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J. Bacevich teaches international relations at Boston University and is the author of "American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy" (Harvard University Press, 2002).


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

Posted on Mon, Jul. 21, 2003

BOB GRAHAM
Keeping secrets for policy`s sake

The Bush administration is looking more and more like a bait-and-switch operation. Much like a profiteer who advertises a too-good-to-be-true deal to lure customers into his store, this White House is willing to shade and manipulate information to sell its policies to the American people and our allies.

But that cynical strategy erodes our government`s credibility at home and abroad. It must stop.

To justify a pre-emptive war with Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials selectively used -- and may have misused -- intelligence information to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to his neighbors, U.S. interests in the Mideast and even Americans here at home.

The most egregious example: Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union Message that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for production of nuclear weapons -- when in fact that information had been discredited at least three months earlier.

The White House continues to claim that Bush`s statement was technically accurate because he attributed it to British intelligence. But that is disingenuous because the CIA, at Cheney`s request, had undertaken a review of the reports from Niger and had found them bogus. Also, the CIA told its British counterpart in September 2002 that it had ``reservations`` about the information.

Claims about Hussein`s biological and chemical weapons, and his ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network, have yet to be verified.

It appears that the administration has stretched some information to justify those claims. For example, Bush and others said that high-strength aluminum tubes being shipped to Iraq were to be ``used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.`` In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that the tubes were not for uranium enrichment but for conventional weapons.

Earlier this month, under questioning from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rumsfeld disclosed that the cost of operations in Iraq are $3.9 billion a month. That is nearly twice the estimate that the administration had given to the public as recently as April.

With such disclosures, it`s no wonder that this White House has such a passion for secrecy. It was little noticed when Bush signed an executive order in March 2003 delaying the release of classified documents that would otherwise have been automatically declassified after 25 years. That order also gave government bureaucrats broader authority to keep materials secret.

INTELLIGENCE FAILURES

Such tactics are coming under attack. A federal appeals court ruled on July 8 that the White House must release records from the energy task force chaired by Cheney in 2001 -- records kept hidden from the General Accounting Office and other investigators for nearly two years.

But the battles continue. Last year, I co-chaired a special joint House-Senate inquiry that investigated the intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. We not only tried to lay out the facts for the American people; we identified the lessons that we should have learned and made recommendations for reforms to avert a repeat of that tragedy.

We filed the classified version of our report on Dec. 20, 2002. It took seven months for the administration to decide what portions of the report can be made public.

Meanwhile, we have lost valuable time to work with first responders to apply our findings and bolster our homeland security. Even more seriously, there is much valuable information in the 800-page report that we will not be allowed to release. Why? Because the executive branch controls the classification process, and this information would embarrass the administration or otherwise not serve its policy ends.

CONDUCT AN INVESTIGATION

Rather than a free and open debate over policy, analysts in the intelligence community and other agencies can see that the White House wants only the information that will further its political goals. They tell the powerful what the powerful want to hear.

Is that what happened when the CIA reviewed a draft of the State of the Union Message -- or crafted its assessment of Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction?

Only an open, honest and independent investigation will determine the answer to that question.

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., is running for president.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/6347424.ht…

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

By Ernest Partridge
Co-Editor, "The Crisis Papers."
July 21, 2003


“We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address


Earlier this month, in an essay titled “The late, great, American Republic – A Report from Mid-Century, 2050” http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/mid-century.htm I projected a dark future for the United States if trends and conditions set in motion by the Bush Administration continue well into the future. In this follow-up I fulfill my promise to portray a brighter alternative future.

It is a future that we will not see, unless a sizeable portion of our population takes courageous, intelligent and persistent action in opposition to the Bush regime, the reactionary Congress, the Republican leadership, and the media that slavishly support them.

The reader must keep in mind that this essay offers a scenario, not a prediction. It is certain that the future will not unfold precisely this way – surely not in all particulars. For example, to avoid partiality to any of the announced Democratic candidates, I project that Gen. Wesley Clark will get the nomination. Furthermore while any number of the developments suggested here might contribute to the downfall of the Bush regime and the renewal of our democracy, if that desirable outcome is achieved, there will no doubt be many other contributing factors not anticipated here.

The essay takes the form of a letter, written in the summer of 2005 to a friend abroad. Because I have the good fortune of having many such friends, I have chosen a name belonging to none of them. My make-believe friend is a biologist at Moscow University, Mikhail Ivanovich Milankov.




July 21, 2005

Dorogoi Misha!

Your amazement at the “Second American Revolution” of the past three years is no greater than my own. Few are privileged to live through such an astonishing moment in world history, and I am pleased to give my contemporary observations, not only to fulfill your request for an account of how it came about, but also to provide our children and their children some understanding of these events.

But, of course, you also have had such an experience. I recall vividly our conversation on that misty day in August, 1991, as we walked along the Moscow River past the Russian Federation Parliament building. I asked you then if there were any likelihood of significant political reforms in the Soviet Union – beyond the glasnost and perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. You were doubtful – “not,” you said, “as long as the Communist Party remains in firm control.”

Three days later, I was back home in California, riveted to the TV screen as I watched the 1991 revolution and then the counter-revolution unfold at that very site of our conversation. At the close of that year, the Communist Party was broken as a political force and the Soviet Union was no more. (Author’s note: This was, in fact, my personal experience except, of course, my Russian friend was not named Mikhail. EP).

And so we have both learned: “never say ‘never’.”

In the Spring of 2003, the Republican control of our government seemed every bit as secure as Leonid Brezhnev’s control of yours at the peak of his power. In November 2000, the Bush administration seized power through massive vote fraud and manipulation in Florida, followed by the judicial coup d’etat in the Supreme Court. The public, the Democratic Party, and their candidate Al Gore, meekly accepted. And so the Bush clique wondered, “just what more can we get away with?” As it turned out, it was a very great deal – and even more, after the American public was stunned by the catastrophes of September 11, 2001.

Raid the US Treasury, give it to the super-rich, and pass the bill on to the masses and future generations? Why not? Dismantle the social contract between the government and the public by starving government agencies of funding? No problem. Abrogate judicial rights guaranteed by the Constitution? The USA PATRIOT Act did just that and the Congress, with virtually no opportunity to read this massive bill, approved it without a whimper. Just as it cheerfully handed over its Constitutional power to declare war to the President.

Thus the Bush regime came to believe, not without justification, that the American public would accept almost anything, provided it was sugar-coated by the captive mass media. All the while, the polls reported that George Bush’s “approval ratings” were solidly between the high sixties and low eighties. With control of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the mass media, and apparently a sizeable majority of the public, what politician could ask for more.

And so, on March 19, George Bush confidently went to war with Iraq, ostensibly to disarm the brutal dictator of his allegedly deployed “weapons of mass destruction” and to “liberate” the Iraqi people, but in fact to establish a power base in the Middle East, seize the oil fields, and set an example to the world of American military power and his willingness to use it.

By mid-summer, 2003, a few of us began to detect whiffs of the political firestorm that was soon to follow. For, at long last, the Bush regime had over-reached in its ambition, and had overestimated the limits of public tolerance and gullibility. Official “evidence” of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, presented by Bush in that most solemn public statement, The State of the Union address, was found to be concocted and groundless. Following the expected easy military victory in Iraq, the American troops were greeted, not with cheers and flowers, but with determined resistance. While state and municipal services – schools, universities, police, firefighters, infrastructure maintenance, etc. – were starved of funding, billions of dollars were flowing to Iraq to rebuild that shattered country and to stem the growing disaster, all the while the coffins of fallen soldiers were regularly shipped back to embittered friends and families throughout America.

At long last, the muted Democrats found their voice and spoke out in eloquent protest. The solid wall of media support of Bush and the Republicans began to crack, as first a few columnists, then more and more reporters, began to resume the roles of journalists rather than of propagandists and apologists. This tentative return to journalistic integrity was encouraged also by the growing disaffection of a public that turned to foreign sources, such as the Guardian in England and the Toronto Star in Canada, and to the internet, for their news and information.

Bush’s approval ratings plunged until, by early August, they finally dropped for the first time below 50%, as more than 50% of those polled reported that they were not inclined to vote for Bush’s re-election in 2004.

Facing this loss of public support, Bush reached into his trusty bag of tricks for the device that had previously bloated his ratings: In October, he ordered the invasion of Syria which, he said, was hiding the Weapons of Mass Destruction that the US Military had failed to discover in Iraq.

With that, the iron discipline of the Congressional Republicans collapsed. Four Republican Senators, Chaffee, Snowe, Collins and Voinevich, unwilling to be “fooled twice,” declared themselves as Independents, joining Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont. The control of the Senate reverted back to the Democrats, who promptly rescinded the war resolution of 2002 and adopted a resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops in Syria. The Senate then ordered a series of investigations of alleged abuses of power by the Bush Administration.

Soon thereafter, fifteen moderate House Republicans fled the GOP fold and declared themselves independents. The House of Representatives, reorganized under a Democratic-Independent coalition, set up a parallel series of Select Investigation committees, and drew up Articles of Impeachment against both President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Following upon these political seismic shocks, a few dissenters’ slogans, which had been circulating throughout the progressive internet, broke into the general public consciousness and conversation. Among them, “Is this the kind of country you want for yourself, your children and your grandchildren to live in?” And to the traditional Republicans, “What is more important to you, your Party or your Country?” For more and more Republicans, desertion from a party captured by a radical- anarchistic-evangelical fringe, became first imaginable, and then for many, compelling. The levee of party loyalty was crumbling before the flood of outrage.

In the Fall of 2003, the right-wing monopoly in the media was finally broken with the inauguration of a liberal radio talk-network, and a liberal cable news network. Both were funded by investors who did so out of sense of dedication and with full expectation of huge financial losses. Both featured unbiased news reports in addition to progressively oriented analysis and commentary, and authentically balanced liberal-conservative debates. To the astonishment of all, both ventures drew audiences, and then sponsors, that far exceeded the most optimistic expectations. Clearly there was a vast audience starved for comprehensive and unbiased news reporting and for the progressive messages offered by these new networks. Moreover, the talent pool available to these ventures was virtually bottomless, consisting of celebrities who had been shunned and slandered by the right-wing media – Martin Sheen, Robert Redford, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins. On the radio talk shows, Al Franken and Michael Moore were instant sensations, and on the new cable network, Phil Donahue returned, uninhibited by conservative management, with a program that surged to the top of the ratings, as it featured such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Nat Hentoff, Greg Palast, and other progressives whose previous appearances had been confined to University lectures. No longer fearing spin and slander at the hands of media “personalities,” Democratic notables such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter rejoined the public conversation. And finally, established media personalities, such as MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who had paid dearly for their lapses into candor and integrity, had a career alternative – a refuge. Many such high-profile individuals signed on to the new networks, while others who remained with the established media, gained, with this alternative at hand, a leverage which allowed them more freedom and which moved the media in general toward the center and toward renewed journalistic integrity.

The progressive opposition had long lamented that if only they could get an even break with the media and get the compelling facts about the Bush policies out to the public, the days of the right-wing domination of politics and public relations would be numbered. At last Thomas Jefferson’s faith was re-affirmed: corruption, demagoguery, abuse of power, and oppression, he wrote, can not survive in the bright light of a free, open, independent and diverse press – and now, broadcast and internet media.

But the right wing did not surrender easily. In February, 2004, the office of the liberal publication The Nation was fire-bombed. The culprit said that he was motivated by columnist Ann Coulter’s remark that she had wished that Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma truck bomb had exploded alongside the New York Times offices. The consequences of this act were not what the right wing terrorists had expected or desired. Donations of equipment, personnel and cash flowed toward the emergency offices of The Nation, which was back in operation with quadrupled subscriptions within two weeks. This act of sabotage alerted and reinvigorated the journalistic profession more than any amount of ink on paper could have done. It was the catalytic moment of the restoration of the free media in America.

There remained another dragon at the gate to political reform: the dreaded “paperless” computer voting machines. Throughout the country, states and municipalities were adopting computerized voting, whereby ballots would be tallied electronically, with no paper records, and with software that was “proprietary” – i.e., the undisclosed property of the machine manufacturer. In other words, the election returns were to be taken “on the word” of the computer manufacturers, all of which, by the way, were supporters of and contributors to the Republican Party. In fact, a major investor of one company, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, was elected by the machines made by a firm of which he was a major stockholder. Moreover, had the pre-election polls of the 2002 mid-term election proven fully accurate, the Democrats would have taken control of the Congress. However, in a few of the contests tallied by paperless computers, there were statistically improbable “shifts” toward the Republicans, who thus controlled the Congress. In that same election, exit polls, which had consistently proved to be the best indicators of election results, were cancelled for reasons never fully explained. Predictably, the mass media were astonishingly uncurious about these strange anomalies and coincidences, and so the public accepted the results of the 2002 election without protest.

All this changed when three Democratic state Attorneys General launched investigations into computer vote fraud. Computer experts demonstrated the ease with which a 50-50 voter input to a computer voting machine could yield a 60-40 output, with no traceable record in the software. At length, three software programmers employed by the computer companies testified, under oath and the threat of perjury, that they had done just that in the 2002 Georgia election.

In January, 2004, the “Absolve Allegiance” movement emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, and then from everywhere. “Absolve Allegiance” (the words are from our Declaration of Independence) had a starkly simple message: if the 2004 Presidential Election is decided by unverifiable computer programs, we will absolve our allegiance to the resulting United States government. Individuals were then invited to sign pledges to that effect. The response was tepid and slow at first. But then Attorney General Ashcroft proclaimed that he would regard any individual who signed a pledge to be immediately eligible for loss of citizenship and deportation. This so outraged the public that a flood of pledges followed, many by Governors, Mayors, celebrities and more than a few United States Senators and Congressmen. By March, 2004, more than five million pledges had been signed and verified, and copies dumped at the office of the Attorney General. Pressure on Congress to pass the Holt Voter Confidence Act became irresistible, when it became clear that for many Congressmen, opposition to the bill was a sure ticket to defeat. The Bill became law in May, 2004, ensuring a fair Presidential election in the fall.

In the meantime, with the freedom of the media renewed, and with the Congressional investigatory committees hard at work and their public hearings widely broadcast, the corruption and maladministration of the Bush Administration became painfully apparent to the public at large. At last, the public came face-to-face with the dreadful consequences of Bush policies for the economy, for civil liberties, for environmental protection, for health and safety regulation, and for a myriad of other government functions heretofore taken for granted by the public.

In addition, the American public was obliged, at last, to acknowledge and deal with the devastating loss of international prestige and honor, brought about by the international lawlessness of the Bush Administration.

The disclosure in June, 2003, of the lies about the alleged Iraqi WMDs proved to be a snowball tossed upon the mountain slope that set loose the avalanche that would eventually sweep George Bush, and the so-called “conservative revolution,” out of the American body politic.

By mid-Summer, 2004, with his approval ratings at 20%, and his re-election numbers at 15%, and the Congress moving decisively toward impeachment and conviction, George Bush announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election in 2004. In the meantime, faced with influx of millions of protesters to the September GOP convention in New York, the Republican National Committee moved the convention to Dallas, Texas..

The Presidential election of 2004 was almost anti-climactic. Dubbed by the press as “The Army-Navy Game,” General Wesley Clark soundly defeated Senator John McCain. Though highly regarded as an honorable man, McCain could not overcome the burden of his discredited party. Both houses of Congress were won by the Democrats by substantial margins. This was particularly surprising in the case of the House of Representatives where, it was believed, the two parties had arranged to have districts drawn so that election to the House amounted, in most cases, to lifetime appointments. They had not counted on a voter rebellion of such magnitude, as voting shifts of fifteen to twenty percent swept sixty Republican incumbents out of the House.

Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O’Connor had intended to retire when a Republican President and Senate were likely to appoint conservative successors. These hope vanished with “the revolt of the independents” and the impending impeachment of George Bush. And so, when they retired in the Summer of 2004, their seats remained vacant pending the outcome of the Presidential election. Soon after the election, President Clark nominated and the Senate confirmed Senator Patrick Leahy as the new Chief Justice, and Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard scholar, the new Associate Justice. The appointment of these liberals blunted the effects of the conservative Bush appointments to the lower federal courts. For now, the more outrageous decisions in the lower courts faced reversal in the Supreme Court.

Scarcely had President Clark finished his oath of office when the new President and Congress set upon a breathtaking and exhilarating program of reforms.

Clark announced the withdrawal of all US occupation forces in Iraq, as soon as a contingent of UN peacekeepers, heavily represented by Middle East and Islamic nations, assumed administration of the country. At the earliest opportunity, elections would be held and an Iraqi government installed. Generous reconstruction aid would be sent to Iraq, to be administered by their new government. “We may not like the government they elect,” said the President, “but it is their choice, and we will respect it.”

It was abundantly clear to the new administration, as to the public at large, that radical reforms in campaign financing had to be enacted, if the dreadful abuses of the recent past were not to be repeated. And so the Campaign Reform Act included, among its many provisions, a limit on campaign spending for each office, a ban on corporate political contributions, an allowance of personal contributions to blind general funds (so that no particular candidate could be benefited by a particular contribution), and a requirement that free broadcast time be allotted for candidate debates. (See "A Bribe by Any Other Name"). When GOP and corporate interests challenged the campaign rules, the Supreme Court upheld the reforms, ruling that the free speech clause of the First Amendment did not condone bribery, and that the apportionment of political influence to wealth violated that most fundamental Constitutional principle carved above the Supreme Court portico: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

The Bush tax policies were thrown out, and taxes on estates and dividends restored. The income tax rates were restored to the levels set by President Clinton, which, as we know, resulted in the previous decade in a period of prosperity and budget surpluses. US companies which had incorporated off-shore to avoid US taxes, were classified as foreign enterprises subject to tariffs, and barred from federal contracts. This put an quick end to off-shore tax evasion. With the increased cash flow to Washington, the rising unemployment peaked and subsided as laid-off public employees – teachers, police, administrators, researchers, etc. – returned to their jobs, and federal contracts created still more jobs. Hard core unemployed were invited into government training programs, or put to work repairing the infrastructure. Federal funds were directed to the states which were suffering severe budget deficits, and these funds created still more jobs as neglected infrastructures were repaired and government services restored. The Treasury Secretary, Dr. Paul Krugman, cautioned that due to the considerable damage to the economy caused by the Bush policies, the recovery might be prolonged. Even so, early indications showed significant improvement in the national economy which, in turn, reversed the long-term decline in the stock market.

The Congress promptly repealed the USA PATRIOT Act, whereupon, Attorney General Hillary Clinton ordered that within two months, either charges be brought, attorneys assigned and trials scheduled for all federal detainees (including those at Guantanamo Bay), or that these individuals be released. Thus the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Articles of the Bill of Rights were restored. The Fourth Article was restored with the abolition of the search, seizure and eavesdropping provisions of the Patriot Act.

Interior Secretary Lester Brown instituted a widespread program of restoration of public lands, in particular the neglected and dilapidated National Parks. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was added to the National Park system with permanent protection from development.

In anticipation of the looming decline in world petroleum production, President Clark launched an “Energy Apollo Project,” under the direction of Energy Secretary Amory Lovins, with a goal of total energy independence and 80% renewable energy use within ten years.

There remained the devastated landscape of our foreign relations. The Senate resolution reinstating all treaties in effect as of George Bush’s January, 2001 inauguration has been very helpful, as has the payment in full of UN dues and the appointment of the highly esteemed former President James Carter as Ambassador to the United Nations.. Much improvement has resulted from President Clark’s recent “tour of reconciliation” to Europe, where our friends abroad have assured the President that their complaint was not with the American people, but with the Bush administration – a misfortune shared both by the Americans and the world beyond. The overthrow of the Bush regime and with it the neo-conservative imperialists, all to the credit of the American people, has gone a long way toward restoring the reputation of the United States. The President’s scheduled trip this Fall, to Asia and the Middle East, promises to be equally productive.

This is only the beginning of a long list of reforms put in place by President Clark and the Congress. But there is no need to elaborate, for you know of these through the reporting of our restored free press.

Like the Russian people in August, 1991, we Americans barely escaped disaster. Had the ordinary citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg not crowded in front of the Byelii Dom (Parliament) and into Nevsky Prospect, Gorbachev and glasnost would have been overthrown and the dark days of Communist oppression would have returned. In our case, the dogmatism, the greed and the arrogance of the Bush regime finally roused the American public from its media-induced slumber. You Russians had an advantage, for you knew your media lied, and you ignored it. We didn’t come to that realization until it was almost too late. The Bush regime believed us to be a nation of docile and credulous sheep, willing to be led, shorn, and impoverished, without complaint. For two and a half years we gave them little reason to believe otherwise. And then they overplayed their act.

American hate to be lied to, and hate even worse to be taken as suckers.

When that realization seeped into the public mind, and then burst forth, the Bush insurgency was finished.

But just in time!

And this is how, painfully, persistently, and courageously, the American people achieved their new birth of freedom.

All the best,

Tvoi Droog,

Ernie

Copyright 2003, by Ernest Partridge

http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/freedom.htm

[Joerver]

July 19, 2003


Cheney`s Oil Maps
Can the Real Reason for War be This Crass?
By MANO SINGHAM

Now that the official case for attacking Iraq made by the US and British governments has started to unravel, the question of the real reason for unleashing this death and destruction has become a hot topic of conversation again.

During the run-up to the invasion on Iraq, while speaking at teach-ins and other forums and taking part in other anti-war activities, I was somewhat skeptical of those who argued that the war was simply about getting hold of Iraqi oil for American oil companies. I cringed a little at the slogans and placards that said "No blood for oil!" , "No war for oil!", etc., and disagreed with those that the attack was due to a simple quid pro quo between the administration and its oil company cronies. While I found the administration`s case for war to be unbelievable, the `war for oil` thesis seemed to me to be a far too simplistic approach to global politics.

I fancied my self to be a much more sophisticated geo-strategic analyst. Of course, the fact that Iraq had the world`s second largest reserves could not be coincidental and definitely played a role in the war plans. But I thought it more likely that broader geopolitical concerns were more dominant, such as showing the world that the US had the power to enforce its will anywhere, and to establish a long-term and secure strategic base in the middle east from which to ensure dominance of the region. To the extent that oil played a role, I thought that purpose of the war was not mainly to divert Iraqi oil revenues to US companies but instead to ensure control over the oil flow to the rest of the world so that economic rivals such as Europe and Japan, whose economies were dependent on middle east oil, would be forced to be subservient to US global interests and pressure.

The thought that the war was actually about making money for individuals and corporations in the short term did not seem to me to be credible. That was too petty and crass.

That was why I was stunned to read the press release put out by the public interest group Judicial Watch on July 17, 2003. This organization, along with the Sierra Club, had argued that both the membership of the Energy Task Force chaired by Vice-President Cheney and the proceedings of its meetings should be made public and had sought the information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) since April 19, 2001. The Vice President had vigorously opposed this opening up of its activities and so a lawsuit was filed. On March 5, 2002 the US District Judge ordered the government to produce the documents, which was finally done by the Commerce Department just recently.

The Judicial Watch press release states that these released documents "contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org."

The press release continues: "The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country`s oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date."

This foreign policy involvement is a somewhat surprising turn of events. The original FOIA case was initiated (before 9/11 and before the ratcheting up of the attack on Iraq) because of more domestic concerns, specifically suspicions that the membership of the Energy Task Force may have included people such as Ken Lay of Enron Corporation who may have been in a position to exercise undue influence over government energy policy at the expense of the public interest.

Now, other news items come to my mind, all pointing in the direction of Cheney. Although generally keeping a low profile in his frequent stays at his hideout, Cheney has been one of the most adamant proponents of attacking Iraq and hyping its threat. He has made some of the most authoritative statements that Iraq already had weapons of mass destruction, saying things like "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." (August 26, 2002) and "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." (March 16, 2003), the latter statement made just three days before the invasion.

It is also Cheney who reportedly had the most involvement in the fraud involving Iraqi uranium purchase from Niger, reportedly initiating the sending of Ambassador Wilson to that country to investigate. It is also Cheney who is reportedly the driving force behind the President`s foreign policy and serves as his main strategist and mentor.

So perhaps my friends in the antiwar movement were right all along. Perhaps we have reached such a nadir that foreign policy (and even wars) can be made, and people sent to certain death, for such crass reasons. Perhaps it is time to put the Vice-President under much closer scrutiny.

Mano Singham is a physicist and educator at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/singham07192003.html

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http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-edpnewvoices…

NEW VOICES

Machiavellian Bush
By Alexander Hart
New Voices

July 19, 2003

Recently, I read The Prince. Niccoló Machiavelli writes that the ideal ruler is ruthless and will do anything to enhance his own power or his nation`s. His overall political philosophy is simple: The ends justify the means.

Although The Prince is almost 500 years old, President Bush appears to believe in Machiavellian politics. His Patriot Act allows the government to delve deeply into our personal lives. In the interest of "national security," we`re losing something precious -- the Bill of Rights. When the Constitution was created, many were afraid it gave the national government too much power. The Founding Fathers promised a bill of rights to guarantee the freedom of the people. Now, these rights are being eroded. Warrants for wiretapping are much easier for the government to acquire. The suspect`s name isn`t even needed. Other invasions of privacy and personal freedom are also permissible under the Patriot Act. Is it still safe to exercise my First Amendment rights and write this commentary? Do I have to fear being wiretapped? If the answer to that is yes, are the means allowable under the Patriot Act justified by the goal of total national security? No.

Machiavelli wrote, "Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavor of them may last longer." Once again, it seems Bush agrees. We lost a lot of privacy in one fell swoop with the Patriot Act. The decision to invade Iraq also happened over a relatively short amount of time.

However, Bush made campaign promises for Social Security reform, reduction of the national debt and protection of the environment. He is almost three years into his term, and where are we? There was a meager Social Security increase, we have a rapidly inflating national debt, and the president has repeatedly pushed for drilling in a wildlife refuge. Either he is following Machiavelli`s advice and giving out the good things slowly, or they just aren`t coming.

Bush`s recent tax cut demonstrates the Machiavellian principle, "Princes should delegate unpopular duties to others while dispensing all favors directly themselves." The cuts are not really tax cuts, but tax redistributions. Because of lower general revenue, many states have to raise taxes, thereby negating the effect of the president`s tax cut. Bush appears to be a hero, while the states are the bearers of bad news.

Our leader is following cynical advice that is 500 years old. Hasn`t civilization changed since the day of Machiavelli? There are far more compassionate means to achieve far more compassionate ends.

Alexander Hart, 15, is a sophomore in the international baccalaureate program at Winter Park High School.
Copyright © 2003, Orlando Sentinel

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Leave No Millionaire Behind
Driven by hollow political priorities, the Bush administration`s disastrous economic policies are undermining our national ideals.

Arthur I. Blaustein
July 21, 2003

The President and his party have cooked up the ultimate recipe for keeping political power. A nation in a constant state of anxiety -- over the thereat of terrorism, or a potential war -- is a nation off balance. And that insecurity is the perfect cover to divert public attention from the country`s serious domestic problems and the administration`s political agenda.

The "Bush doctrine" opens the door to a series of pre-emptive wars against "evil" regimes, ostensibly to protect the United States and bring security, stability, safety and democracy to the citizens of Damascus, Tehran, and Pyongyang -- as the president claims to be doing in Baghdad and Kabul. Meanwhile, the administration shows little or no concern for the security, stability and safety of the citizens of Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, or thousands of other cities and small towns across America, who are facing enormous economic and social difficulties.

Just like in the "The Wizard of Oz," when we finally get to see who is operating the smoke-puffing machine, we find a consummate pitchman. In Bush`s case, the man behind the screen is a flag-waving, lapel-pin wearing, anti-terrorist fear monger who labels his opponents anti-patriotic. He has done a clever job of manipulating the mass media, but in reality his smooth imagery and charming personality are subtly undermining America`s values. While he composes hymns to individualism, Sunday piety, trickle-down economics, and family values, he is trying to gut every program providing for social, economic, and environmental justice. America`s families need less pious rhetoric, and more policies geared toward a healthy economy, secure jobs, decent health care, affordable housing, quality public education, renewable energy and a sustainable environment. Bush seems unable -- or unwilling -- to grasp that the government has an important leadership role in this. In fact, the only policy that Bush seems energized by is one of tax giveaways for the rich and for corporate America.

At present, there exists an air of suspended belief over the radical changes of the past two years. That is because the layoffs, shutdowns, cutbacks, and reduced paychecks have been obscured by the events of September 11 and the nation`s subsequent focus on terrorist alerts and the Iraq war. But those changes are taking a huge toll. Bush`s economic policy, which in turn determines social policy, is much like the iceberg waiting in the path of a steaming Titanic.

Bush does not seem to understand that, while it is not a sin to be born to privilege, it is a sin to spend your life defending it. John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that. They knew the narrowness privilege can breed. This administration, despite its early pledges to provide a policy of "compassionate conservatism" has in fact adopted policies that amount to a war against the poor and the middle class. The tax and budget cuts were not made in order to jumpstart the economy or balance the budget; they were simply massive cash transfers. Social programs are being slashed to pay for tax giveaways for the wealthy and new defense contracts for arms makers who just happen to be big campaign contributors. Moreover, this was accomplished in a policy vacuum. The administration has not provided the American people with a strategic vision as to how this excessive and bloated arms build-up fits into our larger defense, anti-terrorist, or foreign policy. Is it in the national interest to relegate our most precious assets -- our human and natural resources -- to the junk pile while we increase the pace of an arms race where overkill has long been achieved? Do we really need to spend $9 billion on a missile defense system that doesn`t work?

Thomas Jefferson warned us that we could be free or ignorant, but not both. We have not taken that warning to heart. We have not had a serious national debate about the Bush administration`s policies because the mass media have treated politics -- as well as economic and social policy -- as entertainment: a combination of hype and palliative. The political and economic life of the country has been reduced to little more that a struggle for partisan power, the results not unlike the score of a football game: BUSH WINS AGAIN or SENATE DEMS BEATEN. There seems to be no sense of higher good, no question of national purpose, no hope for critical judgment. Hype has impoverished our political debate, undermining the very idea that public discourse can be educational and edifying -- or that national public policy can grow out of reflective discussion and shared political values. We have sought simplistic answers to complex problems without even beginning to comprehend our loss.

Which brings us to the difficult and complex issue of the inter-relationship between America`s economic and social policy, and how these policies are shaped by politics in Washington. A fundamental assumption underlies the administration`s domestic approach -- an assumption so ill-conceived that it seriously jeopardizes any prospects for solving our nation`s pressing domestic needs. It is the illusion that economic policy can be separated from social policy.

This is impossible, and the consequences of believing it are grave. By separating economic theory from social policy, and by pursuing the former at the expense of the latter, the administration has adopted a strategy of brinkmanship that could lead to social disaster. The drastic cuts being made in basic social and human service programs will exact painful and immediate social and human costs, and they will also appear as direct financial costs -- in terms of illiteracy, incarceration, and ill-health, among others -- at future times in different ledgers.

The administration`s contention that renewed economic growth as a consequence of tax cuts for the rich will eventually "trickle down" to the poor flies in the face of everything we know about poverty today. The best research indicates the opposite. Growth in the private economy has had a declining role in reducing poverty, and virtually all of the reduction in poverty since the mid-1960s has been brought about by the expansion of national social insurance and income-transfer programs of the kind now under attack by the Bush administration.

In addition to the massive tax cuts, the administration proposes to privatize or turn over to the states vast portions of the nation`s social, education, housing and health programs -- a move that amounts to reneging on our social and moral commitments as a nation. The real issue is not public versus private or federal versus state; rather, it is the diminution or avoidance of any national standards of responsibility and accountability. Worse than that, Mr. Bush seems to be denying that this responsibility even exists. Successful and effective national programs are being replaced with an inequitable, inconsistent patchwork of systems run by states -- a patchwork that is restrictively financed, more bureaucratic, less accountable, and subject to intense local, political, and fiscal pressures. Instead of the more efficient government that Bush promises, we will have fifty bureaucratic and anachronistic messes: government by provisional catastrophe. The question becomes whether basic human services will be provided at all.

For true conservatives, the ideological implications behind Bush`s economic policies must be disturbing, in that they depart from the genuine conservative philosophies that have played such an important role in American history. Historically, conservatives have not promised lower taxes or economic privatism. Traditionally, conservative leaders have focused on the underlying problems of the human community -- issues of leadership, of equality of opportunity, of continuity and order, of the obligations of the strong to the weak, and of the safeguards needed to keep the privileged from abusing their power.

By contrast, the Bush administration encourages us to revert to our basest inclinations: Look out for number one; write off those who can`t make it as shiftless, a drag on the economy. Our moral decline deepens as we condone the sheer political power of special and self-serving private economic interests -- wealthy campaign contributors and corporate powers -- over the legitimate moral authority that represents our nation`s best public interests. Rather than opportunity, equality, justice, and vitality, the Bush prescription for economic stimulus amounts to inequality, economic cronyism, and acquiescence. People programs are out and tax avoidance schemes are in. Human needs are made subordinated to political and technical arrogance.

Recently, I took the opportunity to reread Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and the Federalist Papers, and recalled that our founding fathers were well aware that politics and economics were interrelated faces of power, each necessitating its own checks and balances. What impressed me most, though, was their mature leadership, one that was based on a genuine commitment to the struggle for social, political, and environmental justice as well as economic opportunity. A commitment to this sense of public interest is just as important today.

Only those people have a future, and only those people can be called humane and historic, who have an intuitive sense of what is significant in both their national and public institutions, and who value them. It is this conviction and the continuing belief in the common-sense vision of the American promise that demand that we begin a serious national dialogue over our country`s economic and social policies. The Bush administration`s radical and dangerous changes have occurred without any serious national debate. Mr. Bush seems to think that his electoral "mandate," as suspect as it was, has changed our government from a representative democracy to economic royalism.

The Bush economic policies -- and the overtly antisocial political priorities driving them -- are not based on a commitment to any high principles such as freedom, liberty, equality, justice, or opportunity, although such pieties are mouthed at the swivel of a camera. The administration`s policies instead are based on the very narrow personal prejudices and biases of a group of men who have been motivated by the acquisition of money and power. Bush and Cheney have constructed a hypothesis to fit a simple notion: "The plutocracy is good to me, so I`ll be good to the plutocracy."

For the past two years I have listened carefully to the President, his chief advisors, and the neo-conservative right. All of it has reminded me of a passage in The Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad put it this way:


"Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight... in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world."
Conrad`s words capture the radical frenzy in Washington; they reflect the mood and the moral nullity of the reactionary enterprise that seeks to tear apart the public good. The Bush administration just doesn`t get it. No country can sustain itself, much less grow, on a fare of smooth one-liners, rerun ideas, hot-house theories, paranoia, and official policy pronouncements borrowed from Orwell`s 1984; where recession is recovery, war is peace and a social policy based on aggressive hostility is compassion.

Arthur I. Blaustein is a professor of economic and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was chair of the President`s National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity during the Carter Administration. His most recent books are Make a Difference and The American Promise: Justice and Opportunity.

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http…

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The cartoon is a Ramirez cartoon in the LA Times for July 20th
Two coiffed anchors on MSNBC were discussing the Ramirez cartoon, when the male co-anchor said to the female co-anchor, "That cartoon was taken from a Vietnam era cartoon, right?" The bimbette answered "That`s right.", gleefully, I might add. MSNBC should hire people who actually have a sense of history or the sense not to make an incorrect statement concerning one of the most well known photos out of the Vietnam War.

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September 11, 2001, marked a momentous and tragic event in U.S. history. It also evoked a flood of patriotic fervor and an instant fear that Americans now were vulnerable to international terrorism. Capitalizing on these fears, the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government quickly enacted measures purported to counteract terrorism or terrorist threats. One of the principal results of this activity was an act titled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” or, the USA PATRIOT Act, passed and signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act is one of the most sweeping acts in modern American history because of its potential impact on the civil liberties of U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens residing in the United States
It is hard to believe the Act could have been drafted, debated, and passed in only 45 days. It is over 342 pages long and extremely complicated. Given its complexity, and the fact the legislation represented a wish list of new investigative and detention powers long sought by law enforcement officials, it is more likely the pro-law enforcement Administration had been drafting such provisions for many months. Post-September 11 provided the perfect opportunity to introduce them, with very little Congressional or public opposition. The Senate voted for the Act 98 to 1 and the House 356 to 66. The vast majority of Americans never even heard of it at the time.

The Act is complex and difficult to grasp because of its multiple references to and incorporation of other foreign intelligence acts, principally the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Congressional hearings were minimal and the legislation was not accompanied by either a committee or conference report. Nonetheless, in the meager hearings that took place, the Act was vigorously opposed by numerous civil rights groups, especially the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who warned that the Act was constitutionally defective and represented a broad attack on many of the traditional civil liberties enjoyed in the U.S.

One of the most significant features of the Act is a new, broader definition given to terrorism. The definition now also includes “domestic,” as contrasted with international terrorism. Section 802 states that a person engages in domestic terrorism if they do any act “dangerous to human life” that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if that action appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. Further, the act or acts must take place primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

This definition is broad enough to encompass the activities of such organizations as Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, Environmental Liberation Front, protests about Vieques Island, and protests at the meeting of the World Trade Organization. Civil disobedience, such as entering on the premises of a U.S. military base, which is a violation of federal law, would now be included within the definition of an act of domestic terrorism. Disrupting a meeting or procession of vehicles as a means of drawing attention to or attempting to influence an unwanted governmental policy all could be considered acts of domestic terrorism. The implications are huge and the Act can be used to prosecute political dissidents of many stripes.The Act potentially violates at least six of the ten original Bill of Rights: the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 13th Amendment. It grants broad new powers to law enforcement and permits law enforcement officials to side-step or avoid entirely many traditional controls on the surveillance, investigation, arrest, and prosecution of civilians residing in the United States.

The first effects of the Act were soon felt when the government secretly arrested and jailed more than 1,200 people in connection with its investigation of the events of September 11. “Despite demands from members of Congress, numerous civil liberties and human rights organizations, and the media, the Government refused to make public the number of people arrested, their names, their lawyers, the reasons for their arrest, and other information related to their whereabouts and circumstances.”

After first failing, by means of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to obtain information about those arrested and held, multiple organizations joined to file suit in federal district court in Washington, DC (Center for National Security Studies, et al. v. U.S. Department of Justice). The government still refused to provide the requested information, citing several exemptions under FOIA. A final order in the case was not entered until August 2, 2002, which required the government to divulge the names of almost all those arrested. By that time most of those arrested had been either released or deported.

Many of those arrested and jailed were Arabs and Muslims, who were cab drivers, construction workers, and other laborers, with no more than ordinary visa violations. Many of them were caught up in routine traffic stops and other incidental contacts with law enforcement officials. Some were incarcerated for up to seven months without being charged or permitted to see their families. Despite the lower court’s ruling, the government still refused to divulge the names of those arrested and is appealing the decision.

In a related secrecy issue, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and others sought to have the Supreme Court review a secret appeals court decision that broadly expanded the government’s power to spy on U.S. citizens. The special, secret court was created in 1978 with the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Its purpose was to review and approve government wiretaps in foreign intelligence investigations. All hearings and decisions of the court are conducted in secret. Now, under the PATRIOT Act’s new definition of foreign intelligence investigations, its role is being expanded to include domestic investigations that the government claims are related to foreign intelligence. The Supreme Court, in its first decision on an issue related to the PATRIOT Act, refused the request to review the secret decision of this special court.

In subsequent months, the PATRIOT Act was challenged on other grounds. The Justice Department used the Act to declare two American citizens enemy combatants. They then were held as military prisoners, denied the right to an attorney or access to civilian courts, and left without a roadmap as to how they could challenge their imprisonment. One was arrested in Afghanistan, the other in Chicago. The Justice Department took the position that it was improper for courts to inquire too deeply into the government’s classification of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant. The District Court in Norfolk, Virginia ruled that the two-page memo provided by the government to explain its decision in one of these instances was inadequate. However, that ruling was overturned by a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit in Richmond in January 2003.On March 11, Manhattan U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey stood by his earlier, December ruling to allow one of the U.S. citizens, Jose Padilla, who was arrested in Chicago, to meet with defense lawyers. The Justice Department announced it would study the opinion before deciding whether to appeal.

Another area in which the Act has been challenged concerns the Administration’s decision to hold as many as 600 deportation hearings in secret. It did this based on the Attorney General’s assertion that those detained for deportation were suspected of having links to terrorism. A federal district judge in New Jersey ordered that all such deportation hearings be opened to the public unless the government could show, on a case-by-case basis, there was a need for secrecy. That decision also was overturned, by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which held that secrecy was warranted by the grave threats to the nation.

Meanwhile, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court decision that such deportation hearings must be open, unless good cause is shown for secrecy. That is now the law in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee and makes it likely the Supreme Court will consider at least one of these cases to resolve the conflict. However, since most deportation hearings are heard in New Jersey, the Cincinnati court’s ruling may be little more than a gesture.

All told, through mid-March, 2003, the ACLU had filed or participated as a plaintiff in 31 lawsuits and friend of the court briefs in connection with government activities involving arrest, detention, surveillance, and First Amendment violations, in which countering possible terrorist acts was the ostensible reason for the actions. The number of other government violations of civil liberties that have gone unchallenged is inestimable.

Aside from these court challenges, the PATRIOT Act insinuated itself into the everyday lives of ordinary Americans in a variety of ways. While the PATRIOT Act granted extensive new powers to law enforcement, the Bush administration augmented and extended these powers through the issuance of 11 new executive orders, 10 new interim agency regulations, and 2 final regulations implemented by the Justice Department. In this way the Administration sidestepped both the legislative and judicial branches. Government investigations pursuant to the Act are shrouded in secrecy, such as the closed deportation hearings, the secret arrests, and the new power of the government to enter and search the homes of private citizens without notifying them.

Yet another government power under the Act requires courts to issue warrants and orders based on the mere government assertion that the order is sought in connection with a terrorism investigation. These warrants and orders permit the FBI to question any person about co-workers and other persons and to demand access to records about such individuals. The Court order also warns the person questioned not to reveal anything about the contact to anyone else, under threat of criminal sanctions. As a result, it is difficult to determine just what law enforcement officials using the Act are actually doing.The chilling effect of the Act on free speech and political dissent has been felt already. Individuals have been questioned by the FBI about their political beliefs for being openly critical of a possible war against Iraq. In San Francisco, a 60-year-old retiree remarked at his local gym that he thought any war with Iraq was not just about fighting terrorists, but about corporate profits and oil. He promptly received a visit at home from the FBI with questions about his political beliefs.

The FBI paid a call on a North Carolina college student for displaying an “un-American poster” in her own home. The poster in question was critical of President Bush’s stand on capital punishment while serving as governor of Texas. While there the FBI agents asked the student if she had any pro-Taliban materials.

Federal agents spent an hour or more inspecting a car museum in Houston, Texas based on a tip that artwork on display at the museum was “of a nature threatening to the president.” There were no such art works, but the agents questioned a museum docent about the artists, who funded the museum, and who had visited the exhibit.

Other low ranking quasi-law enforcement officials have eagerly joined in the suppression of individual First Amendment rights since the passage of the Act. Recently, in a shopping mall in Guilderland, New York, a 61-year-old lawyer and his son were wearing T-shirts that read “Peace On Earth” and “Give Peace A Chance.” They were ordered by mall security guards to remove the offending shirts or leave the mall. The lawyer refused and was charged with trespassing. Recently, Natalie Maines, the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, an all female country and western group, spoke out in opposition to the Administration’s war policies in Iraq and criticized President Bush. Subsequently, at a pro-war rally organized by radio station KRMD, part of a radio chain, which banned the Dixie Chicks from its play lists, a tractor was used to smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes, and other paraphernalia, while a supportive crowd looked on.

Other, pro-war Bush rallies were sponsored around the nation by radio stations. Called Rally for America, Clear Channel Communications organized them. Clear Channel is a San Antonio-based organization that controls more than 1,200 radio stations and whose vice chairperson, Tom Hicks, is a close friend and political supporter of President Bush.

Since September 11, there have been innumerable instances of public officials, quasi-public officials, and private citizens attempting to control political speech. These range from banning public rallies and peaceful marches to the cancellation of a Baseball Hall of Fame appearance by Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Dale Petroskey, the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

There were other instances in American history when the government adopted extraordinary measures to suppress unpopular political views or arrest those suspected of being disloyal to the United States. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. As a result tens of thousands of Americans suspected of being disloyal to the Union were arrested and held without charges by the military. During World War I, and the Red Scare, as many as 10,000 resident aliens, targeted because of their political views, were arrested, interrogated, jailed, and beaten to force them to sign confessions. Raids were carried out in over 30 cities and some 500 “aliens” were deported.During World War II, President Roosevelt issued an executive order for the forced internment of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the U.S. West Coast. Two-thirds of those placed in so-called preventive detention, under harsh conditions, were U.S. citizens against whom there was no evidence of collaboration with the Japanese.

During the Cold War, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when fears of communism were fueled by certain U.S. political leaders and anti-Communist hysteria was rampant, leaders of the American Communist Party were criminally prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act for their political beliefs. The House Un-American Activities Committee carried out a witch hunt of suspected Communists and so-called “fellow travelers.” Thousands of Americans were subpoenaed and called to testify about their own and other Americans’ political affiliations and activities. Those who refused to testify were held in contempt and imprisoned. In other instances, college professors and other employees were forced to sign so-called loyalty oaths or lose their jobs.

Richard Posner, a conservative federal jurist in Chicago, uses the above instances to argue that the current measures taken under the PATRIOT Act are not that worrisome. He urges the use of cost/benefit analysis to weigh the relative importance of liberty vs. security at a time of perceived threats to security. He believes that in time, when the threats to security have waned, a balance between liberty and security interests will be restored.

This sanguine view overlooks the fact that the earlier restrictions on civil rights were one-time phenomena, more specifically targeted, and narrow in scope. In the case of the PATRIOT Act, the restrictions are broad, indefinite, and far-reaching. The Administration insists the war on terrorism is open-ended and will continue for many years, if not indefinitely. Many of the emergency measures to combat the threat of terrorism will likely become permanent and even more comprehensive. Senator Orrin Hatch, a leading congressional supporter of the PATRIOT Act, recently tried quietly to introduce amendments to strengthen the Act and make it permanent.

Already, there is a new bill, prepared by the Justice Department, entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Dubbed PATRIOT II, the new act seeks to further expand the government’s powers to combat suspected terrorism and further encroaches on civil liberties. According to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, the proposed new act will expand the authority of law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies; reduce or eliminate entirely judicial oversight of surveillance; permit wiretapping of Americans—without any court order—for 15 days if the executive branch decides there is a national emergency; authorize secret arrests; create a DNA data bank based solely on unconfirmed executive suspicion; create new offenses punishable with the death penalty; and seek to strip Americans of their citizenship if they belong to or support disfavored political groups. Perhaps as importantly, the draft bill was produced in secret, without consultation with Congress. Senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee minority staff, who inquired of the Justice Department about any such proposed legislation, were informed that no such legislation was being planned only a few days before the proposed bill was publicly revealed on PBS’s “Frontline NOW.”The U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has swept aside all criticism of the Administration’s current disregard for traditional civil liberties by publicly proclaiming that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Ashcroft’s views are so extreme that he has alarmed even the conservative right wing of the Republican Party. While agreeing with his position on abortion and child pornography, they are asking how they and their own organizations might fare under the new rules affecting civil liberties. If another power were to occupy the United States and institute the policies provided for in the USA PATRIOT Act—secret arrests, secret trials, secret investigations, secret depor- tations—the United States would be considered a police state.

The federal government is also enlisting American universities to assist in maintaining surveillance of foreign students residing in the United States. The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS), launched February 15, 2003, will involve almost 6,000 U.S. colleges and universities in gathering and forwarding information about foreign students to a national computer data bank. Along with other information gathered, the schools must notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) if a foreign student fails to enroll or is arrested. Institutions that do not have INS approval to participate in the data gathering system will be prohibited from enrolling new foreign students. (On March 1, 2003, the INS was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security and is now the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.)

This past February, a Jordanian foreign exchange student, who confessed to once having had thoughts of being a terrorist martyr, but subsequently renounced those ideas, was summarily ordered deported within five days by a U.S. immigration judge in Dallas. The student, three months shy of earning a master’s degree in software engineering at a Texas university, was under investigation by the FBI for undisclosed reasons.

Currently being put into effect is another new plan, dubbed CAPPS II, in cooperation with U.S. airlines. It will check the backgrounds of all commercial passengers and assign them a threat level of red, yellow, or green. Information about the passengers’ credit reports, bank account activity, and cross checks with the names of persons on a government watch list were to be instituted by Delta airlines about April 1, 2003. A comprehensive system that includes all airlines should be in place by the end of the year.

Creating comprehensive homeland security would cost trillions of dollars and completely change the way Americans lead their lives. It would include national identity cards, surveillance, and subject to search rules in all public places, random searches of vehicles entering airports and parking garages, compiling dossiers on all persons who take scuba diving lessons, tracking the comings and goings of subway riders electronically, and the list goes on and on. Virtually everything anyone does, 24 hours a day, would be subject to constant surveillance.

Already, the security measures put in place in New York City are a portent of things to come throughout the nation. There is a proliferation of armed security guards, surveillance cameras, handbag searches, metal detectors, electronic access cards, and bomb sniffing dogs from the railroad terminals to the art museums. Heavily-armed police officers, dressed like assault troops, patrol landmark buildings such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown Manhattan. The costs of these measures—and these are just the tip of the iceberg—are potentially astronomical. The costs in terms of the loss of civil liberties are incalculable.

As the scope of the Act and the threats it represents to all U.S. residents became more apparent, more than 100 municipalities and Hawaii, passed resolutions in opposition to the Act. Some encouraged public employees not to comply with the Act’s most invasive and civil rights threatening features. One, Arcata, California, criminalized compliance with the Act. But the main features of a U.S. police state are already in place and it will take a major groundswell of public opposition to undo them.

http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Aug2003/cornehls0803.html


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Jim Cornehls has practiced law and is currently professor and director of the Law and Public Policy Graduate Certificate Program in the School of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Texas at Arlington.

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Die neue Unbefangenheit

Rechnen die Russen ihre Ölexporte künftig in Euro statt in Dollar ab? Europa spannt die Muskeln - und die Amerikaner wundern sich.

Romano Prodi krönte das Mittagsmahl, zu dem er die 25 Brüsseler Botschafter der erweiterten Europäischen Union Anfang Juli eingeladen hatte, mit einem politischen Leckerbissen. Dank seiner guten Kontakte in Moskau, so der Kommissionspräsident bei Tisch, gehe er davon aus, dass Russland demnächst seinen gesamten Erdöl- und Gasexport in die EU nicht mehr in US-Dollar abrechnen wolle, sondern in Euro. Putin wolle die Anbindung an die EU drastisch ausbauen.

Das wäre ein Triumph für die Europäer und ein herber Schlag für die USA. Gründet sich doch deren Macht auch auf die bislang unangefochtene Herrschaft ihres Dollar als Leitwährung im globalen Energiegeschäft.

Sollte der Euro im Geschäft mit den Russen, die über 50 Prozent der Brennstoffe der EU liefern, den Dollar verdrängen - den Beziehungen zwischen Washington und Brüssel würde es kaum weiteren Abbruch tun. Sie sind bereits schlecht genug.

Die Amerikaner sehen sich mit einer europäischen Herausforderung konfrontiert, die weit über alle bisherigen Emanzipationsversuche Europas hinausgeht. Ohne Vorbehalt stehen auch jene EU-Mitgliedstaaten, die sich im Irak-Krieg noch uneingeschränkt zu George W. Bush bekannten, hinter dem ersten eigenen sicherheitsstrategischen Konzept der Gemeinschaft.

Die Botschaft des Papiers, dessen Grundzüge festliegen und das auf dem Gipfel im Dezember in Rom verabschiedet werden soll, lautet: "Als Zusammenschluss von 25 Staaten mit über 450 Millionen Einwohnern, die ein Viertel des Bruttosozialprodukts weltweit erwirtschaften, ist die Europäische Union - ob es einem gefällt oder nicht - ein globaler Akteur", bereit auch, Verantwortung für die globale Sicherheit zu tragen.

Die Unterstützerfront für die USA in den östlichen EU-Beitrittsstaaten bröckelt, weil sich deren Regierungen in Washington keine nennenswerten Vorteile, bei den EU-Altstaaten aber viel Ärger eingehandelt haben. Entzaubert sind die Amerikaner auch durch ihr offensichtliches Unvermögen, der Probleme in Afghanistan wie im Irak Herr zu werden. Die Abweichler wollen dabei sein, wenn die Union sich jetzt langsam, aber stetig militärische Fähigkeiten zulegt und in der Weltpolitik mitzureden anschickt.

Selbst US-Präsident George W. Bush kommt nicht mehr umhin, die EU wahrzunehmen. Noch im vergangenen Jahr hatte er den Routine-Gipfel mit der EU demonstrativ als lästige Pflichtübung kurz und knapp hinter sich gebracht.

Diesmal, beim Zusammentreffen mit der EU-Spitze Ende Juni im Weißen Haus, schien er zumindest zum Zuhören bereit. Als Prodi und der amtierende EU-Ratspräsident, der griechische Premierminister Kostas Simitis, berichteten, die Union sei im Begriff, sich eine Verfassung zuzulegen, entfuhr es Bush: "Oh, das ist ja sehr interessant, was ihr da erzählt." Dieser Präsident, räumte er ein, müsse noch "besser verstehen" lernen, wie die Union funktioniere.

Natürlich sei es für ihn leichter, mit nationalen Vertretern aus einzelnen Mitgliedstaaten als mit der EU zurechtzukommen, so Bush. Aber so viel habe er schon verstanden: Die Union sei "so ein Ding in Bewegung, von dem man nicht so genau weiß, wohin es sich entwickelt". Es sei ihm aber klar, dass man vor "großen Veränderungen" stehe und die Kapazitäten der EU noch wachsen würden.

Offen redete Bush dann, das ergibt sich weiter aus Protokollnotizen in Händen deutscher Diplomaten in Washington, über die gestörten Beziehungen zwischen alter und neuer Welt: Man habe sich "irgendwie entfremdet". Seine Pflicht sei es nun, erklärte Bush, seine Landsleute eindringlich zu ermahnen, dass die Beziehungen zu Europa wichtig, ja von nationalem Interesse seien: "Schließlich sind sie ja Milliarden von Dollar wert."

Aus der neuen strategischen Doktrin der EU pickte sich Bush jene Passagen heraus, die ihm passten: Die EU würde ihre Interessen ja nun auch global definieren, sich weltweit im Kampf gegen internationalen Terrorismus und die Verbreitung von Massenvernichtungswaffen engagieren, auch unter Einsatz militärischer Mittel. Bush: "Da müssen wir fest zusammenstehen." Man spreche dieselbe Sprache.


Das ist offenkundig nicht der Fall. Denn über weite Strecken steht die europäische Doktrin in krassem Widerspruch zur neuen nationalen Sicherheitsstrategie der USA. Washington begründet darin mit den Anschlägen des 11. September seinen Anspruch, "präventiv" und gegebenenfalls auch "allein" mit militärischer Gewalt gegen Terroristen und gegen Schurkenstaaten loszuschlagen.

Die EU-Leitsätze halten dagegen: "Kein Land ist in der Lage, die komplexen Probleme im Alleingang zu lösen." Keiner der neuen Bedrohungen lasse sich "mit rein militärischen Mitteln begegnen". Präventives Handeln müsse ein Mix von Maßnahmen sein - politische, wirtschaftliche, humanitäre und erst als Letztes militärische Mittel. Und, selbstbewusst: "Die EU ist dafür besonders gut ausgerüstet."

Gegen die amerikanische Missachtung des Völkerrechts und des Willens der Vereinten Nationen wie im Fall der Irak-Invasion setzt Brüssel als "vorrangiges Ziel" die Stärkung der Uno. Es gelte, "gut funktionierende internationale Institutionen" in einer "normengestützten Weltordnung" zu schaffen, dabei auch den von den USA boykottierten Internationalen Strafgerichtshof zu unterstützen.

Derlei Positionen der Europäer bedachte Bush beim Gipfel mit der EU noch mit Spott. Internationale Organisationen würde man ja auch gern stützen, "wenn die nur mehr Zähne hätten".

Und als Prodi sagte, die EU wisse nicht, was mit dem von den USA abgelehnten Klimaschutz-Protokoll von Kyoto zu tun sei, konterte Bush grinsend: "Ich weiß, was zu tun ist." Vergesst es, war die Botschaft.

Wie es wirklich zwischen den USA und der EU steht, hatten kurz zuvor Prodis Spitzenbeamte zu hören bekommen. Der Planungschef im US-Außenministerium, Richard Haass: Die Beschwörung gemeinsamer Werte sei "weitgehend Geschwafel". "Den Westen" gebe es nicht mehr. Er wache auch keineswegs jeden Morgen in Sorge um den Zusammenhalt der EU auf. Es mache ihm geradezu Spaß, die Europäer gegeneinander auszuspielen.

Die sind von der angeblichen Allmacht der USA immer weniger überzeugt. Sowohl an Bevölkerung als auch an Wirtschaftskraft sei die erweiterte EU nahezu ebenbürtig. Die transatlantischen Beziehungen nennt die EU-Doktrin wohl "unersetzlich". Jedoch werde sich die EU "auf die Entwicklung strategischer Partnerschaften mit Russland, Japan, China, Kanada und Indien konzentrieren". Und: "Keine unserer Beziehungen wird exklusiv sein."

Die westliche Supermacht wurde nicht ein einziges Mal informiert oder gar konsultiert, als sich Javier Solanas politischer Stab in Brüssel unter Leitung des deutschen Diplomaten Christoph Heusgen an den Entwurf machte. Der Hohe außenpolitische Repräsentant der EU hatte das Projekt bei einem vertraulichen Treffen mit den Außenministern Jack Straw aus London, Dominique de Villepin aus Paris und Joschka Fischer aus Berlin im Hinterzimmer des Restaurants "Chez Marius" an Brüssels Place du Petit Sablon kurz nach Ende des Irak-Krieges ausgeheckt.

Ähnliche Vorstöße der EU waren in den vergangenen Jahren von den USA stets mit Hinweis auf die Nato-Doktrin unterlaufen worden. Diesmal aber nickten selbst USA-Freunde wie Dänen und Italiener die Solana-Vorlage ab.



USA und Europäische Union nach der Erweiterung 2004


Ebenso einmütig beschlossen die EU-Häuptlinge, im Jahr 2004 eine europäische Rüstungsagentur zu schaffen. Deren Hauptaufgabe: die 160 Milliarden Euro Verteidigungsausgaben der 25 EU-Länder, die über 50 Prozent des US-Verteidigungshaushalts ausmachen, aber nur 10 Prozent des Wirkungsgrads der amerikanischen Militärmaschinerie erzielen, durch Kooperation und Koordination effektiver einzusetzen.

Militärisch sind die Amerikaner, das sehen natürlich auch EU-Analytiker, unangefochten die Nummer eins in der Welt. Dennoch verstören die Anfänge europäischer Selbständigkeit in der Sicherheitspolitik das US-Personal. So intervenierte der amerikanische Gesandte in Brüssel, Rockwell Schnabel, mehrfach bei Solana-Beamten der Kommission: warum die EU vor ihrer Entscheidung, im Kongo mit eigenen Truppen einzugreifen, nicht bei ihm oder in Washington angefragt habe.

Die neue Unbefangenheit ist der Bush-Administration so wenig geheuer, dass sie von früheren Zusagen nichts mehr wissen will. Die Übergabe der Sfor-Militäraufgaben in Bosnien an die EU wird verzögert, ein militärisches EU-Engagement in der von Separatismus geplagten ehemaligen Sowjetrepublik Moldawien soll unter Nato-Kontrolle gehalten werden.

WINFRIED DIDZOLEIT, DIRK KOCH

© DER SPIEGEL 30/2003

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Der ganze Time Poll. Troubles in Irak, trouble for Bush


http://www.time.com/time/2003/iraqpoll/

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 11:15 a.m. EDT July 21, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

The No. 2 man at the Pentagon is in Iraq, telling Iraqis to be patient. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz visited the relatively stable northern city of Mosul on Monday. Wolfowitz said Iraqis should not look to the United States to solve all of their economic problems. He said, "even though we can do many things, we`re not gods."
A U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter have been killed in northern Baghdad. The bomb attack wounded three other soldiers from the 1st Armored Division.
The top U.S. official in Iraq says Saddam Hussein is probably alive and still in Iraq. But Paul Bremer says it`s unlikely Saddam is orchestrating the daily attacks on American troops. He said on the Sunday news shows the attacks are being carried out by small groups of well-trained former soldiers.
The top U.S. official in Iraq is in Washington this week for a series of meetings. L. Paul Bremer is likely to repeat what he`s been saying over the weekend and last week -- that the Bush administration does have a strategy for achieving the goal of a free and prosperous Iraq.
A delegation from Iraq`s U.S.-picked Governing Council is expected to visit the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday. The council, the first civilian group organized to eventually take control of the country, had said the group planned to declare itself the sovereign representative of Iraq at the U-N.
The top American general in Iraq predicts that resistance to U.S. forces will grow in the coming months. Gen. John Abizaid said he`s setting up an Iraqi "civil defense force" to help U.S. forces combat the violence.
Baghdad`s zoo opened its doors to the public on Sunday. Only a few dozen people, most of them young men, wandered into the newly renovated park to see the lions, jaguars and monkeys wilting in 122-degree heat.
Sunday, two American soldiers and an Iraqi employee of a U.N.-affiliated relief agency were killed near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The soldiers died in an ambush by attackers using rocket-propelled grenades and small arms.

IRAQ-ISRAEL
There are signs that Iraqi officials may be willing to make peace with Israel. Israeli Labor Party chief Shimon Peres told Israel Radio he met with a former Iraqi minister over the weekend. The 80-year-old Iraqi could be a pivotal figure. He`s already a candidate to head the temporary Iraqi government.

IRAQ-BLAIR-WEAPONS
His critics want a broader probe, but British Prime Minister Tony Blair is suggesting a new inquiry be limited to the death of a Defense Ministry weapons adviser. A judge is investigating David Kelly`s suspected suicide. The BBC says Kelly was its source for a story that Blair`s office doctored an intelligence dossier on Iraqi weapons to bolster the case for war.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he`ll take full responsibility if an inquiry finds the government contributed to the suicide of scientist David Kelly.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

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Joschka beinhart - das flenst!

Jürgen Elsässer 21.07.2003
Biertrinken mit Powell, die Zeche zahlt Chirac - der Washington-Besuch des deutschen Außenministers steht für das Ende des "alten Europa"

Werner als Vorbild für Joschka? Die Comic-Figur von Zeichner Röttger "Brösel" Feldmann stiftet ihre Freundschaften über das gemeinsame Inhalieren von Flensburger Pils, und nach diesem Erfolgsrezept arbeitet seit neuerem auch der deutsche Außenminister. Als sein US-amerikanischer Amtskollege Colin Powell im Mai seine Aufwartung in Berlin machte, schenkte ihm Fischer nämlich eine Kiste "Flens". Letzte Woche, beim Gegenbesuch des Deutschen am Potomac gab ihm Powell das Leergut zurück.
Was den Besuch zum "vollen Erfolg" (Fischer) gemacht hatte, war aber nicht nur der gute Stoff, sondern vor allem die strategische Offerte des Deutschen, die gemeinsame "Allianz für Frieden". Das Europa der Zukunft könne nur "zusammen mit den Vereinigten Staaten stark sein - nicht als sein Rivale", hatte Fischer gesagt. Daraus machte die International Herald Tribune in ihrer Sonnabendausgabe gleich ihren Aufmacher auf Seite eins. "Fischer setzt Berlin von Paris ab", schrieb das Blatt.

Mit Recht: Der französische Staatspräsident Jacques Chirac hatte in der Irak-Auseinandersetzung mehrfach vor einer unipolaren Welt unter Dominanz der USA gewarnt und als Alternative eine multipolare Ordnung gefordert ( Einheit statt Multipolarität, Ordnung statt Chaos). Prompt hatte in den USA eine antifranzösische Kampagne begonnen, Gaststätten benannten French Fries in Freedom Fries um (vgl. Parlez-vous Pommes Frites?). "Die deutsche Position zielt nicht auf eine multipolare, sondern eine multilaterale Ordnung ab," erklärte ein hoher deutscher Regierungsbeamter gegenüber der IHT.


Multipolar (Chirac) versus mulilateral (Fischer), das hört sich nach Haarspalterei an. Doch wie nahe die deutschen Vorstellungen den angelsächsischen wieder geworden sind, konnte man schon im April erahnen, als Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder sogar Tony Blairs Vision einer unipolaren Welt als "angemessen" bezeichnete. Aus dem Außenministerium wurde nun diese Wiederannäherung an die USA theoretisch untermauert. Multilateral bedeutet demnach, dass "international bedeutsame Angelegenheiten durch Diskussion und auf der Basis des internationalen Rechts gelöst werden", so der bereits zitierte Beamte des Auswärtigen Amtes. Im Gegensatz zu diesem konsensualen setzt Frankreich auf ein konfrontatives Vorgehen - die USA sollen nicht in Gremien eingebunden, sondern durch den Aufbau von Gegen-Polen eingedämmt werden.

So bezeichnete vorletzte Woche Alain Juppé, ein Vertrauter Chiracs, bei seinem Moskau-Besuch Russland als einen dieser Pole und sprach von einer "strategischen Partnerschaft zwischen dem europäischen Pol und dem russischen Pol", was freilich, wie er gnädig einräumte, einen "Dialog" mit dem amerikanischen Pol nicht ausschlösse. Diesen Plänen hat Fischer in Washington "mit eloquenter Brutalität eine Absage erteilt", kommentierte die Süddeutsche Zeitung am Sonnabend.

Mit Deutschland lässt sich das Projekt (eines Gegenpols), auch wenn es ein paar Monate so ausgesehen haben mag, nicht verwirklichen.

Fischer war auch deswegen nett zu den Gastgebern, weil ihm die Instrumente gezeigt wurden. Präsident George W. Bush wertete ihn nicht, wie im Mai den CDU-Herausforderer Roland Koch, durch eine Kurz-Audienz auf und machte dadurch deutlich, dass der Grüne bei seinen weiteren Höhenflügen - im Gespräch ist das Amt des EU-Außenministers - mit Gegenwind aus dem Weißen Haus rechnen muss. Massiv war die Drohung, die Fischer auf einer Gemeinsamen Sitzung der Auswärtigen Ausschüsse des Senats und des Repräsentantenhauses entgegenschlug.

Wenn sich Deutschland noch einmal einen solchen Streit mit den USA wie in diesem Frühjahr leiste, werde das Auswirkungen auf das beiderseitige Verhältnis "für die nächsten 50 Jahre" haben. Kanzler Schröder hatte im März 2002 eine ähnliche Formulierung kolportiert: Deutschland dürfe den USA auch im Falle eines nicht-UN-mandatierten Irak-Krieges nicht die Nutzung seiner Basen und die Rückendeckung durch die Fuchs-Panzer in Kuwait verweigern, weil sonst das deutsch-amerikanische Verhältnis "für die nächsten 30 bis 50 Jahre" beschädigt werden könne.


Wirtschaftliche Symbiose


Die Drohung hat einen materiellen Kern: Im Verlaufe der neunziger Jahre ist die deutsche Abhängigkeit von den USA deutlich gewachsen. Während die deutschen Exporte insgesamt um knapp 90 Prozent zunahmen, explodierte die Warenausfuhr in die USA um 217 Prozent. Jeder fünfte Euro, den deutsche Firmen außerhalb der Euro-Zone umsetzen, ist ein Dollar und kommt aus den USA. Waren die Vereinigten Staaten zu Beginn des Jahrzehnts nur der sechstwichtigste Handelspartner, so haben sie sich jetzt mit einem Anteil von zehn Prozent zum zweitwichtigsten Abnehmer deutscher Exporte entwickelt.

Die indirekte Abhängigkeit ist noch größer: Deutschland ist mit einer Exportquote von 31 Prozent neben Japan die Volkswirtschaft, die am meisten auf den Weltmarkt orientiert ist. Die Konjunktur auf dem Weltmarkt ist aber im wesentlichen eine Resultante der Nachfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten.



Die Europäische Union und Japan, die zusammen für 40 Prozent der Weltwirtschaft stehen, dürften auch im neuen Jahr als Wachstumsmotoren ausfallen. Amerika, das mehr als 30 Prozent des Weltinlandsprodukts erwirtschaftet, muss damit wieder einmal die Zugmaschine spielen.




prognostizierte die FAZ zum Ende des Jahres 2002. Wenn die US-Wirtschaft brummt, brummt die Weltwirtschaft insgesamt - und Deutschland kann exportieren.

Doch die Abhängigkeit ist nicht einseitig. Auch die USA sind mehr Sklave als Herr der globalen Ökonomie - ihre Auslandsverschuldung etwa wächst ständig : Ende der siebziger Jahre waren die USA Netto-Gläubiger mit Forderungen an das Ausland in Höhe von 20 Milliarden US-Dollar, im Jahre 1982 erreichten diese Forderungen mit 231 Milliarden US-Dollar ihren Höchststand. Doch kurz darauf kam die Wende in die roten Zahlen: Seit 1985 sind die USA - Staat, Wirtschaft, Privathaushalte - an das Ausland verschuldet : Im September 2001 betrug die Brutto-Schuld 7.815 Milliarden US-Dollar, verrechnet mit eigenen Forderungen an das Ausland bleibt immer noch eine Netto-Verschuldung in Höhe von 3.493 Milliarden Dollar übrig (am 17.7.2003 hatten die USA 6,722,160,964,748.21 US-Dollar Schulden).

Da die gesamte jährliche Wirtschaftsleistung der USA (BIP) bei etwa 10.000 Milliarden Dollar liegt, liegt die Auslandsverschuldung damit bei knapp 35 Prozent des BIP. Zum Vergleich: Die DDR wurde im Oktober 1989 von einer Arbeitsgruppe des Politbüros für bankrott erklärt, weil sie eine Westverschuldung von 49 Milliarden Valutamark hatte. Das waren lediglich 16 Prozent des BIP der DDR.

Die USA können die (deutschen, europäischen, japanischen) Export-Überschüsse nur deswegen aufsaugen, weil ihnen ausländisches Leihkapital aus diesen Staaten zufließt. Ein militärisches Schlamassel ähnlich wie in Vietnam würde zu einem Vertrauensverlust an den internationalen Finanzmärkten führen - 1971 mussten die USA bekanntlich die Goldbindung des Dollar aufgeben, dessen Kurs stürzte steil ab. Deshalb hieß es am Sonnabend in der FAZ: "Berlin ist nicht an einem Scheitern der Amerikaner im Irak gelegen." Wer soll denn "unsere" Exportüberschüsse aufkaufen, wenn die USA in Folge eines zweiten Vietnams pleite gehen und der Greenback nur noch zum Feueranzünden taugt?


Aber Deutschland tut auch nichts zur Entlastung der US-Army im Irak - Fischer hat die Hoffnungen Powells auf deutsche Hilfstruppen unmissverständlich enttäuscht. Das Verhältnis zwischen Washington und Berlin ist wie das zwischen Löwe und Geier: Der Aasfresser ist weder bereit, sich an der Niederwerfung des Opfers zu beteiligen, noch willens, den Gewaltakt zu behindern, möchte aber den Kadaver ausweiden. Je labiler die Besatzungsherrschaft im Irak wird, um so eher muss Washington die deutsche Forderung, das Kommando an die UN abzutreten, erfüllen. Dann müssten die US-Konzerne aber einen Teil der ergaunerten Konzessionen an die Konkurrenz abgeben.

Werner-Schöpfer Feldmann ist übrigens seit einiger Zeit vom "Flens" abgekommen und versucht ein eigenes Bier in Umlauf zu bringen. Doch während man die alteingeführte Marke an jeder Tankstelle kaufen kann, sucht man den neuen "Bölkstoff" vergebens. Daraus hat Fischer gelernt: Wenn der Trittbrettfahrer zu früh abspringt, kann er mehr verlieren als gewinnen.

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Germany rejects a U.S. rivalry
John Vinocur/IHT IHT
Friday, July 18, 2003

Fischer differentiates Berlin from Paris

PARIS Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany, the leading candidate to become the European Union’s first foreign minister under its new constitution, has told Bush administration officials in Washington that the Europe of the future can be strong only ‘‘together with the United States, and not as its rival.’’ The statement is an important one, a German official in Berlin said, because it clearly differentiates, in an American setting, Germany’s view on Europe’s development from that of France — which talks of Europe as a separate power-to-be in a world of competing poles, alongside the United States, Russia, and China. The German position does not recognize or seek a multipolar world, the official said, but a multilateral one in which issues of international importance are decided through discussion and on the basis of international law. The French view, emphasized recently by Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie and Alain Juppé, who heads President Jacques Chirac’s reformed Gaullist party, involves a vision of the EU’s growth into an international force that could be defined in opposition to or as a rival for the United States. Visiting Washington for the first time since the Iraq war and his government’s rejection of it, Fischer met Thursday with Vice President Dick Cheney after talks earlier with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the White House security adviser. Fischer has made no secret that he wants to become the EU’s first foreign minister. No certain date has been laid out for creation of the post, but it could come as late as in 2006. Although the Americans have nothing to do with naming the EU foreign minister — however much their preferences might be noted — friends of Fischer confirmed a German press account this month that there have been some signs of reticence in the Bush administration about Fischer’s candidacy. In an interview with the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service picked up by German-language news agencies, Fischer, in addition to his remark on rejecting a Europe that is a rival to the United States, talked of a trans-Atlantic partnership after the Iraq war in which ‘‘we must bring all our capabilities together to win the peace.’’ He also restated the German offer of humanitarian and economic help in Iraq. The issue of France seeking to create a Europe conceived in opposition to the United States was pointed up in April when both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed concern about such a strategy. Blair, warning France against a plan he said would make for rivalries and instability, urged Europe and the United States to work as a ‘‘one-polar world’’ in tackling problems. But, in spite of attempts to warm U.S.-French relations, high French officials have shown no inclination in the last two months to move away from urging development of a global political landscape divided into a series of polar entities. Last week, visiting Moscow, Juppé, who is close to Chirac, designated Russia as one of the poles and said that ‘‘the idea of a strategic partnership between the European pole and the Russian pole’’ did not exclude ‘‘dialogue with the other poles, the American pole, of course, and China.’’ Juppé, a former prime minister and foreign minister, added: ‘‘The world of the next decades will function this way’’ — a situation, he insisted, that would be ‘‘much better than a single power ruling over the affairs of the planet.’’ The previous month, talking to Chinese military leaders in Beijing, Alliot-Marie predicted that ‘‘in a few years Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will have opposite him a united Europe.’’ Fischer seemed intent on making it clear that this was neither Germany’s position nor one he would carry forward representing Europe in its foreign affairs. His position appeared in line with a statement by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder when he was confronted with the issue at a press conference with Chirac in April after France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg announced they would set up their own military operations center next year. Asked then to comment about Blair’s definition of a ‘‘one-polar world,’’ Schröder commented that it was ‘‘accurate,’’ and said it was not his view that Europe should be an opposite pole to the United States. He pleaded instead for the primacy of multilateral institutions. International Herald Tribune



Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint…

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Iraq rows slash Labour`s poll lead
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Tuesday July 22, 2003
The Guardian

Labour`s lead over the Conservatives has narrowed to only two points as Tony Blair`s personal rating has taken a battering in the last month, according to the July Guardian/ICM opinion poll.

The poll shows that Mr Blair`s reputations for competence, trustworthiness and being "in touch with ordinary people" have all taken severe knocks in the last three months as the political argument has continued to rage over the war in Iraq.

The fieldwork for the ICM survey was carried out mainly on Friday and Saturday after the death of Dr David Kelly but before the BBC`s decision to name him as its source. It shows that Mr Blair`s personal rating has fallen four points in the last month and now stands at minus 17 points, with 37% happy with the job he is doing as prime minister and 54% unhappy.

His personal rating, which has deteriorated sharply since he enjoyed a plus 7 point "Baghdad bounce" in the immediate aftermath of the military victory, is now heading back towards his prewar depths of unpopularity.

But the ICM survey also shows that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Mr Blair is still seen as overwhelmingly popular among Labour voters, with 75% saying they are satisfied with the job he is doing. Indeed 86% of Labour voters say they see Blair as competent; 70% say he is trustworthy; 63% say he is in touch with ordinary people and only 33% say he lacks clear ideas.

Among the wider electorate, the prime minister`s standing is much more mixed. In the last three months the proportion of the electorate who regard him as trustworthy has fallen 12 points to only 39% and those who see him as "in touch with ordinary people" has fallen by 8 points to 34%. Both are qualities which prime ministers notoriously find hard to regain once they have lost them.

A clear majority of all voters, including Labour, continue to believe that Blair relies too much on spin and public relations.

His reputation for competence has also slipped since April, by 9 points, but a healthy 59% of voters still think he can be seen as a competent prime minister.

The fact that a clear majority of the voters also see Mr Blair as a tough prime minister who has firm principles and clear ideas despite the lack of trust shows that the picture is more complex than some recent polls have indicated.

The ICM poll shows that the impact of the government`s bitter dispute with the BBC has continued to erode the government`s opinion poll lead, which has fallen from a comfortable 12 points only two months ago.

Labour is down two points on the month to 36%; the Conservatives are unchanged on 34%; the Liberal Democrats up one point on 22%; and "others", mainly the nationalist parties and the greens, up two points to 9%.

Compared with their performance at the last general election, Labour is down six points; the Tories are up one point and the Liberal Democrats up three.

But there is little comfort for Conservative central office in these figures in that the party has failed to capitalise on Labour`s biggest crisis since the petrol dispute three years ago.

Only 13% of voters believe that the Tories will win an outright victory at the next general election. Indeed, they have yet to convince most of their own voters this is possible: only 30% say they will win the next election outright.

By contrast, 63% of Labour voters believe their party will form the next government, making complacency rather than credibility the main problem facing their election strategists.

· ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,001 adults aged 18 and over by telephone from July 18 to July 20, 2003. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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I`ll decide extent of inquiry, says judge
Critics from the three main parties demand wider review of the government`s use of Iraq intelligence

Michael White, political editor
Tuesday July 22, 2003
The Guardian

Lord Hutton, the senior law lord appointed to investigate the death of David Kelly, yesterday announced his determination to resist all outside pressure that might inhibit the scope of his inquiry.

In most circumstances that would be enough to quell doubts about the range and authority of Lord Hutton`s investigation - most of which will be conducted in public.

In the current fevered atmosphere, it left opposition MPs and others still raising questions, not least about how Dr Kelly`s name got into the public domain.

Downing Street`s hopes that Lord Hutton will leave policy issues to the two parliamentary investigations already in progress and concentrate on the last week of Dr Kelly`s life may not be fulfilled.

No 10 ducked such questions yesterday. But Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: "Clearly in getting to the bottom of this tragedy, Lord Hutton will have to touch on some of the wider aspects of the case the government made for going to war."

That view is widely shared. Robin Cook, the former cabinet minister, yesterday endorsed it. So did Richard Shepherd, the libertarian Conservative MP, who argued that Lord Hutton must be allowed to see all the raw intelligence data that prompted BBC claims that No 10 had "sexed up" pre-war dossiers on Iraq`s weapons arsenal.

Such data is currently being examined by the intelligence and security committee of senior peers and MPs, meeting in private. They will decide the narrow point of contention between No 10 and the BBC over the prominence given to the 45-minute readiness claim on weapons of mass destruction.

That is not good enough, Mr Shepherd told the Guardian. "Tony Blair could have sorted out this side issue by appointing a judge to decide what happened weeks ago. Who cares about the vanity of Alastair Campbell and the BBC compared with the much bigger question of sending people to war?"

Mr Blair has already signalled his own willingness to give evidence to Lord Hutton - curtailing his family holiday if necessary - and senior BBC executives were also eager to provide their account of dealings with the weapons specialist, the "prime source" of their disputed reports, who apparently committed suicide on Thursday.

But the fact that the inquiry has been set up as a "quickie" - likely to report in the early autumn - prompted some critics, including the shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, to insist that a full-blown 1921 Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act investigation would be more suitable.

That would allow Lord Hutton to subpoena witnesses, something No 10 says is not needed because the main players are keen to cooperate. At a photo-opportunity at the Department for Constitutional Affairs the 72-year-old Lord Hutton yesterday sought to address such fears.

"It will be for me to decide as I think right within my terms of reference the matters which will be the subject of my investigation," he said. "I intend to sit in public in the near future to state how I intend to conduct the inquiry and toconsider the extent to which interested parties and bodies should be represented by counsel or solicitors."

That amounted to a hint that key witnesses such as Mr Campbell or even the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, could have lawyers at their sides. So far witnesses such as Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter at the centre of the drama, have appeared with a senior colleague as an observer. Dr Kelly was accompanied before select committees by two Ministry of Defence minders.

Mr Blair`s spokesman said: "It`s up to Lord Hutton to decide who he wants to talk to, when he wants to talk to them and in what conditions he wants to talk to them."

Mr Letwin told Radio 4`s Today programme: "There are very large numbers of questions which all centre on the issue of whether the public can trust what the government tells it and which relate to the information given to parliament and the public during the lead-up to war in Iraq."


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Bush in new threat to Iran and Syria
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Tuesday July 22, 2003
The Guardian

President George Bush issued a strident new warning to Iran and Syria yesterday, accusing them of harbouring terrorists and hinting at the consequences. "This behaviour is completely unacceptable," he said during a joint press conference at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. "And states that continue to harbour terrorists will be held completely accountable."

Mr Bush said that the sponsoring of terrorism in the region was undermining the latest push for peace in the Middle East, which is delicately poised after promising overtures last month.

The US president will meet both the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon, in Washington later this month, and is keen to ensure that the influence of regional power brokers Syria and Iran does not jeopardise recent progress.

"Both prime minister Abbas and prime minister Sharon are showing leadership and courage," Mr Bush said. "Now it`s time for governments across the Middle East to support the efforts of these two men by fighting terror in all its forms."

Iran`s nuclear ambitions are looming particularly large over the region. Israel warned yesterday that Iran "is trying everything" to get a nuclear weapon, and that if it succeeded it would threaten a far wider theatre than just the Middle East.

Iran denied the charge, saying that developing nuclear weapons would imperil its own safety. It repeated the claim that its nuclear developments are aimed at meeting energy needs and are in no way a threat to the region.

But the EU also voiced "increasing concern" about Iran`s nuclear manoeuvres, and warned that a trade deal could be in jeopardy unless Tehran allows inspectors to look at its nuclear projects. The Bush administration has made no secret of its desire for regime change in Iran, but has had even less international support than it had for toppling Saddam Hussein.

During Mr Berlusconi`s visit, the US president has thanked him for his support as part of the "coalition of the willing" during the war in Iraq.

Before sitting down to a chicken lunch at the ranch, Mr Bush said: "Defending freedom requires cost and sacrifice. The United States is grateful for Italy`s willingness to bear the burdens with us."

Mr Bush expressed concern about the deteriorating situation in Liberia, but stopped short of specifying what sort of contingent he would commit to the country beyond the 40 marines sent in yesterday to protect its embassy in Monrovia.


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New visa rules for entry to US
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Tuesday July 22, 2003
The Guardian

Visitors to the United States, including those from the UK, will face new passport and visa requirements from October 1. The change in policy has already been introduced for other European countries and has led to those without the proper passport or visa being handcuffed, strip-searched and sent back to their home country.

The new requirement comes under the USA Patriot Act of 2001. Visitors from visa waiver countries such as the UK must now have a machine-readable passport. The US state department advised people to check if their passport was compatible. Those whose passports are not will have need a $100 US visa.


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If politicians want power, they must give some away
This crisis is not about a dossier, but the political elite that made it

Hugo Young
Tuesday July 22, 2003
The Guardian

The British political class is in deep crisis. Its promises are not trusted, its words are not believed. The people who are meant to be our leaders no longer get any real purchase on the public mind. Many of them know it. Oliver Letwin, one of the few political voices who retains the calm and quizzical tone of a normal human being, alluded to it yesterday morning. The political class needs rescuing from a predicament that poisons the life of the entire country.

The agents of such a rescue are, in fact, to hand. But they lie outside the political class, and the government, befitting its own blindness to the problem, seems determined not to recruit them.

The Hutton inquiry looks like one form of rescue. Enter the independent judge. He is assigned to drain the heat of partisan battle out of the appalling death of Dr David Kelly. Judges are trusted as politicians seldom are. Lord Hutton, who spent years on the Northern Ireland bench, knows what it is to pick a way between some of the most unforgiving partisans in the world. He may break free from his narrow terms of reference, and plunge into the minutiae about the infamous September dossier - the 45-minute deployment time for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and all that - that brought about this bloody mess. It will be, after all, hard to divine what Kelly told Gilligan about what Campbell did or did not do without getting into that. The ball of wool is bound to unravel some of the way.

But that`s not what the government wants. It wants the threads kept tightly furled. In that respect, Kelly`s death is a kind of lurid convenience. It demands inquiry. There has to be a judge. The apparatus of judicial reassurance can therefore be wheeled in, giving a perhaps unwary public the sense that the politicians have subcontracted what bothers people to this agent of untarnished credibility.

However, they have not. The Kelly tragedy is a pimple on the hide of a bigger elephant. Why did Tony Blair go to war? Was there a discrepancy between his stated reasons and his real reasons? Did he and his people distort intelligence assessments for propaganda (an issue now dogging George Bush and receiving serious Congressional inquiry)? Was the country manoeuvred into war on a false bill of goods, drawn up sincerely or otherwise? These questions have attracted much more scepticism after the "victory" than before.

They`ve also been more openly discussed. The intelligence world now has its own briefing methods, which open the sacred veil of silence that has seen off the demands for inquiries in the past. Defending its refusal to let another judge in to examine the big picture, the government points to the foreign affairs committee and the intelligence and security committee of the Commons. But the one was kept away from key witnesses, the other meets in secret and reports only to the prime minister.

There were times when this might have satisfied a trusting public. Now it runs into the political class problem. Nobody will easily trust the words of political insiders, often not very eminent, reporting to the Supreme Insider and awaiting any acts of censorship it suits him to perform. What the questions need is examination and answer by an outsider, whether a judge or (if such a person exists - another decline produced by 20 years of partisan politics) a former mandarin of the status of Lord Franks who did the job after the Falklands war.

For the government to concede this, however, would be to sacrifice, as they believe, control. They will not do it. Mirroring the public`s lack of trust in government is ministers` lack of trust in the people. They prefer to tough it out on the basis of their own power, rather than delegate decisions to another power, even when that power might be the people themselves.

The case for a referendum on the future European constitution exposes the same pattern of behaviour. The government rejects it. I`ve argued before that this will be a serious political error. On political grounds alone, the coming stage of constitutional reform offers a perfect opportunity to confront British, or rather English, voters with the choice that has to be made: do they want to be in the EU as about to be roughly shaped, or not? The changes put on the table by the Giscard d`Estaing convention are a clever, moderate and acceptable mix. This is the moment and the method to decide whether the Europhobia that wants to set the clock back several decades will continue to corrode our relations and undermine our ambitions for the indefinite future, or not.

But there`s another reason to favour a referendum. It would be a surrender of political power to popular power. It would say: we the political class are failing you, we have not listened enough, we have not been interested in your voices except once every four years, we face a rather desperate need to find new routes to public trust. So we are letting go. We acknowledge that this change in the shape of the EU is indeed constitutional, does mark something pretty big, and merits the thumbprint of the nation to endorse it.

This would be a risky thing to do. The disease of the political class may have reached so far into the nation`s bloodstream that when the dominant set of politicians argues for a verdict, that will be enough to send the people the other way. Certainly Mr Blair has far to travel if he is ever to become once again an asset rather than a liability to any of the European causes in which he undoubtedly believes. Whether the referendum were on the euro or the constitution, he would have reason to view it with special trepidation - as, no doubt, he would the judge set loose to examine who told the truth about the case for war against Iraq.

But the alternative is to watch the political class sink further in public esteem. High among the counts against it, some of them exhibited over both Iraq and Europe, are its capacity for twisting evidence, its relentless indulgence in casuistry (viz that Europe is not a constitutional issue, or that the September dossier was in no way souped up), its inability to admit any but the least offensive errors (viz that the February dossier was copied off the web), and its ironclad defensiveness in all circumstances.

I write as one who is not an enemy of politicians, and does not believe their motives are invariably suspect. But the class has a lot to be defensive about. It has come to be seen by many voters if not yet as a public enemy then certainly as suspect number one in the debauching of public life. The Brits` pride in their public standards, compared with those of other countries, lies in ruins. The people offer one road back - if Mr Blair can bear to trust anyone but himself.

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DEr Bericht der WaPo ist gestern nicht beachtet worden.

Annan backs Iraq`s US-picked leaders
Gary Younge in New York
Tuesday July 22, 2003
The Guardian

The United Nations secretary general gave his stamp of approval yesterday to Iraq`s governing council, selected by the US-led occupation forces in Iraq, which he believes "will provide a broadly representative Iraqi partner with whom the United Nations and the international community at large can engage".

In a report released yesterday he called on the UN security council, which will discuss the report today, to "assist the governing council" and "confer legitimacy on the process" of transition to democracy laid out by the occupying powers.

British officials welcomed Mr Annan`s comments, which came as the security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and the 25-member governing council remains divided on who should lead it.

"Our initial reading is that it is encouraging and we should be in a position to recommend it [today]," said one official.

A delegation from the council, many of whom are returned exiles drawn from disparate and often fractious religious and ethnic communities, will visit the UN today, and declare itself the sovereign representative of Iraq.

Mr Annan praised the occupying powers for having "deployed intensive efforts to build consensus around its evolving transition plan".

The report also opens the possibility of the US going back to the UN and seeking its help in policing Iraq at a time when public support for the occupation is waning.

With American troops being killed almost daily and the operation costing approximately $4bn a month, America is keen to share the financial and military costs. But it has had trouble persuading other countries, notably India, to provide soldiers to serve under anything but a UN mandate.

Mr Annan`s report does not provide a blanket endorsement of the process so far.

The UN special representative, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, has stressed "the need to ensure Iraqi ownership of the political process".

He also called on the Americans to "devolve real authority to a broadly representative and self-selecting Iraqi leadership" while raising serious concerns about the security situation.

The report provides respite for the US and British governments, as questions about the legitimacy of their war plans and their failure to find weapons of mass destruction place both governments under domestic political pressure, with few international allies.

The report comes after a flurry of diplomatic activity from George Bush`s administration, including a meeting between the president and Mr Annan, and talks between both national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and secretary of state Colin Powell, and security council diplomats.

The efforts reflect a growing sense within the administration that the international consensus it eschewed when going into Iraq will have to be established if it is to get out in the foreseeable future.


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July 22, 2003

Bush tries to switch focus to Israel peace
From Tim Reid in Washington



PRESIDENT BUSH attempted to shift public attention from bad news in Iraq to peace in the Middle East yesterday, when he accused Syria and Iran of undermining efforts to create a Palestinian state.
In prepared remarks delivered at a press conference on his Texas ranch, Mr Bush did not mention Iraq, but instead declared: “Today Syria and Iran continue to harbour and assist terrorists. This behaviour is completely unacceptable and states that support terror will be held accountable.This undermines the prospects for peace in the Middle East and betrays the true interests of the Palestinian people.”

Washington has been giving warning to Damascus and Tehran for months that they must do more to clamp down internally on terrorist groups, particularly Syria’s support for Hezbollah and Tehran’s alleged refuge for senior al-Qaeda officials.

Although the remarks came only days before separate White House visits by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister, Mr Bush’s remarks appeared to be a clear effort to divert media attention from Iraq, but it was an issue that continued to dog him.

Mr Bush, appearing next to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, a staunch ally in the Iraq campaign, was forced to answer questions on Iraq. He said that the continuing attacks in Iraq were merely “an extension of the hostility that is part of the war to liberate Iraq”.

Intimating that he is now open to a new UN mandate increasing the role of international troops in the peacekeeping effort, Mr Bush said he is working to persuade more nations to help in Iraq. After France, Germany and India refused last week to send troops without a wider UN mandate, the Administration has been forced to consider returning to the Security Council. Facing domestic calls to “internationalise” the occupation, the US has also asked Turkey to send 10,000 troops, despite strained relations with Ankara.

Mr Bush’s comments came as another US soldier was killed in Baghdad. The soldier, of the 1st Armored Division, was killed with an Iraqi interpreter in a gun and bomb attack, bringing the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq to five since Friday and 39 since Mr Bush declared serious combat over on May 1.

The President’s credibility is being eroded by controversy over discredited claims in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa. Initially the White House forced George Tenet, the CIA Director, to take the blame for including the claim in the speech, but yesterday there were further allegations that the White House had twisted intelligence.

On Friday, the White House released excerpts of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a detailed summary of all US intelligence agencies’ views on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes. First circulated in the Administration on October 2, it was released by the White House to try to show that the President’s prewar claims were genuine.

Instead, the excerpts have raised more questions, contradicting one claim made by Mr Bush in a speech to the nation on October 7. Mr Bush gave warning that “on any given day” Saddam could decide “to provide a chemical or biological weapon to terrorists”. In fact, the NIE report said that Saddam was likely to supply weapons to terrorists only “if engaged in a life or death struggle with the US”.

It also emerged that the CIA was never asked to check Mr Bush’s use of the British claim that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological weapon in 45 minutes. Mr Bush twice cited the claim in speeches in September, attributing it to the British, and the claim is still on the White House website, without attribution. CIA officials said that they were never asked to check its veracity.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-753268,00.html

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July 22, 2003

‘We should deal with our troubles first’
Elaine Monaghan from Coldwater, Michigan
Support for the war and Bush is flagging in the US heartland



A TORN American flag flaps from Sara Ostrander’s front porch in this small town in the heart of the flat, green farmland of southern Michigan.
The 28-year-old mother of three children put it up after a friend narrowly survived the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Nearly two years on, its colours have faded, along with her enthusiasm for President Bush and his war on Iraq.

Mrs Ostrander feels that Mr Bush deceived her over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and she wants American troops — including her sister’s boyfriend — to be brought back. “They have overstayed,” she said. “We just want them home.”

Across Michigan teachers are losing their jobs and classes are being cut back as the state struggles to reduce its budget deficit. “We should deal with our own problems first,” she said.

Coldwater, a short drive from the Republican Party’s birthplace, is as patriotic as any town in America’s heartlands and many of its 36,000 residents still back Mr Bush’s decision to topple Saddam.

Irma Spence, 75, the owner of Irma’s Restaurant on West Chicago Street, said younger Americans had no idea what they were talking about. “They don’t remember World War Two like I do. Sometimes thousands died in a day,” she said. To date 148 American troops have been killed in hostile action in Iraq since the war began. “The United States has always helped anyone in trouble. There might not be an England if it wasn’t for us.”

Yet, with US soldiers being picked off daily, the cost of America’s occupation now running at $1 billion (£625 million) a week and no prospect of the military withdrawing in the forseeable future, Mrs Ostrander is not alone in her sense of disillusionment. Doubts are beginning to stalk Coldwater’s neat, gridiron streets, as they are across America.

Mr Bush’s approval rating has plummeted from about 90 per cent after the September 11 attacks of 2001 to 55 per cent now, according to a Time/CNN poll released yesterday. Only 39 per cent of Americans think that the US intervention in Iraq has been successful. Fifty-one per cent now question whether they can trust Mr Bush as a leader. Only 47 per cent say they can.

“The problems in Iraq took 1,000 years to develop. Where does George W. Bush get off thinking he can just go in and settle this stuff?” Connie Sowers, 39 and a “Republican by marriage only”, said as she rested from serving in the diner. “He’s lied to everyone.”

“I think George Bush should be tried for war crimes,” said Marvin Rosenberg, who voted for Mr Bush in 2000, but will not do so next year. “People say that people with my views don’t support the troops, but that’s a bunch of bullshit. I do support the troops, but I said before they went that if they didn’t find the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and, what’s his name, Rumsfeld, and all the others should be tried,” he said, referring to Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.

Coldwater is the county seat of Branch County and part of the seventh congressional district, which in 2000 backed Mr Bush over Al Gore by just 51 per cent to 46. The state of Michigan narrowly backed Mr Gore. Whether Coldwater will back Mr Bush again next year is far from clear.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-753150,00.html

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July 22, 2003
In Search for Baath Loyalists, U.S. Finds Itself in Gray Area
By AMY WALDMAN


BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ahmad Saleh al-Wan says he languished for 15 years in an Iranian prison, a foot soldier in Iraq`s unwinnable war against its neighbor. When he came home in 1997, his eyesight ruined, Saddam Hussein gave him his reward: he was made a "group" member in the Baath Arab Socialist Party, the vehicle for Mr. Hussein`s rise to power and his grip on it. An honor, the rank more importantly meant higher pay for Mr. Wan in his job at a government printing plant.

But six years later, Mr. Hussein is gone, the Americans are here, and the reward that was meant to ease Mr. Wan`s life has, he says, ruined it.

Under a policy to "de-Baathify" Iraq imposed in May by L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator, all public employees with the rank of group or above in the party have lost their jobs. Like many of his former colleagues, Mr. Wan, 51, is applying for an exemption. But for now, he says he has no way to support his five children. Gaunt and unkempt, he comes to the printing plant and hangs about like a ghost.

The policy is one piece of the effort under way here to "extirpate" — the word of Mr. Bremer`s choosing — the remnants of the old government, and rid Iraq of an ideology that was born long before Mr. Hussein`s rule but became inextricably intertwined with it. Mr. Hussein took over the party in the 1960`s and rode its slogan of "One Arab Nation With an Eternal Message" and its principles of unity, freedom and socialism, for more than three decades.

Much like the Nazi Party, and the Communist parties of Eastern Europe, the Baath Party came to play a central role in disseminating propaganda, stifling dissent, and ensuring that neighbors and colleagues policed each other`s behavior, speech and thought.

The effort to "de-Baathify" Iraq mirrors efforts in postwar Germany and Japan and the post-Communist Soviet bloc. It is seen as the first step in building a new, democratic culture here, and undoing the legacy of 30 years of authoritarian rule. But like all principles, this one is easier to pronounce than apply.

Not all of the people affected are as sympathetic as Mr. Wan. There are plenty like Ibrahim al-Najim, 55, a university administrator and unrepentant Baathist who conceded passing reports about people up the party chain but said he could not be held accountable for how the security services used the information. Even now, his greatest regret about Mr. Hussein`s rule is not gross violations of human rights but his betrayal of the party`s pan-Arabic ideology by the invasion of Kuwait.

But many people, probably most, fall in between as those who went along to get along, who did not believe but did not defy. "I`m one of the ones with clean hands," said Fawzia Habib Hassan, a school principal and ranking party member who is now out of work.

Some worry that the current approach may sweep up some whose complicity was only nominal — and leave many of the guilty untouched. Low-level members could have given the word that sent someone to prison as easily as higher-ranking ones, even non-Baathists say.

Hints and Accusations

The Baathists also overlapped with and worked closely with the vast security apparatus, which has been dissolved but not brought to account. Some Baathists accrued wealth or property, sometimes taken from their victims, that could give them a leg up in a new free-market economy. All of this will have to be sorted out for some sense of justice to prevail in the new Iraq, a process that may take years.

At the Association of Freed Prisoners in Baghdad, where volunteers have amassed millions of government and party files, they are finding that the identities of many of those who gave orders for executions and the like were masked by code names or numbers.

But the association is also closely guarding any information about perpetrators until a new justice system is in place. "We do not want to start trouble within Iraqi society," said the association`s administrator, Nasir Jasim Lazeem al-Khrawi, 43.

In the meantime, millions of minds shaped by the party`s culture of eliminating choice and smothering initiative will have to be retooled.

That culture is well documented in fat notebooks that fill a maze of lightless rooms beneath the Baath Party`s National Command headquarters in Baghdad. Much of the bureaucracy recorded here is banal: Iraqis informing on one another and then the reports moving up the party chain of command in a voluminous, handwritten paper trail.

The party had at least 1.2 million members of a total population of about 24 million, and it had many more supporters, but ultimately only one member counted. The files include letters appealing directly to Mr. Hussein.

A dismissed Baath Party member from Basra wrote to him in desperation, "The accusation I have connections to Iranians is false."

The recruiting plan for a southern district includes this thought: "Show the importance of the leadership of Saddam Hussein to lead the Baath Party, the country, and oppose the aggressions of the Americans and Zionists on our country."

The plan further suggests training all Baath Party members in light and heavy weapons, and "creating a deeper understanding of the democratic concepts of the Baath Party in this society."

Over time, party membership became a prerequisite for most chances at higher education and many promotions in the public and even private sector. There were other sources of power in Iraq, including those linked to Mr. Hussein by tribe or birth, but the party held its own until the end.

One March 2002 decree in the Baath files orders that students applying for advanced degrees meet the party`s security and intellectual requirements. Such decrees constitute the defense of those who say they are being unfairly punished for trying to survive and succeed in a system that showed no sign of ending.

"I`m sure Mr. Bremer and the new administration will understand this was our duty," said Hyam Sabri, 38, the principal at El Najat Secondary School for girls in eastern Baghdad. "We had to be Baathists." She said she joined the party at the age of 12 because she knew even then that she wanted to teach. In 1997 she became a group member, which means that she has now lost her job.

Defining Duty

Mr. Bremer and his aides bring a different understanding to the Baathists. Scott Carpenter, a deputy assistant secretary of state whose portfolio in Iraq includes weeding out senior Baathists, argues that the process should be the administration`s "No. 1 priority," even if it slows the revival of government services.

"Unless you scrub hard," Mr. Carpenter said in an interview, "you can`t create the seedbed" for a new society. For now, he said, the occupation should "cut very deeply." Over time the Iraqis may create, as the Allies and the Germans did with many Nazis after World War II, a mechanism to rehabilitate former Baathists.

In Iraq, Americans are relying more on the model set by the purging processes throughout Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism. Mr. Carpenter spent time there, and said that in some countries the Communists simply capitalized on the assets and networks they had amassed while in power to reinvent themselves.

He has little sympathy for those who say they had no choice but to rise in the Baath Party.

"There was also somebody who said no," Mr. Carpenter said. "It represents that fundamental human choice."

From the view of the American soldiers charged with putting the policy in place, things are less black and white. To the chagrin of the civilian administration, some commanders have tried to use Baathists with skills and experience to get government services running again. Other commanders complain that excluding so many people from the building of a new society is creating an army of disenchanted people.

And many soldiers are finding that, up close, nuance crowds in. "It`s kind of dicey — who was just toeing the line, doing what they had to do, and those ideologues," said Lt. Louis Morelli, 26, of the First Armored Division, who is based at Baghdad University. "There`s a gray area." His unit has been besieged with anonymous tips and letters complaining about Baathists still in their jobs. They must sort through it all, weeding out the personal grievances.

The unit also wants to save a man it has fired, Hamid al-Muhammad, 36, a champion high-jumper. "I`ve got kind of an attachment to him," said First Lt. Mike Messner, 25.

Mr. Muhammad willingly concedes that he joined the party in 1991, but said that was only because he wanted to finish his higher education. "It was a choice — you step backward to guarantee two steps forward," he said. His two brothers chose not to become members, and they never found jobs.

Mr. Muhammad earned a doctorate and worked as a physical trainer and extracurricular activity coordinator at Saddam University. In 2001, he became a group member in the party — at students` insistence, he said. Now he is unemployed, with a pregnant wife and severely disabled daughter. He has no skill essential to the allies or the Iraqi people, as the exemption application demands. It comes down to this, Lieutenant Morelli said: "good character, good values."

Exceptions to a Rule

That probably will not be enough. Even the president of Saddam University — now renamed Nahrain University — faces an uphill battle in trying to rehire the 25 professors he has lost of 260. Many are highly trained specialists.

The president, Dr. Mahmoud Hayawi Hamash al-Tikriti, has dutifully made the case for his fired professors, but he holds out little hope. Saddam University was founded in 1993 to provide the best in scientific and professional education, so originally its officials were allowed to hire on merit. But in the past several years, Dr. Hamash said, he faced increasing pressure to "Baathify" the university. He could appeal to hire a non-Baathist, but exceptions were rare.

Now he finds himself appealing for exceptions to keep Baathists. "This is a mirror image," he said with a smile.

Dr. Hamash still has his job because he left the Baath Party in 1964, a year after joining. He conceded, though, that he cooperated with security agencies and party officials to screen applicants for higher education and jobs at the university — the files at the National Command are full of correspondence with him — and said he never took a stance that would have put him in danger or into exile.

He criticized privately — and publicly sent Saddam Hussein congratulatory telegrams. "Before the war, we used to say, `If he weren`t a dictator and a murderer, he would be all right,` " he said.

One challenge for the Americans is that many Iraqis still support Baathist principles as the best to uplift and modernize Iraq. Others have been shaped by three decades of propaganda delivered through state news media and party seminars.

"We didn`t become members of this party for Saddam`s sake," said Nassir Muhammad, 22, a political science student. "We found in this party and its aims, and what it wishes for, things we liked," particularly Arab nationalism. He hopes to go into academia, he said, to create a generation that understands that the "occupying Americans and international Zionism" are the real enemy.

Having been raised to please the powerful, others are simply transferring blind obedience to the new powers — the Americans in some areas, hard-line Islamic groups in others. For example, Ms. Sabri, the school principal, has allowed hard-line Shiite groups to put posters of clerics in her school — next to the Hussein-era militaristic murals — and says she would adopt an Islamic curriculum, despite Iraq`s secular character, if told to do so.

Hearts and Minds

No policy can instantly remove Baathist elements from minds. Nor can any decree wipe out overnight the fear that the party created, as suggests the situation at the printing plant where Mr. Wan, the former prisoner of war, worked.

The plant caught the eye of Lt. Col. James Danna of the First Armored Division when its employees refused to sign a form, given to all government employees, renouncing their membership in and allegiance to the Baath Party. "They`re really being defiant," he said.

Hussein Abbas, 35, said neither he, nor the 650 people he managed, nor the director general he worked for, had signed the form. "What`s the use of this paper?" he asked.

It seemed to be intransigence for its own sake. But in the dim office of the director general, with the door closed, curtains drawn and anonymity guaranteed, things became clearer. In truth, the director general said, he had signed the form, and he believed that all of his employees had too. Officials with the American-led civilian administration knew this, he said, even if the American military did not.

But no one would ever publicly admit signing the form, he said. They were too frightened of vengeful Baathists.

"I cannot provide 19,000 people with security," he said.

One of his colleagues had recently received a note threatening death if he continued working with the Americans. The director general had begun driving his car himself because he no longer trusted his driver.

"We can`t tell our friends from our enemies," he said in a low voice. "You cannot even trust your own children."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Soldiers with one of two American military vehicles destroyed on Monday in an explosion along a road in Baghdad, believed to be the strike in which one soldier and his Iraqi interpreter were killed.

July 22, 2003
Wolfowitz Sees Challenges, and Vindication, in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT


MOSUL, Iraq, July 21 — The fruits of a long personal mission for Paul D. Wolfowitz were spread out before him today in a modest second-floor conference room in this bustling city in northern Iraq.

There sat the newly elected mayor and his council — Arabs, Kurds, Christians and Turkmens. It was the kind of mix of ethnic groups and faiths that Mr. Wolfowitz has long argued could thrive if Saddam Hussein was ousted, and Iraq became free and democratic.

Now Mr. Hussein is gone, and Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary and a main intellectual architect of the Bush administration`s Iraq policy, today expressed both elation at meeting the council — part of a carefully choreographed visit to Iraq — and sounded a cautionary note to his new allies in what he says is a running war on terror.

"You don`t build a democracy like you build a house," Mr. Wolfowitz said over tea, honey pastries and water buffalo cheese. "Democracy grows like a garden. If you keep the weeds out and water the plants and you`re patient, eventually you get something magnificent."

Mr. Wolfowitz crisscrossed Iraq on a fact-finding trip to gauge the road ahead for America`s strategy here, as attacks against United States troops continued to put pressure on the Bush administration.

In the latest strike on Americans, a roadside bomb exploded today near a military convoy in northern Baghdad, killing one soldier and his Iraqi interpreter, The Associated Press reported. Three other members of the First Armored Division were wounded. The American military credited an Iraqi bystander who helped the troops out of the damaged vehicles with saving the life of one of the soldiers.

Mr. Wolfowitz`s five-day journey seemed to produce a welter of soaring emotions as well as a sense of final vindication in a man who had warned since 1979 of the menace posed by Mr. Hussein and his Baath Party followers — long before anyone feared Iraq`s suspected chemical and biological weapons arsenal.

Much of the trip had the feel of being stage-managed to support those long-stated views on Mr. Hussein`s brutality. Reporters joined Mr. Wolfowitz on a tour of a mass grave in Hilla, where 3,000 bodies had been unearthed from shallow pits. He led another tour through the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad where thousands of Iraqis were tortured and executed.

Mr. Wolfowitz has long compared the rule of Mr. Hussein to that of Nicolae Ceaucescu, the deposed head of Communist Romania. So when the occupation authority`s senior civilian adviser to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry turned out to be a Romanian diplomat, Mr. Wolfowitz was delighted when the diplomat agreed with his comparison.

Throughout the trip, in conformity with his activist bent, Mr. Wolfowitz referred to Mr. Hussein as "tyrant," "killer" and "sadist."

Mr. Wolfowitz said at a news conference here that Washington would welcome outside help in rebuilding Iraq, but he warned its neighbors and suspected foreign guerrilla fighters who may have arrived in the country against meddling. "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq," he said. "Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not."

During his tour, Mr. Wolfowitz was greeted as a liberator by two groups who suffered the most under Mr. Hussein`s three-decade rule — Kurds here in the north and Shiites in the south, especially marshland Arabs — and he listened to their horrific tales of loved ones tortured or killed by Mr. Hussein`s followers.

Mr. Wolfowitz was, however, also a magnet for complaints that the all-powerful United States had failed to provide more security, more electricity and more jobs. "Even though there are many things we can do, we are not gods, and the things we can do take time," Mr. Wolfowitz told leaders here. "It`s important for you and your colleagues to teach patience."

During the trip, Mr. Wolfowitz underscorced Mr. Hussein`s brutality, but he virtually ignored the issue of weapons of mass destruction, even though that was President Bush`s main reason for waging the war.

Mr. Wolfowitz met briefly in private on Sunday with David Kay, who is overseeing the strategy for a newly expanded American search team.

"I`m not concerned about weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said tonight to reporters traveling with him, adding that that was now the job of American intellegence agencies. "I`m concerned about getting Iraq on its feet."

Clearly Iraq is still a very dangerous place. On the ground, Mr. Wolfowitz traveled in a heavily armed convoy, often with attack helicopters buzzing overhead. Word of his destinations was not widely disseminated in advance. His C-130 transport plane detected enemy ground radar on a flight today to Kirkuk, and discharged flares as a defensive measure. Crew members said they saw no missiles.

Immense challenges lie ahead — some glimpsed by Mr. Wolfowitz and others discussed in his many meetings with Iraqis and Americans now trying to run Iraq. Thieves in Basra tap into pipelines and smuggle oil into nearby Iran. The slightest rumor of fuel shortages creates huge lines at gas stations, requiring Army soldiers to stand guard. The country needs tens of thousands of new police officers.

In Baghdad and Mosul, Iraqis who work for the occupation authority have received death threats. Foreign guerrilla fighters and terrorists continue to infiltrate Iraq`s porous borders and ambush American troops. The United States is scrambling to set up a new Iraqi civil defense force to free up thousands of American troops to conduct antiguerrilla missions and to put more of an Iraqi face on the postwar security effort.

Despite the challenges, Mr. Wolfowitz found an ebullient note here as he wrapped up his trip. "I feel very encouraged overall that conditions here are much better than I thought they were before I came," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a news conference for mainly Kurdish journalists. "The biggest challenge we face immediately is a very serious security challenge. But I believe it`s just a very small minority of Iraqis and some foreigners who are doing that.

"You can`t deal with the complex situation of Iraq in simply a one-dimensional way," he said today. "The problem of security is related to the problem of electricity. They`re both related to the problem of employment. And the question of governance affects everything. We need a strategy that moves forward on all those things."

Indeed, there is some progress. Here in northern Iraq, the 101st Airborne Division says it has helped establish interim city and provincial governments, restore commerce along the Syrian and Turkish borders, and repair schools, bridges and courthouses.

In the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in south-central Iraq — despite a tense confrontation between Americans and crowds of Iraqis supporting a young ayatollah in Najaf over the weekend — American marines have worked closely with tribal and religious leaders to win their trust. At one point, Mr. Wolfowitz gloated that many of the dire predictions of "uninformed commentators" and Middle East experts that Shiites would rise up against the American occupation forces have so far not materialized.

"It`s hard for them to throw rocks at us when we`re handing out water in 110-degree heat," said Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the First Marine Division.

There were more demonstrations in northern Baghdad today, The A.P. reported, as Shiites gathered to protest the presence of American troops in Iraq.

During his trip, Mr. Wolfowitz took copious notes and threw out questions and comments to everyone from aid workers on their security conditions — "Save the Children`s office here has suspended operations because of death threats" — to chatting with the Tennessee Air National Guard C-130 crew that flew him here. — "They have been on active duty for 19 of the past 23 months."

He said the barrage of information and impressions over the five days had felt like drinking out of "two or three fire hoses" at once, and many questions remain.

None, perhaps, is as pointed as the fate of Mr. Hussein himself. Military commanders say he is still alive and almost surely in Iraq, and Mr. Wolfowitz said he would eventually be captured or killed. He acknowledged this was crucial for ending the state of fear Mr. Hussein still engenders in many Iraqis.

At a city council meeting in Najaf, one councilman even asked if the United States was secretly holding Mr. Hussein to ensure that Iraqis did what the occupation authority wanted. It set off a rare flash of anger, and strong language, from Mr. Wolfowitz. "We`re not playing any games with Saddam Hussein," he said. "The sooner we can catch that bastard, excuse me, the better."



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July 22, 2003
Crimes Outside the World`s Jurisdiction
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY


WASHINGTON
A crusading Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, has been winning praise from human rights groups for trying to prosecute members of the military juntas that ruled, and terrorized, South America in the 1970`s. In 1998, he tried to extradite Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator; last month he got custody of a former navy lieutenant accused of genocide and terrorism in Argentina.

The praise isn`t surprising: prosecuting people who are apparently escaping punishment for horrible crimes seems fundamentally sound. The problem is that efforts by Judge Garzón, and others, are based on a legal doctrine that has worrisome implications. That doctrine is "universal jurisdiction," under which every state is entitled to prosecute and punish the officials of every other state for "international" offenses. It is a principle that even its most active international practitioner, Belgium, is wisely starting to reject: the governing party plans to amend a law under which activists tried to prosecute George H. W. Bush, Gen. Tommy Franks and Prime Minister Tony Blair for human rights offenses in connection with the wars against Iraq, even though nobody involved is Belgian.

By contrast to those named in the Belgian cases, the man whom Judge Garzón has jailed, Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, doubtless richly deserves prosecution. Mr. Cavallo is accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering hundreds of people during the "dirty war" in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Under Argentina`s amnesty laws, however, Mr. Cavallo cannot be punished; he was extradited to Spain not by Argentina, but by Mexico, where he was living. Judge Garzón is essentially ignoring Argentina`s own history and desires.

Universal jurisdiction does have a proper place in international law. It began as a device to fight piracy and slave trading, offenses that took place on the high seas, beyond the boundaries of any individual state. In more recent years, however, universality has been asserted for an increasing number of human rights offenses, even though there is little practice (in the form of actual prosecutions that are accepted as legal by the defendant`s own country) to support these claims. Without such a body of consistent and accepted practice, universal jurisdiction remains an academic aspiration rather than an established fact, and rightly so.

If international law really did permit each state to prosecute the leaders of all others, based on its own interpretation of international law, this would prompt a new kind of war, one fought in courtrooms around the globe. Courts, however, are poor instruments of international policy, and such a result would make normal international relations impossible. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently said, for instance, with respect to the claims brought against American officials in Belgium, that if United States officials cannot travel to Brussels without the fear of politically motivated prosecution, then the United States would take its business (i.e., NATO headquarters) elsewhere.

In addition, when compared with criminal enforcement in national legal systems, international prosecutions are always second best. This is because all prosecutions are meant to accomplish at least two goals. The first is to punish the guilty. The second is to promote socially desirable results in the form of deterrence and an overall respect for the rule of law. In instances where the cases grow out of national traumas, such as civil war or repression, the reassurance of the citizenry, political reconciliation and a kind of national catharsis are also critical elements.

International prosecutions can achieve the first goal, punishing the guilty, but they are singularly ill-equipped to deliver on the others (a flaw shared by the International Criminal Court). Reconciliation and respect for law can be taught; they cannot be dictated. This is especially the case when such "international" prosecutions are undertaken by foreign judicial systems, with little or no connection to the perpetrators, victims or offenses, under the rubric of universal jurisdiction. Such proceedings are invariably decoupled from the political, social and economic context of the affected country, and may well be based on the political or foreign policy agenda of the prosecuting state. For all of these reasons, national prosecutions should remain the primary means of doing justice. Where they have failed, the focus should be on reforming the national system from within.

In Mr. Cavallo`s case, Argentina did not fail. Rather, it made the difficult and distasteful choice to give immunity to many of the people who had terrorized the country during military rule. In return, Argentina made a peaceful return to civilian government and democracy, and avoided further military coups.

It is neither the right nor the place of the Spanish judiciary to deny the validity of Argentina`s laws, any more than it is, say, Britain`s right to correct perceived deficiencies in the American judicial system. Argentina is no longer a colony. It made a choice. Perhaps it chose badly. Perhaps it paid too high a price for democracy. (In fact, Argentina`s new president, Néstor Kirchner, is seeking to have these amnesty laws overturned.) That, however, is for Argentina, not Judge Garzón or anybody else, to decide.



David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey are lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.



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July 22, 2003
Who`s Unpatriotic Now?
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Some nonrevisionist history: On Oct. 8, 2002, Knight Ridder newspapers reported on intelligence officials who "charge that the administration squelches dissenting views, and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House`s argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary." One official accused the administration of pressuring analysts to "cook the intelligence books"; none of the dozen other officials the reporters spoke to disagreed.

The skepticism of these officials has been vindicated. So have the concerns expressed before the war by military professionals like Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, about the resources required for postwar occupation. But as the bad news comes in, those who promoted this war have responded with a concerted effort to smear the messengers.

Issues of principle aside, the invasion of a country that hadn`t attacked us and didn`t pose an imminent threat has seriously weakened our military position. Of the Army`s 33 combat brigades, 16 are in Iraq; this leaves us ill prepared to cope with genuine threats. Moreover, military experts say that with almost two-thirds of its brigades deployed overseas, mainly in Iraq, the Army`s readiness is eroding: normal doctrine calls for only one brigade in three to be deployed abroad, while the other two retrain and refit.

And the war will have devastating effects on future recruiting by the reserves. A widely circulated photo from Iraq shows a sign in the windshield of a military truck that reads, "One weekend a month, my ass."

To top it all off, our insistence on launching a war without U.N. approval has deprived us of useful allies. George Bush claims to have a "huge coalition," but only 7 percent of the coalition soldiers in Iraq are non-American — and administration pleas for more help are sounding increasingly plaintive.

How serious is the strain on our military? The Brookings Institution military analyst Michael O`Hanlon, who describes our volunteer military as "one of the best military institutions in human history," warns that "the Bush administration will risk destroying that accomplishment if they keep on the current path."

But instead of explaining what happened to the Al Qaeda link and the nuclear program, in the last few days a series of hawkish pundits have accused those who ask such questions of aiding the enemy. Here`s Frank Gaffney Jr. in The National Post: "Somewhere, probably in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is gloating. He can only be gratified by the feeding frenzy of recriminations, second-guessing and political power plays. . . . Signs of declining popular appreciation of the legitimacy and necessity of the efforts of America`s armed forces will erode their morale. Similarly, the enemy will be encouraged."

Well, if we`re going to talk about aiding the enemy: By cooking intelligence to promote a war that wasn`t urgent, the administration has squandered our military strength. This provides a lot of aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden — who really did attack America — and Kim Jong Il — who really is building nukes.

And while we`re on the subject of patriotism, let`s talk about the affair of Joseph Wilson`s wife. Mr. Wilson is the former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate reports of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases and who recently went public with his findings. Since then administration allies have sought to discredit him — it`s unpleasant stuff. But here`s the kicker: both the columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine say that administration officials told them that they believed that Mr. Wilson had been chosen through the influence of his wife, whom they identified as a C.I.A. operative.

Think about that: if their characterization of Mr. Wilson`s wife is true (he refuses to confirm or deny it), Bush administration officials have exposed the identity of a covert operative. That happens to be a criminal act; it`s also definitely unpatriotic.

So why would they do such a thing? Partly, perhaps, to punish Mr. Wilson, but also to send a message.

And that should alarm us. We`ve just seen how politicized, cooked intelligence can damage our national interest. Yet the Wilson affair suggests that the administration intends to continue pressuring analysts to tell it what it wants to hear.







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Jean Copen, 63, left, and Mike Williamson, 45, clean the front of a store, once Williamson Farm and Lawn, in preparation for Lynch`s homecoming.


Die junge Frau kann nichts dafür, dass sie verheizt wird. Ich hoffe nur, dass sie gute Berater hat und dadurch für ihr Leben ausgesorgt.

washingtonpost.com
In Lynch Country, a Puzzled Kind of Pride
Hamlet Prepares a Hero`s Welcome

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A01


ELIZABETH, W.Va., July 21 -- This small mountain town is bearing witness to the magic and machinery of celebrity.

The homecoming Tuesday of former POW Jessica Lynch has inspired fanfare worthy of a visiting head of state. A floodlit stage and media tent have been erected with seating for hundreds. Flag-bedecked T-shirts announcing "Welcome Home Jessica" are on sale for $5, and a CD featuring a song about her -- "She was just nineteen, became America`s queen" -- is available for $10. Every few miles along the main road, traffic slows for orange-vested road crews filling potholes, plucking trash from the weeds and trimming shrubbery.

"The level of preparation is consistent with a presidential appearance," said Joe Carey, director of communications for West Virginia Gov. Robert E. Wise Jr. (D) and a former Clinton advance man.

Lynch`s celebrity status is undisputed here, even if the details and significance of the war story that launched her fame are not.

The town, draped in flags and yellow ribbons, is unmistakably proud. Many here have taken the recent CBS proposal to develop a Beverly Hillbillies reality TV show as an insult to their heritage, and are pleased that tiny Wirt County (pop. 6,000) can take credit for something more dignified.

But even among the most ardent supporters of "Jessi," as she is known in town, there is an unsettling sense that the phenomenon of her celebrity, through no fault of hers, has rapidly outgrown what is known of her capture and rescue.

"Every war needs a hero," reflected James Roberts, 77, the third-generation owner of the 117-year-old general store here. "Rickenbacker . . . Kennedy . . . she`s the hero in this war. The facts don`t particularly matter."

Muddied by conflicting media accounts, some in this newspaper, and Lynch`s inability to remember much of her ordeal, her story has been dismissed by some skeptical pundits as a work of Pentagon propaganda even as it has triggered a national fascination with the 20-year-old private first class. She has not yet spoken in public.

"We are great Jessi people -- this whole county is Jessica people -- and we don`t like anyone to say anything bad about her," said Ray Watson, 79, a member of the county`s Board of Education, a former high school principal and something of an elder statesman in town.

He says that those trying to take the luster away from her story, or minimize her sacrifice, should "go to hell."

But as satellite trucks rolled into town, and as camera crews looking for local comment converged on startled shoppers at the nearby grocery store, he marveled at the deep appeal her story has had for many strangers.

"Let`s face it -- she`s the number one hero in the war, and to a degree I understand the fame. But it`s so explosive," Watson said. "I saw a woman at the dentist`s office, tears in her eyes, crying about it. She didn`t even know Jessica."

Even the Lynch family has sought to play down her sacrifice, aware that it could have been worse. Others died and received a fraction of the accolades.

"The family is quite cognizant that she is coming home and that other members of her unit are not," said family spokesman Randy Coleman. "She doesn`t consider herself any kind of hero. She was just doing her job, and bad stuff happened."

Lynch was captured by Iraqis after her unit was ambushed near Nasiriyah on March 23. She was rescued a week later from an Iraqi hospital in a U.S. commando mission. Word of that operation and the elation it provoked came after a string of disheartening news stories about the U.S. war effort. Lynch quickly became a focus of global media attention.

After the rescue, U.S. officials, speaking anonymously and relying on unconfirmed intelligence reports, told The Washington Post that Lynch had fought fiercely when her convoy was attacked. The supply clerk fired until she ran out of ammunition, and she was shot and stabbed, they said. Lynch "was fighting to the death," one official was quoted as saying.

Military officials familiar with an Army investigation of the matter said later that Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed, and that she had tried to fire her weapon but it jammed. Officials said she sustained major injuries after the Humvee she was riding in crashed into another Army vehicle in the attack. Two U.S. officials with knowledge of the investigation have said that Lynch was mistreated by her captors but would not elaborate.

Lynch has been recovering in seclusion at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from broken limbs and a spinal injury. Her door at Walter Reed has been guarded by military police, amplifying the curiosity leading to Tuesday`s appearance. At Walter Reed today, Lynch was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals.

About 2 p.m. Tuesday, she is scheduled to arrive by Black Hawk helicopter at the local park where the stage, lights and media tent have been assembled. She is expected to reach the platform either by wheelchair or with the aid of a walker, and then make a statement of about 21/2 minutes. She will not take questions.

"She has days when she`s in a lot of pain, and she has other days when she can endure better," Coleman said.

She is then expected to be driven from Elizabeth, the county seat, to the family home in adjoining Palestine with her family -- and out of sight of reporters.

All along that country road, winding around hills and past hayfields, she will see signs of support and shows of religious devotion, such as "Amazing Grace -- Jessi is rescued!"

Neil Bumgarner, 18, was with one of the crews laying asphalt and tidying up the roadsides.

"It`s the biggest thing in Wirt County in a long, long time," he said. "It`s a lot of fuss. I think they`re going a little overboard."

The outpouring has been national in scope, too.

One of two cells at the Wirt County jail is filled with hundreds of items -- quilts, pillowcases, angels made of World Trade Center rubble, even a pair of thong underwear -- sent by people swept up by her story, officials said.

Out of fear that she could be a terrorist target, sheriff`s office personnel have had the duty of opening the packages.

"We`ve got at least 4,000 thank-you cards to send out," said Debbie Hennen, county assessor.

Lynch, who since her rescue has received offers of college scholarships and automobiles, will find one of the most generous displays of spontaneous volunteerism at the family house.

Locals initially aimed only to add a wheelchair-accessible bedroom and bathroom, but they wound up expanding the two-bedroom, one-bath house into a four-bedroom, two-bath home.

The effort was made possible by volunteer labor and donated materials, along with $60,000 in contributions, volunteers said.

"I think everyone in the country wanted to do something for the young people in Iraq -- it wasn`t just Jessi," said Lewis Peck, a sergeant in the Wirt County Sheriff`s Office who took two months off to help.

The house remodeling for Jessi "was a tool to thank them all."

Like others, Peck wasn`t exactly sure what propelled the national fascination with Jessi.

"Was it because Jessi is a blond-haired child type? -- I can`t say for sure," he said. "I think it gave the country something to hold onto. Jessi is somebody that people can easily take into their hearts -- and they have."

Ben de la Cruz of washingtonpost.com contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
A Generation on the Move in Europe
For Continent`s Young, Borders Are No Longer an Obstacle

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A01


MADRID -- For a glimpse of Europe`s young generation on the move and the future of the borderless continent, head to the late-partying Spanish capital, drink a strong shot of coffee and try to keep up with Stina Lunden, a 25-year-old Swedish transplant.

Lunden stands out in Spain -- she is blonde, blue-eyed, Nordic-looking -- but she speaks fluent Spanish, writes in Spanish for Tiempo, a Madrid-based newsweekly, and has thoroughly adopted the young Spanish lifestyle. When she left her desk one night last week, the drill started with beer and tapas at an outdoor restaurant. Next, over to the Plaza de Toros, the open-air bullfighting stadium, for a concert by the Oxford rock band Radiohead. Then, after midnight, over to the trendy La Latina district where the young crowd spilled onto the sidewalk at El Bonanno`s bar.

Her group of friends is a mix -- Madrid locals, but an Italian and a Brazilian, too -- and the conversation comes in rapid-fire Spanish, and sometimes English. "You can`t do this back in Sweden," she said, as the clock struck 2 in the morning. "People don`t go out like this, and stay out this late."

Lunden is part of the new "Generation E" -- E for Europe, a continent that has been essentially without borders for most of Lunden`s and her peers` adult lives. For them, traveling from Sweden to Spain is about as simple as it is for an American college student to take a spring break drive from the Northeast to Florida.

While bureaucrats in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, toil away at highly technical regulations aimed at forging a single, more integrated Europe -- with rules on everything from aviation to how to store fresh cheese -- a new society is being created much faster on the ground, by people in their twenties and thirties for whom the ability to live, work and study anyplace on the continent is now taken as a birthright.

Educated young people like Lunden are traveling farther from home, crossing borders to study and work, learning more languages, building cross-cultural friendships -- and chipping away at the old national stereotypes and animosities of their parents` generation.

A 28-year-old Finnish pediatrics nurse who is working in Dublin and buying a home there says she has no intention of ever returning to Finland. A 22-year-old French student with an Italian mother began playing rugby while on an exchange program in Oxford, and now feels comfortable speaking three languages and spending time in various countries. A 21-year-old Italian student, whose girlfriend is half-Finnish and half-Greek, says: "My passport is Italian. I am more and more European."

"The main sign of change in this country is how the young people speak several languages, which is entirely new," Noelle Lenoir, France`s minister of European affairs, said in an interview. "Europe is too small for them. They are citizens of the world."

She added: "Each time I meet young people, students, I find them very, very European. It`s a changing world -- and it makes us look very, very archaic."

Under the rules of the 15-country EU, people crossing borders often don`t have their passports stamped and don`t need to register anyplace. That, in part, has fueled travel, but it has also made it difficult to put numbers on youth mobility. One telling sign, however, can be found in the Erasmus student exchange program, which for the past 10 years has allowed young Europeans to study around the continent.

The other main factor fueling youth mobility is the advent of budget airlines, such as EasyJet and Ryanair, which offer cheap flights between European cities. Whereas the last generation traveled by train, members of Generation E can just as easily, and as cheaply, hop a flight. Lunden, for example, said she returns to her home in Lund, in southern Sweden, once every three or four months, at a round-trip cost of only about 225 euros, or $255 at current exchange rates, for the 1,300-mile trip.

"This is a borderless Europe," said Daniel Keohane, a 27-year-old Irishman working as a researcher for the London-based Center for European Reform. "Me and my friends, we all worked in Germany over the summer." He added, "We take these things for granted."

There is also a class element to the new mobility. The young Europeans who are relocating are most likely to be the university-educated elite, not factory workers or farmers.

"Probably about 50 percent of my friends [from school] are working abroad now," said Alexander Stubb, a 35-year-old Finn working with the European Commission in Brussels. "But probably only about 1 percent of the people I played ice hockey with are working abroad."

Stubb said the total number of people moving is small, perhaps 2 percent of the EU`s workforce. "It`s nice for a journalist, an academic or a Eurocrat," he said, using the slang term for the EU`s international civil servants. "But it`s not that nice for a construction worker. . . . It`s not very easy if you are a farmer in Poland just to leave your farm."

Still, the movement of young people is quite visible, particularly as it converts some of Europe`s once-sleepy capitals into more cosmopolitan, vibrant centers. Dublin, for example, has been transformed by an influx of South and East Europeans who have flocked there to learn English and to work in pubs, hotels and the flourishing call-center industry as company representatives talking to people all over Europe by telephone.

The flow is creating a small but growing group of young people for whom "Europe" is home. They may feel no particular attachment to the formal signs and symbols of the New Europe -- the EU`s blue flag with yellow stars, the European anthem, a nascent constitution that few have actually read. But they do feel comfortable in several countries, cultures and languages.

Far From Home
Stina Lunden in many ways typifies the new European.

She studied French and history in Sweden, then at age 17 spent a year in France as an exchange student, living in a small town in the Pyrenees. At the school there, many of her friends were from Spain, and that sparked in her an interest in learning Spanish. Later she took a five-month language course in Spain.

After graduating from a journalism school in Stockholm, Lunden applied for a Swedish scholarship to fund an internship in another European country. She decided on Spain, and targeted the newsmagazine Tiempo.

"I called and I had my phrases written down," she said. "I knew how to say scholarship and Swedish and journalist." She had learned French during her high school year abroad, which helped. And like many young Swedes, she speaks English extremely well. She came to Madrid in April 2002 and has stayed on past her six-month internship, writing in Spanish about international affairs as a freelancer.

"All my friends are from different places," she said, speaking over a dish of bull`s tail and Spanish red wine, just before the start of a flamenco show in one of Madrid`s oldest traditional restaurants. "You have scholarships and all of this helping you -- that`s the whole idea of Europe."

Lunden took off in June to return to Sweden. While she manages the commute several times a year, she said it feels increasingly difficult to readapt to living in Sweden.

On her first night home for an Easter vacation, Lunden said, she had a frightening dream. She dreamed that she could speak only French, and her mother couldn`t understand what she was saying.

"It`s like I was losing touch with my roots," she said. "I`m glad it was just a dream, because I`m not. Of course, when I go home, I need a few days to `go home.` "

A Man of Many Tongues
In the past, the biggest obstacle to mobility -- besides cultural animosities and stereotypes -- was language. But that has never been a problem for French student Thomas Gilbert. He spent much of his childhood in Germany, where his father was working with the military. Now he finds himself equally at home in both cultures -- he is in many ways the New European that Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, former leaders of Germany and France, dreamed about generations ago.

"What am I?" asked Gilbert, a thin young man with curly red hair who looks younger than his 20 years. "I am French because my parents are French. But when I`m in Germany, I`m thinking in German, I`m even dreaming in German."

He is now living and studying in Brussels, capital of the New Europe, at a school for comic book art and cartooning. In school, he meets budding young illustrators from across the continent. He speaks English as well as French and German. And his girlfriend, also at the art school, is a Swiss who speaks English, German and Italian as well as French.

But Gilbert believes that the trend toward mobility is lagging in some countries, such as France. "A lot of French people are still afraid to go to Germany or to the U.K.," he said. "We are French first."

In a grungy student bar in a working-class part of Brussels, Gilbert and four other young people, all in their teens or early twenties, were discussing the meaning of the New Europe and their place in it. The group itself exemplified the topic -- Gilbert is a German-speaking Frenchman, his multilingual girlfriend was there, and seated around the table were two young Italian men and a 19-year-old woman who is half-Finnish and half-Greek. They shifted easily from French to English to Italian, then back again -- with few even noticing the switches.

"Each country has its own characteristics," said Thalia Vounaki, the Finnish-Greek woman. Her Greek relatives are very open, she said. Her Finnish relatives are generally more reserved. "It`s not our goal to become a melting pot."

"The U.S. is 50 states, but it`s still one country," one of the Italians chimed in. "Here it`s not the same thing."

Gilbert is unconvinced Europe will become more integrated quickly. The problem, he said, is that "everyone still has his clichés." The Germans have preconceived notions about the French, the French about the Belgians, and so on. "In Europe," he added, "each country has a long history."

`I Feel European`
It was an Italian who said, somewhat derisively, that the new Europe would be created sexually. What he meant was that open borders would lead to more cross-border relationships, and over time national boundaries would have less meaning.

Caroline Soole, an energetic 25-year-old with short blond hair, is a living example of that.

Soole`s mother is French and her father English. But her father is himself ethnically half-Danish. She grew up in France, and considers herself French. But she said, "I have this strong French culture, but I have this northern culture, which is English."

Soole was born in the French Alps, where her maternal grandparents -- of Portuguese-Jewish background -- imbued her with a strong sense of French culture. But she went to London as an adolescent and ended up in an international school. "I really liked being in an international culture," she said. "I think that was a turning point. Before, I was really French."

After returning to France, she enrolled in a bilingual French and English school. She took part in student exchange programs that sent her to the United States -- where she lived near Columbus, Ohio -- and to Dublin. Then she traveled to Germany to learn German, came back to get a business degree in France and decided to return to Germany, where she got a job at a radio station in Berlin.

With her international background, and ability to speak multiple languages, she was a perfect candidate for the French firm Pernod Ricard, where she now works as a junior brand marketer for Martell cognac.

"You still have people my age who were born in a place and will stay in that place," she said. "But now you have more and more people who are ready to go. They are ready to leave their family and friends for their jobs and careers."

A few weeks ago, she was in the United States for work. The next weekend she was in Germany visiting her boyfriend. Then back to Paris, where she lives on Rue Montorgueil, a trendy cobblestone street.

"I feel European," she said. "I`m feeling more connected, it`s true. It`s not having it in the blood, but getting to know the different cultures. . . . When you`re in Paris, you can go to Brussels on the TGV [high-speed train]. When you`re in Biarritz [in southwestern France], you can go to Spain and look around. With the euro as well, you feel closer."

Soole recalls that, when she first decided to go to Germany, the main problem was selling the idea to her grandparents. "They still had memories of the war," she said. For them, "It`s too far, too difficult, too dangerous."

Now Soole has a German boyfriend, the same one she met when she was 19 on her first trip. He has since come to France on occasion to learn French. She said it took time to persuade her grandparents to accept her boyfriend.

If they ever get married and have a family of their own, the children will be half-German, a quarter-French, with English, Danish and Portuguese blood thrown in.

"More and more, it`s becoming like this," she said.

Soole still has other goals. "The next step is learning Spanish," she said.



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In Mansour, a neighborhood in west Baghdad, Pfc. Thomas Poorbaugh mans a .50-caliber machine gun during his guard duty at an al-Rasheed branch bank.

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Troops Ready for Change in Guard
U.S. Soldiers Hope to Transfer Security Duties to Iraqis Soon

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A09


BAGHDAD, July 21 -- A bomb, tossed at midday from a passing car, exploded in the dirt outside a branch of the al-Rasheed Bank last Wednesday, killing a young Iraqi boy and shattering the leg of a U.S. soldier on guard duty at the bank.

The wounded soldier, Spec. Adam Zaremba, comes from a unit of soldiers trained to fire howitzers. But for several weeks they have essentially been bank security guards, like many U.S. troops who are standing guard outside hundreds of hospitals, power plants, shopping malls and other civilian sites across Iraq.

Pfc. Thomas Poorbaugh, who was manning a .50-caliber machine gun atop an armored personnel carrier still pockmarked from the bombing, kept an eye on passing traffic and summed up the job: "We`re sitting ducks here, pretty much."

Of the 39 U.S. soldiers killed in attacks in Iraq since May 1, at least six were on guard duty at "fixed sites," and at least five were directing traffic or manning checkpoints. Military commanders and soldiers on the ground say that those duties have been unavoidable given the looting and insecurity in postwar Iraq.

But now, top U.S. commanders, including Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, want to give those jobs back to Iraqis, freeing American soldiers for different operations and taking them off a duty that has left them especially vulnerable.

Abizaid has said that U.S. casualties suffered during raids or other operations to secure Iraq are an unavoidable cost of combat. But he also said that noncombat casualties, such as those suffered by soldiers guarding civilian institutions, are unacceptable and that those jobs must be given back to Iraqis.

"We`re still at war, and in this environment, no soldier likes to be on guard duty," said Army Col. Guy Shields, a spokesman for the U.S. military here. "The way these soldiers are trained, they can do a lot more than just being security guards. We want to get soldiers doing more soldier-like things."

Other officials expressed worry that the heavy U.S. military presence in Baghdad could be a prime reason for the attacks. American soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles patrol the streets here with machine guns ready. Officials said removing military guards from places where Iraqis bank, shop and visit the doctor would lower the military profile and might reduce the simmering resentment among the Iraqi population.

Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, said this week that more than 8,700 trained Iraqis were working in a new facilities protective service, which provides guards for key civilian sites.

That corps is separate from the Iraqi police force and the new Iraqi army that are being organized. It is also distinct from a militia-like civil defense force that U.S. officials plan to create to patrol alongside U.S. troops until the new army is fully functional.

At the al-Rasheed Bank in the Mansour neighborhood of western Baghdad, a crew of Iraqi guards works with U.S. soldiers. Four of the guards were also injured in last week`s bombing, two seriously.

"I got out of the hospital yesterday, and today I`m back," said Raid Fadhil Hamid, 22, whose forearm, shoulder and leg bore wounds from the attack.

Hamid, dressed in the same shirt and pants he was wearing when the bomb hit, with holes where shrapnel tore into him, said it was dangerous to work alongside U.S. troops who were being targeted for attacks. But he said the danger was outweighed by lure of his $100 monthly pay. "We have to live," he said.

Lt. Col. Richard Bowyer commands the unit providing security at 10 sites in the Mansour area, an upscale neighborhood he calls "the Beverly Hills of Baghdad." He said he had 190 Iraqi security guards working with his 500-plus troops. For now, his soldiers guard the bank when it is open, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., along with a few Iraqi guards, he said. After hours, the soldiers leave and the Iraqis are in charge of security.

Bowyer said his troops are willing to stand guard duty, and all believe they have helped make Iraq safer. But he said they would be happy when Iraqis take over.

"This is not our primary mission," Bowyer said. "We`re artillery men. We shoot howitzers. That`s our profession, although I don`t think we`re going to be shooting howitzers anytime soon."

As Bowyer spoke, about a half-dozen of his troops guarded the bank in the blinding midday heat. Two stood near the roadway, Poorbaugh sat with his machine gun atop the armored personnel carrier, and two other soldiers watched over the scene from the bank`s roof.

An Iraqi man walking along the sidewalk appeared to have something tucked under his long, loose-fitting shirt. The soldiers watched him until he was out of sight. A man ran across the street carrying a bag, and Bowyer yelled for the soldiers to check him out. Cars and buses passed 10 feet from the soldiers, who watched closely for anything suspicious -- an open window, an arm getting ready to throw something, a car slowing down.

"You never know when you`re going to be attacked, but they do," Bowyer said. "They know where we are, and they can come and case the joint. You really have to be on the edge of paranoia. Fear is okay, because it keeps you on edge."

A soldier assigned to guard duty in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, was killed by small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire on Saturday. The soldier, identified by the Pentagon as 2nd Lt. Jonathan D. Rozier of the 1st Armored Division, was part of a unit that has been guarding a municipal office building for the past three weeks, said Sgt. Douglas Swanson of the unit.

Swanson said that the soldier was not standing guard at the time he was killed, but that the attack occurred just a few feet from the municipal building. A U.S. military press release erroneously reported that he was guarding a bank at the time .

Swanson said the building, which houses the post office and city council offices, has frequently come under fire, with attacks from nine rockets, two flares, two grenades and lots of bullets from small arms.

Despite that, Swanson said he did not consider the guard duty especially dangerous. He said the attacks were "nothing" compared with combat. But he said he was looking forward to turning the duty over to the Iraqi security guards who work alongside his troops.

"We have to get the Iraqi people involved," he said.

He said the soldier`s death was tough on his men.

"I brought 16 guys over here and last night we lost our lieutenant," Swanson said. "But you don`t see guys out there beating the kids and shooting everything that moves."

At the al-Rasheed Bank, Akel Oda Saib, 21, an Iraqi security guard, said the U.S. soldiers should leave and turn over guard duty to Iraqis, but not quite yet. He said that for the past few nights, people have shot at the Iraqi guards at the bank. "There are times when we need them [the Americans] and times when we feel they should go," Saib said. "Right now, we are afraid that these things will keep happening. Maybe they should stay for another week or so. Then Iraq will be more confident, safer. Then they should go."

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.



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IG Probes Patriot Act Charges
Six Complaints Allege Muslims` Civil Rights Violated

By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A15


The Justice Department`s inspector general is investigating six complaints from Muslims who have alleged that federal employees pursuing enforcement of the USA Patriot Act violated their civil rights or civil liberties.

Among the complaints is that an immigration officer threatened a detainee by holding a loaded gun to his head, and that a federal prison guard ordered a Muslim inmate to remove his shirt so the guard could use it to shine his shoes.

In a report prepared for Congress, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said his office has acted on 34 complaints in the past six months, referring most to the Bureau of Prisons for review. The IG is required to make semiannual reports to Congress about allegations of abuse by Justice Department employees as part of the USA Patriot Act, the 2001 legislation that gave the department expanded powers to pursue terrorists.

The complaints, in substance and number, are similar to those contained in the previous two reports to Congress required by the Patriot Act and "are similar in many respects to complaints we receive from other federal inmates," said Paul Martin, deputy inspector general.

Civil liberties groups have complained that authorities have subjected Arab and Muslim men to discriminatory or harsh treatment since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The Justice Department "remains committed to investigate and prosecute any allegations of civil rights abuses," said spokesman Mark Corallo. He said the department has investigated more than 500 complaints of retaliation against Muslims since the 2001 attacks and prosecuted 13 cases.

In a special report last month, Fine`s office found that there were "significant problems" in the treatment of some of the 762 men taken into custody for immigration violations after the attacks. That investigation found that some of the men languished in jail for weeks without being able to contact lawyers or make phone calls, and that some were kept for months in cells illuminated 24 hours a day and were escorted in handcuffs, leg irons and waist chains.

In that investigation, which is continuing, the IG singled out the federal detention facility in Brooklyn, saying some detainees held there had made credible complaints of being taunted by guards and slammed against walls.

The new report, issued yesterday, identified some problems but made no such broad findings.

"This report is not an assessment of the Patriot Act as a piece of legislation. It doesn`t examine the department`s use of Patriot Act authorities," Martin said.

Two of the 34 complaints received by the IG were substantiated by the Bureau of Prisons, including one in which an inmate complained that during a physical examination a prison doctor told him: "If I was in charge, I would execute every one of you . . . because of the crimes you did." The doctor, who "allegedly treated other inmates in a cruel and unprofessional manner," according to the report, has been reprimanded by the Bureau of Prisons.

In the instance involving the guard who used the inmate`s shirt to shine his shoes, the IG found evidence corroborating the complaint after the internal affairs section of the prison bureau concluded the complaint was unsubstantiated. The IG`s office presented the results of its investigation to the Justice Department`s civil rights division, which declined to prosecute.

The IG closed three investigations in which physical abuse against inmates was alleged, saying it could not substantiate the claims.



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Bush ist kein Lügner, sondern ein nützlicher Idiot.

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Bush the Believer


By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A17


Is George Bush the Iraq war`s "useful idiot"?

The phrase was coined by Vladimir Lenin to refer to gullible communist sympathizers who swallowed whole the party line. They believed what they were told, and what they were told was mostly lies.

It could be somewhat the same with Bush. He may well be the last person to believe that the Iraq war was waged virtually in self-defense. He believes that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. He believes Hussein had other weapons of mass destruction and that he was linked somehow -- don`t ask how -- to Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the events of Sept. 11.

The evidence is nowhere to be found. No weapons of mass destruction have turned up. An advanced Iraqi nuclear program seems to be, well, not so advanced. The evidence for it is either bogus or so tenuous as to be far from convincing. Ties to al Qaeda -- "bulletproof evidence," in the words of Don Rumsfeld -- have not been proved and never made much sense anyway. Al Qaeda is not well disposed toward secular leaders.

What evidence exists suggests, in fact, that the United States was hankering for a war no matter what. Intelligence -- no matter how fragmentary or inconclusive -- was shaped, molded and goosed until it could be used to prove that Hussein had to be taken out swiftly. The bogus uranium from Niger is a mere detail in this regard -- a smoking gun, yes, but one in the hands of White House aides for whom truth meant less than impact.

The real mystery is whether Bush himself realized how weak the evidence for a preemptive war was or was being manipulated by a cadre of disciplined administration aides who long had sought a war with Iraq. These are some of the very same people who in 1998 wrote a letter to President Clinton arguing that America should abandon containment, "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." Ten of the 18 signatories -- including Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz -- are now in the Bush administration and were among the most vigorous proponents of war. Rumsfeld, Bob Woodward tells us, argued at the first Cabinet meeting after the Sept. 11 attacks for war on Iraq.

They may have been right then and they may be right now -- and in my view, a pretty good case can still be made for the war. But that`s not really the case Bush made. Instead of arguing that down the road Iraq might have a nuclear weapons program or that eventually the United Nations would lose interest in maintaining sanctions, he raised the rhetorical danger to one of virtual imminence: Hit Iraq quick -- before Hussein could hit us.

That was a bogus argument. The war could have waited. But Bush could not. My guess is that his tendency to see things in black and white and an un-Clintonian determination to eschew micromanaging led him astray. The president "is not a fact-checker," an administration aide told the media last week in explaining why Bush used weak evidence in his State of the Union message.

But neither is Colin Powell. Yet he went over the evidence carefully, discarding some of it before he made his own presentation to the United Nations. Powell might have suspected what Bush apparently did not -- that some administration officials were so intent on war they were cooking the books.

The proposals contained in the 1998 letter to Clinton were either bold or reckless, depending on your point of view. Whatever the case, Bush essentially adopted them. But in choosing an unconventional course, he persisted in using the conventional language of self-defense. In fact, he opted for a discretionary war, one waged not so much to preempt terrorism -- although that was part of the mix -- as to reorder the Middle East.

Had Bush made the same case for war that his aides did in 1998, that could have been debated. But it was a hard case to make, because Hussein really and truly did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. He posed a distant or theoretical threat -- and not really to America but to our interests and allies.

Now Bush stands abandoned by events. No weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear program. No links to al Qaeda. His judgment and his competence are being questioned -- his honesty as well. But the president is no liar. More likely, he is merely an uncritical man who believed what he was told. Lenin knew the type.



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Defending States` Rights -- Except on Wall Street


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A17


States` rights are a matter of high principle -- except when they become inconvenient to some powerful interest group. Then they can be ignored or swept aside.

That lesson, taught over and over, will be put to the test again, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. That`s when the House Financial Services Committee may take up a proposal that would sharply restrict the power of state regulators to oversee the securities industry. The measure, introduced by Rep. Richard Baker, a Louisiana Republican, would prevent state regulators from working independently of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission in seeking structural changes in the way brokerage houses and investment banks work.

In other words, if federal regulators are asleep at the switch, states won`t be able to step in. No wonder the bill is being seen as a direct slap at New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who forced the securities industry to end stock analysts` conflicts of interests in a settlement last year. Spitzer embarrassed the industry when he released e-mails showing that research analysts were privately trashing stocks that they were recommending to the public.

States may have a lot of rights, but if they embarrass a few Wall Street firms, the power of big government in Washington will be brought in to stop them. So it seems to Spitzer, a Democrat. "The federalism of the Republican Party seems to apply when the issue is the rights of the poor, and they want to leave that to the states," Spitzer said in an interview. "But when it comes to using power to help their corporate patrons, they bring it back to Washington."

Strong words? Some Republicans are also worried about the inconsistencies on display in this battle. "As Republicans, we do believe in states` rights, state prerogatives and state control," said Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican who, like Baker, is a senior member of the Financial Services Committee.

Before Congress cuts back on state authority, King continued, "we need very compelling evidence, and right now the evidence goes the other way. It`s state officials who have been cracking down on corporate corruption."

"I would never vote for Eliot Spitzer for any office," King added, "but he has made real inroads in uncovering corporate corruption and bringing a sense of justice to the market."

You would think an administration that regularly sings the praises of state experimentation would side with the states. "Texans can run Texas," President (and former governor) Bush once declared of his home state. Doesn`t the same principle apply to, say, New Yorkers?

While Bill Clinton was still president, Tom Ridge, then the governor of Pennsylvania and now the secretary of homeland security, declared of the president-to-be: "George is more inclined than the current administration to trust state legislators and governors, Democrats and Republicans, to make decisions."

Former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer once said of the president: "He believes deeply that many of the nation`s answers can be found in the state capitals."

But somehow, that is not the view of Bush`s SEC chairman, William H. Donaldson, where securities regulation is concerned. "You can`t have a system in which there are 50 different structures," Donaldson told a group of Post reporters and editors last week in speaking kindly of Baker`s idea. "It will paralyze business. When you get down to the remedy, the SEC must be supreme."

So an administration that is eager not to have the federal government be "supreme" when it comes to Medicaid or even Head Start wants to smash the test tubes in our laboratories of democracy when states try to protect investors in the face of Washington`s failures.

"They claim it`s federal vs. state," says Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "But it`s actually enforcement vs. nonenforcement. They want to reduce enforcement."

Naturally, Baker and Donaldson deny this. But state regulators such as Spitzer and Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin say the proposal will have the practical effect of reducing their power to deal with abuses that Washington will never get to. Galvin has been saying the bill would take "the cop off the beat" where protecting investors is concerned.

Being in favor of capitalism requires being against abuses that prevent markets from working honestly. "What I am concerned about," says King, the Republican, "is the signal we`re sending to the investing public, especially in these economically uncertain times, that we`re easing up on corporate corruption."

The cleanup of the financial industry is a clear case where state officials pushed hard for innovation -- and justice. Why is this the issue on which states` rights should be thrown out the window?




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The Neoliberal Take on the Middle East


By Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack

Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A17


A consensus is emerging in Washington that the greater Middle East constitutes the primary strategic challenge of our time and that the West must fundamentally rethink the way it approaches this region. In the past, Washington assumed it didn`t have to care about the internal order of these countries so long as they accommodated our interests in their foreign policies. If things got really bad, Washington would step in and intervene, in a modern-day version of the popular game whack-a-mole.

But whack-a-mole isn`t a very good game, and it`s an even worse foreign policy. Sept. 11, 2001, taught us the price we pay for ignoring the underlying problems of the region. The question now is how best to transform the Middle East so that it no longer produces people who want to kill us in great numbers and increasingly have the ability to do so. To be sure, traditionalists across the government and in foreign policy still argue that such goals are beyond the pale and that the West cannot possibly "solve" the problems of the region and must instead manage the status quo better to limit our risk.

But this approach is rapidly losing out, and for good reason; if Las Vegas were giving odds, this wouldn`t be a good bet. Instead, the debate is increasingly between the neoconservative strategy of coercive democratization and what might be called the neoliberal alternative emerging among internationalist Democrats and moderate Republicans. Neocons and neoliberals recognize that the status quo in the Middle East is producing anti-Americanism, terrorism and failed and rogue states and has gone way beyond "management." Both agree the West must promote the transformation and democratization of the region. But they disagree profoundly on how best to do so. Neoliberals believe that coercive democratization is bound to fail and that true success will come only from a long-term effort to help push Arabs to reform their own societies from within. This leads to four fundamental differences.

• Preemption and use of force. Neocons believe that the United States must use a high-pressure approach to compel Arab regimes to change, by force if necessary. They argue that the region`s problems are so great and the danger of another 9/11 so real -- this time with chemical, biological or radiological weapons -- that the end justifies the means. If the regimes of the region won`t change, American power should be used to bring change about. The invasion and reconstruction of Iraq are not an exception but a precedent that, if need be, can and will be replicated elsewhere.

Neoliberals, among whom we number ourselves, believe in political preemption first and military preemption only as a last resort. We supported the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq because we concluded that force was the only way to lance these boils. But force will not work as a normal tool of policy or social engineering in the Middle East. Our goal must be to have the Arabs embrace democracy and modernization, not to force it down their throats. At present there really are only two political voices in the Arab world: One is the regimes and their cronies, the other the Islamic fundamentalists. We need to help foster alternatives. A growing number of Arabs are calling for these changes, and we must find ways to help them transform their societies even if it takes decades and not months.

• Nation-building. Neocons don`t like nation-building, and the Republican Party has largely opposed it for more than a decade. Thus, while neoconservatives talk of democracy promotion, they have a hard time carrying through on it. Nothing better exemplifies this than the administration`s fits of attention deficit disorder when it is forced to promote democracy on the ground in ways that go against its own ideological instincts -- as is evident today in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Neoliberals see nation-building as a strategic tool. Winning the peace is as important as winning the war, only harder. In Iraq it is particularly worth the commitment because a stable, prosperous and pluralist Iraq could eventually become a model for the region, demonstrating that it is possible to be both "Arab" and "democratic."

• The Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Many neocons are skeptical about the peace process. While they rhetorically embrace the goal of Palestinian democracy as a key part of a two-state solution, they prefer to do nothing, excusing their inaction by insisting that Arab autocrats first convert to democracy. Neoliberals embrace the peace process as a priority both for the security of Israel and to open the door for a broader transformation of the region. As long as the Arab-Israeli conflict simmers, those opposed to change in the Arab world will use the pretext of an Israeli threat to avoid reform. Moreover, successfully brokering peace between Israel and the Arabs will enhance America`s credibility as an advocate of democratic reform in the region.

• Empire vs. leadership. Neocons talk about empire and American primacy as a legitimate goal. They eschew traditional alliances as burdensome and prefer ad hoc coalitions or simply going it alone. They believe might makes right and international rules and norms are there for the bad guys, not us. Neoliberals believe in leadership through persuasion and strong multilateral alliances. Transforming the Middle East will take decades of sustained political, economic and strategic cooperation. That requires revamping our alliances, not discarding them. We want America to inspire not only fear among our adversaries but admiration and support from our friends.

Ronald D. Asmus is senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Kenneth M. Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Both served in the Clinton administration.




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A dwindling case for going it alone


By Thomas Oliphant, 7/22/2003

WASHINGTON


THE ONCE MIGHTY unilateralists around President Bush - Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld - are in the process of losing another fight against a broadly international response to the mess in Iraq.

A year ago they lost a bizarre argument about whether to invade Iraq without special authorization by Congress and without a last-chance effort to forge a workable consensus through the United Nations.

The current struggle, however, pales in comparison to the one a year ago. The hearts of the vice president and defense secretary are not in this one. Facts on the ground have obliterated their case that a quasi-revival of colonial administration with the United States running the show is feasible or even desirable. Facts at the Treasury - $4 billion a month for an American-run occupation at an absolute minimum indefinitely - have eroded domestic support. There is simply no case to be made for unilateralism after three months of avoidable mistakes that are costing lives, treasure, and international standing.

A year ago - most likely via the gentle nudging of Bush`s father - the case was made that the United States should not go to war with narrow domestic support and virtually nonexistent support from the rest of the world.

It was a rare example where President Bush appears to have actually made a decision after participating in a detailed examination of the options. The more common and accurate picture of a disengaged, incurious, passive receptacle for his advisers` machinations is so widely accepted around here that even the administration officials desperately defending themselves over the crude manipulation of prewar intelligence have in the process depicted Bush himself as little more than a ventriloquist`s dummy.

A year ago Bush saw the merit of expanding domestic support via a congressional authorization for the use of force against Iraq, even at the price of going back to the UN and securing Security Council endorsement (ultimately unanimous) for a last-chance round of diplomacy and weapons inspections. His position won over a great many Democrats, and it solidified the position of Britain as an ally.

At the same time, however, his henchmen made a colossal blunder in selling the case. They had the high ground available - the unacceptability in the post-9/11 world of a rogue state directly flouting the specific requirements of the UN. But they abandoned it for the cheap and dirty trick of building a false facade of spurious claims - not just about alleged inquiries about purchasing uranium in Africa - supposedly adding up to an imminent threat to the United States from unconventional weapons.

The cheap and dirty route often works in the short term, especially when the cooking of intelligence books is involved. The administration`s position was also bolstered by the stance at the UN of France, Russia, and Germany - which let their opposition become blind and unyielding.

In the longer run, however, cheap and dirty tends to boomerang, which is what has now happened. As it turns out, the manipulation of intelligence was accompanied by an equally outrageous manipulation of what planning there was for the war`s aftermath. In keeping with its unilateralist vision, the Cheney-Rumsfeld clique put all their chips on an American-run Iraq, joyous in its embrace of American liberators, financed by quickly restored oil revenues and built around their favorite Iraqi exile, the occasionally honest and isolated Ahmad Chalabi.

That vision, always suspect but never examined critically (least of all by a passive president), is in tatters. For the last several days especially, it has gradually become clear that only the nature of its abandonment is in question. The first major clue was not so much the refusal of the French to send nation-builders and peacekeepers to Iraq without a fresh UN resolution internationalizing the occupation as it was the turndown from India (long a mainstay of peacekeeping and a magnet for other countries).

The second clue was a truly pathetic overture to Turkey - until now a consistently bad actor in the Iraq mess, particularly in relation to the self-governing Kurds; only the truly desperate would even talk to the Turks.

Now the preliminary diplomatic work is more in the open, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is proving an adept, helpful figure. He has mixed cooperation with the occupation regime and a willingness to legitimize the infant interim ruling council with targeted criticism of the occupation`s mistakes and a call for a clear timetable for the withdrawal of American military forces.

The poles in this mess still have their adherents - Cheney-Rumsfeld`s ongoing message to the world (butt out) and the French-oriented riposte (no, you butt out). Good will is in the air, however, and there exists a way to make postwar Iraq the showcase for determined, aggressive internationalism it could have become last winter.

There needs to be debate as well as investigation about how so much could have gone wrong and how so much baloney could be fed to the public. This period of reckoning for those who misled the world, however, cannot block or slow the vital task of helping a broken country heal.

Thomas Oliphant`s e-mail address is [e-mail].

This story ran on page A13 of the Boston Globe on 7/22/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Posted on Tue, Jul. 22, 2003

Bill Tammeus
Destroy terror`s causes

Tom Kean gets it. Or at least most of it.

He`s chairman of the national commission studying the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he grasps how crucial it is to understand and suppress terrorism`s root causes instead of simply trying to destroy the terrorists.

``To defeat and destroy our enemy,`` he said recently, ``we must understand more than the crimes it already committed. We must understand what drives and motivates it, the source of its power, the resources at its command, its internal strengths and weaknesses.``

Exactly. I have only one quibble with Kean. He`s right that for our own protection we may need to ``destroy`` terrorists, but our goal -- no matter how unrealistic or idealistic it sounds -- should be to change their thinking and, thus, their behavior. That`s the only way we`ll be safe in the long run.

It`s hard to focus on that task when we`re ducking bullets or suicide bombers. Our immediate task must be to stop people trying to kill us. But if we don`t ultimately change the reasoning (or lack of it) that causes people to use terrorism, we`ll never be free of terrorists.

That`s why Kean`s admonition to ``understand what drives and motivates`` religious extremists is so compelling.

The sad fact is that we often fail to get at the root causes of our problems, even simple ones. We swat mosquitoes instead of draining water from the old tire in the yard where they breed. We build more prisons to warehouse criminals instead of attacking the causes of crime -- which often means the run-amok illegal drug trade.

Even though discovering and uprooting the factors that breed terrorism will be long, difficult, complex, frustrating work, it must be done.

First, it will require that we not look for a simple or single answer. There is none. The history of religious violence shows that many factors motivate people to adopt destructive means. Just as all crime is not the result of poverty, so all terrorism is not the result of political grievances.

Any list of modern terrorism`s causes will go far beyond that to include distorted religious teachings, the failure to educate young people well and broadly, perceptions of injustice, the manipulations of political and religious leaders, the paucity of fundamental human rights and freedoms in the countries producing most of the terrorists, a failure to view every human being as precious and irreplaceable and the longing to be perceived as heroic in a noble cause.

But even that list is not exhaustive. And each cause I`ve listed can be unpacked to reveal countless variations and subsets of additional causes.

This complexity, however, is often so frustrating to Americans that from time to time it`s possible still to hear people who have given up trying to understand it all and whose solution is something like this: ``Let`s just bomb them back to the stone age.``

A far more effective approach to ridding the world of terrorism would be to bring together military, political, religious, psychological, economic, educational and other experts to share their insights about what motivates people to commit acts outside the boundaries of rational, civilized behavior.

Once the problem is analyzed and solutions proposed, of course, the hard work begins. Helping people find better options than terrorism will require a long-term strategy that takes their hopes and dreams seriously but sets clear limits on the kinds of behavior civilization can tolerate.

But eliminating terrorism also will require institutions through which political and social change can occur peacefully.

I wish I were more confident that Americans were ready to do more than unleash our military on terrorists and on the states that support them. Tom Kean understands why that is an incomplete solution, but I`m not sure how many of the rest of us do.

[e-mail]

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.

©2003 The Kansas City Star

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/6353822.ht…

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U.S. Army Spc. Zack Watkins (center) and fellow 3rd Infantry Division soldiers from A Company 3rd Battalion 7th Infantry Regiment listen as their commander discusses their extended stay in Habaniyah, Iraq, on July 7. Right, President Bush celebrates Iraq "victory" onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln May 1.
Achtung um diesen Artikel auf Dauer zu speichern, bitte auf Festplatte speichern, da Home Page nicht frei zugänglich und die Seite, von der ich es kopiert habe kein Archiv hat.

From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.

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By Michelle Goldberg



July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam`s regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq`s reconstruction.

The war`s architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.

Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can`t sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren`t readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.

America isn`t losing the peace. The peace never began.

The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis` nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon`s chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."

Much has been made recently of exaggerations and misinformation used in building the case for war. It now seems that the postwar plan was predicated on similar misinformation, if not outright self-delusion. "They knew what Iraq was like and nobody could argue with them about it, including the people in the intelligence agencies," says Lang. Just as administration hawks took over intelligence gathering during the prelude to war by creating the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, they also dominated the postwar planning, refusing to let any evidence enter the discussion that contradicted their ideology.

That`s why "there doesn`t appear to have been" a contingency plan, according to Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard`s John F. Kennedy School of Government. "It`s scary but true. An underlying assumption of this whole campaign against Iraq and the larger campaign to remake the whole Middle East was that all we had to do is knock off Saddam Hussein and everything else would fall down obediently at our feet. The Iraqis themselves would welcome being liberated, the Syrians and Iranians would be cowed and start doing what we want, Israel would be able to impose a peace on the Palestinians because they`d be intimidated, and all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

Official policy was to treat this scenario as inevitable. Lang says the war`s architects "simply didn`t allow" anyone to plan for an outcome that didn`t match the one they envisioned. "If you think back, the word was you didn`t have to worry about this, there wasn`t going to be any occupation," he says. According to Pentagon hawks, he says, "this wasn`t an occupation, it was a liberation. The Iraqi people would simply take charge of their own affairs and we could go home almost immediately. They didn`t think [retired Lt. Gen. Jay] Garner`s people were going to be in Iraq for more than three months. That`s why there are so few troops in the plan. The assumption was that all you had to do was defeat the Iraqi military, liberate it from Saddam Hussein`s henchmen and these people would immediately take charge of their own affairs. There was great disdain for those who thought otherwise."

In fact, those who thought otherwise were cut out of the process altogether. Humanitarian NGOs that would be doing postwar work in Iraq were kept in the dark, says Kevin Henry, advocacy director for CARE, and the groups within the government that they usually work with were marginalized.

"One of the really amazing things for us," Henry explained, "and this does account for some of the failures in planning, is that the interagency process within the U.S. government for planning for the humanitarian response and reconstruction was being co-chaired by the [White House`s] Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council. These are not the agencies of the U.S. government that have the greatest experience in relief and reconstruction. The State Department, U.S. AID, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance -- they`re the organizations that we and all the other humanitarian organizations have a history of working with."

On July 12, Knight Ridder newspapers reported that the Pentagon ignored the State Department`s eight-month-long "Future of Iraq" project, which involved Iraqi exiles and government agencies preparing strategies "for everything from drawing up a new Iraqi judicial code to restoring the unique ecosystem of Iraq`s southern marshes, which Saddam`s regime had drained. Virtually none of the `Future of Iraq` project`s work was used once Saddam fell."

"Those with greatest expertise were not completely sidelined, but they certainly weren`t at the center of the planning process," says Henry, who prepared testimony about planning failures that CARE is delivering to a congressional committee on Friday. "Every time we would ask for more information, essentially we`d be told, `Trust us, don`t worry, we know what to do.`"

The administration continues to stand by its war plan. In a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies on July 7, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, correctly noted that none of Iraq`s worst-case scenarios have materialized.

"Had we decided that large numbers of forces -- large enough to police the cities to prevent the immediate post-regime-collapse looting -- were the top priority, we could have delayed the start of the military action and lost tactical surprise, but then we might have had the other terrible problems that we anticipated," Feith said. "War, like life in general, always involves tradeoffs. It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be attributed to poor planning."

Other officials, though, say that planning wasn`t just poor -- it was virtually nonexistent. "In the aftermath of a quick war, we find ourselves in the deplorable situation of having no planning, no allies, and no burden-sharing," says U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

And burden-sharing is crucial, because right now, there aren`t enough troops in Iraq to keep order. Many commercial buildings in Baghdad are protected by U.S. forces, says David Andrus, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Southern California School of International Relations, who recently returned from Iraq. But with only 147,000 American soldiers on the ground, there isn`t enough manpower to guard schools, hospitals, utilities and neighborhoods.

"The security situation in Iraq is getting worse, not better," CARE reported on July 8. "It is the biggest impediment to delivering effective humanitarian aid. Murders and carjackings are common. The frenzy of looting that followed the war is over, but theft is still a serious problem for aid agencies." As the New York Times reported on Wednesday, rape is also increasing.

Lack of security, which is most acute in the Sunni triangle around Baghdad, hinders efforts to repair Iraq`s infrastructure. A month ago, the electricity situation was improving -- every day, it seemed, there was power for a few more hours. Since then, though, electrical components have been looted and Iraqis working to restore electricity have been attacked, reversing gains. "Water, waste treatment, hospitals and factories in Iraq all depend on electricity," says CARE. "The risk of a health crisis grows as clean drinking water remains scarce, temperatures routinely exceed 40 degrees [Celsius, 104 Farenheit] and hospitals and healthcare centers struggle to provide treatment to sick people."

Administration officials recently have blamed the lack of electricity and water on Saddam`s failure to upgrade infrastructure over the years. According to Gen. Carl Strock, deputy director of operations for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the electrical system is antiquated.

"It`s basically 1960s technology," he said in a July 9 press briefing in Baghdad. "Due to its age and condition, they can only generate about 4,500 megawatts [per day]. The national demand right now is about 6,000 megawatts." The water supply situation is similar, as the pumps rely on the electrical system. "Here in Baghdad, before the war we were getting about 2,000 million liters per day of drinking water," Strock said. "Right now we`re about 1,400, and we should be back to 2,000 in the next three months or so."

For Baghdadis, access to electricity largely depends on where they live. In the richer neighborhoods, most households have generators -- so even if the power goes down, they can still sit in air-conditioned rooms on 110-degree days. As has always been the case, the people most affected by the lack of electricity in the heat are the poor. But for them, the lack of electricity and adequate water supply is nothing new -- they didn`t have them before the war either. "There`s never been enough electricity to go around," says Strock. "Saddam definitely used the provision of utilities as a political tool to reward those he wanted to reward and punish those he wanted to punish."

For the people living in the areas surrounding Basra, this means that nothing has really changed. In the cities of the south about 60 percent of the people in the urban population have access to drinking water -- in rural areas the figure is closer to 30 percent. This is approximately what they had before the war, and levels are expected to rise.

But according to Johanna Bjorken of Human Rights Watch, who returned to the U.S. from Baghdad on July 1, the electricity situation in the Iraqi capital actually got worse in June. "When the month of June started," Bjorken told Salon, "electricity levels were at roughly half of what they were before the war. By the end, there were entire days where Baghdad was completely without power."

There`s no doubt that many Iraqis welcomed regime change, and there`s still a reservoir of goodwill toward U.S. forces. Though some Iraqis working with American troops have been assassinated, many continue to risk their lives to cooperate with the occupation, eager for the opportunity to rebuild their country. In Baghdad and the Sunni areas of central Iraq, though, patience is evaporating amid a growing sense that life has gotten even worse since the Americans arrived. On the streets of Baghdad, there`s a mounting conviction that the U.S. invaded to plunder Iraq`s resources rather than to free its people. "We have moved from victorious liberator to hated occupier very quickly," says Tauscher.

Nor is the insecurity limited to central Iraq. Though there`s far less resistance in Shiite southern Iraq, "the climate of fear and insecurity is overwhelming in Basra," Amnesty International reported on July 4. "The widespread looting and scavenging of public buildings, witnessed in the first days of occupation, has decreased, but crime, often involving violence, remains much higher than before the occupation ... The U.S. and U.K., as occupying powers in Iraq under international law, have a clear responsibility to maintain law and order, and to protect the Iraqi population. The occupying powers have clearly failed to live up to this obligation. They have shown a lack of preparedness -- in terms of political will, planning and deployment of resources -- to bring the lawlessness under control, and millions of Iraqi men, women and children are paying a terrible price."

It didn`t have to be this way. In February, when Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki (since retired) told the Senate that several hundred thousand soldiers were needed to subdue Iraq, he was derided by hawks at the Pentagon. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called his estimate "wildly off the mark" and said, "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down."

Now, though, many experts say that the worst of the chaos in Iraq could have been contained if there had been enough troops on the ground from the beginning. There`s a growing consensus that something close to what Shinseki suggested might be necessary to turn the situation around.

"Certainly the short-term problems that we faced could have been prevented if there had been proper planning and a very careful assessment of what the postwar situation was likely to look like," says professor Walt at Harvard. "If we had gone in with a much larger force, the way former Chief of Staff Shinseki wanted, and a very generous aid package that was ready to roll at the moment of victory, you probably could have put off a sort of day of reckoning. Whether that would have ultimately prevented problems from emerging down the road, we don`t know."

War planners apparently believed that, since their precision bombs would largely spare the Iraqi state`s infrastructure, the country could operate more or less normally as authority was transferred from Saddam`s regime to someone like Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Though some in the administration grew disenchanted with Chalabi, Wolfowitz and his coterie never stopped pushing him.

"One of the assumptions was that they could knock off the very top of the Baath party but leave the rest of the regime intact," says Walt. "They were going to install Ahmed Chalabi on top of the regime, but the rest of the state would still be functioning. What happened instead was they knocked off the top and the rest of the state disintegrated."

As soon as Baghdad fell, government ministries and public utilities were stripped by looters. "It`s ironic that the hospitals and water treatment plants and electrical infrastructure was virtually spared from the bombing," says Henry, "and then completely devastated by the looting that followed."

Some of this could have been foreseen. "When Hurricane Andrew struck the Florida coast in 1992, it destroyed an airbase, destroyed towns, and Florida went into anarchy," says professor Andrus of the University of Southern California. "People were hiding in their houses with guns to protect themselves from roving bands of thieves and rapists. It was a horrible place. Now if you take Iraq, that`s been under this very tight dictatorship for decades, and all of a sudden the U.S. comes in and sweeps aside this very tightly controlled political and civil structure, you have a huge vacuum and the people aren`t prepared to deal with it, so it deteriorates very quickly."

Lacking the manpower to stop the deterioration, troops simply stood by as the foundations of civil society burned. "If we had had 250,000 troops, the targets of looting might have been secured," says ex-Marine Lou Cantori, an expert in military policies in the Middle East at the University of Maryland who has taught at West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Marine Corps University. "We were shorthanded because of the Rumsfeld team`s preconceptions, and therefore the troops stood around and watched as the infrastructure of Iraq was destroyed.

"Americans cannot enforce order in the society," Cantori continues, "and because order cannot be enforced, reconstruction cannot take place, and because there`s no order and no reconstruction, there cannot be an American withdrawal. This is a quagmire and a situation that is deteriorating, and it`s about time that somebody started saying this."

Meanwhile, Iraqis, having seen the American military crush Saddam, the most powerful force in their universe for decades, can`t believe that these same soldiers are incapable of getting the lights to work, and many believe the hardships they`re suffering stem from American indifference. Their hostility makes the situation even more volatile for the Americans, who anticipated a grateful populace that would shower then with rose petals.

Many experts predicted such Iraqi animosity, but the war planners dismissed their warnings. "I know from lots of discussion and debates with these guys that they believe so deeply in the power of the democratic idea, and in people`s view of the United States as benign, that they just assumed that we would be seen as liberators," says Bruce Jentleson, a former senior foreign policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore and author of 1994`s "With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-90."

Thus none of the troops sent into Iraq were prepared to be occupiers. The strain of doing a job they`re not trained for while under siege from people they expected to welcome them is increasingly obvious. Every day brings new reports of the rage and misery of soldiers in the 3rd Infantry Division, some of whom have been in the region for 10 months, their homecoming repeatedly promised and repeatedly postponed.

"If Donald Rumsfeld was here. I`d ask him for his resignation," Spc. Clinton Deitz of the 3rd Infantry Division told ABC News on Wednesday. A 3rd I.D. officer told the Christian Science Monitor that the troops "vent to anyone who will listen. They write letters, they cry, they yell. Many of them walk around looking visibly tired and depressed ... . We feel like pawns in a game that we have no voice." The hawkish Weekly Standard reports in a cover story this week that "the soldier story now is that the 3rd Infantry is `black` -- meaning critically short -- on Prozac supplies."

The intensity of the 3rd I.D.`s outspoken criticism of its leaders is unprecedented, says Lang. "You`re getting professional, noncommissioned officers in the U.S. Army complaining to media people about the leadership," he says. "I can`t remember an instance when a sergeant first class with 20 years of service says the same kind of stuff" he`s hearing from such soldiers in Iraq. After all, such complaints are actually illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, says Lang, "forbids active-duty military personnel from publicly holding up to ridicule people in the chain of command above them."

That they`re doing it anyway indicates the depth of their unhappiness, and "they get meaner and tougher when they`re unhappy," Lang says. "If they get really even more unhappy, you`re going to start having incidents involving them and Iraqi civilians." There have already been a few. In April, U.S. soldiers opened fire on Iraqi demonstrators in Falluja, killing 13 and wounding dozens more. In June, the Associated Press reported that soldiers were accused of killing five Iraqi civilians whom they mistook for attackers. This does little to convince the locals of American benevolence.

It`s a dangerous spiral, Walt says. "We are being forced to take much more aggressive action against potential resistance. The more you go out and have to search people and search their homes and their mosques, the more angry they get. There`s a lot more friction between American forces and the society than we`d like."

Cantori says the only way the situation can be stabilized now is by raising troop levels to those suggested by Shinseki, but doing so would be politically disastrous for Bush. "American public opinion is that troops should be coming home," he says. "If they send two divisions of troops right now, it`s an indication that their policy has failed."

Besides, there simply aren`t enough soldiers available. Lang points out that forces were scaled back during the Clinton administration, and that there are only three divisions available to be rotated into Iraq, two in the Army and one in the Marines. "We are stretched way too thin," says Tauscher.

Unfortunately for the administration, other countries aren`t rushing to send their own contingents. According to a July 17 Wall Street Journal article, "even allies who supported the war have failed to follow through with major commitments. Hungary pledged a truck company for Iraq. But defense officials later learned the Hungarians were willing to send 133 drivers, but no trucks or mechanics." This week India refused to send 17,000 of its troops to Iraq without a U.N. mandate, despite American pressure and India`s eagerness to improve its relationship with Washington. Even Britain has reduced its contribution, from 45,000 troops during the war to 15,000 now.

This may force the Pentagon to call up 10,000 National Guard soldiers, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Yet even that won`t bring troop strength up the level many say is necessary to stabilize Iraq.

"India is very telling," says Jentleson. "There`s a lot of discussion about a strategic partnership between the U.S. and India," he says, and for many Indian officials, helping the U.S. in Iraq makes sense as a way of gaining U.S. support against Pakistan. The Indian population, though, is viscerally opposed to "supporting American unilateralism, so even with expert foreign policy opinion behind it, they have to abandon it," he says.

"It`s just like what happened in Turkey before the war," Jentleson continues. "The government said, `Let`s make a deal, because we`re going to get a fair amount of money and U.S. support,` and their own parliament said no. The administration is really underestimating how pervasive is this concern about American unilateralism."

Many say the neocons have been blinkered by an essential inability to grasp others` opposition to their designs. "One of the things that seems to be a thread that runs throughout all of their thinking is a sort of big-stick view of the world, that the world tends to jump on the bandwagon and follow whoever the big dog is, that you can cow people and intimidate them and get lots of respect, that power generates its own respect," says Walt.

In this case, though, America`s assertion of power has generated primarily resentment and Schadenfreude. "The Indian decision is not so much a serious blow in and of itself, but it`s an indicator of world opinion that, having gone to war in defiance of the wishes of most of the international community, the rest of the world is not going to be in a hurry to bail America`s chestnuts out of this fire," Walt says. "In fact, some countries are likely to be eager to let us stew in these juices for quite some time."

The situation can still be salvaged, but many say that to do so, the administration will have to let go of the bombastic unilateralism that brought it to war in the first place. They say Iraq can only be saved by appealing to the United Nations and giving up the dream that Americans can fashion the country into a beacon of pro-Western democracy in the Middle East that would undermine regimes like Syria`s and Iran`s. "That was always a goofy dream," says Walt.

"You have to be willing to accept the fact that the United States is not going to run Iraq," says Col. Lang. "You have to transfer control to the U.N. so countries like India and France will contribute troops. Until you give up the idea that this was our victory and this is our occupied territory, the situation is not going to be stabilized."

Resistance from hardcore Baathists will likely continue regardless, but Jentleson says U.N. oversight would defuse some of the anti-American anger among ordinary Iraqis. "If there is a sense that the international community were the ones providing the authority for remaking Iraq, it would be very different than going out and shooting an American," he says. "If the U.N. was genuinely behind this, it would give it authority. There`s a difference between power and authority. Right now we`re relying totally on power, and that`s not sufficient."

Furthermore, Jentleson says, if Iraq`s reconstruction were placed under the aegis of the U.N., trained peacekeepers and civil administrators from around the world would likely flow in. "It would be brilliant diplomacy to now engage the U.N. and engage other countries," he says.

To do this, though, would require a profound attitudinal shift in an administration that has clung stubbornly to its own assertions, whether or not the facts cooperate. "We may have to sit down and have a meal of humble pie, followed by a little crow, in order to deal with the loss of credibility that we have worldwide," says Rep. Tauscher.

"What other reason do they have for not [going to the U.N.] other than that they have decided it`s their way or the highway?" she asks. "I can`t tell you why they`re not doing it. They don`t even tell us why they`re not doing it. We asked Secretary Rumsfeld, `Well, have you talked to the French?` He says, `I don`t know.` Who else would do the military-to-military discussion but him? There are 2 million troops in NATO countries that we have refused to ask for help."

Right now, there`s not much sign that the administration is ready to rethink its control of the occupation. On NBC`s "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Rumsfeld continued to insist that the force in Iraq is already multilateral. Asked by Tim Russert whether he`d be interested in having the U.N. take over, he responded: "I don`t know what it means by `take over.` At some point I think -- they already are playing an important role, and they have to play an important role. And we have got a large coalition of countries there."

Rumsfeld also insisted that the United States is making progress in Iraq, and that the recent attacks are just the last gasp of a dying regime. "The more progress we make I am afraid the more vicious these attacks will become, until the remnants of that regime have been stamped out," he said.

Yet Walt thinks that behind the scenes, the neocons are scrambling. "I believe that they`ve been shocked by what`s happened," he says. "The architects of this war did not want American troops to be there in large numbers for very long, for two reasons. First, they understand that if you had to occupy the country for a long period of time, you were going to look like an imperialist power, and that was going to cause a lot of trouble."

Secondly, he says, "if you have to tie up a lot of your forces in Iraq for a long period of time, you can`t go off and threaten others. The whole idea was we were going to teach the Iraqis a lesson and that lesson was also going to be learned by the North Koreans and the Syrians. It`s much tougher to threaten North Korea when much of your army is sitting in Iraq."

"Even given their own objectives," he says, "they blew this one big-time."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/18/pre_war/index_n…

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What`s Wrong Is Wrong


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By: J.G. Schwam - 07/18/03



There is no such thing as sort of wrong or almost wrong. Wrong is like dead. It`s absolute. William Pryor is wrong. Not just a little bit. There is no just a little bit wrong. You can`t be a moderate bigot or a moderate ideologically driven zealot. The assertion that the USA is a Christian nation is prejudicial, exclusionary and defies the letter of the first amendment. We are fools if we believe that Pryor`s assertions that his personal views and beliefs will not affect his opinions. This is rather like accepting a pet mosquito`s promise not to bite its master. Has Clarence Thomas shown for a minute that his values misguided or not have not affected his voting record? This might possibly be fine if he were a small claims court judge whose rulings do not make law or affect public policy. It is patently silly for first circuit court judge who rulings clearly interpret laws that have a profound affect on public policy to assert that his personal beliefs will have no bearing on his performance or interpretation of the law. Who does he think we should think he is? Perhaps his interpretation of himself is as some sort of prophet or harbinger of what the lord himself wishes for humanity.

The Bush administration clearly wants to take our nation back to a time when prejudice and policy were entwined and only spoken about in hushed tones behind the closed doors of private clubs while night riders terrorized and intimidated the objects of their loathing with no fear of reprisal or prosecution.

It is time that these angry small minded southern bigots still angry that the Jim Crow period has been relegated to dirty dustbin of history`s mistakes, as well it should finally realize that America changed the world because it is has progressively become a land without barriers or prejudices. Since the industrial revolution often despite often huge barriers, Jews, Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Irish, Poles, Hungarians, Gypsies, South Asians, Muslims, Buddhists and countless other present or one time minorities in this or their own lands have risen to greatness, invented things and penned words that changed the world and created vast wealth.

There is no place for any debate that excludes rather than includes anyone in this country. The more we use legal processes to empower Americans the more Americans empower America and the world. The proof that this is true can be seen in the phenomenal growth Americas has experienced as public policy and law has moved toward inclusionary and equality oriented practices in business, education, housing, access to health care and finance in the last half of the last century.

Moving public policy away from this trend instead of clarifying and expanding such efforts is regressive not progressive. Who could possibly favor policy that is already moving America away from its preeminent global reputation as a beacon of freedom, fairness equality and freedom above that of all nations?

It is because of the divisive, misguided zealotry of likes of Ashcroft, Thomas, Lott, Delay and their equally dimwitted ideologically driven backers such as Pat Robinson, Jerry Falwell and others. These men and those like them, driven by fear and hatred for those so called minorities that have risen above them despite their efforts to prevent their advance that our nation is falling further everyday back to the economic uncertainty and widespread domestic and global poverty and disunion of early part of the 20th century, are destroying this inclusive fabric that has made America great.

This is a trend we must fight to reverse not enable. We must not allow Bush and his hatred and greed driven ideologue backers revert public, social and economic policies back to the this tenuous time before WWI. We must not allow them appoint judges who will lie about their true motives to secure appointments which are really to support the extreme rights desire to enable an agenda of hate, exclusion, zealotry, avarice and covetousness.

The necessity of inclusionary and non-discriminatory public policy in this country is not a flighty, limp-wristed liberal pursuit. It is not a gay or minority rights issue. It is essential economic policy. It is a policy of empowerment. Empowerment of all groups without regard to race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation or physical limitation to pursue wealth and happiness on equal ground benefits the entire nation as a whole. Anyone or any policy that advocates legislation to the contrary for any reason is wrong, wrong for America and wrong for the
economy.

The place for an ideologically driven government is not in America. It is what we have fought against since the battle to ratify the United States Constitution ended in 1791. The demise of the Soviet Union and continuing moderation in the Peoples Republic of China proves that an Ideologically driven public policy is antithetical to the pursuit of the economic and the social freedom essential to the creation of wealth.

Simply stated what`s wrong is wrong. There is no such thing partially wrong public policy.



J.G. Schwam is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant

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COLUMN ONE



Mexico`s Mania for the Beetle
The last VW plant to make the original Bug will soon phase out production. But its host country`s `Vocho` love affair will continue.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer

July 22, 2003

MEXICO CITY — For Mexico City dentist and Beetle fanatic Geraldo Velasco, Volkswagen`s decision to halt production of one of history`s most popular and distinctive cars is more than the end of an era. It`s like losing a member of the family.

Velasco bemoaned the imminent passing at the bimonthly meeting of the Beetle owners club here recently. Beside him was the object of undying affection: his souped-up 1981 "Vocho" — the name by which many Mexicans call the old-style hunchbacked Volkswagen Bug.

Surrounding him were dozens of VWs and their owners — lawyers, underwear salesmen, mechanics and students among them — a diverse bunch united in their common passion for Vochos and membership in KDF-Wagen, the Mexico City Beetle owners club.

Many of the cars have been restored to the pristine condition they were in when new, in some cases 35 years ago. Others have been outrageously modified with an ear-splitting stereo system or a chassis achaparrado — a lowered body.

"I feel so much tenderness for this car and for what it has given me — a hobby, relief from monotony and worries of my job and friendships, which are hard to find," Velasco said. "The end of production is the end of something that I love."

Velasco, 27, is one of many Mexicans who feel a special bond to their Beetles and are saddened that Volkwagen`s plant in Puebla, about 70 miles southeast of here, is phasing out production at month`s end.

The Puebla plant has been the only one of 34 factories owned by the German automaker worldwide that still made the Bug, whose prototype was introduced at a Berlin auto show in 1936.

And for some time, Mexico has been the only place where the old-style Beetle is sold.

Now, declining sales and the decision by Mexico City authorities to phase out the ubiquitous Bug from the city`s taxi fleet has rung the death knell.

"Real stars know when to retire and the public knows it too — this is what happened with the sedan," Volkswagen executive Jens Neumann said at a July 10 ceremony kicking off the final production run of 3,000 old-fashioned Beetles. "These days clients and friends of Volkswagen are choosing more modern products."

After July 30, the Puebla plant will focus on models such as the New Beetle, Jetta and Cabriolet convertible. While the success of the Volkswagen Bug was a global phenomenon, it especially took root in Mexico.

Ever since the import first arrived in 1954, and particularly since the Puebla plant started making them in 1967, Mexicans have been devoted customers. The fact that the cars are inexpensive to buy and maintain, easy to modify and fuel-efficient are big reasons. Generational loyalty is also at work. Until Mexico`s car market started to open up 10 years ago, the Beetle was the only choice of affordable wheels for many Mexicans.

"It`s a car you can go to war in," said David Romero, a 28-year government chauffeur who owns a 1974 restored Beetle. "I`m already feeling nostalgic about it."

For now, Velasco and his fellow club members are confident they`ll be able to keep their cars running, thanks to junkyards and a satellite industry of manufacturers that make older Beetle parts, which are becoming harder and harder to find.

"We`re not going away. The Vocho has totally invaded Mexico," said Francisco Beltran, owner of Xtreme and Beltran Volks, two small manufacturing companies in Mexico City that make vintage-style mirrors, taillights and hubcaps for Beetle models going back to 1954.

The hobby will continue to be fed by magazine publishers, customizers and the accessory manufacturers that profit from the popularity of the Bug. Velasco has spent thousands of dollars restoring his car since buying it three years ago and has traveled as far as Orange County to buy parts.

"The Vocho is a vice for us, but a good vice, because instead of spending money on getting drunk , we buy modifications for the cars," said Carlos Loaiza, a 22-year old mechanic and member of the Beetle owners club in Chiautempan, in Tlaxcala state east of the capital.

But how much longer this vice can last without new vehicles entering the market remains to be seen. Carlos Niezen, principal of the AT Kearney management consulting firm in Mexico City, said it is inevitable that Vocho parts will become more scarce and expensive over time, putting a damper on owners` enthusiasm.

"VW will probably keep producing a few parts for replacement, but for no more than five years. After that, you will have to wait for parts, do more searching — even internationally — or pay premium prices to get ahead of someone else in line," Niezen predicted.

Of the final production run, all but one car will be sold in Mexican showrooms. The very last Beetle off the assembly line will be taken to a VW museum in Germany.

Though technologically superior, the New Beetle, introduced in 1997 and also made in Puebla, doesn`t fire the imagination of hobbyists. And with a price starting at nearly $18,000 — more than twice the $7,700 cost of a new Vocho — the new car is prohibitively expensive for many in Mexico.

Sure, the New Beetle features a water-cooled engine that is almost three times more powerful than those in the air-cooled Vocho. The new, computerized Beetle also includes ultramodern plastic composite parts — the Vocho`s exterior is strictly metal.

But technology isn`t the point with Mexico`s Beetlemaniacs, said Armando Gomez, an independent VW mechanic who owns a fully restored 1973 model. Most important for him and his fellow enthusiasts is that the old Beetle lends itself to "personal expression."

"You can modify Vochos so the doors open in reverse or from the roof, add more seating, or chop it down and take the back seats out," Gomez said. "There are an endless number of ways to put your imagination to work, without ever losing the form of the Vocho.

"The new ones don`t have the same soul."

Despite the devotion of Beetle lovers, the fact is that Beetlemania even in Mexico has been slowly dying over the last decade.

From a peak of 95,000 new Vochos sold in Mexico in 1993, sales fell last year to 22,000. Car buyers looking for cheap transportation have a host of options they didn`t have a decade ago, thanks to free trade and the entry of more car makers here.

As sales of the old Beetle have waned, so have those of other Volkswagens, not just in Mexico but in the U.S., where 80% of the Puebla factory`s output is destined. Lower volume overall has made it harder to support the old Beetle line, according to Volkswagen management .

"VW realized that even for this very popular car, every product has its life cycle and that it was time to say goodbye," Niezen said. What made the Bug unique is that its life cycle lasted almost 70 years, longer than any other car.

The clincher in the decision to discontinue the model came when the Mexico City government decided, for security and environmental reasons, to phase out Beetles and all other two-door vehicles from the city`s taxi fleet. The city views four-door taxis as safer because passengers are better able to flee kidnappers and carjackers.

The taxi phaseout means the loss of a sizable Mexican market for the German car maker. At their peak, there were as many as 75,000 Volkswagen Beetles in Mexico City`s taxi fleet of 120,000 vehicles. Beetles were the choice of taxi drivers for the same reason as consumers: They were cheap to buy, new or used, and easy to maintain.

"The new law is a good idea," said cabdriver Miguel Esmenjaud as he drove Tuesday morning in his 10-year-old, green and white Beetle. The new regulations give him five years to change to a four-door vehicle.

"The client pays the same tariff for a two-door or a four-door taxi and he has the right to choose the one that is more comfortable," he said. "I lose fares every day" to four-door taxis.

Declining sales and exports have also forced Volkswagen to announce layoffs of 2,000 of its 10,000 manufacturing workers in Puebla, although the company and labor officials are still negotiating a new contract that may reduce the downsizing by cutting workers` hours and wages.

Even with the end of Vocho production, owners like Velasco will try to keep the flame alive. He goes faithfully to club meetings to discuss Beetle aesthetics, power, durability and the latest modification fads. He and other members also take weekend trips to visit other owner groups across Mexico.

Admiring the Beetles assembled for the Saturday club meeting, Mexico City policeman Raul Olvera predicted that restored and modified models will remain the car of choice for Mexican youths for years to come. "It`s a way of standing out from the crowd, fixing up a Vocho and then showing it off to get the best-looking girls," Olvera said.

Are there any negative aspects to Beetle ownership?

"Jealous wives," said Romero, the government chauffer. "Mine sees them as competition. Women demand time and say it`s better to dedicate money to the kids than to spend it on car parts. But she puts up with it. She knows the affection I have for my Vocho."

"Robberies," said club president Raul Ramirez, a photographer who owns a restored 1970 Beetle. He said four club members have had their cars stolen in the last three months.

Policeman Olvera said at least one gang operating in Mexico City targets old Beetles for parts. "Everybody loves them," Olvera said. "Especially car thieves."


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Times researcher Froylan Enciso in The Times` Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD


`A True Soldier` -- but a Statistic Too
Spc. Joel Lynn Bertoldie of Missouri was killed in Iraq last week by a bomb. His death put the fatalities above the toll for the `91 Gulf War.
By David Zucchino
Times Staff Writer

July 22, 2003

HABBANIYAH, Iraq — When a roadside bomb snuffed out the life of Joel Lynn Bertoldie on Friday, his death nudged the body count in Iraq one notch higher. He was, for a moment, anonymous — another sad statistic in a country where an American soldier perishes, on average, every other day.

But his death sent out rays of sorrow and pain to those who knew and loved him. For them, thousands of miles away, his was the hidden face beneath the newspaper headlines and TV news scrawls that reduce tragedy to shorthand: "Another soldier killed in Iraq."

To his buddy, Spc. Bruce Brech, Spc. Bertoldie — everybody called him "Bert" — was an unusually mature 20-year-old who wanted nothing so much as to be the best father in the world to his 10-month-old son, Jesse.

To his sidekick, Spc. Gerard Dessman, he was a man with a special charisma: "He had a way about him that drew you to him and made you feel like you were home, like you were family."

To his company commander, Capt. Steven T. Barry, Bertoldie was the consummate soldier: fearless and loyal, a wisecracking kid who turned the tables on his captain before the battle for Baghdad in April by reminding him to stay safe and come back alive.

And back home in Independence, Mo., Joel Bertoldie was the gung-ho young man who joined the Army right out of Truman High School, who loved to water ski and wanted to become a marine biologist. He was Debi Bertoldie`s boy, Koda Bertoldie`s big brother and, just two months before he shipped out for the Middle East, the proud new father of Jesse Michael Bertoldie.

No one realized it right away, but Bertoldie`s death had set an unwelcome benchmark. He was the 148th member of the U.S. military to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom, surpassing the death toll of 147 from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That was a meaningless statistic to officers and men who came to honor him at a memorial service Sunday night, where Bertoldie`s boots, rifle and helmet were on solemn display.

The men spoke instead of Bertoldie`s authentic storytelling abilities, his Tusker team spirit — his battalion is nicknamed the Tuskers — and the way his personality could light up a room.

"A true soldier and a true battle buddy," said his immediate superior, Sgt. Patrick Jockisch.

On the duty roster, Bertoldie was a driver for Headquarters Company, Task Force 4-64, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). He was at the wheel of his Humvee on Friday afternoon, returning from an escort mission, when someone very close to the roadway detonated a homemade bomb that sent the vehicle careening across the highway at a traffic circle overlooking the Euphrates River and the desert city of Fallouja.

Over the military radio network that day could be heard the voices of Bertoldie`s fellow soldiers describing frantic attempts to stabilize and resuscitate him, the clipped call for a medevac helicopter, the desperate reports that he was still breathing, and finally the news that he was gone.

Across their sunbaked desert base, soldiers listening in stopped what they were doing and hung their heads. Some of them cursed the enemy; some wiped away tears. The 2nd Brigade was devastated. Bertoldie was its first combat death since April 8, the second day of the battle for Baghdad, and its ninth combat death in the war. Overall, the 3rd Infantry has suffered 37 dead in the Iraq conflict, the most of any division.

Driving in a well-armed convoy to the memorial at the remote Tusker base in Habbaniyah late Sunday, some of the soldiers had to pass the spot where Bertoldie died. It was a scorched patch of roadway at the traffic circle, an obscenity for them on the road at twilight.

Division commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount III was at the memorial service, seated among his officers and men on a reviewing stand overlooking a parade field. Someone had placed a coin-sized Tusker insignia and a lone cigarette next to Bertoldie`s rifle and his helmet, with his name inscribed on the band. Two snapshots showed a trim, handsome young man cradling a football, and seated behind the wheel of his Humvee.

Capt. Barry was mournful, but angry too. His voice had a hard edge when he told his fellow soldiers: "I challenge everyone here today to remain vigilant in the fight to kill and capture the scum who continue to attack us." Bertoldie, he said, was a dedicated soldier "who lost his life fighting cowardly Iraqis."

The battalion chaplain, Peter Johnson, acknowledged the division`s long, punishing mission. Many of its soldiers arrived in the region as long ago as September and later fought their way into Baghdad. They were "weary, tired, running low on faith," the chaplain noted, and burdened by questions surrounding Bertoldie`s death:

"Why did this have to happen?"

"Where was God when Bert needed him?"

"When are we going home?"

The chaplain assured the soldiers that their mission in Iraq was "right — a hard right, and it comes at a very high price." They occupied the moral high ground in Iraq, he said.

"But if attacked, we will fight — and we will fight hard," Johnson said. "We will fight with justice dignity and honor."

When the chaplain had finished, a private sang "Amazing Grace," breaking down in sobs halfway through, then composing himself and resuming. An honor guard fired a crisp salute. A bugler played Taps. In the front row, Bertoldie`s closest friends hugged each other and wept.

Back home in Independence, Bertoldie`s grandmother, Judy Hampshire, described for the Kansas City Star how the family had been preparing to send him a package of his favorite DVDs when the military told them he had been killed. He had sent them an upbeat e-mail just that morning, she said.

"I think he really liked the Army," Hampshire told the paper. But "he wanted to come home."

In a November 2001 interview with the Savannah Morning News, Bertoldie said of Army life: "It`s a whole new world for me. I like coming out here and staying overnight and roughing it. I like driving the tanks."

Sunday`s memorial service was filmed by soldiers from the Army`s combat camera team, who are preparing a video to send to the family — and in particular, they said, for his son when he`s a man.

An investigation is underway to determine how insurgents were able to plant and disguise the bomb. The brigade`s commanders say they are trying to find ways to protect their soldiers from future attacks. They are also struggling to find the right words to put into personal letters they will write and send to Bertoldie`s family.

There were several American military checkpoints Sunday night along the highway where Bertoldie died. And on Monday, all day and into the hot night, his fellow soldiers swung on their flak vests and ducked into their helmets, back on patrol.



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THE WORLD
a d v e r t i s e m e n t




Hundreds Line Up to Join New Iraqi Army
Most of the men applying for 1,000 spots in the first battalion are enticed by the idea of a steady paycheck.
By John Daniszewski
Times Staff Writer

July 22, 2003

BAGHDAD — They all came Monday — the young, the old, Sunni and Shiite, the Yankee-go-home bunch and the thank-goodness-for-America crowd too — each of them wanting to be a soldier in the new Iraqi army.

Under a blazing sky at the site where Saddam Hussein wanted to build the world`s biggest mosque, hundreds of Iraqi men stood in line for hours awaiting their chance to fill out a 19-page application to serve in the first 1,000-man battalion — and earn a steady paycheck.

The U.S.-led occupation authority and the country`s new governing council intend the Iraqi Corps to be a downsized army of about 40,000, free of political influence, that would be responsible for the country`s defenses against external enemies and for securing its borders.

It would replace the old Iraqi army, which was abolished May 23 by L. Paul Bremer III, the chief U.S. civil administrator.

So far it looks like a buyers` market for the recruiters. In the three days since recruitment began, thousands of men have jammed enlistment centers in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. In Baghdad, some came as early as 5 a.m. Monday — three hours before the first applications of the day were handed out. By 11 a.m., when the handing out of forms ended for the day, 500 men still stood in a block-long line, and many said they would be back today.

The forms, written in English and Arabic, ask for a detailed array of personal information, including the volunteer`s possible affiliations and loyalty to the old regime. After the forms are filled in, the would-be enlistees are invited back in the afternoon for interviews.

Unlike in Afghanistan, where the formation of a U.S.-trained national army has been bogged down by the unwillingness of some tribal chieftains and warlords to send recruits, in Iraq there seems to be no lack of enthusiasm. Even Iraqis who said they oppose a prolonged U.S. presence in their country stood in line.

The volunteers had a wide range of experiences and political attitudes. Some had been fighting in the former Iraqi army up until the last day of the war. Others had been political prisoners under Hussein and had been banned from serving in the old army.

Their common denominator was their desire for a steady salary in a country with massive unemployment, and a wish to serve. Those in line dismissed the sloganeering of anti-U.S. groups who accuse anyone collaborating with the Americans of being a traitor.

"We don`t know who are those people who say that. They are outlaws. They just want to make problems," said Abdul Wahed Mohsen, a would-be recruit who was rejected because of his age, 53.

Mohsen said he favored the U.S. Army staying in Iraq. "Thanks to them the security is good. Without them, people would be killing each other."

Enlistees must be from 18 to 40 and in fit condition. They must have no criminal history. They are obliged to serve at least two years after receiving training. No high-ranking members of the former ruling Baath Party, or anyone ranked colonel or above in the old Iraqi army, need apply.

Mohsen insisted he should be taken by the recruiters as a matter of justice, in spite of his age. An ex-pilot, he said he was pushed out of the Iraqi air force in 1979 because his father had been executed by the regime for an alleged political plot.

"I was kicked out when I was a young man, so I want to contribute now, at least for my self- respect," Mohsen said. "I want back my rights."

Another man, Hussein Enad, 36, had more practical concerns.

"I am coming back for the money of course," he said. "There are no other jobs, and I don`t know how I will feed my family."

Since he lost his army pay three months ago, Enad has been supporting his wife and four children by peddling cigarettes and selling off part of their monthly food rations.

What to do with former soldiers has been a difficult question for Bremer. Occupation officials originally contended that the 400,000-member Iraqi army essentially dissolved itself in the last days of the war and that there was no obligation for the U.S.-led coalition to support the troops. But after a string of sometimes violent protests by the idled military personnel, Bremer agreed to small stipends.

Although he was in the old army, Enad said it was for patriotic reasons, not because he was an admirer of Hussein.

"Hussein is a traitor because he gave up the country without a fight," Enad said. As to how he would feel serving initially under U.S. command, he answered, "I will serve my country, not the Americans."

Soldiers in the new force have been promised basic monthly salaries of at least $60, regular meals, health care and the chance for promotion based on merit. That compares favorably to Hussein`s time, when recruits got as little as $4 a month.

Enad, who came to the recruitment center with a group of friends who also had been noncommissioned officers, craned his neck impatiently to look about 25 yards ahead to the front of the line, where four U.S. soldiers in helmets, body armor and desert camouflage kept the throng from degenerating into a mob. On the other side of a fence, a U.S. soldier perched on an armored vehicle surveyed the scene lazily.

The mad rush for the limited number of places came on a day when U.S. forces in Baghdad were once again attacked.

Insurgents killed a soldier from the 1st Armored Division and an Iraqi interpreter, and wounded three other soldiers with an explosive device that blew up under their vehicle in northern Baghdad, U.S. Central Command said. The attack was accompanied by small-arms fire, officials said.

The death brought the number of American troops killed in action since the war began on March 20 to 152.

In another development Monday, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside a U.S. military detention facility in Baghdad to protest the arrests of five Shiite religious leaders, chanting, "No for America! No for Saddam! Yes, yes for Islam!"

Clerics leading the protest said they would maintain a presence until the captive Hawza leaders are freed. Hawza is an extensive seminary and charitable organization based in the holy city of Najaf. The leaders were arrested by U.S. troops who surrounded the home of Shiite leader Muqtader Sadr, son of Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, the most prominent Iraqi Shiite religious leader in recent history, who was assassinated by the Hussein regime in 1999. The rally reached its peak when a protester, who reportedly brandished a pistol within 100 yards of heavily armed soldiers, was quickly spirited away by other demonstrators.

To help counter attacks on U.S. forces, which the new head of Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, recently described as guerrilla warfare, officials have announced plans to create an Iraqi civil defense force — separate from the new army — that would be directly involved with U.S. troops in intelligence gathering and tracking down holdout Baathist elements.

In addition to the army, the recently revitalized Iraqi police and the proposed civil defense militia, some U.S. advisors foresee a need for a force that would safeguard basic services and public property, such as power lines and oil refineries, from saboteurs. That would free up U.S. and British troops who are now thinly stretched.



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COMMENTARY


Is Bush Conservative Enough?
By Sam Tanenhaus
Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Whittaker Chambers: A Biography" (Modern Library, 1998). He`s at work on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

July 22, 2003

Just how conservative is the Bush administration? This is a question liberals have no trouble answering. They point to many items on an agenda long associated with the activist wing of the Republican Party: a parade of ideologically driven judicial nominees, a tax plan that rewards the rich even as the working poor are being lopped off employment rolls and, above all, a go-it-alone America-first foreign policy.

But one notable group of critics has serious doubts about the administration`s commitment to conservative ideals: American conservatives. For months now, a chorus on the right, growing in volume and clarity, has been challenging the White House`s motives and aims. You can hear it in the pages of the American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan`s new magazine. Its critiques of the Bush administration`s overseas adventurism and "Wall Street socialism" have sharpened with each issue.

You can hear it too in the back and forth on the conservativenet listserv, an Internet discussion group in which scholars, most of them conservatives and many of them historians, have been dissecting the philosophical foundations of policymakers in the Bush administration who seem wedded to an American gigantism starkly at odds with the movement`s core principles.

And I got an earful of it this spring when I spoke to 150 members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — a national organization of student conservatives who immerse themselves in classic political and philosophical writings.

The war in Iraq was going well. And they were pleased. But they wondered why some conservatives, like the editors of the Weekly Standard, were squelching debate about the war and throwing around scare words like "appeasement."

What alarms these conservatives, young and old, is not so much the specific policies of the Bush administration as its appetite for an ever-enlarging, all-powerful government, a post- 9/11 version of statism, the bête noire of conservatism and the subject of one of the movement`s founding texts, Albert Jay Nock`s "Our Enemy, the State."

Published in 1935, this manifesto analyzes centralization in the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its expanding bureaucracies and new entitlements. In Nock`s view, the New Deal bore disturbing resemblances to new dictatorships arising overseas. The connection seemed remote, because FDR was so genial and because Americans were "the most un-philosophical of beings," immune to doctrines of the kind espoused by Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.

But Americans suffer from a different weakness, Nock said. Our national temper is that of "an army on the march." Susceptible to grandiose crusades, we respond with emotion rather than thought and are easily swayed "by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music, uniforms, decorations and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie."

Nock had in mind World War I — a war he opposed. But his description also applies to the mood created by the Bush administration since 9/11.

The ringing call for an all-encompassing yet ill-defined war on terror; the paraphernalia of a massive new Homeland Security Department; the showy drama of the president`s Hollywood-style landing aboard the U.S. carrier Abraham Lincoln; the decorative images of Bush`s features framed against the rocky visages on Mt. Rushmore — all of it backed by stern reminders from the White House that criticism of administration policies may undermine our camaraderie, our national zeal.

For the moment, few elected conservatives seem concerned about Bush-style statism. There have been some grumblings about the ballooning budget, larded with entitlements. But most point contentedly to the president`s handsome poll numbers and to the satisfying results of the off-year elections.

But modern conservatism, at its most serious, never tied itself to party loyalty. On the contrary, as the postwar movement took shape, conservative intellectuals were as tough on Republicans as on Democrats.

National Review, the magazine William F. Buckley Jr. started in 1955, was formed partly to organize resistance to Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican to occupy the White House since Herbert Hoover.

A hero of the right like Ohio Sen. Robert Taft was a powerful legislator but constantly battled with his party`s own establishment — and as a result was repeatedly denied the presidential nomination.

And today, middle-aged conservatives fondly recall the 1976 presidential campaign and how the insurrectionist Ronald Reagan, the sworn enemy of Washington politics, nearly wrested the nomination from the moderate incumbent Gerald Ford.

These same conservatives are well aware that the current administration boasts holdovers from the Ford years, most prominently Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. This alone invites suspicion. Not because Ford Republicans aren`t "real" Republicans but because Cheney and Rumsfeld have been comfortably perched for many years now within the Beltway establishment — "the imperial bureaucracy," as Nock called it.

And Nock`s brand of conservatism, rooted in ideas and fiercely contrarian, fears most the "monocrat" at home in either party.

"The exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power," Nock wrote, "are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another."

These are words some conservatives are pondering today as they observe an administration that is avowedly Republican but is not, perhaps, truly conservative — at least not if judged by the lights of the movement that did so much to revitalize American politics during the last 50 years.


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COMMENTARY


The Witch Hunt Against the BBC
Robert Scheer

July 22, 2003

In England, they shot the messenger. True, the death of British biological weapons expert David Kelly was a suicide. But if the reserved scientist took his own life, it was in response to the British Ministry of Defense outing and reprimanding him as the alleged whistle-blower behind the BBC`s controversial report that the government "sexed up" its intelligence information to make the case for war.

The BBC charge against the government in this instance was quite mild, because what Tony Blair did was not merely hype the case for preemptively invading Iraq. Rather, he deliberately lied to his public about the certainty of his claims to frighten the people into sending their children off to war. In this case, the Brits said — wrongly — that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes, a lie also employed by our president as one of his hysterical claims to justify the invasion of Iraq.

But in England, Kelly`s death and the unraveling justifications for war have created a governmental crisis and prompted calls for Blair to resign.

The prewar confetti of frightening claims about Iraq has been exposed as nothing more than cherry-picked snippets from intelligence reports that generally regarded that nation`s threat to the world as modest and shrinking. Instead of admitting this now-obvious fact, the Blair government unleashed a witch hunt against the BBC and anyone in the Blair administration who might have been a source for the news agency`s reporting.

Kelly was the first victim of the government`s revenge against the British Broadcasting Corp., which had — until Kelly was found dead — refused to name its source. The BBC has been a target of the Blair-Bush partnership ever since they decided to invade Iraq.

During the Iraq war, the BBC, in stark contrast to leading U.S. news outlets, distinguished itself for objective coverage of its own government, even during a time of heightened patriotism. This should be a great advertisement for the model of a free society that we claim to be eager to export to, or impose on, the rest of the world. In most countries, publicly subsidized broadcasting is an important source of news, and the BBC serves as the premier example that such reporting can withstand official government assaults on its independence. The BBC`s reporting on the doctored intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction followed its notable report debunking the U.S. military propaganda tale of the battle and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

Remember, the BBC was not taking the safe route that so many news organizations prefer. Yet, time and again, they have been proved right with each new revelation of half-truths, outright lies and data manipulation on the part of the coalition`s leaders-in-chief.

As Paul Reynolds, a veteran BBC military affairs analyst, said of the British intelligence dossier cited as the source for Bush`s now-repudiated claim about Iraq`s nuclear program: "Of the nine main conclusions in the British government document `Iraq`s Weapons of Mass Destruction,` not one has been shown to be conclusively true."

Blair last week told the U.S. Congress that he and Bush were right to invade Iraq even if no weapons of mass destruction are ever found. Left unmentioned is that it was the coalition that chased U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, claiming they weren`t doing their job and that the Iraq threat was growing. Clearly the immediacy of the threat from Hussein was a phony claim that Blair and Bush should have known full well was not backed up by any substantial evidence.

What`s left is the idea that we are in Iraq to build a democracy there by force. Yet the people on both sides of the Atlantic were adamantly opposed to this sort of nation-building, smacking as it does of past disasters, from the collapse of the British Empire to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In essence, we are now told to be happy with a rationale for war that we didn`t find convincing before the war started.

This is a denigration of the core ideal of representative democracy — rule by an enlightened public — as are vindictive attacks on journalistic watchdogs and whistle-blowers who keep our representatives honest. Last week in his speech, Blair smugly claimed the favorable judgment of future historians, but it is the BBC that history will celebrate for its pursuit of truth.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

Like Father, Like Son
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, July 21, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/columnists/sorensen/



Here are three of my favorite quotes:

"I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

"It depends on what your definition of `is` is."

"I don`t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."

The first two quotes, as everybody knows, were uttered by former President Bill Clinton. The last, published in the May 17, 2002, New York Times, was attributed to Condoleezza Rice, national security ddvisor to President George W. Bush.

All three quotes fall into the broad category of obfuscation, telling the literal truth with intent to deceive.

Here`s another, from the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George H.W. Bush:

"I talk regularly with our son. I`ve been doing that since he was a little kid." This also is from The New York Times, on Sept. 14, 2001.

Then the former president added: "It`s not always about policy. It`s not, ŒWhat do you think, Dad, I should be doing?` That kind of thing. It is more the relationship of a very close family staying in touch, one with the other."

So the elder Bush, who spent most of his adult life plugging away at one political job or another, wants us to believe he doesn`t spent much time discussing policy with his son the president?

Ha! Ha! And ha!

In their book, "Bush`s Brain," the authors James C. Moore and Wayne Slater make a compelling case that presidential advisor Karl Rove, by manipulating the president, is the most powerful man in America today.

I can`t argue with that assessment, yet I`m inclined to believe the most influential man in America today is the former president, not the current one or any of his non-familial advisors.

When the time comes to investigate the present Bush administration, trying to determine what went wrong and why, and who was responsible, my advice to the investigators would be to take a very, very close look at George Herbert Walker Bush.

It`s impossible for an outsider like me to untangle all the webs of intrigue operating in national politics, but in this case I think a good start would be to look at something called "Project for the New American Century," now known by its detractors as PNAC.

PNAC laid out its " statement of principles" on June 3, 1997. Its 25 signers read like a Who`s Who of Bush cronyism, with a few marginal characters thrown in to give the illusion of balance: Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, Gary Bower, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalizad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel and Paul Wolfowitz.

Most of these people had roles in the former Bush administration and now have roles in the current one.

David Brook, writing in the July 21, 2000, New York Times, had this to say about the old/new Bush team:

"This season there are no outsiders. The Bush campaign is about as insurgent as General Electric or I.B.M. If the Bushies win, they can cancel the White House orientation tour because everybody will have already worked there.

"The foreign policy team is like a Desert Storm reunion tour: Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Roibert Zoellick all worked for President George Bush. One exception is Richard Perle, and he worked in the Reagan administration. ...

"The Bush campaign looks as much like an incumbent campaign as the Gore one. Measured by governing experience, the edge actually goes to the G.O.P."

PNAC is important because it was the planning group that decided, in 2000, before George W. became president, that the United States should conquer Iraq "even should Saddam pass from the scene."

This plan (called " Rebuilding America`s Defenses (pdf. file)" did not suggest United Nations involvement, nor did it justify military action on the basis of Saddam`s supposed weapons of mass destruction. It had to do with establishing American bases in the Middle East.

Where did the phrase "New American Century" come from? I wondered about that, so I did a Nexis search of The New York Times through the 1980s and `90s.

Guess what? Almost every time the phrase was mentioned by the Times, it came out of the mouth of the first George Bush.

March 17, 1989, in Houston: "My agenda for a new American century ..."

Jan. 27, 1992, 1992, to a group of religious broadcasters: Said his State of the Union messsage would "detail how we can nuture creativity ... and harness it to the needs of a new American century."

March 22, 1992, at a swearing-in ceremony, "... help us compete in a new world economy and create a new American century."

April 2, 1992, in Philadelphia: "Today our mission is to begin restoring the principles of our founders and guaranteeing for our children a new American century."

And so on. If you put everything into context, "new American century," as used by the elder Bush, did not mean a new century in America. What it meant, in simplest terms, is that the United States would dominate the world in the 21st century.

And that`s what the younger Bush is clearly striving for: world domination.

That`s why a single day of terrorist attacks (that perhaps could have been prevented) is ballyhooed as "another Pearl Harbor." The Bush people needed a rallying cry to motivate the masses. (In "Rebuilding America`s Defenses," the authors even looked forward to "another Pearl Harbor." Sept. 11 gave it to them.)

The push for American dominance is why the younger Bush treats the United Nations with a contempt usually reserved by conservatives for the Berkeley City Council. To dominate, we can`t cooperate with others; we must become a rogue nation.

It looks to me like Daddy had his cohorts lay out the blueprint, then he put them in charge of Sonny. Sonny does what he`s told.

Even the scheme to destroy our social programs is straight out of Daddy`s playbook. First, through ill-conceived tax cuts and reckless spending, you put the nation into debt. Then, lamenting a lack of funds, you abolish the programs. That`s vintage Reagan-Bush.

It`s hard to tell now when the Bush family steamroller will finally be brought under control. When it is, I do hope the investigators took a good look at Daddy. He Da Man!

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist and liberal iconoclast. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

[goldmist]

Hi Joerver

hier mal ein artikel aus der jungen welt

zur abwechslung mal auf deutsch



Ausland
Rainer Rupp

Schwindende Moral der GIs

Das Pentagon greift im Irak inzwischen auf alte Männer und Wochenendsoldaten zurück

»Up yours, asshole«, war die Reaktion des US-Sergeants auf das Zuwinken eines vorbeifahrenden irakischen Jugendlichen in der 200000-Einwohner-Stadt Falludscha, eines der Zentren des irakischen Widerstandes gegen die fremden Besatzungstruppen. Und er fügte hinzu: »Oh Gott, wie ich diese Leute hasse«. So zitierte jüngst der Reporter einer britischen Tageszeitung den US-Feldwebel Ronald Black von der Dritten US-Infanteriedivision. Trotz wiederholter Versprechungen, bald nach Hause gehen zu können, bekamen die US-Soldaten kürzlich den Befehl, bis zum Herbst vor Ort auszuharren.

Nach übereinstimmenden Berichten hat die Moral der US-Soldaten im Irak-Einsatz einen Tiefpunkt erreicht. Inmitten einer feindlichen Umgebung müssen sie sich in voller Montur bei 40 Grad im Schatten ständig »als lebende Zielscheiben« fühlen. Entsprechend verärgert und ungehalten reagieren die GIs bei ihren Patrouillen. Immer wieder kommt es zu tragischen »Irrtümern« der GIs, die so ihren im Irak erworbenen Ruf als brutale und schießwütige Soldateska bestätigen. Damit aber erreicht das US-Militär genau das Gegenteil dessen, was die fünf vom Pentagon eingesetzten unabhängigen Experten in ihrem jüngsten Bericht als oberste Priorität genannt haben: die »Herzen und Köpfe« der Iraker zu erobern. Ansonsten, so heißt es in dem Bericht, könnte das Land innerhalb von drei Monaten für die US-Besatzer vollkommen unregierbar werden. Kürzlich berichtete CNN, wie sich nach einem Angriff auf US-Truppen in Bagdad eine irakische Menschenmenge zusammenfand und beim Abtransport eines toten GIs in Minuten langen Jubel ausbrach.

Jüngsten Berichten zufolge gärt es sogar in den ländlichen Keimzellen des amerikanischen Nationalismus. Ein Beispiel bietet das 30000 Einwohner kleine Militärstädtchen Hinesville im US-Bundesstaat Georgia, wo die Dritte US-Infanetriedivision beheimatet ist. Hier können auch die riesigen US-Flaggen und Plakate, die an jeder Straßenecke »patriotisch« Gottes Segen für Amerika und seine Truppen im Irak erbitten, nicht über die zunehmende Unzufriedenheit der Soldatenfrauen und Angehörigen hinwegtäuschen. Medienberichten zufolge ist das »Klima von Angst bestimmt, die leicht in Wut umschlagen könnte«. Die Moral der Angehörigen und der dort noch stationierten Soldaten sei inzwischen sehr niedrig. Laut Patrick Donahue, Redakteur der Lokalzeitung Coastal Courier, sind die Soldatenfrauen »sehr enttäuscht – es grenzt fast an Wut und Verbitterung«. Die Tatsache, daß die US-Truppen im Irak nicht als Befreier gefeiert werden, ist für viele ein Schock.

Nicht nur in Briefen an Angehörige und ihre Vertreter im US-Kongreß machen die Soldaten inzwischen ihrem Ärger und der Enttäuschung über die politische und militärische Führung Luft, sondern auch in den Medien. »Ich habe meine eigene ›Liste der am meisten gesuchten‹ (Verbrecher - R.R). Die Asse in meinem Kartenspiel sind Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush und Paul Wolfowitz«, wurde ein namentlich nicht genannter US-Feldwebel von dem amerikanischen Nachrichtensender ABC-News kürzlich zitiert. »Ich habe mein Vertrauen in die Army verloren«, sagte auch US-Soldat Jayson Punyhotra, der sich nicht scheute, seinen Namen zu nennen. Und der GI Clinton Deitz sagte, er würde »Donald Rumsfeld auffordern, sofort zurückzutreten«.

Da sich solche abfälligen Äußerungen von GIs in den Medien gehäuft haben, wollen kommandierende Offiziere bereits Verfahren wegen »Wehrkraftzersetzung« anberaumen. Dennoch steht das Pentagon vor einem Dilemma. Es steht zu befürchten, daß viele der für teures Geld ausgebildeten GIs ihre Verträge nicht mehr verlängern oder vorzeitig kündigen werden. Das geschähe zu einem Zeitpunkt, zu dem das Pentagon Soldaten dringender braucht denn je. Zunehmend greift das Pentagon auch für den Einsatz im Irak auf sogenannte Wochenendsoldaten der Nationalgarde zurück und öffnet damit unfreiwillig eine weitere gefährliche Flanke. Denn diese Männer kommen mitten aus dem zivilen Leben, wo sie als Feuerwehrleute, Postboten, Techniker oder Lehrer arbeiten. Der am 9. Juli von einem irakischen Scharfschützen getötete 55jährige US-Feldwebel Roger Dale Rowe war bereits siebenfacher Großvater. Nun will das Pentagon weitere 10000 Nationalgardisten in den Irak schicken.

Mit jedem Verwundeten oder Getöteten rückt der Krieg im Irak derweil stärker ins Bewußtsein der amerikanischen Bevölkerung. Der tägliche Blutzoll und die Berichte über Beisetzungen und trauernde Familien in der Regionalpresse haben nicht nur in den Medien inzwischen Erinnerungen an Vietnam geweckt. So könnte Bushs »glorreicher Sieg« im Irak noch rechtzeitig zu den Präsidentschaftswahlen nächstes Jahr zu seiner politischen Niederlage werden.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

POLL ANALYSES
July 22, 2003


Iraq War Rally Effect Has Disappeared
Bush`s ratings essentially the same as before the war began


by David W. Moore
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- In the wake of national emergencies, the American public tends to rally around its government and leaders. In polling, this "rally effect" is typically indicated by a sudden increase in the president`s approval rating, though often the president`s ratings in other areas will increase as well. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for example, President George W. Bush`s approval rating jumped 35 percentage points, from 51% to 86%, then reached a record high of 90% a week later. The effect is rarely permanent, although it is important to note that, while Bush`s approval declined over the next 18 months, it did not fall as low as 51%, where it was just before 9/11.

After the Iraq war was launched in mid-March, Bush enjoyed another, though much smaller rally effect, with his approval rating going from 58% to 71%. While this 13-point jump is only about a third the size of Bush`s rally effect after 9/11, it is nevertheless quite substantial and one of the largest ones in Gallup polling history. Still, the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds that this latest surge has essentially dissipated -- Bush`s presidential approval rating, his ratings on the economy and foreign affairs in general, his handling of the situation in Iraq, as well as his re-election standing among registered voters, are all back to pre-war levels.

The poll, conducted July 18-20, finds the current approval ratings of Bush all within a point or two of where they were just before the war was launched:

His overall job approval rating is 59%, a point higher than before the war.

George W. Bush’s Job Approval Rating
Before the Iraq War Until Now

His economy rating is 45% approve to 51% disapprove, virtually identical to the 44% to 52% rating found right before the war
George W. Bush’s Job of Handling the Economy
Before the Iraq War Until Now


http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030722.asp

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Fisk ist wohl aus dem Urlaub zurück.

Fisk: The ugly truth of America`s Camp Cropper, a story to shame us all
By Robert Fisk
22 July 2003, Independent

Now here`s a story to shame us all. It`s about America`s shameful prison camps in Iraq. It`s about the beating of prisoners during interrogation.

"Sources" may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but the sources for the beatings in Iraq are impeccable. This story is also about the gunning down of three prisoners in Baghdad, two of them "while trying to escape". But most of all, it`s about Qais Mohamed al-Salman. Qais al-Salman is just the sort of guy the US ambassador Paul Bremer and his dead-end assistants need now. He hated Saddam, fled Iraq in 1976, then returned after the "liberation" with a briefcase literally full of plans to help in the restoration of his country`s infrastructure and water purification system.

He`s an engineer who has worked in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is a Danish citizen. He speaks good English. He even likes America. Or did until 6 June this year.

That day he was travelling in Abu Nawas Street when his car came under American fire. He says he never saw a checkpoint. Bullets hit the tyres and his driver and another passenger ran for their lives. Qais al-Salman stood meekly beside the vehicle. He was carrying his Danish passport, Danish driving licence and medical records.

But let him tell his own story. "A civilian car came up with American soldiers in it. Then more soldiers in military vehicles. I told them I didn`t understand what had happened, that I was a scientific researcher. But they made me lie down in the street, tied my arms behind me with plastic-and-steel cuffs and tied up my feet and put me in one of their vehicles."

The next bit of his story carries implications for our own journalistic profession. "After 10 minutes in the vehicle, I was taken out again. There were journalists with cameras. The Americans untied me, then made me lie on the road again. Then, in front of the cameras, they tied my hands and feet all over again and put me back in the vehicle."

If this wasn`t a common story in Baghdad today - if the gross injustices meted out to ordinary Iraqis and the equally gross mistreatment in America`s prison camps here was not so common - then Qais al-Salman`s story would not be so important.

Amnesty International turned up in Baghdad yesterday to investigate, as well as Saddam`s monstrous crimes, the mass detention centre run by the Americans at Baghdad international airport in which up to 2,000 prisoners live in hot, airless tents. The makeshift jail is called Camp Cropper and there have already been two attempted breakouts.

Both would-be escapees, needless to say, were swiftly shot dead by their American captors. Yesterday, Amnesty was forbidden permission to visit Camp Cropper. This is where the Americans took Qais Al-Salman on 6 June.

He was put in Tent B, a vast canvas room containing up to 130 prisoners. "There were different classes of people there," Qais al-Salman says. "There were people of high culture, doctors and university people, and there were the most dirty, animal people, thieves and criminals the like of which I never saw before.

"In the morning, I was taken for interrogation before an American military intelligence officer. I showed him letters involving me in US aid projects . He pinned a label on my shirt. It read, Suspected Assassin`."

Now there probably are some assassins in Camp Cropper. The good, the bad and the ugly have been incarcerated there: old Baathists, possible Iraqi torturers, looters and just about anyone who has got in the way of the American military. Only "selected" prisoners are beaten during interrogation. Again, I repeat, the source is impeccable, and Western.

Qais Al-Salman was given no water to wash in, and after trying to explain his innocence to a second interrogator, he went on hunger strike. No formal charges were made against him. There were no rules for the American jailers.

"Some soldiers drove me back to Baghdad after 33 days in that camp," Qais al-Salman says. "They dropped me in Rashid Street and gave me back my documents and Danish passport and they said, Sorry`."

Qais al-Salman went home to his grief-stricken mother who had long believed her son was dead. No American had contacted her despite her desperate requests to the US authorities for help. Not one of the Americans had bothered to tell the Danish government they had imprisoned one of its citizens. Just as in Saddam`s day, a man had simply been "disappeared" off the streets of Baghdad.

Copyright: The Independent

[Joerver]

Bad Guy / Good Guy
War Forces; Peace Frees
By DIANE CHRISTIAN

"You help me find the bad guy or we come back with our tanks and run over your fields and break down your house."

US soldier to a northern Iraqi villager,
July 17, 2003, CNN news

The soldiers face sniping resistance and are attempting to root out the fighters who blend into the Iraqi village population. So they`re coercing information from the neighbors through the threat of ravage. This tactic is not exactly the same as the Israeli practice of destroying the land and homes of Palestinian suicide bombers` families. That is deliberately punitive revenge and it`s also rationalized as deterrence. Our soldiers` tactic is simply brutal coercion, guerilla warfare, extortion.

Should `good guys` get `bad guys` by coercing and ravaging neutral guys? Didn`t we disparage Saddam`s inhumanity by pointing out that he terrorized his own people in a reign of fear and retribution? Or does war suppress humanitarian questions and radicalize everyone into good guys who are with us and bad guys who are against us? The soldiers who mistakenly kill civilians they think are hostile are excused because fear is seen as a reasonable excuse. Alan Dershowitz, sometime defender of civil rights, thinks even torture is allowable. Everybody knows people do these things. Warrior types sneer at liberal squeamishness. Ann Coulter swashbuckles that we should ravage and kill and convert the Muslims. As Yeats puts it: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

One reason it`s so difficult to move from war to peace is that they`re different tactics. War forces and peace frees. U.S. Americans love both force and freedom-the tough guys who triumph and the high ideal. As Tony Blair so deftly demonstrated speaking to the US Congress, we thrill to freedom talk, stand up and clap for it, are willing to die for it, love the flag for it. My favorite revolutionary war headstone reads "When I heard freedom was the cause my heart was enlisted."

But it`s hard to love the soldier who says get me the bad guy or I ruin your fields and house. When Saddam Hussein terrorized and threatened his people and punished them for criticizing him we said he was a monster worthy of death. Is the soldier that, or does he get a pass because it`s us against them and war is hell and any means possible is ok if it`s a bad guy you`re after?

The soldier is still in war mode, which is reasonable as he`s being shot at. He`s not a policeman or a peacemaker except in the war fantasy that killing and destroying will make all well in the end because we`ll get rid of evil. Our exorcisms fail for several reasons, including the obvious trouble we have catching demons. Like Khaddafi and Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, our Iraqi incarnation of evil, evaded our awesome decapitation campaign. This unnerves the Iraqis who are afraid he`ll come back and also punctures our apocalyptic pose. The day of reckoning George Bush promised Saddam Hussein is postponed due the sacrificial oblation`s sneaking away to escape smiting. Death comes to us all in course, but taking out bad guys gives us the illusion that we`re in charge and triumphal.

If we caught Saddam today and put his head on a pole as they did in 17th century Britain would all be well, would there be no more bad guys, would we be good guys because we killed the bad guy? The demons aren`t only out there. It`s a fantasy to think they can be packaged into regimes which can be changed like socks-the holy tossing the holey.

Is it a good guy tactic to destroy a person`s fields and home to force him to name his neighbor as a bad guy? Aren`t these tactics we`ve deplored in other regimes? Are they good because we do them and we`re good? What moral maelstrom do we descend to to delude ourselves so?

Most religious and moral teachings warn against thinking you`re good. Call no man good is the counsel. The wisdom is that if you think you`re good you`re dangerous because you won`t acknowledge where you`re bad. Contrary to popular appetite, it`s not all or nothing, good or bad forever fixed, but separate actions in time. You can be good today and bad tomorrow, bad yesterday and good today. If you`re free it`s an open option.

The only unforgivable sin Christ named is confusing good and evil, calling evil good and good evil.

The bad guy doesn`t define the good guy. Actions do.

Diane Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Buffalo. She can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/christian07222003.html

[Joerver]

July 19, 2003


The Pax Americana
Will It be More Sustainable than the Dot.com Bubble?
By ARTHUR MITZMAN

Both the critics and the supporters of neoliberal globalization had, in the years before September 11, 2001, assumed that neoliberal globalization had made obsolete the nationalist militarism and imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is a powerful geopolitical basis for such an assumption. Traditional empires expanded in two-dimensional space, along the surface of land and sea. The further away the imperial possession or interest, the more difficult was communication and transportation. Accordingly, capitalist imperialism too was tied to nationalism, and powerful corporations looked to their governments for support -- tariffs and if necessary armies -- against all comers.

Neoliberal globalization has been based on the technological revolutions of the last half century. Air transport and telecommunications have added a third dimension to geopolitical and entrepreneurial space: the rapid transportation of goods and persons, and the instantaneous transmission of information through the earth`s atmosphere. Using this third dimension, multinational corporations prowl the surface of the earth for cheap labor to reduce the costs of production, for willing partners (or unwilling corporate victims) on other continents, and for lucrative international currency deals that escape the attention of national regulators. The nation-state, together with war and imperialism, had, we thought until 2001, become obsolete.

But neoconservative ideology, having guided the military prowess of the world`s only remaining superpower into the conquest of Iraq, argues openly for a new American empire, a Pax Americana mandated by U.S. military preeminence, justified by the democratic values of American civilization, and based on neoliberal principles of market economy, deregulation and privatisation.

How did we get here? Is neoconservatism an atavism or is it, by some defiance of what we thought to be logical, the real face of neoliberal capitalism? And what is the significance for America`s imperial pretension of the reemergence of quasi-religious patriotic conviction after September 11? A brief look at the last century will illuminate these questions.


MODERNIZATION, NATIONALISM AND CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM

One of the most powerful forces underlying the awful history of the past hundred and fifty years has been the paradoxical but lethal dialectic between economic modernization and xenophobic nationalism. A brief look at this dialectic in European history will illuminate the antecedents of the current neoconservative cry for a global Pax Americana to save the world from terrorism and rogue states.

The turn to extreme nationalism in Europe -- and particularly in Germany and France -- at the end of the nineteenth century was mediated in both cases by the impact on traditional societies of capitalist modernization. As indicated, the latter, begun under the flag of free trade, shifted to the quest for protected Empires (and protected industrial sectors) in the course of the depression of the 1870`s. The economic motives for this turn were supplemented by the growing power of right-wing populist, xenophobic parties in which the democratic nationalism of earlier generations metamorphosed into militarist chauvinism. Such parties, often inpired by a conservative Christian antisemitism and antimodernism, offered artisans and peasants, torn from the traditional social fabric of village life and hurled into insecure urban jobs by the spread of industrial capitalism, a new sense of identity -- identity with a militarized concept of the "nation" and with the imperial state that claimed to incarnate it.

Where the tradition of national democratic revolution was weak, as in Germany, the antisemitic "völkisch" parties were so effective in attracting the electorate of the older conservative and liberal parties that, to compete with the populist upstarts, those older parties largely took over the right-populist combination of antisemitism, cultural conservatism and xenophobia in the decades before World War I. Where the democratic revolutionary tradition was stronger, as in France, the threat to Republican institutions from the populist Right may have been powerful during the Dreyfus Affair, when it was supported both by the military establishment and by reactionary Catholicism, but it was repulsed around the turn to the twentieth century by a strong anti-clerical, anti-militarist backlash from radical republican and socialist parties inspired by the ideals of 1789. Another source of the relative weakness of the populist-nationalist reaction in France was the more gradual - compared with Germany - transition to the industrial age. The French peasantry, which had become firmly entrenched at the time of the Revolution, slowed the growth of capitalist industry, as did the relative scarcity of good coal deposits.

Nonetheless, the imperialist turn of the eighteen-eighties and the power of populist nationalism nurtured in both France and Germany a foreign policy based on dangerous alliances with atavistic imperial states -- respectively Russian and Austria-Hungary -- whose support for mutually hostile Slavic nationalisms ultimately, in 1914, dragged all the great powers into a conflict which lasted until 1945. With a twenty year intermission for a brief recovery, a disastrous economic crisis and the fascist takeovers in Italy, Germany and Spain, this conflict ended up costing the European peoples tens of millions of dead and hundreds of millions of shattered lives.

At the end of those decades of carnage and despair, every major force in Europe and North America, from capitalist conservatives to Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Communists, agreed to create institutions that would block any new drift toward nationalist confrontation: the United Nations, European Unification, and international, multilateral trade agreements. These institutions worked effectively for a quarter of a century and on paper for another twenty-five years. Since the Nixon regime`s trashing of the Bretton Woods currency stabilization agreement in the early seventies they have been undermined by the increasingly unilateral tendencies of the United States.(Will Hutton, The World We`re In, 2002) They are now being deconstructed by the openly imperial claims of the United States.

The miscalculations of various power elites in the early twentieth century are instructive. Trigger for the first phase of the apocalypse -- Armageddon had a few years earlier been threatened by conflicting great power claims in North Africa -- were the unstable nationalisms of the Balkans, in which a crumbling Ottoman Empire had ceded control to Russian and Austrian areas of influence: The Russians were allied with Serbia, the Austrians had long occupied Croatia. After the Austrians annexed Bosnia in 1909 -- a pre-emptive move designed, they thought, to prevent terrorism -- the Serbian secret police helped establish the tiny terrorist organization, the Black Hand, which, purportedly to castrate the war party in Austria, carried out the murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July 1914. Far from intimidating the Austrians, the assassination enraged the Austrian war party and gave them the public support to issue an ultimatum to Serbia with a forty-eight hour deadline, demanding that the investigation of the murder would be carried out by Austrian agencies in Serbia. Serbia`s refusal led to an Austrian declaration of war. Since Serbia was allied to Russia, czarist forces were immediately mobilized against Austria-Hungary. Wilhelmian Germany, which had a similar alliance with Austria was required to enter the war with Russia, and, since the French-Russian alliance was common knowledge, with France as well. England`s alliance with France and Russia brought it too into the conflict.

The Wilhelmian government was delighted to support Austria against this burgeoning list of enemies, since it had long been perfecting a strategy for a two-front war that would enable it to smash both its Slavic and Gallic enemies in a short period of time -- the Schlieffen plan. In fact, all the participating armies were initially supported by immense popular enthusiasm, egged on by various patriotic, nationalist or "völkisch" journalists and intellectuals who saw in a quick, successful war the heroic antidote to generations of stultifying domination by bourgeois and late-aristocratic elites. The fifty month bloodbath that followed, accompanied at its close by the disintegration of the Russian, German and Austrian Empires, is well known. As are the results of its repetition between 1939 and 1945.

The salient features of this horror were three-fold.
First, the dialectic between the capitalist modernization of the age and an essentially archaic and no-exit nationalist imperialism, mediated by the social problems caused by rapid industrialization.
Secondly, the way main stream political and economic forces become captive to the violent extremisms they had supported as, precisely, a popular alternative to social reform or revolution.
Finally, the usefulness of acts of terrorism to stimulate popular support for aggression.

Let`s return now to the present, where, unless U.S. neoconservatism is effectively blocked, all the elements of the early twentieth century apocalypse, magnified by the danger of nuclear war, threaten to reemerge.



THE NEOCONSERVATIVE PAX AMERICANA, GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND EUROPE

In the flood of recent material explicating the rise of neoconservative ideology and the basis for a U.S. unilateral foreign policy, two works are particularly illuminating: Robert Kagan`s Of Paradise and Power. America and Europe in the New World Order, (2003) and Will Hutton`s The World We`re In (2002). Kagan offers a robust political defense of neoconservativism, Hutton a trenchant economic critique of its significance for American capitalism.

Kagan`s book on the U.S. and European "takes" on world politics would have been more appropriately title "Of Weakness and Power", since the European "paradise" he juxtaposes to the American power realism is a transparent euphemism for weakness. In a Hobbesian vein that many of the neoconservatives have taken over from Leo Strauss, Kagan argues that only military might really counts in international relations. Europeans, in their pleas for multilateral agreements and their aversion to violence, are possessed, in this view, by the slave mentality Nietzsche attributed to Christian pacifism in its efforts, inspired by nothing more or less than the slave`s weakness, to castrate the virtuous power of the aristocracy. Kagan does not openly cite Nietzsche, but his argumentation strongly suggests the "philosopher of the hammer." (In fact, he uses the hammer in a striking metaphor comparing European and American attitudes to world problems.)

Sustaining Kagan`s Hobbesian view of the international scene is the assumption of unceasing threat. The jungle of imperialist power politics preceding World War I was, in this view, followed by the global menace of international fascism, particularly the design for world conquest of Nazi Germany. After World War II, the focus of perceived threat shifted eastward to the Soviet Union, whose expansion to eastern Europe was widely seen as the harbinger of a Communist takeover of the rest of the continent. After the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the threat shifted to the southeast, to the fanatic world of middle eastern moslem fundamentalism, and, most recently, to the Iraqi rogue state, with its horribly dangerous weapons of mass destruction and its alleged ties to Osama Bin Laden.

Unlike post-1945 Europe, which exchanged the Hobbesian perspective for a Kantian one of universal peace, the United States, in this view, has been on the whole a responsible defender of liberal civilized values in a dangerous world. Kagan`s explicit reference point is the lonely sheriff in the lawless mid-western town of movie legend, able and willing to defend the cowardly townspeople (the Europeans, typified by the saloonkeeper who can only think of buying off the badmen) against the threats of amoral gangsters on horseback. Europeans, in their "postmodern" paradise protected by U.S. power, have been able to devote themselves to economic and cultural development. They could allow themselves to spend only a fraction of what the U.S. does on defense, because they were protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. This depiction of a Europe able to ignore the profound threats to its existence because of U.S. "realism" applies, in Kagan`s analysis, both to the menace of a Soviet takeover during the Cold War, and to the subsequent threats from Islamic terrorism and Saddam`s WMD. Kagan views any European skepticism about the reality of these threats as wishful thinking, explicable in terms of Europe`s unwillingness to confront renewed global conflict but nonetheless delusional.

Neoconservatism refuted by historical reality

The last of the menaces alleged by Kagan can be taken as pars pro toto for the rest. The Pentagon`s assurances that, according to unimpeachable intelligence reports, the Ba`athist regime, in contravention of its pledged commitment, still possessed and was itching to use enormous amounts of nerve and mustard gas, motivated a U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq to "disarm" perfidious Saddam. Since then, thousands of searchers have been unable to locate the slightest trace of those diabolical instruments. It turns out that most of the intelligence consisted of rumors, gossip and forgeries forwarded by the U.S.-protected Iraqi exile organization of the convicted embezzler Chalabi (himself privy to the neocon inner circle) to the "Cabal", the secretive twelve man intelligence unit (Office of Special Plans) established in the Pentagon by Donald Rumsfeld as a counterweight to the C.I.A.

The alleged threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe between 1945 and 1989, most historians and political scientists now agree, was as chimerical as Saddam`s Weapons of Mass Destruction have turned out to be in 2003. Archival research has confirmed the reasoning of many Cold War skeptics: the Soviet Union`s posture after the Second World War was essentially defensive. By its occupation of eastern Germany, the Soviets were not planning global conquest but simply maintaining the disunity of a Germany that had twice in very recent history invaded and devastated European Russia.

Moreover, Soviet domination of the European states that had earlier been part of either the Austro-Hungarian or the Czarist Empires was largely a conservative return to the pre-1914 status quo. After the crushing of German military power, the Soviet military and political presence in Eastern Europe had the double function of exploiting the raw materials of the region for post-war Soviet industrial development, and of keeping under tight control the latent nationalisms of the area, first and foremost the German variety, but also to an important degree those of the quarreling and unstable states between the Slavic heartland and German-speaking Europe.

Notwithstanding the internationalist rhetoric of Soviet Communism, however, the foreign policy of Russia under Stalin and his successors was founded on the realistic perception that any effort to take over, by invasion or subversion, the much more developed industrial societies of western Europe would inevitably shift westward the balance of political and economic power in the Communist world and create the danger of contamination of the Slavic heartland by liberal and socialist values. No more than Czarist Russia after the defeat of Napoleon could Stalinist Communism realistically envisage administering an empire that extended from the Sea of Japan to the Bay of Biscay.

There remains of course, the reality of September 11, the galvanizing shock that permitted U.S. neocons to sell their world view to a traumatized U.S. public opinion. While most of the world, including the vast majority of Europeans, were horrified by this event, many Europeans were aware, as most Americans were not, that the attacks on New York and Washington were not intended to bring the U.S. to its knees but to express the outrage of fundamentalist Moslem fanatics at the profanation of Islamic holy places, particularly in Saudi Arabia, by the American military presence in the Middle East. In fact, most European observers as well as a good many American ones argue that the heavy-handed military riposte to the terror attacks of 2001 -- like the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1909, also undertaken in the name of combatting terrorism -- has increased rather than decreased the possibility of their repetition.

To justify its military response to all three situations, U.S. power has alleged the need to prevent or pre-empt an imminent and devastating attack. For Kagan, as for most other conservatives, the crucial never-to-be-repeated event, elevated to the force of transhistorical legend, was the pusillanimity of liberal democracies regarding the rise of Hitler: "The `lesson of Munich` came to dominate American strategic thought....today it remains the dominant paradigm. While a small segment of the American elite still yearns for `global governance`and eschews military force, Americans from Madeleine Albright to Donald Rumsfeld, from Brent Scowcroft to Anthony Lake, still remember Munich, figuratively if not literally." Yet in all three post-war situations, Europeans, who have far more reason than Americans to fear attack and who have had a much closer experience of both mass Communist Parties and Islamic (and non-Islamic) terrorism, have rarely made the comparison with Munich and not shared the intense U.S. feeling of insecurity. Kagan argues that this is because they are too afraid to look reality in the face, just as they were when they were "appeasing" Hitler. But the systematic errors of American assessments of global menaces to the western social order suggests another possibility: that Europeans are realistic in their assessments and Americans are pathologically fearful of foreign menaces.

Social anxieties, fear of terrorism and the new imperialism

Indeed, Americans live in a society riven by such extremes of wealth and poverty that social fear -- based on urban muggings and robberies, on downsizing, on the many cases of middle class decline into the unprotected lower orders, on becoming seriously ill without the necessary health insurance, etc., etc. -- is pervasive, from the wealthy residents of gated communities to the meanest inhabitants of urban ghettos. After decades of media exploitation of this anxiety through cataclysmic scenarios of alien invasions, sinister criminal gangs, diabolic intervention in human affairs, South American drug barons, and fascist and communist totalitarian menaces, it is hardly surprising that Americans should rally around flag and president when their fears become focussed on a gang of fanatic Islamic fundamentalists whose behavior might have come from a 007 film.

Looking at the insecure mass of Americans threatened on a daily basis with criminal aggression and social decline, often forced out of the decently paid jobs that prevailed several decades ago into a life of parttime "flex" work, one is reminded of the patriotism of the deracinated Roman mob, forced out of the social nexus by the slaves brought back to Rome with the victorious legions in a way comparable to today`s elimination of regular work by automation and job export. Another point of comparison is with the right-populist masses, recruited from traditional middle classes threatened by industrial capitalism, that supported xenophobic ideologues and nationalist imperialism in pre-World War I Europe, and fascist totalitarianism during the interbellum.

If, however, European capitalist elites before World Wars I and II viewed alliances with such right-wing popular forces as both a support for their imperialist aims and a fine way of neutralizing the socialist opposition, they became aware in 1945 that such opportunism led to a dead end of mutual annihilation, and they have ever since quarantined the far right politically and socially. Imperialist rivalries also were interred after the demise of fascism, partly because of the post-war surge of Third World anticolonialism and partly because of the turn, after the devastation of European cities and populations, to principles of European political and economic cooperation. If the threat from the left, seemingly supported by a resurgent Soviet Union, was stronger than ever in the late 1940s, the response was not the earlier combination of support for populist chauvinism and social legislation, but the creation of a full-fledged welfare state, inspired broadly by a Keynesian perspective on the need for state regulation of market capitalism and for amelioration of the social problems it produced. This welfare state coincided with the reconstruction of a Europe based economically on the proliferation of Fordist methods of mass production: burgeoning numbers of Europeans worked in centralized factories and offices.

North American economic elites, during and after a 1950`s phase of paranoid nationalism sparked by the Soviet nuclear bomb and the Korean War, similarly supported welfare state protections, extended Fordist production of consumer goods, and implemented Keynesian principles in international financial relations through the Bretton Woods monetary accord.

Hutton on the assumptions underlying social ideology in the U.S. and Europe

Will Hutton, in his brilliant juxtaposition of European and American capitalism, The World We`re In, explains how in the early `seventies the Nixon presidency started a movement away from this Keynesian multilateralism by jettisoning Bretton Woods. Thatcherism in England parallelled Reaganism in the U.S. in exchanging the welfare state for the panaceas of privatisation, deregulation, and pure market capitalism. From this point on, Hutton argues, the latent unilateralism of American foreign policy, pendant of the anti-social individualism of American capitalism, was coming to the fore, inhibited only by the "Vietnam syndrome" that September 11 did so much to dissipate. Underlying the U.S. and Thatcherian versions of market capitalism, however, was a fundamental characteristic of Anglosaxon capitalist development: the harshly individualist premises exemplified in the philosophy of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

Europeans, to the contrary, have, in their diverse mentalities and ideologies, generally stressed the social basis of human existence, exemplified in the sociological theory of Emile Durkheim. This social presupposition has very old roots in Christian doctrines of responsibility for the poor and in feudal notions of responsibility for one`s dependents. In the modern era, the plurality of nations and of social forces within nations has mandated interstate cooperation and social compromise. Periods in which powerful states have thrown these principles to the winds have been the darkest and bloodiest in European history. In consequence, the European Keynesian welfare state was more solidly anchored than the American variety in popular as well as elite mentalities, and conservative efforts to convert continental Europe to a privatised market economy based on U.S. principles of pure individualism have encountered vast popular resistance.

Hutton denies the Anglosaxon argument that government or social controls over market economies limit wealth creation and productive growth and that their absence makes a completely deregulated, privatised capitalism the most progressive economic force on earth. He underlines the long-term competitive disadvantages of U.S. shareholder capitalism based on such principles compared with a European capitalism subject to the interplay of banking, state and social controls. In a number of striking examples, Hutton points to the undermining of powerful corporations like Boeing, Enron and General Electric by the dependence of corporate finances on fickle shareholder favor. To boost share prices on a day-to-day or at most week-to-week basis, corporations are in continual search of flashy but expensive merger operations, or downsizing gimmicks or a new way of cooking the books to show more profit. Since the downsizing often goes at the expense of research and development programs, which may only be profitable years later, technological and productivity improvements tend to lag behind those of European corporations in the same areas, whose financing is more dependent on the judgment of lending banks as to their long term viability. An additional consequence of dependence on shareholder value is the bubble effect of incredible overvaluations, as in the telecoms industry, where the bursting of the bubble led to the U.S. recession of 2001.

Hutton`s book of 2003 seems, like the neoconservative ideology he detests, to view the unilateralist military and economic policies of the Bush regime as an expression of the most deepseated impulses of the American social order. The question however which Hutton does not broach is whether the multilateral neoliberalism to which even conservative capitalists paid lip service before 9/11 may not have actually been the norm of the current era, to which the policies of the present administration and the neoconservative ideology that support them may be little more than an opportunist and temporary aberration, made possible by the national outburst of fear and patriotism after the WTC and Pentagon attacks.


Who benefits from the new imperialism?

The knock-them-down, build-them-up-policies that have since characterized U.S. military and reconstruction campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are of great benefit to two major sectors of the American economy, energy and defense, which happen to have supplied much of the campaign funding and many of the key figures for the present Republican adminstration. But in terms of the neoliberal globalization of the past two decades, the sudden release of capitalism from two-dimensional space limitations to its three-dimensional breakthrough, to its ability to buy cheap labor and materials everywhere on earth, characterized by the spread of computerized technology, social dumping on distant continents and the concomitant decline in labor costs for the manufacture of consumer goods -- in all these terms, the energy and defense industries are economically archaic. They are dwarfed by the giant manufacturers of electrical appliances, cars, computer and telecom equipment and apparel and by the burgeoning service industries of consumer society, like the tourist industry.

Let`s look at this archaism of the defense and oil beneficiaries of Bush`s policies in another framework. Neoliberal capitalism signifies in social-economic terms the replacement of a Fordist by a post-Fordist production system, in which computerization permits the replacement of human labor by machines and, where this is not yet feasible or advantageous, the export of onerous work to branch factories or subcontractors in Asian or East European or South American cheap labor areas. Concomitantly, the driving forces of individual behavior, in the west at least, are no longer the work norms and identities of mass production Taylorism and the welfare state but the consumer norms inculcated by omnipresent advertising. In these terms, both the oil rigs and the defense plants fall largely out of the new conceptual framework of consumer society. Oil, it is true, is a vital commodity for running that coveted prize of the aspirant consumer, the automobile. But the car is precisely the characteristic symbol of Fordist production, and even the more enlightened oil and automotive companies, aware of the global pollution and warming problems the present administration denies, are investing considerable sums on research into alternative, non-pollutant, energy sources and motors.

Moreover, the production costs of oil are roughly the same in the Western Hemisphere as in the Middle East. Computerization does relatively little to eliminate a work force which was neither large to begin with (compare it to the 200 million on our planet whose livelihoods are dependent on the tourist industry, crippled by international hostilities) nor tied to an assembly line; in addition, unlike the other industries I have mentioned, the sales of U.S. oil companies are not much geared to the world market, but are more or less restricted to their captive clientele in North America. The defense industry is even more clearly than the oil industry economically archaic in both its production systems, which can hardly be exported to Chinese export production zones, and its guaranteed sales to a single consumer: the U.S. military.

In fact, the most bizarre and untenable aspect of the present ideological and military offensives of the Bush administration is this: whereas the ultimate justification for "civilizing" Iraq is its failure to understand the virtues of free market capitalism, the corrective force is a state-supported "defense" industry and the beneficiary is the oil industry, both of which only thrive by virtue of an interpenetration with the state apparatus unmatched since the symbiosis of party, government and economy in the Soviet Union.

It is of course possible that Hutton`s -- and the neocons` -- perspective on the deep-rooted permanence of the new U.S. strategy is correct. In that case, only the formation of economically protected continental blocs in Europe and Asia will stand in the way of the subjection of the planet to a Pax Americana. Such protectionist blocs, each fending off the other`s capital and products, are, according to many astute analysts, quite likely in the coming decade. Whether a putative European bloc should also try to equal U.S. military might is doubtful. To double, as some advocates of a continental defense force argue, European military expenditures would necessitate further cuts in the already weakened European social protection system and significantly reduce popular support for the idea of Europe. To the contrary, as Hutton points out, the strength of Europe in any future contest with the United States lies not in its ability to make war but in its superior social cohesion and productivity.

It is also possible, however, that the conditioning of America`s aggressive unilateralism by the needs of the defense and oil industries is indeed an aberrant, reactionary phenomenon, given a temporary boost by two more or less accidental and non-systemic factors: the one-shot terrorist coup of September 11, and the political need of the Bush/Cheney administration, which is focussed on reelection in 2004, for popular military adventures to distract the public from a reactionary domestic agenda that is loathed by most Americans. In this case, as Immanuel Wallerstein has recently argued, the impulse to correct it will come from within the capitalist heartland itself, from the many U.S. corporate powers whose interests in cheap labor and unfettered market reach would be thwarted by such global protectionism.

In either case, Hutton`s point about the difference between the Anglosaxon and European models of market capitalism gives an initial space for the European opposition to an Americanized world and more broadly to the international movements for peace and global justice. The resistance of Europe to current American unilateralism, mirrored in a myriad of trade disputes with the United States, is crucial. If Europe is to live up to its social character, then Europeans, either within or against the European Union, must themselves restore the social protections which, under the influence of Americanized values of privatisation and deregulation, they have until now allowed to be eroded. Moreover, only a socialized European economy, one whose international trade policies could work toward reducing north/south inequalities, would be able to offer a humane alternative to U.S.-style globalization as a model for Asian, African and South American development. In other words: Social Europe must come in the place of neoliberalism as the model of the future.

Arthur Mitzman is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber and Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France and, most recently, the excellent Prometheus Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the 21st Century. He can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/mitzman07192003.html

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 11:17 a.m. EDT July 22, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

Troops from the 101st Airborne Division traded fire with gunmen holed up in a house in Mosul belonging to a cousin of Saddam Hussein who is a key tribal leader in the region. An Associated Press Television News cameraman at the scene says residents claimed soldiers were searching for Saddam`s sons Qusai and Odai. The building wound up burning to the ground. It was not immediately clear if anyone was apprehended.
Another U.S. soldier has been killed in an ambush in Iraq. The U.S. military reports one soldier was killed and another injured Tuesday in an attack in the so-called "Sunni Triangle," where support for Saddam Hussein has been the strongest. The latest death means 153 American troops have been killed in action in Iraq since the start of the U.S.-led war.
Businesses and countries considering exporting goods to Iraq now have greater assurances of getting paid. The U.S. administration in Iraq has announced the establishment of a trading bank to guarantee payment for imported goods and services, especially food and reconstruction supplies.
Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, is expected to meet Kuwaiti officials Tuesday during his first visit to this major Washington ally since replacing General Tommy Franks. Oil-rich Kuwait was the launch pad for the U.S.-led war on its northern neighbor, Iraq, that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in April.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says finding the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that President Bush cited as his main justification for going to war is now a secondary issue. In an interview Monday night aboard an Air Force jet on the way to Washington following his five-day tour of Iraq, Wolfowitz says the task of settling the weapons question is in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is urging the United States to quickly restore control of Iraq to its people, warning that "democracy can`t be imposed from the outside." In a report to the Security Council, Annan also noted concerns about the U.S. treatment of Iraqi detainees and the failure to improve security in Baghdad.

LYNCH HOMECOMING
American flags are up and yellow ribbons are tied in bows awaiting the return of former POW Jessica Lynch. The Army private is making her journey home to Palestine, West Virginia Tuesday. She`s leaving Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where yesterday she was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals.

US-IRAQ
The top U.S. official in Iraq gives members of Congress an update on the reconstruction effort Tuesday. Paul Bremer is holding closed-door meetings with both the House and Senate. With U.S. casualties continuing to climb, Bremer can expect some tough questions from Democrats.

U.N.-IRAQ
Three members of Iraq`s new Governing Council will be in New York Tuesday. They`ll attend a Security Council meeting
where they`re expected to declare the Governing Council Iraq`s sovereign representative at the U.N.. The State Department says the visit is an important first step in Iraq`s "reintegration into the international community."

BLAIR-IRAQ
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that going to war with Iraq was "the right thing to do" and said he had no doubt Baghdad tried to develop weapons of mass destruction. The prime minister, nearing the end of a marathon Asian tour, was speaking a day after holding talks with Chinese leaders to heal strains in relations over the Iraq war, which Beijing opposed.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

...........US.. UK.. Total.......... Avg/Day

Total 233 43 276 2.23

Latest Fatality Date: 7/22/2003
View Details
07/22/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 1 WOUNDED IN RPG ATTACK
07/21/03 CENTCOM
ONE US SOLDIER KILLED, 3 WOUNDED, IN 7-21 AMBUSH IN BAGHDAD
07/20/03 CENTCOM
ONE U.S. SOLDIER KILLED, TWO INJURED, IN JULY 20TH VEHICLE ROLLOVER
07/20/03 CENTCOM
TWO U.S. SOLDIERS KILLED, 1 WOUNDED, IN AMBUSH JULY 20TH
07/20/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES 7-19 DEATH ... AND ADMITS TO 2ND DEATH ON 7-17
07/20/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES 1 OF 2 SOLDIERS KILLED IN AMBUSH ON JULY 20TH

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Saddam Hussein(C) poses with his sons, Uday(L) and Qusay, in a photo from the private archive of an official photographer for the regime. The two sons were killed during a U.S. raid on a house in Mosul on July 22, 2003, according to U.S. Central Command. Photo by Reuters

July 22, 2003
Saddam`s Two Sons Killed in U.S. Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 4:45 p.m. ET

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) -- Saddam Hussein`s sons Odai and Qusai were killed in a six-hour firefight Tuesday when U.S. forces, acting on a tip from an Iraqi informant, surrounded and then stormed a palatial villa in this northern Iraqi town, a senior American general said.

Four coalition soldiers were wounded and two other Iraqis were killed in the raid, but Saddam was not among them. The house belonged to one of Saddam`s cousins, a key tribal leader in the region.

``We are certain that Odai and Qusai were killed today,`` said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez at a news conference in Baghdad. ``The bodies were in such a condition where you could identify them.``

The deaths of the sons could have a major impact on the Iraqi resistance, which has been mounting about a dozen attacks a day against U.S. occupation troops. The guerrillas are thought to be former military officers and Baath Party leaders loyal to Saddam and his family -- especially the sons, who played primary roles in the military and feared security services.

Both Odai and Qusai ranked second only to their father in the deposed regime, officials have said. They were Nos. 2 and 3 on the U.S. list of 55 top former Iraqi officials wanted by Washington. The United States had offered a $25 million reward for information leading to Saddam`s capture and $15 million each for his sons.

In Washington, L. Paul Bremer, Iraq`s top civilian administrator, said he did not want to comment on how the deaths of Saddam`s sons would affect security in Iraq.

However, Bremer said: ``It certainly is good news for the Iraqi people.``

``This will contribute significantly to reducing attacks on coalition soldiers,`` said Ahmad Chalabi, a delegate from the Coalition Provisional Authority, speaking at the United Nations.

Asked whether the killing of the sons would reduce the incessant attacks on American forces, Sanchez said he thought the security situation now would improve.

``I believe very firmly this will have an effect. This will prove to the Iraqi people that these two members of the Iraqi regime will never come to power again,`` Sanchez said.

Hours after the raid in Mosul, gunfire erupted throughout Baghdad, making travel very dangerous. The shooting was believed to be celebratory as news of the killing of the sons spread through the capital.

``It`s probably very appropriate that they would be celebrating about now,`` Sanchez said.

Fighting broke out after soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division surrounded the stone, columned villa.

When troops approached the building, gunmen inside opened fire with small arms. The ``suspects barricaded themselves in the house`` and ``resisted fiercely,`` Sanchez said.

``They died in a fierce gunbattle,`` Sanchez added.

He told reporters that soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were working on a tip from an Iraqi informant that the sons were present in the house.

Asked if the $15 million rewards would be paid, Sanchez said: ``I would expect that it probably will happen.``

According to witnesses in Mosul, a small force of American soldiers went to the house about 9 a.m. and asked permission to search it. The occupants refused, and the patrol withdrew until about 10 a.m., when 100 more soldiers arrived in 25 vehicles.

The Americans opened fire but received fierce return fire from inside the home, the witnesses said. Kiowa helicopters arrived and fired rockets into the villa. The interior of the house was destroyed and two adjacent homes were badly damaged.

Once the fighting died down, Iraqi police arrived to help the Americans search the building.

``When we saw the people in the house shooting back, we knew Odai and Qusai were there,`` said the 31-year-old Jamal.

Afterward, about 1,000 people gathered, some expressing delight, others cursing the Americans.

The soldiers removed four bodies and did not let photographers near enough to take pictures.

The building, in the al-Falah neighborhood, was left charred and smoldering, its high facade riddled with gaping holes from bullets and heavy weaponry. Kiowa helicopters roamed the sky.

Some Mosul civilians appeared to have been caught in the crossfire. It was not known how many people were injured, but several were taken to a hospital.

Officials gave conflicting reports on whether anyone was captured during the assault. The officials said they had no initial information that would suggest Saddam was present during the raid.

Experts conducted DNA tests after the bodies were flown from Mosul to another location, officials said.

Throughout the day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld briefed President Bush personally about the assault.

Qusai was probably intended as Saddam`s successor, according to U.S. intelligence officials. He ran much of Iraq`s security apparatus, controlling several militias, internal security services and the military forces of the once-vaunted Republican Guard.

He was described as quiet and level, particularly compared to Odai, Saddam`s eldest son, who had a reputation for brutality and flamboyance. Odai controlled Saddam`s Fedayeen, the paramilitary force that fought U.S. troops during the war; many of its survivors are thought to be part of the ongoing guerrilla campaign in Iraq.

Odai also controlled information and propaganda in Saddam`s Iraq, and was chairman of the country`s Olympic committee.

Saddam has a third, younger son, according to some reports, and three daughters. All kept a low profile in his regime.

Mosul, a town 240 miles northwest of Baghdad that housed Iraqi army bases, is outside the so-called ``Sunni Triangle`` in central Iraq -- home to much of the remaining support for Saddam, a Sunni Muslim who used his Baathist Party to oppress the country`s Shiite majority.

The triangle is also a center of anti-American resistance: In the latest attack, Tuesday, a U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in an ambush along a dangerous road north of Baghdad. His death brought to 153 the number of U.S. troops killed in action since the March 20 start of war, six more than during the 1991 Gulf War.

The U.S. Central Command said the attackers used rocket-propelled grenades and small arms in the assault staged along the road between Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, and Ramadi, 60 miles west of the capital. It gave no other details.

The U.S.-led coalition`s military occupation of Iraq has been met by constant armed Iraqi resistance, resulting in almost daily deaths of American troops. Many recent assaults have been staged with remote-controlled roadside explosions.

Before the announcement, White House officials were cautious in their assessments of whether the raid was successful.

Asked about reports of that Saddam`s sons had been killed, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he was ``not in a position to confirm anything.``

Given a series of failed strikes against Iraqi leaders since the war began March 20, U.S. officials clearly did not want to make any public claims that later prove untrue.

On April 7, Rumsfeld announced the death of Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam`s first cousin and one of his bloodiest henchman, and showed reporters video of laser-guided bombs obliterating a house in Basra, Iraq`s second city, where a tipster had told coalition forces he was staying.

But last month, U.S. military officials said that interrogations of Iraqi prisoners indicated al-Majid, known as ``Chemical Ali`` for his use of mustard gas and other poisonous gases to kill thousands of northern Kurds during a 1988 rebellion, might be alive.

Twice during the war, information on Saddam`s whereabouts was deemed solid enough that an airstrike was sent to kill him. But despite optimistic statements in the hours after each raid, U.S. officials now believe he is alive.


Copyright 2003 The Associated Press


Saddam Hussein`s sons Uday (L) and Qusay relax in a field in an undated photo from the private archive of an official photographer for the regime. Hussein`s two sons may have been found in Iraq during a shootout in Mosul in which U.S. soldiers killed four high ranking Iraqis, U.S. officials said July 22, 2003. REUTERS/Str

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Real Americans love our Commander-In-Chief. Real Iraqis do too...
According to Fox News, an Iraqi leader named Mubarak Ali az-Zubaidy "offered to build a golden statue of President Bush to thank him for freeing the Iraqi people."

What a powerful idea! But instead of making the Iraqis pay for it, what if we Americans gave a statue to them?

Imagine a tribute to the liberator of Iraq, symbolizing democracy at its finest in the heart of Baghdad...

As patriotic American taxpayers, we`re spending billions to rebuild Iraq`s infrastructure - so why not spend a few hundred grand to help rebuild Iraq`s democratic spirit too?

What a magnificent gesture of friendship and goodwill this could be!

And what better way to honor our President? If you agree, then contact your Congressional representative and suggest the idea today.

PLEASE NOTE: The statue at the top of this page is just one idea for what this memorial might look like. Many people have complained that this model doesn`t accurately reflect the President`s endowment. Please remember that this is just an artist`s rendition, based on an already-existing statue and not on our President`s actual anatomy. It is presented as a conceptual aid, not an accurate depiction.


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http://bushstatue.org/

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How US troops cut off Saddam`s bloodline - and maybe his lifeline
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday July 23, 2003
The Guardian

There are only two people on the planet whose deaths would be more welcome to the White House. But in the absence of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein`s bodies, it will gladly settle for Saddam`s two sons. For Washington, their death has come in the nick of time.

The administration was initially exceedingly cautious about the news yesterday, aware that if the reports turned out to be unfounded, like previous claims about the death of Saddam, they could serve only to accentuate the manhunt`s failure.

However, confirmation of the identities of the corpses in a charred house in Mosul is the best news in weeks for the beleaguered US forces in Iraq, who have been under immense pressure from Washington to find weapons of mass destruction which may not exist, to track down Saddam and his family in a country of 25 million, while being ambushed and sniped at every day.

The US force has been bled, one guerrilla attack at a time, as it tries to maintain order among an increasingly hostile and impatient population. Thirty-nine of its soldiers have been killed since May 1, when President Bush triumphantly declared that the "major combat operations" were over.

Yesterday the toll from Operation Iraqi Freedom reached 153, more than were killed in the previous Gulf war. Exhausted soldiers who have seen their tour of duty extended again and again have expressed their disillusionment openly on US television, and faced disciplinary measures.

The death of Uday and Qusay Hussein will not only be an important morale boost for the increasingly demoralised oc cupation force; it will also be a useful distraction for the White House, which is under intense scrutiny for its misleading prewar claims about Saddam`s banned weapons and links with al-Qaida, and for the apparent gaps in its planning for the postwar occupation. But the death of the two feared sons could have a much more profound and longer lasting impact on the American troops in Iraq and the government that sent them there.

"I don`t think it`s going to end the violence against American forces, but it could put a damper on it," Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert at the National Defence University, said. "Some people are going to hate you whatever, but for some it could be a sign that it really is over. It shows that persistence, perseverance really counts. There is no interest in cutting and running."

Ralph Peters, a former intelligence officer, now a military analyst, said: "The symbolism of US troops killing them is important. It wasn`t an assassination. It wasn`t a bomb, it was US troops. It`s symbolism, and as our symbolism goes up, theirs goes down. Far from driving us out of Iraq, we go in and kill his sons."

Saddam has a teenage son, Ali, from another marriage, but he was never a significant figure in the regime. Severing the dictator`s visible bloodline is likely to have enormous psychological impact on Iraqis convinced that the old regime has been eliminated for good. Those groups such as Return, which has been fighting for its restoration, may lose hope, and the rest of the population may lose its fear.

Laith Kubba, a prominent Iraqi civic leader, said: "I think it will be a very important boost for the coalition and for [Paul] Bremer [the US administrator]. I think it will impact on security, because some of these groups, even if they had nothing to do with Saddam, got strength from the fact that the coalition had been unable to reach him and his family. So it might turn the tide in favour of the coalition; it will reassure the public that the past is behind them."

Mr Peters agreed, even arguing that their death "could be more important in the long run than the fall of Baghdad".

"The dynasty is broken. If Saddam is still alive, this is the worst punishment that could be devised: it is not only his sons but perhaps his oldest grandson [a teenage boy, possibly Qusay`s son, was reported to be among the dead]. The symbolism is almost biblical.

"Knowing the chain is broken, it castrates him and it breaks him. The real fear was that not only he would last but his sons would last beyond him. Now, even if Saddam lives to be 90, he`s a man of the past. It will be interesting to see how many of his courtiers and henchmen fade away."

To the extent that Uday and Qusay were orchestrating ambushes on US forces, their killing might help decapitate and disorganise the resistance, but it may never have been a coherent campaign in the first place. "I`m not convinced on how organised it ever was," Ms Yaphe said. Indeed, the immediate consequence could be an increase in attacks as the dynasty`s supporters take revenge, but in so doing they may have to show themselves.

At its best for the Bush administration the gunfight in Mosul could be the much sought after "tipping point" in the occupation, turning a vicious circle of attacks, disillusion and fear among Iraqis into a virtuous cycle of greater security, faster economic recovery and greater Iraqi confidence in the US-led coalition. Investigators might even come across more traces of banned weapons.

But if such a tipping point exists it may not materialise until the death or capture of Saddam himself. His is the image that has hung over Iraqis all their lives, and it is his shadow that hangs over the country now. Even fervent supporters of the regime hated and feared the two sons, and many Iraqis were fascinated and awed by the dictator himself. Most of the population have known no other leader.

Mr Kubba said the sons` death would significantly weaken Saddam`s influence and could lead his pursuers much closer.

"That is really closing the circle. Nobody will be surprised now if they find Saddam himself," Mr Kubba said in an interview in Washington. "Without his sons, Saddam cannot function. He does not trust anyone more than them and if they`re out of the equation, he`s out of the equation."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Lack of safety and power worries Iraqis more than fate of Saddam`s sons
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Wednesday July 23, 2003
The Guardian

Iraqis in Baghdad last night expressed undisguised delight at the news that Saddam Hussein`s two sons were dead.

"I`m very happy to hear it. Uday had a very bad reputation for the way he treated women," said Umm Merna, a housewife carrying her five-year-old daughter in a suburban street as the sun began to set.

"I`m only sorry that they died so easily," said Ali Hamid, 30, who used to own a book shop. "After all their activities, they ought to be put on trial. So should their father."

Few Iraqis ever saw the three men, except on endless pictures on state television. They lived a shadowy public life, fearful of assassination.

One man who said last night he had caught a glimpse of Uday Hussein was Ahmed Heider, whose family owns a supermarket and a shop selling CDs.

"I saw him at the races on New Year`s Eve last year," he said. But he was unsure whether to believe the news as it began to filter out. "Unless I see it with my own eyes, I`ll have to hold back."

A few Iraqis took the news in their stride, still more anxious about the present chaos rather than the fate of men who were considered to have lost power for good.

"It doesn`t make any difference to me," one said. "It isn`t important whether they have been killed or not. The main thing is the lack of security and electricity, and all these problems with infrastructure."

US officials have become particularly keen to capture Saddam and his sons since the attacks on US troops intensified recently. They argued that many Iraqis were reluctant to cooperate with US troops for fear that the family might return to power and take revenge.

Few Iraqis interviewed last night said they had had such fears.

"Saddam Hussein is still alive but I don`t think they can ever come back," said Saad Mohammed, a self-employed businessman.

It was not clear last night whether the US special forces who carried out the raid on the house in Mosul had been tipped off by neighbours or by earlier intelligence reports.

Troops arrested two top former Ba`athists in Mosul on July 11. Anwar al-Asaw and Bashir Ahmed Thanun were from the pro-Saddam Dulaymi tribe. The two men were being detained at a US base in Mosul and may have given vital information that Saddam`s sons were in the area.

The house targeted by the special forces belonged to a wealthy tribal sheikh who is related to Saddam.

Mosul`s Arabs, who form about 70% of the city`s population, are largely Sunni, the group which has been behind most of the attacks against US forces.

But the town has been much quieter than Baghdad and US troops this weekend were still going round in their vehicles looking relatively relaxed. They did not carry their automatic rifles cocked and pointing out of the sides of their Humvees as they do in such areas as Ramadi, Falluja, and Tikrit.

But there were signs of increasing anti-US activity in the area. Two Americans from the 101st Airborne Division were killed on Sunday by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire at Tal Afar, about fifty miles west of Mosul. Another soldier was wounded in the attack.

Unknown assailants a month ago also fired a mortar at the International Organisation of Migration, which is affiliated to the United Nations.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Won`t get fooled again
The war bill soars, while public confidence sinks - now Bush needs the UN more than ever

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday July 23, 2003
The Guardian

Iraq is providing the Bush administration with some hard and necessary lessons. One home truth is that frightening the voters only works for a while. George Bush & Co put a great deal of effort into persuading Americans that Saddam Hussein posed a direct threat to home, high school, family SUV and, generally, to the American way of life. Lest we forget, Bush claimed at one point that unmanned aerial vehicles could menace US cities with biological or chemical weapons. Dick Cheney went bigger than big on the supposed Iraqi nuclear threat. Bush adopted the notorious Blair-Campbell "45 minutes to Armageddon" one-liner, as well as the exotic Niger yellowcake fairytale.

Yet nearly two years after 9/11; after two all-out wars; after a deal of extra-judicial killing and illegal incarceration; after attorney-general John Ashcroft`s faith-led subversion of the US constitution; and three months after Saddam joined Osama bin Laden and the Taliban`s Mullah Omar in the displaced-but-not-deleted category - do Americans really feel any safer?

Many voters must wonder, with Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, whether increased resources for airline and border security, police, firefighters and a more effective FBI might not be a better bet than spending $3.9bn a month on occupying a country that does not want to be occupied. That total does not include the Afghan quagmire - or the human and political cost of daily US casualties. Another White House contender, Dick Gephardt, says a "macho" Bush has left the US "less safe and less secure".

Even Bush`s most obliviously hawkish officials have given up claiming that toppling Saddam has somehow reduced the al-Qaida threat. It is still out there - and may be intensifying.

A long-obstructed congressional report into 9/11 due this week identifies a startling string of prior intelligence failures. It suggests a Saudi government link with the hijackers, criticises the Pentagon and CIA and implies that the FBI "doesn`t have a clue about terrorism", according to a Newsweek report. But what remains in serious doubt is whether Bush has taken effective steps to ensure that what were systemic, not simply one-off failures, do not reoccur.

The Riyadh bombing in May, the current Taliban/al-Qaida resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and this week`s Saudi anti-terror purges show how serious the threat still is. "New instability in Afghanistan and the continued spread of jihadist ideology mean that the prospects for another September 11 are growing," security analysts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon commented in the New York Times this week. "America ... still lacks a comprehensive programme to deal with a growing global insurgency."

If al-Qaida were successfully to mount another large-scale attack within the US, where would that leave Bush? Victimising Iran, Syria or North Korea or some other hapless "rogue" would not save his political skin a second time around. Rather, Bush would be left looking like a blusterer who put the frighteners on his own people but failed in his primary duty to protect.

Veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg told the Los Angeles Times this week that confidence in Bush`s conduct of his "war on terror" is slipping. "There is an erosion of trust ... I think this is already adding up to something quite big."

Maybe it is Bush who should be frightened now. His and Cheney`s ever-ready willingness to scare the children and drape themselves in the flag may not be enough for voters in a 2004 election focused on largely economic issues.

The enormous cost of Iraq, put at $50bn and rising, is feeding into broader worries about Bush`s overall economic competence. This is the man, remember, who has forced through a $350bn tax cut for the rich amid increased unemployment, state spending cuts and record deficits. Bush is launching a month-long "economic recovery" speaking campaign this week. He may be realising belatedly that people`s day-to-day economic security is at least as important to them as state security.

Another Iraq lesson, to paraphrase a more eminent Republican president, is that you can fool some people indefinitely, but not all the people all the time. Senate Republicans irresponsibly blocked a proposal last week for an investigation into administration handling, or mishandling, of pre-war intelligence.

But that will not quell the growing clamour, echoing the uproar in Britain, that much of what the American public was told about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction was sexed up, blown up or just plain made up. This is not merely a question of imaginary, anthrax-armed Scuds. It is a fundamental question of truth and integrity in governance.

The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said last winter that the US had "bullet-proof evidence" of an al-Qaida/ Saddam connection. Even by blowhard Don`s dodgy standards, this whopper was truly epic. Not a scintilla of proof has been found, nor is it likely to be now.

Rumsfeld also bears responsibility for the chronic post-war planning fiasco that has led to avoidable large-scale destruction, bureaucratic chaos, the alienation of ordinary Iraqis and now to an ongoing guerrilla war. He continues to insist that Iraq is a success story. He must think Americans are stupid.

Many now suspect that Bush privately decided to attack Iraq in spring-summer 2002, and then spent six months telling Americans (and gullible or complicit allies such as Tony Blair) that war was not inevitable - when it was. If true, that would be the biggest lie of all.

Voters like being taken for suckers even less than they like incompetence at the top. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll found that 50% now believe Bush exaggerated the WMD evidence. Only 55% (and falling) still think the war was worth it. A CBS poll suggested a majority would deem the war wrong if the WMD claims were unfounded. These figures imply a big turnaround. They indicate that an indefinite Iraq occupation will be increasingly unpopular; they may spell big trouble in next year`s hustings. Democrat Joe Biden gives the Bushies 90 days to get on top of things in Iraq."We`re not gods," America`s greatest living genius, deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz said plaintively in Mosul this week. Actually, nobody dreamed they were. The mortal question is, are they honest?

A broader lesson comes directly from Iraq itself. It concerns the limitations of military power. Nobody but a few batty Ba`athists seriously doubted that the US could win its victory. But many warned that the US by itself, even with plucky Britain at its side, could not win the peace. As it haemorrhages men and money, Bush is beginning to grasp that the US needs the much-abused UN - badly. It needs a new UN mandate authorising countries to send peacekeeping troops to help pull Bush out of his hole. The UN`s guidance is also needed to help Iraqis take charge of constitutional, electoral and judicial reform.

With Iraqi oil revenues coming nowhere close to reconstruction requirements, the US needs UN authority to attract foreign funds - or else those funds may never come. And if Bush (and Blair) are ever to escape the WMD miasma, they must allow the UN inspectors back. Only their independent verdict will suffice.

For Bush, Iraq`s lessons are becoming clear - if he has the sense to see them. The world community works together - or it doesn`t work. And the American people don`t like being taken for mugs.

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Italian media chief resigns in row over senate bill
John Hooper in Rome
Wednesday July 23, 2003
The Guardian

The head of Italy`s state broadcasting corporation, RAI, announced her resignation last night, minutes before the upper house of parliament approved a bill that critics say will enhance the immense power of Silvio Berlusconi`s commercial TV empire.

Lucia Annunziata, the president of a board which is set to be removed by the bill, said: "The only way to respect the will of parliament and the interests of RAI is to allow for the early formation of a new board under the rules of the new law."

But, in a clear reference to Mr Berlusconi`s double role as media tycoon and prime minister, she said RAI was in a precarious situation in a market "distorted by conflict of interest".

Mr Berlusconi, who owns all three main commercial channels, is also - as prime minister - ultimately responsible for the wellbeing of the state broadcaster`s three channels. The opposition argues that the bill passed last night after a stormy passage through the senate blatantly favours the interests of Mr Berlusconi`s Mediaset group.

Among other things, it allows Mediaset to keep all three of its free-to-air channels, despite a ruling by Italy`s highest court that one of them should be put on satellite; to raise the limit on its overall advertising revenue; to abolish curbs on the broadcasting of profitable sponsored promotions, and to buy into the newspaper market.

The ethical questions posed by his extraordinary influence over what Italians can see and hear surfaced earlier this month when the main RAI evening news bulletin failed to broadcast the insulting remarks he made in the European parliament to the German MEP who challenged him over his apparent conflict of interest.

Last night, shortly after the senate passed the government`s communications bill, the chamber of deputies, the lower house, approved a separate measure intended to deal with the conflict of interests question. This too has come in for savage attack from the opposition.

The bill contains a clause barring from high office those who manage companies, but not those who own them - a provision which critics say was specifically introduced to let Mr Berlusconi off the hook. He controls Mediaset through a stake of almost 50 per cent, but no longer holds executive office within the group.

One opposition MP called the conflict of interests bill "a symbol of, and metaphor for, the sickness of our democracy".

The government`s position is that the communications bill will dispel all of these interrelated controversies by opening the way for digital terrestrial television and an increase in the number of channels available to viewers. But the leftwing opposition is not alone in believing that, on the contrary, it will help Mediaset to crush its competitors, inside and outside television.

Paolo Serventi Longhi, secretary of the Italian national press federation, said the measure would act to "the detriment of RAI and the written press". It was "a licence to kill off newspapers".

The new communications bill was sent to the chamber of deputies for a third reading. Ms Annunziata said she would step down on the day it passed its final parliamentary hurdle.

The conflict of interest bill has effectively completed its passage through the legislature and is expected to become law by the end of the month.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/di…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/di…

KOMMENTAR
Vom Triumphator zum Bittsteller

Von Pierre Simonitsch

Sollen jene Staaten, die vor der Invasion Iraks gewarnt haben, jetzt die Besatzer vor ihrem Scheitern bewahren? Es ist noch nicht lange her, da bezeichnete US-Präsident George W. Bush die Vereinten Nationen als "irrelevant", und sein Kriegsminister Donald Rumsfeld verspottete das "alte" Europa. Noch selten sind Ansprachen an die Nation so rasch zu Makulatur geworden wie Bushs Reden im Vorfeld des Irak-Kriegs. Weniger als drei Monate nachdem der US-Präsident in Pilotenmontur auf einem Flugzeugträger vor dem Spruchband "Mission erfüllt" schwadronierte, stecken 150 000 demoralisierte US-Soldaten im besetzten Land fest. Daran ändern auch US-Erfolgsmeldungen bei der Jagd auf Saddams Clique nichts.

Das Bemühen Washingtons, "die Koalition zu erweitern, um Irak mehr Sicherheit zu bringen" (Bush zu Berlusconi), kommt nicht vom Fleck. Von den polnischen Truppen, die als dritte Besatzungsmacht einen Sektor in Irak kontrollieren sollen, hat man bisher mehr gehört als gesehen. Das "neue" Europa bringt zu wenig Gewicht auf die Waagschale, um US-Amerikaner und Briten in Irak zu entlasten. Andere angesprochene Staaten versuchen, Zeit zu gewinnen oder machen die Entsendung von Soldaten von einer Resolution des UN-Sicherheitsrats abhängig.

Müssen die UN als Retter einspringen? Die USA behaupten zwar unablässig, dass die bisherigen UN-Resolutionen völlig ausreichten, allen Staaten die Teilnahme an der Befriedung Iraks zu ermöglichen. Dasselbe Argument diente bereits zur formalen Rechtfertigung der Invasion. Dass die überwältigende Mehrheit der UN-Mitglieder aus den Resolutionen des Sicherheitsrats keine Legitimierung des Kriegs und der Besatzung herauslesen können, ließ die US-Globalpolitiker kalt. Für sie zählt einzig die Macht des Faktischen.

Das könnte sich jetzt ändern, denn Bush muss um die Gunst der Wähler fürchten. Die Verstrickung in einen Guerillakrieg bei 55 Grad Hitze, ohne Aussicht auf eine rasche Lösung der politischen und wirtschaftlichen Probleme, ist das Letzte, was sich der Präsident wünschen kann. Seit vergangenem Wochenende suchen US-Diplomaten in vertraulichen Gesprächen am New Yorker UN-Sitz wieder die Nähe der Weltorganisation und der noch vor kurzem verhöhnten Staaten. Aus den Triumphatoren sind Bittsteller geworden. Sie möchten die UN für die Gewährleistung der Sicherheit und den Wiederaufbau des kriegszerstörten Landes einspannen, ohne sie allerdings an der Gestaltung der politischen Zukunft oder am Management der Ölquellen zu beteiligen.

Diese schlaumeierische Rechnung wird wohl nicht aufgehen. UN-Chef Kofi Annan hat in seinem jüngsten Irak-Bericht an den Sicherheitsrat den Tarif einer Hilfestellung genannt. Er verlangt von den USA einen "klaren Zeitplan" für den schrittweisen Abzug der Besatzungstruppen und die Wiederherstellung der vollen Souveränität Iraks. "Unter der irakischen Bevölkerung herrscht ein gewaltiger Drang nach Selbstbestimmung", stellt Annan fest, "die Demokratie kann nicht von außen aufgezwungen werden." Er kritisiert den Umgang der Besatzer mit Kriegsgefangenen und politischen Häftlingen. Die Entsendung einer von den USA angeregten UN-Polizeitruppe nach Irak schließt Annan indessen aus. Eine solche Aktion würde ein Parallelsystem von Ordnungsschützern schaffen, das einer wirksamen Verbrechensbekämpfung im Weg stehen würde. Die UN möchten US-Amerikanern und Briten nicht die undankbarsten Aufgaben abnehmen, zu deren Erfüllung eine Besatzungsmacht verpflichtet ist. Laut UN-Resolution 1483 vom Mai ist die Siegerkoalition Besatzungsmacht. Befreier, als die sich die USA gerne gesehen hätten, gibt es im Völkerrecht nicht.

Auch Frankreichs Außenminister Dominique de Villepin hat den USA zu verstehen gegeben, dass sie sich nicht gratis aus dem Schlamassel ziehen lassen können. Laut seinen Vorschlägen soll eine neue Resolution des Sicherheitsrats den UN die umfassende Verantwortung für die Zukunft Iraks übertragen. Dazu gehöre die Transparenz beim Wiederaufbau des Landes und bei den Ölgeschäften, die allen Irakern zugute kommen sollen. Bisher hat die Bush-Administration die lukrativsten Bauaufträge an US-Firmen vergeben, die den Republikanern nahe stehen. Über die Ölreichtümer wollten ebenfalls die Sieger allein verfügen. Verträge der früheren irakischen Regierung mit ausländischen Firmen wurden gekündigt, um den Kuchen unter Freunden zu verteilen.

Bei dem diplomatischen Ringen, das jetzt beginnt, geht es nicht um Peanuts. Die Minister der EU-Staaten beschlossen am Montag ihren eigenen Wiederaufbaufonds für Irak, damit die Gelder nicht in den von den Besatzungsbehörden aufgestellten Topf fallen. Ein energisches Handeln der UN und der europäischen Staaten liegt im Interesse des irakischen Volkes. Die Globalstrategen in Washington haben zwar minutiös den Krieg geplant, hatten aber keine realistische Vorstellung von der Nachkriegszeit. Wenn im November das UN-Programm "Öl für Lebensmittel" ausläuft, wie es der Sicherheitsrat auf Antrag der USA beschlossen hat, wird die irakische Bevölkerung zum ersten Mal eine ernste Ernährungskrise kennen lernen.

Erscheinungsdatum 23.07.2003

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The Brownite dream could turn into a real nightmare
The left should ask itself why the right is rooting for the chancellor too

Polly Toynbee
Wednesday July 23, 2003
The Guardian

Two horsewomen of the apocalypse in knife-wielding Boadicea chariots are tearing across the television firmament. Clare Short and Glenda Jackson, calling for their leader`s head on a plate, speak out loud what other conspirators whisper. They are only the outriders of more formidable forces which bring the Brownite New Statesman and Mirror into unison with Tory press hell hounds.

The old Blair-Brown fence is electrified by the trouble the prime minister seems to be in. Genuine anger over the war combines with Brownite wishful thinking about the imminent regime change. Time to drop the pilot?

Lord Hutton, the deus ex machina, may not provide quite the grand finale some hope for. Few are likely to escape unscathed, but blame may be judiciously spread among several players. The long list of quite different questions starts with the minuscule: what did Kelly really say to Gilligan? Next comes the moderately important: who threw Kelly to the wolves? (Should Kelly have given hostile briefings to the press anyway?) Finally comes the monumental: without WMD, was war in Iraq legal?

A Mail on Sunday reporter outrageously asked Blair in a foreign press conference if he had "blood on his hands", but there has been no murder: suicide usually has complicated causes. (If all those bullied and humiliated by the Mail killed themselves, the death toll would be high: luckily, most victims don`t.) Everyone has old axes to grind, but the poison press on their high horses about moral standards in either politics or journalism is an unedifying spectacle. The Times and Sun obey their master`s voice in savaging the BBC. The Mail, in commercial rivalry with Murdoch, rallies to the BBC`s defence: its single purpose is to destroy the Labour government any way it can. It glimpses a dream scenario: Blair falls, Red Gordon inherits, bringing New Labour crashing down and heralding a glorious Tory revival. Tory historian Andrew Roberts recently lectured a rightwing thinktank on "The Coming Brown Premiership and its Myriad Opportunities for Tories".

In a hot crisis like this, very few people change their stance: they just shout louder. But what is emerging with greater clarity than before is the strange and unholy alliance of anti-Blair forces, the swelling noise from right and left. It would be wise for those on the sensible left to watch carefully. If, like many Labour supporters, you strongly opposed the war, the temptation is to want Blair`s head over this. Revenge, disgust at all that applause from the Bush Congress, dismay at accumulated failings and the provocation of decent people in his own party might make the prospect appealing. Luckily, it looks extremely unlikely.

For in all this cacophony, where are the voters? Astonishingly unmoved. Despite the post-war traumas, Labour remains 2 points ahead. Before the war a majority opposed invasion, yet 51% now think it was justified. In a calamitous mid-term, governments are often 20 points behind, yet 59% of all voters still regard Blair as a competent prime minister: virtually none think the Tories can win. To be sure, Blair`s personal rating is knocked - but 75% of Labour voters are satisfied with him, and that is important. MPs and even local parties are not typical of Labour voters.

In the real world, Labour has a remarkably resilient leader, likely to win a never-before third term. Keep things in perspective. Whatever Blair`s deficiencies, keeping the Tories out matters most of all for poor pensioners, poor children, schools, hospitals and the low paid.

Another issue that matters is: what might make Blair better? This crisis should make him turn to his real friends for support and inspiration. His only electoral peril is if too many of these Labour voters stay home through distaste or indifference. This may be the most redistributive government since Attlee, but the anger and frustration of its natural supporters that it could be so much better needs assuaging. They need a shot of inspiration.

Some dreamers look elsewhere. To unseat Blair, 25% of Labour MPs, over 100, need to back a challenger. Brown is no chancer and it`s not going to happen. If it did, the internecine warfare would be catastrophic. The chances are that Blair will lead his party into the next election and he will win.

The puzzle is why there is a wistful hopefulness that Brown would usher in a new golden age, or what the New Statesman calls a "radical watershed". It`s a dream enjoyed by Labour`s enemies on the right as well. He is a chancellor of genius: he may go down as the greatest. If only the feud between the two men were less destructive, they would be the perfect match, each with the virtues of one another`s vices. Brown`s iron obduracy earns him grudging trust in the City. His smouldering force keeps order among spending ministries. His insistence on PSAs, targets and outcome measurements may have gone a bit far, but it formed an intellectual backbone to policy-making. His commitment to the poor and third world debt has been admirable (though it was Blair who nailed his party to the hardest target of all, abolition of child poverty). Remember too, it was Brown`s two-year freeze that made poverty rise, and delivery of everything so late. It was his needless lone parent benefit cuts that caused the first big rebellion.

What kind of prime minister would he make? So far all we have seen is an instinct to surround himself with a tight circle of trusties. Those who watched how he forced through the tube PPP will always have doubts about his leadership. The way he refused to meet Bob Kiley, the London transport commissioner, for fear that Kiley actually knew more than he about the disastrous way the contracts were being drawn up, was an eye-opener. Blair, in comparison, seems the great conciliator.

Foreign policy? Brown never has a warm word for Europe or any European economy, speaks no languages, spends no time imbibing European culture. He lambasts their "inflexible" labour markets and resists all the EU directives on better workers` rights. He turns to slave-wage America for inspiration, to American gurus and holidays. The only reason we are not in the euro is that Brown has held Blair to ransom - an abuse of his blocking power. Released of his rival, his charm and ease in private might surface in public from his carapace. Now, he plays his cards well to suggest opposition to totemic Blair policies, but it strains belief to imagine that he would make some great new red assault upon wealth.

Conjoined twins, these two share political genes with less ideological difference than the Brownites pretend. There is much need for new radicalism in the third term: let them both hammer it out, without civil war that risks everything.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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The homecoming: Private Jessica`s public turn out for a woman they regard as a hero
By David Usborne in Elizabeth, West Virginia and Andrew Buncombe in Washington
23 July 2003


The journey home for Private Jessica Lynch began, in reality, several months ago.

Then - as was the case yesterday - she was taken from a hospital bed and flown by a Black Hawk helicopter to a safe haven full of friendly faces.

Then, as yesterday, she would have struggled to believe her eyes. Shortly after lunch yesterday Pte Lynch, a 20-year-old army supply clerk whose capture and subsequent rescue in Iraq became one of the most celebrated episodes of the war, arrived back in her home town of Palestine, West Virginia. Whether or not she deserved to be called a hero - on Monday, she was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart medals - it was a hero`s welcome she received from the people who saw her grow up.

A huge roar went up from the crowds who had lined the streets of the community where she lived as the helicopter bringing her from Washington performed a "fly by" and then finally touched down.

Everywhere one looked in the tiny town, and in the not-much-bigger neighbouring town of Elizabeth where she went to school, there were people with banners and placards gathered to welcome the girl-next-door who joined the army to get an education and ended up becoming a national celebrity. "Hi" said Pte Lynch sitting in a wheelchair. "Thank you for being here. It is great to be home".

In uniform, but heavily made up and looking frail, she thanked her medical teams in Washington and in Germany. She also thanked the "several Iraqi citizens who helped save my life".

Earlier, she had left the Walter Reed Medical Centre in Washington thanking staff there and the public for their cards and letters. She said: "These really raised my spirits and kept me going." Pte Lynch had been in the army hospital since 12 April,when she was rescued from hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah in a night-time operation by US forces.

She had lain in the city`s Saddam Hospital for at least eight days after her unit, the 507th Maintenance Corps, was ambushed by Iraqi fighters and militia.

When the Delta Force troops landed in Black Hawk helicopters and stormed into the hospital at around 1am on 1 April, one of them reportedly said to her: "Jessica Lynch, we`re United States soldiers and we`re here to protect you and take you home."

Pte Lynch, still weak from her injuries, replied: "I`m an American soldier, too."

Her rescue was quickly seized on by the Pentagon, who presented it to the world as a dramatic and morale-boosting operation by US forces who would not forsake "a fallen comrade".

Furthermore, they told reporters that Pte Lynch had tried to fight off her ambushers, shooting and killing many of them until she ran out of ammunition. Her captors had treated her badly, they said, and the pretty girl from West Virginia had suffered gun-shot and stab wounds.

The reality was quite different. A report issued earlier this month by the Pentagon revealed Pte Lynch had not been shot or stabbed and that her weapon had jammed. She suffered her injuries after the Humvee in which she was travelling crashed into a truck.

Furthermore, inquiries by The Independent, whose correspondent spoke to the Iraqi doctors who cared for her, suggested the Pte Lynch had been well-treated and was put in the cleanest ward in the hospital. In addition, what quickly became apparent was that the special forces rescue was not quite what it appeared.

When the Delta Force troops arrived at the hospital they were immediately led to Pte Lynch and did not need to fire a shot. Of course, among the deep hills and wooded valleys of the Ohio valley, none of this mattered to the people who had been waiting during those dark days for news of Pte Lynch, tying yellow ribbons to trees and fences and spending hours in prayer. Why should they be concerned with a controversy about whether the Pentagon had been giving a slanted picture? That was just politics, they said. Pte Lynch was one of them.

Pte Lynch`s grandmother Wyonema said yesterday: "We are excited just to see her, just to be able to give her a hug.

"To Jessie, home is in the hills. She has been wanting to get here."

Quite how fully Pte Lynch has recovered from her ordeal is not entirely clear. Reports say that she can walk a hundred or so yards with the help of a walking frame but that she still has trouble standing up unaided.

Her cousin Dan Little, a member of the Parkersburg National Guard, which was there to welcome her, said: "She`s a strong, disciplined young lady.

"Her injuries are long healing, and that can be hard if you dwell on it. But she has not allowed that to happen."

The story of her recovery and indeed, that of her capture and rescue, has become the focus of an intense bidding war among rival media outfits.

Last month it was revealed that the CBS network had been so desperate to obtain an exclusive interview with Pte Lynch that it has offered her many enticements linked to other parts of its parent company, including a book deal, a movie contract, an opportunity to co-host an hour-long MTV video show and a concert in her home town featuring either Ja Rule or Ashanti.

Pte Lynch last night made her first brief public comments to the media, during a press conference that was closed to local people - something that upset some residents.

Tammy Simms, from Elizabeth, whose daughter graduated from Wirt Country High School with Pte Lynch, said: "It`s very disappointing but we hope eventually she will come out and do something for the community. I just want to see her face. I can`t wait to see her face."

There has been some disagreement within the community as to whether Pte Lynch should have received the attention she has, and whether others who fought in Iraq have been ignored as a result.

Some of it appears to be jealously, while some of it appears to be genuine concern from a community that is used to many of its young people entering the armed services as a way to escape the lack of opportunities available in this down-at-heel part of the state.

But yesterday, most people just seemed glad that she was home. Regina Ray, the owner of a gift shop in Elizabeth, said: "I just hope she can cope with everything that`s going on around here. You think you are coming home to normal, and this town is not normal."

Greg and Sheila Hodak, of North Carolina, had made a detour to Pte Lynch`s home on their way to Pennsylvania. "We just felt drawn to come by," said Mrs Hodak. "I would love to get a glimpse of her. Everybody felt like she was their adopted child."
23 July 2003 09:30

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Dictator still at large despite reward of $25m for his capture
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
23 July 2003


Where is Saddam Hussein? The US military will now concentrate its attention on the hunt for the ousted Iraqi leader, still believed to be at large in Iraq.

Finding the former dictator has become more important because the guerrilla-style resistance to the American forces that has grown since Saddam was overthrown at the beginning of April.

The US administration in Iraq believes that Saddam`s continued evasion is being used by resistance forces to gain leverage and influence over elements of the Iraqi population and to foment opposition to the new government.

Naturally enough, Saddam`s whereabouts are just about the hottest topic of conversation among the people of Iraq and officials at the Pentagon and the CIA. There is a $25m (£15m) reward for information leading to his capture or proving that he is dead.

Saddam has long been thought to have been living in an area north of Baghdad. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often said he believes Saddam is moving in an arc from Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, around the Tigris river towards his home town of Tikrit and into the Dulaimi areas to the west of the Tigris. He said Saddam was offering a reward of $200 for every US soldier killed.

Earlier this month, a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer told The Independent that Saddam and his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, were hiding in an area of farmland and small villages on the Tigris river between Baghdad and the city of Samarra.

General Wafiq al-Samarrai, the head of Iraqi military intelligence before he went into exile, is helping American forces in the hunt for Saddam. He said the deposed leader had been able to escape capture because the area was heavily populated and had thick vegetation. "He is hiding in an area about 60km [37 miles] long and about 20km wide according to my information," General Samarrai said. He said that Ali Hassan al-Majid, the senior member of Saddam`s inner circle notorious for using poison gas against the Kurds, was also there but moving separately from the other former Iraqi rulers.

Other Iraqi opposition leaders have said they believe that Saddam, who disappeared after the fall of Baghdad on 9 April, is hiding a little further to the east near the town of Baqubah.

The hunt for Saddam is being led by a specialist and secretive team of American troops.

The so-called Task Force 20 includes members of the Army`s Delta Force, the Navy`s counter-terrorism specialists and operatives from the CIA.

Finding Saddam would represent a massive public relations coup for the Bush administration.

Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, said last month that the failure to track down the former dictator "does make a difference because it allows the Baathists to go around in the bazaars and villages as they are doing, saying `Saddam, is alive and he`s going to come back and we`re going to come back`."
23 July 2003 09:32

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Boost for Bush as US hails mission`s success
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
23 July 2003


The deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein have given a welcome fillip to the Bush administration, after weeks of nothing but criticism and controversy in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

"This is good news for the Iraqi people and a great day for the American military," said Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, during a break in testimony on Capitol Hill where he was updating increasingly anxious Senators and Congressmen on the progress of the occupation.

His delight was matched in the White House, which hopes the success will shift the dynamic of the whole Iraq debate in its favour. Officials also believe that the deaths of the sons may lead to a reduction in what seems to be increasingly organised opposition to the US occupation. It will also send a powerful signal to diehard Saddam loyalists that not only is there no prospect of a return to power by the former regime but that none of its fugitive members, however senior, is safe.

Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and initially, at least, regarded as a possible president of a post-Saddam Iraq, said the development was "very important". It would contribute to reducing attacks on US forces, and help lead to the capture of Saddam himself, predicted Mr Chalabi, who along with other provisional leaders in Iraq was in New York to appear before the United Nations Security Council.

The elimination of Uday and Qusay Hussein is perhaps the best news from Iraq for the White House since 1 May, when President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim an end to "major combat operations".

As troops struggle to
restore basic services to an increasingly frustrated civilian population, and lawlessness and violence continued, the Pentagon`s planning for the post-war phase has been exposed as grossly inadequate.

Even before yesterday, many leading figures of the former regime have been rounded up. But US troops have been dying at the rate of one or two a day in what General John Abizaid, the new chief of US Central Command, now openly describes as a guerrilla war.

Commentators talk of a "quagmire" and even draw comparisons with Vietnam.

Among the GIs themselves, morale has plummeted, as tours of duty in the torrid summer heat of an unwelcoming country have been extended far longer than expected.

The sorry state of affairs on the ground, and the embarrassing failure to find the alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have embroiled President Bush and his top aides in controversy over the intelligence used to justify the war.

The relentless flow of bad news from Iraq, coupled with rising unemployment and a continuing weak economy have driven his approval ratings down into the low 50s, roughly where they stood before the 11 September terrorist attacks.

But the killing of Qusay and Uday Hussein ought to still these complaints, for a little while at least. The acid test, however, will be events on the ground. If deadly attacks continue against troops, the White House will again find itself under political fire, amid renewed questions about why the US went to war in the first place.
23 July 2003 09:34



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Allies hail death of Saddam`s sons
From Tim Reid in Washington and Stephen Farrell in Baghdad

US general confirms identity of the bodies
Baghdad celebrates end of Qusay and Uday





SADDAM HUSSEIN`S sons Uday and Qusay were killed by US troops yesterday after a fierce six-hour gunbattle in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Several hours after four badly charred bodies were pulled from a villa belonging to a first cousin of Saddam, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the head of coalition forces in Iraq, announced: "We are certain that Uday and Qusay were killed today. We`ve used multiple sources to identify the individuals."

General Sanchez said that US troops surrounded the villa after an informant, believed to be the villa owner , had tipped off coalition forces that Saddam`s sons were inside.

The battle erupted after 200 members of the 101st Airborne Division, together with elite US Delta Force and Navy Seal troops speedily surrounded it.

"The suspects barricaded themselves in the house and resisted fiercely," General Sanchez said. "They died in a fierce gunbattle."

Witnesses described the engagement as a six-hour US pounding of the building with anti-tank rounds, machinegun fire and rockets from helicopter gunships. Khasrow Guran, the deputy governor of Mosul, said that two of the bodies were bearded. Two other bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the building - that of a teenage boy, and a bodyguard. Qusay has a 14-year-old son, Mustafa, who usually travels with him.

A female relative of the villa`s owner named him as Nawaf al-Zaidani, a sheikh of the Bu Issa tribe. He informed US forces that Qusay and Uday, Qusay`s son and a bodyguard named Abdul Samad had taken refuge in the house.

"He wanted to get rid of them," the female relative, who asked not to be named, told Agence France-Presse.

Four US soldiers were wounded in the operation, with at least one Iraqi bystander killed and five others wounded. The stone-columned villa was left ablaze and largely destroyed, with neighbouring buildings also wrecked.

General Sanchez said that US forces were searching the villa for clues to the whereabouts of Saddam, who still remains at large with a $25 million bounty on his head.

Mosul, 280 miles north of Baghdad, lies outside the "Sunni triangle", where Saddam still enjoys strong support and the area of the most bloody attacks against US troops, but it is a transit point for former members of the regime seeking to reach Syria.

General Sanchez added that the US expected to pay out the $15 million reward that the Bush Administration has offered for information leading to the death or capture of each of Saddam`s sons.

The targets of the raid were viewed as so senior that minutes after the bodies were pulled from the smouldering villa, but before they had been formally identified, President Bush was briefed about the raid by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, in the Oval Office.

The White House reacted with delight to the news, which was a huge boost for Mr Bush, who has been reeling from controversy over the use of prewar intelligence and the mounting US death toll.

The successful elimination of the two most feared and powerful members of Saddam`s inner circle should help to convince an increasingly sceptical American public that the campaign is justified.

News of the deaths sent stocks rising. The Dow Jones index closed up nearly 62 points, with most of the gains coming after news of the killings.

Mr Bush`s spokesman said: "We were pleased to learn of today`s action against Uday and Qusay Hussein. Over the period of many years these two individuals have been responsible for countless atrocities committed against the Iraqi people and they can no longer cast a shadow of hate in Iraq. US military forces and our intelligence community working with an Iraqi citizen deserve credit for today`s successful action."

Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator in Iraq, said: "This is a really great day for the Iraqi people. It also shows the co-operation between the Iraqis and Americans. I hope this will encourage other Iraqis to come forward. It`s only a matter of time before we find Saddam Hussein."

But Mr Bremer warned American troops in Iraq that they could face revenge attacks from Saddam loyalists in the coming days. He told ABC News that the deaths "marginally improve the safety [of US troops in Iraq], although we could see attacks in the next few days as revenge".

General Sanchez said: "I believe this will prove to Iraqis that these two members of the Iraqi regime will not be coming back to power. We remain focused on fixing, killing or capturing all the members of high value on the target list."

Uday, 38, the "ace of hearts" and second on the US list of 55 most-wanted Iraqi officials, was the most reviled member of the former regime, a known psychopath feared for his sadism and sexual deviance. He ran the Fedayin Saddam, the militia that inflicted many casualties on US forces early in the war. Many of its survivors are thought to be part of the continuing guerrilla campaign.

Qusay, 37, the "ace of clubs" in the Pentagon deck and the second most powerful man in the Saddam regime, had been named as his father`s successor. Calmer than his brother but ruthless, he ran the Republican Guard and the Mukhabara secret police.

Saddam has a third son, Ali Saddam Hussein, by his second wife whom he married in the late 1980s.

General Sanchez said the bodies had been flown out of Mosul but were still in Iraq last night. It is believed that there were enough Iraqis in the Mosul area who personally knew Uday and Qusay to make a formal identification, without the need to fly the bodies to Washington for DNA tests. The deaths brought to 36 the number of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis captured or killed.

In Baghdad last night, the sky was red with celebratory tracer fire as Iraqis fired into the air to celebrate what they hoped was the end of Uday and Qusay.

As rumours of their deaths were reported on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya satellite television channels, joyful firing of rifles came from all points of the horizon.

The cacophony was such as has not been heard since the closing days of the war in early April, when similar tracer fire sped across the same skyline as US forces fought their way through Baghdad.

Firing into the air - to mark weddings, births, sporting victories and other triumphs is the bane of nervous US forces in Iraq. Countless pleas to find some other way of expressing delight are ignored, despite the injuries caused by the spent rounds.

Last night, there appeared to be little attempt to quell the firing. Iraqis were delighted.

"Everyone is happy, they took the lives of many Iraqis," said Ahmed, a hotel waiter.

"I was a Baath party member and I hated Uday," said another, reluctant to give his name. "No one will miss him. But how do we know he is really dead. They said Saddam was killed in a convoy near Syria. They said Saddam was killed near a restaurant in Baghdad. They have been wrong many times."

Even The Times`s driver was barely able to conceal his glee.

As he sped past Uday`s former palace on the banks of the Tigris, he pointed angrily to the surrounding streets, on which ordinary Iraqis had been unable to travel before. "No one allowed to stop here before. Anyone who stopped on this road, shot dead immediately," he said angrily.

"Not ask and shoot, just shoot. Uday to blame."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-754160,00.html

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July 23, 2003

Deaths could be turning point for Bush and Blair
By Bronwen Maddox



PRESIDENT BUSH and Tony Blair could not have dreamt of better news — apart from the capture of Saddam Hussein himself.
Confirmation that American soldiers had killed Saddam’s sons came at one of the bleakest points of the conflict for both leaders, with the “peace” in Iraq still so bloody and with their decision to go to war under ferocious fire.

For the past month the coalition’s grip on Iraq has seemed to be unravelling fast. Sabotage of power lines has plunged Baghdad repeatedly into the dark, while attacks on soldiers have become far more organised, and at least one has been killed almost every day. Yesterday a roadside attack brought the number of US military deaths to 232.

Bush has suffered nothing comparable to the heat turned on Blair over the decision to go to war, the questions over intelligence and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. It is Blair who has seen the threateningly sharp drop in support, according to polls, and who now looks vulnerable. But the inexorable machinery of congressional investigation has just begun to turn, threatening to shave points off Bush’s popularity scarcely a year away from the next election.

Confirmation that Qusay and Uday Hussein have been killed could easily prove to be a turning point on the ground in Iraq. It will help the United States and Britain to win more international support for their efforts to get the country back on its feet. It might, too, lift the pressures on Bush at home, and even, by a fraction, the heavier ones on Blair.

With good reason, the Pentagon refers to the members of its “deck of cards” as “high-value targets”. It adopted that laconic generality when the best-known targets, such as Saddam himself, remained so stubbornly elusive. But the vocabulary of the financial markets is apt; the $15 million (£9.4 million) price on each of the sons’ heads reflected their value to the US at this point.

Pentagon and White House officials leapt to their podiums yesterday to talk about the six-hour firefight in Mosul, in which 200 soldiers surrounded the house. They were studiedly cautious in confirming the identities, all too conscious of previous incorrect reports of Saddam’s death.

The news easily overshadowed the other “good news” story of the day, the homecoming of Private Jessica Lynch, welcomed back in West Virginia as the “heroine” of a “gun battle”, even though that had turned out to be distinctly less dramatic, or heroic, than that first described by US Central Command.

But when the confirmation of the deaths finally came through, there was exultation in Washington, as celebratory gunfire lit up the skies above Baghdad. Paul Bremer, the top American civil administrator in Iraq, called it a “great day for the Iraqi people and a great day for the American military”. It made his own day easier, certainly; he had just finished being grilled by senators over military casualties and was about to brief members of the House of Representatives.

On the ground in Iraq the killings of Saddam’s sons could now tip the balance towards America, in the way that Bremer has badly needed.

The most valuable result would be to encourage the remnants of Saddam’s regime to give up. It is entirely plausible that they might — but it cannot be taken for granted. No one has suggested that Uday, Qusay or their father were organising the resistance from their hiding places; others seem to be doing it in their name. The Baathist resistance has not lost its actual leaders, simply its symbolic ones.

The second important test will be whether the deaths reassure ordinary Iraqis that Saddam’s regime is not coming back. The sons were feared in their own right. American officials have attributed the lack of support for the new government partly to fears of the family’s return.

The deaths might even yield information on the whereabouts of Saddam himself. The US military says the raid was the result of “walk-in” intelligence — a tip-off — that the sons were in the house.

For obvious reasons officials were not saying anything about the source yesterday, including whether that person stood to claim a total $30 million reward. But the spectacle of a successful tip-off must increase the odds that someone will feel brave enough to betray Saddam’s whereabouts, and try to claim the $25 million reward on Saddam’s head.

The breakthrough comes at a crucial point in the struggle to stabilise Iraq. Progress on the ground has been extremely slow, indeed invisible to many ordinary Iraqis. Power supplies are intermittent after weeks of sabotage, in which opponents have blown up lines and pylons.

The US and Britain have also made painfully slow progress in setting up a police force to stop the crime which has seized Iraqi society, threatening the morale of US soldiers and Iraqis alike, and jeopardising every hope for the country’s future.

Most seriously, the council set up to act as an interim government has barely taken shape, and the US has so far given it almost no real power. This weekend brought a reminder of the tensions that could fracture the country, when a leading Shia cleric called on Iraqis to reject the council, throw out the US and set up an Islamic regime.

Success on the ground will be political gold dust for Blair and Bush, in dealing with other leaders, and at home. Other governments which opposed the war have made little secret of their sense of vindication. They had predicted that war would bring chaos in its wake, and the daily bulletins appeared to bear that out.

The French press has been open in this delight, although the French and German Governments have been mute; it does not, after all, serve their interests to see Iraq in chaos. But they have both made clear that they would not contemplate joining a peacekeeping force in Iraq without United Nations backing. A string of other countries have also rejected US calls for assistance.

Yesterday’s news redresses this balance a little. A week ago it seemed that the US might be forced to plead with others for help in keeping the peace, even if that meant going the UN route. It is in a stronger position now, as the job suddenly looks easier.

Finally, Blair and Bush find themselves in a stronger position at home. Of course, criticism of the decision to go to war goes back further than this past month, particularly in Britain. Bush faced nothing like the opposition that parts of the Labour Party mounted ahead of the start of war, nor was the public anti-war movement as organised or noisy as that in Britain.

But the failure to get a grip on Iraq, coming after the failure to find the expected weapons, has bolstered those in both Britain and America who argued that the war was a mistake. For Blair, the suicide of the arms expert David Kelly, and the judicial inquiry that will now follow, converted these failures into a particularly personal question about his judgment, as well as ensuring that the issue would not go away.

For Bush, there has been no equivalent drama. But there have been identical charges that his Administration exaggerated intelligence to justify going to war. In what increasingly resembles an election year, Democrats in Congress have seized on this as a rare chance to attack the President.

However, they have had some support from their Republican colleagues who chair the committees. For all the debate, after Dr Kelly’s treatment, about whether House of Commons committees should soften their style, there is little question that congressional committees are a greater ordeal. They have greater powers, and witnesses often feel the need to hire ruinously expensive legal representation. And they are relentless: if the committees don’t want to stop, they just don’t.

Blair and Bush will need to show not just that they have vanquished the last regime but that they can create a new one. All the same, success is a powerful weapon.

Never mind saving Private Lynch, it is Blair and Bush who have been rescued in a sudden swoop. The raid has brought them respite at least from a month of dreadful news, if not, for Blair in particular, from a deeper political predicamen

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2731-754215,00.htm…

[Joerver]

Auch der Guardian hat goodbye Lenin ausführlich erwähnt.

July 23, 2003

Hello Lenin: Ostalgia for the old East Germany
Roger Boyes
There is a deep yearning for the slower, swaddled life of communism



Kati Witt, the pirouetting ice-skating star of the defunct East German state, caused a stir the other day by appearing in public in a tightly stretched T-shirt that announced: “I Love the German Democratic Republic.” The uproar was prompted not by offended sensibilities — remember the GDR, the watch towers, the cold dead hand of the secret police? — but by a sense of approval; a taboo had been broken.
Many east Germans want to be East Germans again: they want to be swaddled by a kind of soft communism. Should we be worried? I think so. Not because the Berlin Wall is about to be rebuilt but because reunification has so manifestly failed to convince millions of east Germans that capitalism and liberal democracy are superior to the ramshackle socialism of the Cold War.

The Kati Witt phenomenon — she is about to front a prime-time TV series on the highlights of East German life — is part of a wave of Ostalgie, a yearning for the East. As such it is harmless enough, even comic. The latest Ostalgic excursion is to appear in British cinemas from Thursday — Goodbye Lenin, the funniest film to come out of Germany for a century or so. The storyline is clever, sometimes touching. A devoutly socialist mother suffers a heart attack, falls into a coma and is unconscious when East Germany collapses. Some months later she wakes up and is in acute danger of a second heart attack if she is subjected to shock. So the son reconstructs the East German State in and around her convalescent bedroom: faked news footage is piped into her television set, she is sheltered from Coca Cola, visitors dress with studied shabbiness and the boy goes to extravagant lengths to supply her with socialist-era pickled gherkins. I watched this film with a west and an east German; they laughed in different places.

The point of the film, and the surrounding Ostalgic fuss, is that communism produced an imperfect world, full of defeat, yet it was not evil or run by monsters. It was intimately bound up with the biographies of people who believed in something better. The latest Stasi files to be released into the public domain are shocking not because people snitched on their friends for money — where would the publishing industry be without that kind of help? — but because so many did so for free. They were convinced that their Germany was the superior one; it did not dump on the weak, throw people out of work, it was modest and, usually, decent. That sentimental attachment to a dead state lingers on and I’m not sure it is as ludicrous as it sounds.

We have failed the East Germans. We promised them prosperity, a flourishing new culture that would lift them out of provincial mediocrity. Instead they have become the Mezzogiorno of the north, a hopeless bog where subsidies sink swiftly, leaving mere bubbles on the surface. The united Germany became the laggard of Europe not just because of a chronic inability to reform but also because of the fundamental mistakes made in the east during the 1990s.

If you drive the few miles from Mecklenburg in the east to Hamburg, you leave a state where the average income per head is 16,890 euros a year and enter a city state with an average income of 43,550 euros: the gap between rich west and poor east in some ways more stark than 13 years ago. The east is beginning to resemble a 19th-century colonial settlement: a few scattered, relatively prosperous, oases surrounded by depopulated wasteland.

Airports are built on the basis of half-baked projections about tourism. In villages the houses facing the road are brightly painted; behind, there is a broken-down community, unfinished buildings, dumped cars and unsaleable farmland. A million people have moved out of eastern Germany since unification. At night teenagers, bored and drunk, play chicken on the long straight country roads with hot-rodded cars. On the morning of Berlin’s overmarketed Love Parade, I was marooned at a small station in Brandenburg. Waiting for the train to the German capital was a boy in a wheelchair — the victim of a dare that involved jumping off a local bridge — and three halfnaked youths smoking marijuana. One almost fell in front of the train, another vomited. It was 10 o’clock in the morning in the heart of what used to be Prussia.

The ideologically coherent argument is that this generation has been messed up not by capitalism but because of the soul-destroying legacy of communism. But these teenagers were five years old when the wall tumbled. Communist rule in East Germany did not have much to do with Marxism but it offered a sheltered and slower life. Now these lost tribes feel exposed, under pressure to succeed in a society they no longer understand. So they reach back to a mythical pre-1989 world, not because they crave communism and the Stasi and the ban on foreign travel, but because it was a gentler age.

East Germans learnt patience: they had to wait 15 years for cars that could barely move faster than lawnmowers. They valued the extended family: it was almost impossible to live independently before middle age. East Germans developed a fetishistic interest in Western goods but most understood that consumer choice was nowhere near as important as ethical choice, the daily tests of loyalty and self-respect in a crumbling police state. These were values learnt under communism and in spite of it; it has made thoughtful individuals out of east Germans, sceptical of ideologies, of populism and posturing. Perhaps we should stop mocking them and listen more carefully to the people that history left behind.




The author is Berlin correspondent of The Times



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An American soldier kept residents away from a house in Mosul that troops attacked yesterday, killing Saddam Hussein`s two sons, officials said.
July 23, 2003
With Hussein`s Heirs Gone, Hopes Rise for End to Attacks
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER


ASHINGTON, July 22 — The deaths of Saddam Hussein`s two eldest sons in a battle with American troops in northern Iraq could be an important victory in the campaign to control, and even end, the guerrilla-style insurgency that has almost daily killed or injured allied troops, administration and military officials said today.

The attack that killed Qusay and Uday Hussein could set off an immediate wave of retribution attacks, officials said, but the deaths should also embolden more Iraqis to come forward with critical information to energize the American military`s antiguerrilla operations.

Evidence of the deaths, the officials said, will allow them to make the most convincing case that senior leaders of the Hussein government would never return to power — and that Iraqis need no longer fear openly supporting the United States.

Before today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld routinely cited the climate of fear imposed by Mr. Hussein over the decades of his rule as a significant brake on efforts to pacify and rebuild Iraq. Mr. Hussein`s sons served as his two most senior advisers and their survival at the very least helped inspire the insurgency.

"Key regime figures had spheres of influence, and many in Uday and Qusay`s spheres of influence are without a doubt sleeping better tonight," said James R. Wilkinson, spokesman for the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla.

But the top prize — Saddam Hussein — remained elusive, and initial reports on the attack included no indication of whether information might have been seized at the house to point to his location.

Even so, the raid raised hopes among military officials in Iraq and at the Pentagon that they were tightening the noose around Mr. Hussein himself. A senior military official said the Pentagon would learn more about the kind of hiding places Mr. Hussein and his former top aides may be using. The second floor house in Mosul was so heavily fortified that it took missiles fired from either Apache or Kiowa helicopters to blast it open so troops could enter.

The attack may also validate arguments by senior American commanders who have resisted calls from some lawmakers and other critics to increase the number of troops on the ground in Iraq from the current level of 148,000, saying better intelligence combined with fast-acting troops is the answer.

In an interview on Sunday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Persian Gulf, described a scenario that foreshadowed the raid today.

"It`s not a matter of boots per square meter," General Abizaid said. "It`s a matter of focused intelligence, and then troops that are agile enough to carry out missions in a manner that can cause surprise and take down the targets precisely."

The military has conducted hundreds of raids over the past few weeks, not to seize hundreds of fighters but to confiscate huge caches of weapons and hoards of cash, gold and jewels meant to finance a long-term guerrilla resistance.

American officials were particularly hopeful that the deaths would lead more Iraqi informants to come forward. Since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1, American forces have relied heavily on tips from such informants and from insurgents captured in a running series of raids, to hunt down an elusive array of Baath Party diehards, foreign guerrilla fighters and terrorists.

"We`ve seen an increase in informants coming forward to our military, to our intelligence people and to our police in the last three weeks, and this is an obvious example of a culmination of that," said L. Paul Bremer III, the senior American occupation administrator, after briefing lawmakers on Capitol Hill today. "I would hope this will encourage other Iraqis to come forward."

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the American ground commander in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad that the developments will enhance the allies` credibility with Iraqis, some of whom have questioned whether the United States was secretly holding Mr. Hussein, and possibly his sons, to ensure Iraqis dis what they were told.

General Sanchez said, "We remain totally committed to the Hussein regime never returning to power and tormenting the Iraqi people."

Judith Yaphe, an Iraq specialist at the National Defense University, said that "even those who have shown the most loyalty to the regime, and thought it could survive or come back, can`t be putting much hope on Saddam`s returning if his sons are not alive."

News of the two sons` deaths, she said, "is not going to stop all of the attacks against us." But, she added, "it could weaken, it could lower the degree of them." She cautioned, though, that "there are going to be some people who are going to be cranky no matter who is alive or dead, because they have nothing to lose."

One Bush administration official said tonight that the United States carried the burden of proving to the Iraqi people, and indeed to the Arab world at large, that the two sons were actually dead, and that Pentagon efforts to produce evidence of Mr. Hussein`s brutality to his own people would continue.

General Sanchez acknowledged that providing public proof was essential, and promised to provide more details at a televised briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told reporters on Monday, after completing a five-day trip to Iraq, that the allied public information campaign must do a better job of promoting the occupation`s accomplishments and debunking the guerrilla propaganda.

The mission today may also have a positive effect far beyond quieting the resistance, because it could serve as a big morale boost for the soldiers who have lived, fought and patrolled in the desert for months.

In fact, while Pentagon officials cautioned that they had only preliminary reports from the battle, one military officer briefed on the mission said Apache helicopters flown by the 101st Airborne had performed admirably, which could polish an image of the choppers that some say was tarnished early in the war.

In late March, when army aviation mounted its first attack on Republican Guard forces, the Apaches of the 11th Aviation Regiment were surprised by an Iraqi tactic of throwing up a wall of small-arms fire that downed one helicopter and damaged more than two dozen others.

Missions like the one conducted today often call up the fearsome AC-130 gunship, an Air Force Special Operations plane that carries aloft heavy machine guns and cannon, but the Apache received the assignment for close-air support today and did well, military officials said.

That Mr. Hussein`s two sons could elude 160,000 troops for so long begs the question of whether it was the $15 million reward on each son`s head that inspired the betrayal, or something else.

American intelligence officials say Mr. Hussein`s former secretary told interrogators that the Iraqi leader split from his two sons on April 10. Uday and an aide fled to Syria, but were forced back into Iraq. Saddam Hussein was not believed to have been at the site of the raid.

"It`s only a matter of time before we find Saddam Hussein," Mr. Bremer said, "and I hope that day is a day earlier now."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Das ist aber ein gr0ßartiger Erfolg für Tony.
July 23, 2003
Death Penalty Ruled Out for British Detainees
By SARAH LYALL


LONDON, July 22 — The Bush administration has assured the British government that it will not seek the death penalty for two Britons being held as terrorist suspects at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, British and American officials said today.

In a statement released in Washington, where he had just concluded several days of discussions about the fate of the two men, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, said he had made significant progress in efforts to ensure that they be tried fairly.

Mr. Begg, 35, from Birmingham, England, and Mr. Abbasi, 23, from London, were on a list of six detainees identified by President Bush earlier this month as likely to be tried by military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay. The news immediately raised protests in Britain, America`s staunchest ally in the war against Iraq, with politicians, civil rights groups and editorial writers accusing the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair of failing to ensure the civil rights of British citizens in the face of American legal proceedings.

Among other things, Lord Goldsmith said today, the Americans have promised that, should the tribunals proceed, the Britons` conversations with their defense lawyers would not be monitored or reviewed by American authorities. In addition, he said, the trials would be open to reporters and subject to security restrictions, and the two men would be allowed to consult British lawyers, even though they would be officially represented by American lawyers.

Lord Goldsmith`s statement only referred to the two men, although seven other Britons being held at Guantánamo Bay have been included in his negotiations. In all, 680 prisoners from more than 40 countries are being detained at the naval base, without being charged or tried. The two Britons named so far are thought to be relatively low-level suspects who would most likely be charged with receiving training from Al Qaeda.

The Australian government is conducting separate negotiations with the United States about Australians being held there, one of whom was also on President Bush`s list of six.

In Washington, government officials said the death penalty had never been seriously considered in the cases of the two Britons. But the death penalty is illegal in Britain, and even the possibility that such a sentence might be imposed created a huge political problem for the government. Last week, on a visit to Washington, Mr. Blair pressed Mr. Bush on the issue.

Several other issues are still unresolved, including the question of whether the American government would be willing to return British suspects to Britain, rather than trying them in Cuba.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 23, 2003
Backer of California Recall Feels Heat Directed at Him
By CHARLIE LeDUFF


LOS ANGELES, July 22 — Most Californians have never heard of Darrell Issa, the millionaire congressman who is bankrolling the effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis. But chances are, many know his voice.

Before he embarked on a second career in politics, Mr. Issa, a conservative Republican from San Diego, made a $100 million fortune in the car-alarm business. That was his recorded voice on the Viper alarm system warning the interloper and stray dog alike to "please step away from the car."

"That`s me," said Mr. Issa, raising his eyebrows, while sitting in his sparse campaign headquarters along the loop of John Wayne International Airport in Orange County, nothing on his desk but potato chips and a diet soda. "That made me a celebrity, sort of."

It also made him the money that allowed him to pour millions into his political career, including $1.6 million into the effort to remove the Democratic governor from the Statehouse and insert himself in it.

And it provides a tasty backdrop for his opponents who are looking for ways to discredit the man who has brought California to the brink of this extraordinary political moment.

Because try as he might to step away from the car, Mr. Issa is bombarded at every turn with calls for an explanation to those nagging questions about two arrests for car theft in his youth.

"This stuff is 30 years old," said Mr. Issa, dressed in a blue polo shirt and khakis, his hair combed and parted with tonic, not hair spray as preferred by political veterans.

Such is the state of California politics. Already $38 billion in the red, the state is expected to have to finance a $30 million referendum on a governor who was just elected last November. On the same ballot California voters will be asked to pick a new governor should they back a recall.

And you can blame Darrell Issa or thank him for propelling a movement that just a few months ago looked as if it was going nowhere. The signatures needed to put the measure on the ballot — nearly 900,000 — are expected to be certified this week. If so, the recall vote will occur in late September or early October.

When asked why he was sinking a sizable piece of his personal fortune and reputation into the effort, he spoke of leaving a legacy.

"Some people want to amass a great amount of wealth and make a great looking obituary," he explained. "I`m going to die with more money than is good to leave my son."

So the two-term congressman has the Democratic governor reeling. According to a recent Field poll, 51 percent of likely voters say they would support the removal of Mr. Davis from office.

But whether they would turn to Mr. Issa, 49, is another question. In April, the Field poll found that, of registered voters, 79 percent had no opinion of Mr. Issa, a sign that he was barely known. Of likely Republican candidates, former Mayor Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles, leads as the preference of likely voters, according to a July 16 Field poll.

Next comes Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor with no political experience. There is Bill Simon Jr., the conservative who lost to Mr. Davis in the last election. Next are a couple of little-knowns and at the bottom of the list is Darrell Issa.

Still, he has a Congressional seat and a $100 million fortune, and angry Democrats are determined to tar him, saying Mr. Issa`s political record is shorter than his police record. They also say that his conservative views about abortion, guns and immigration are out of step with most of California.

"He might as well have tattoos on his arms," said Bob Mulholland, a campaign adviser to the California Democratic Party. "Arson, car thefts, gun charges. The man who muscled his way through life thinks he can muscle his way into the governor`s office. He`s mistaken."

And some Republicans, worried about his electability, are not much kinder. Despite the fact that Mr. Issa has single-handedly rejuvenated a moribund party that holds no statewide office, they say it is time for him to step aside.

"Schwarzenegger`s the choice," one Republican operative said. "So, in two weeks, Republicans are going to pat Issa on the head, thank him for his service, then walk over his dead body."

Mr. Issa admits he is not gifted. He is dyslexic and to compensate for this, he says he studies hard, shoots from the hip and tries to memorize prepared statements.

"I have an I.Q. of 100 plus a little bit," he said. "I have to work real hard to get things when I read."

But now that the recall looks like a sure thing, Mr. Issa has developed his own formula to rescue California from its deficit without increasing taxes: changes in the worker`s compensation system so employers pay less, wage freezes for state employees and 10 percent cuts across the board.

An issue for Mr. Issa is whether his voting record from his conservative Southern California district would play statewide. For instance, on the votes that the National Abortion Reproductive Rights Action League considered to be the most important in 2002, Mr. Issa took its preferred position zero percent of the time. At the same time, the National Rifle Association gave him an "A" on gun issues. Voting records show him to be against most environmental measures and a big supporter of business.

Mr. Issa is of Lebanese descent and in that regard has tried to work with Arab leaders, particularly after the attacks of Sept. 11. He was the target of an assassination attempt by Irv Rubin, founder of the radical Jewish Defense League. The plot was discovered, Mr. Rubin arrested and late last yea jumped off the second tier of his cell block and died.

Mr. Issa, with an eye to one of the state`s large constituencies, says he votes consistently pro-Israel. "Peace in Palestine is inevitable," he said. "The question is how do we make it happen today."

Darrell Issa was raised in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the second of six children. His father sold trucks and worked a second job at night grinding valves. His older brother William got his own room, and the young Darrell Issa admired him.

A poor student, Mr. Issa dropped out of high school at age 17. He joined the Army.

He was discharged on a hardship when his father fell ill and was sent home. In 1972, he and his brother William were arrested in the theft of a Maserati from a Cleveland car dealership. The case was dropped.

Last month The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in 1980, after Mr. Issa had re-enlisted in the Army as a 27-year-old officer, he was again arrested with his brother on felony auto theft charges.

The paper said that William Issa stole his brother`s car, sold it to a dealership in San Jose and that within hours Darrell reported it stolen. The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.

Mr. Issa offers a two-pronged defense. One is to blame it on youth. "Look, I was a kid," he said. "What would you rather have? A cardboard-cutout who never made a mistake when he was young only to become governor and then carry on like a juvenile delinquent?"

Defense No. 2: the I`ve-got-a-colorful-brother stratagem.

"I love my older brother Billy," said Mr. Issa, explaining that he got caught in the orbit of his ne`er-do-well brother who has five felony convictions for car theft and is currently unemployed in Cleveland. "He stole a lot of cars. He stole my car. You could say that drew me to the car alarm business. Poetic justice."

But there is the matter of possessing an unregistered handgun in Michigan a few months after the car theft charges. He was fined $100 and put on probation for carrying a long .25 millimeter semi-automatic. The gun belonged to me, says his brother Billy.

"Don`t blame my brother for my sins," Billy Issa said from his home in Cleveland.

The telephone rings. It is a political ally on the other end telling Darrell Issa that reporters are seeking more details on his past. He laughs.

"Some day," Mr. Issa tells him, "somebody`s going to report on those little pineapple squares I snitched at a party."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 23, 2003
For Every Child, a Stake in America
By RAY BOSHARA and MICHAEL SHERRADEN


WASHINGTON
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain came to Washington last week to bolster President Bush against his critics on Iraq. Let`s hope the two leaders found a moment to discuss domestic policy as well — particularly Mr. Blair`s effort to give every child a stake in Britain`s economic future.

Each British baby born after last Sept. 1 will receive a trust fund worth at least $400, and up to $800 for the poorest one-third of children. The government will make smaller supplementary payments when the child turns 5, 11 and 16 years old — and relatives or friends can contribute limited amounts tax-free over the years. Add to this the magic of compound interest, and the account could be worth $7,000 when it matures on the child`s 18th birthday. In large part, the idea is to help the 16 million Britons — out of 60 million — who have no savings or equity at all to join the middle class.

Mr. Blair`s initiative is the latest example of a concept that political scientists call "stakeholding." In postwar Japan, land was redistributed to millions of farmers, laying the foundation for the country`s economic renaissance. Singapore has achieved one of the highest rates of savings and home ownership in the world largely because of laws requiring workers to put a portion of their earnings (and making employers contribute a matching amount) into a trust called the Central Provident Fund. And in the United States, a quarter of adults today can trace their family legacy of asset ownership to the Homestead Act that, beginning under Abraham Lincoln, awarded land in the American West to those pioneers with the courage to settle it.

Why not, then, some version of stakeholding here in the United States, a Homestead Act for the 21st century? This country could certainly use it. The poorest 60 percent of Americans collectively owns less than 5 percent of the nation`s wealth; one-quarter of white children and half of nonwhite children grow up in households with no resources at all for investment.

A United States version of baby bonds would have the political advantage of not being based on the politics of resentment — soaking the rich to help the poor is an idea most Americans reject — but on the politics of opportunity; that is, creating a larger middle class. In fact, members of Congress from both parties have in recent years proposed versions of retirement savings accounts for all children.

Here`s how such a system might work in the United States. Each of the four million babies born every year would receive a deposit in an American stakeholder account. Initial deposits could range from, say, $1,000 to $6,000. Yes, it would be difficult to free up this money in a time of deficits, but as a long-term investment it would be money well spent.

Unlike Mr. Blair`s baby bonds, which can be spent on anything after the recipient reaches age 18, Bush baby bonds would be restricted to higher education or technical training, a small business or a first home, or they could be put aside for retirement.

While all Americans would participate, it would be of the greatest benefit those born in low-income families, who have the greatest need for lifetime asset accumulation. It doesn`t take an army of economists to know that society as a whole reaps huge rewards when we have more owners, savers, taxpayers and entrepreneurs — and fewer people depending on the state, their communities and others for their livelihood and well-being.

Over the next decade, the United States may well spend $100 billion or more to give the Iraqi people, for the first time, a real stake in their society — without doubt a worthy investment. But as our attention inevitably shifts back to domestic economic security, we should consider a new level of stakeholding in America as well.



Ray Boshara is a program director at the New America Foundation. Michael Sherraden is professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Die von mir eingexten Passagen, sind im Original mit schwarzen Balken ausgefüllt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/23/opinion/23DOWD.html

Weapons of Mass Redaction
By MAUREEN DOWD


This correspondence from the Office of the Vice President to the xxxxxxxxxxx ambassador to the U.S. was redacted by the Office of the Vice President for national and electoral security reasons:

Dear Prince xxxxxx binxxxxxxx ,

Thank you, my friend, for the falcon. It survived the trip on your Gulfstream. It is now eating small endangered woodland creatures at my Jackson Hole ranch.

We are pumped about the double rubout of the Hussein boys. We really needed that win. It could be a game-changer for us. The stock market killed on the killings. And the timing will help cover your royalxxxxxx , too.

When the 9/11 commission report comes out tomorrow, I think you will be well satisfied with our efforts to keep you guys out of it.

We have almost as much experience as you at keeping private matters veiled. It`s not good to overburden the American people with too much complicated information.

We didn`t let a thing slip on our private energy meetings where we took care of our mutual friends in the industry; we kept the bidding closed on the Halliburton contracts to rebuild Iraq, and we set up our own C.I.A. within the Pentagon to produce the intelligence we wanted to link Al Qaeda to Saddam rather than to your country.

We`ve classified the entire section of the 9/11 report that deals with the xxxxxxxx family`s support of charitable groups that benefit terrorists, including mentions of your wife`s checks inexplicably winding up in the bank accounts of two of the hijackers. (Lynn says to tell Princessxxxxxxxx we have four tickets for the xxxxxxxx ballet at the Kennedy Center.)

We`re not even letting Bob Graham mention the name of your country. We threatened to throw him in the federal slammer if he calls xxxxxxxxxx anything but "a foreign government."

Not to worry that the report will shed any light on the ties between the hijackers and your government agent al- xxxxxxxxx .

I know you`re worried that the whiny widows of 9/11 will throw another hissy-fit when they see all the blacked-out material, like they did when you whisked Osama`s family out of the U.S. on a private jet right after the attacks. But we didn`t go this far down the road of pushing aside incriminating evidence about you guys and blaming 9/11 on Saddam to turn back now because a few thousand families can`t get their darn closure.

Buddy, we go back a long way. You`ve been a great host to the Bushes and you`ve been generous with rides on your Airbus and Gulfstream and with invites to your beautiful estates inxxxxxxxx and xxxxxxxx and xxxxxxxx .

But now you have to throw us a bone. Al Qaeda cells are crawling all over your kingdom, planning attacks around the world. They`ve gotten even stronger since the May bombing of Western compounds in xxxxxxxx . We need a little more than lip service about quelling anti-American fervor over there and cracking down on phony charities. You`ve got to at least give the F.B.I. something to work with. Don`t worry. They`ll screw it up anyway.

Rest assured that the F.B.I.`s taking the heat for 9/11 in the report tomorrow, not you.

I hear you want to behead that ex-spook Robert Baer, who`s been all over TV talking about the way you lavish money to influence U.S. politics, donating millions to presidential libraries and the like. But after all, every million spent on a congressman`s favorite charity is one less million for a terrorist`s fake charity.

Here in the xxxxxxxxx House, we`ve mastered the art of moving beyond what people once thought was important to look for. First, we switched from looking for Osama to looking for Saddam. Then we switched from looking for "weapons" to looking for "weapons programs." Now Wolfie has informed the public that we need to worry less about finding weapons in Iraq than building democracy.

The trick is to keep moving. Just yesterday, we shifted the blame for the uranium debacle in the president`s State of the xxxxxxxxx speech from George Tenet at the C.I.A. to Stephen Hadley at the N.S.C.

I`d like to return your many acts of generosity. Why not come to dinner at my Secret Undisclosed Location? Here`s the address: xxxxxxxxxx in xxxxxxxx .

All the best, Dick.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
The Ruthless Excesses Of a `Wolf` and `Snake`
Hussein`s Sons Had Contrasting Personalities but Similar Vices

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A13


BAGHDAD, July 22 -- They were known to many Iraqis as "the wolf" and "the snake."

Saddam Hussein`s elder son, Uday, 39, was the wolf -- a sadist who tortured athletes for losing matches and had henchmen snatch women and girls off the street, a tantrum-thrower who beat underlings and rivals to death, a showoff who collected fast cars and jungle pets.

Qusay, 37, was the snake -- a son who was subservient to his father in public but who quietly amassed enormous power through his control of state intelligence and security services, oversaw the brutal crushing of rebellious political movements and emerged as Hussein`s heir apparent.

Together the two men, who American officials said were killed tonight when U.S. troops stormed their villa hide-out in the northern city of Mosul, symbolized the two faces of a family-run dictatorship that was capable of both stealthy and flamboyant evil.

Although Hussein is still missing, the deaths of his two sons and closest aides are likely to have an enormously liberating psychological impact on a country where their rumored exploits were a source of both Machiavellian mystery and Felliniesque revulsion.

Author Con Coughlin wrote in "Saddam: King of Terror" that even as teenage schoolboys, Uday was "loud and vulgar while Qusay was quiet and calculating." Both of their first, arranged marriages failed, but Uday`s departed bride was covered with cuts and bruises, while Qusay`s union was quietly dissolved.

In the years after Hussein became president in 1979, the brothers took on dramatically different roles in their father`s empire, with Uday receiving higher-profile positions in sports and propaganda and Qusay getting tasks that were more discreet and central to Hussein`s consolidation of power.

Uday`s portfolios befit his penchant for publicity, muscle and high living. He was named chairman of the Iraq Olympic Committee in 1984, as well as head of the Iraq Football Association, where he earned a terrifying reputation for cruelly punishing national soccer and track team members who lost important competitions.

Iraqi athletes who escaped to the West reported to human rights groups that when teams lost, Uday administered whippings to the players, made them crawl on hot asphalt, dunked them in sewage tanks and forced them to kick concrete balls.

He was also involved in press and propaganda work as the owner of a daily newspaper and a television channel for youth, and as the head of the Iraqi Journalists` Union -- positions that essentially allowed him to dominate the Iraqi media. Former aides in his radio and TV stations said he often beat their feet with iron rods for making small mistakes, such as being late or misspelling a word.

Meanwhile, according to numerous accounts, Uday`s personal life was a soap opera of drunken brawls, family feuds and playboy sex, played out against a backdrop of opulence and excess that was partly financed by international smuggling. Said to be one of the wealthiest men in Iraq, he bought dozens of European sports cars and kept imported lions and tigers as pets in his palaces.

Uday`s temper was violent and uncontrollable. He beat a servant to death, killed an army officer for refusing to let Uday dance with his wife, and in 1988 murdered his father`s favorite bodyguard and food-taster, an act that soured Hussein`s opinion of his elder son and putative heir.

Finally, in 1996, after a series of vicious family feuds during which he tried to murder an uncle and helped orchestrate the execution of two of his father`s sons-in-law who had fled the country and then been lured back, Uday barely survived an assassination attempt that left him partly crippled and politically even weaker.

Qusay, in sharp contrast, spent his twenties and thirties quietly acquiring power as an indispensable confidante, hatchet man and security operative for his father. In public, he was often described as sitting quietly at his father`s elbow, impeccably dressed, taking notes and letting others do the talking.

But Hussein, who was obsessed with security and repressing dissent, entrusted his younger son with increasingly important and sensitive tasks. In 1991 Qusay personally oversaw the brutal end to an uprising by Shiite Muslims. He also directed an operation to drain Iraq`s vast southern marshes so anti-government insurgents could not use them as hiding places.

By the mid-1990s, having proven his loyalty and ruthlessness, he was given authority over Iraq`s elite Republican Guard, and was put in charge of the Special Security Organization, a combination of personal guard for Hussein, secret police and liaison with the military forces.

Perhaps his most delicate assignment from Hussein was to head a group whose task was reportedly to oversee Iraq`s supply of unconventional weapons and hide them from U.N. inspectors. Because of his close relationship with his father and his control of various security operations, Qusay became the second-most powerful man in Iraq.

Although it was less well known, he could be as cruel as his brother, and one American analyst described him as a "vicious killer." He reportedly ordered prison populations reduced by mass executions and supervised the killing of some inmates by an especially hideous method: putting them through shredding machines.

Qusay also lived a luxurious life, raising peacocks and gazelles on private farms and sending aides to Europe to buy the best whisky. But in the mind of the Iraqi public, the exotic excesses and gratuitous cruelty of Uday are likely to remain the defining image of a regime that, until three months ago, literally knew no limits on power.



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U.S. troops raided a house in Khaldiyah, 45 miles west of Baghdad, during Operation Desert Scorpion last month.
Manche Fotos sehen ganz schön gestellt aus.

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As U.S. Lowered Sights, Information Poured In


By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, July 22 -- After weeks of difficult searching for the top targets on the U.S. government`s list of most-wanted Iraqi fugitives, U.S. military commanders two weeks ago switched the emphasis of their operations, focusing on capturing and gathering intelligence from low-level members of former president Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party who had been attacking American forces, according to military officials.

That shift produced a flood of new information about the location of the Iraqi fugitives, which came just before today`s attack in which Hussein`s two sons were killed by U.S. forces in the northern city of Mosul, the officials said.

"We shifted our focus from very high-level personalities to the people that are causing us damage," Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, said in an interview last weekend. Later, he told reporters in Baghdad: "In the past two weeks, we have been getting the mid-level leadership in a way that is effective."

The captured Baathists provided much new detail about their organization and contacts, officials here said. Some gave information about their financing and their means of communication, they added. Others identified members of their networks. Some described the routes and contacts that fugitive leaders were using. Threats to ship the recalcitrant captives to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern end of Cuba were especially helpful in encouraging them to talk, officials said.

"You get a tip, you pull a couple of guys in, they start to talk," a Central Command official said. Then, based on that information, he continued, "you do a raid, you confiscate some documents, you start building the tree" of contacts and "you start doing signals intercepts. And then you`re into the network."

"The people are now coming to us with information," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the Army`s 4th Infantry Division, told Abizaid in a briefing this week at Odierno`s headquarters in Tikrit, Hussein`s home town. "Every time we do an operation, more people come in."

The 4th Infantry, operating in a region dominated by Iraq`s Sunni Muslim minority, which was a major base of Hussein`s support, conducted an average of 18 raids a day in recent weeks, he added.

The number and breadth of those follow-up raids also encouraged Iraqis who had been fearful of Baathist retaliation to speak up, officials here said.

Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said at a Baghdad news conference at which he confirmed the deaths of Hussein`s sons that the Mosul raid resulted from "a walk-in" Monday night who "gave us the information that those two individuals were in that residence."

Until early June, when the Army launched the first of three major offensives in the an area known as the Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad, U.S. officials didn`t fully grasp the extent of Baathist resistance in the area, one Army official said today.

The first offensive, dubbed Peninsula Strike, wasn`t aimed so much at Baathists as at hostile remnants of the Iraqi military that remained active in the Sunni town of Thuluya, on the Tigris River between Baghdad and Tikrit. Yet when captives from that operation, from June 8 to 15, were interrogated, they began shedding unexpected light on the role that Baath Party operatives were playing in the region in supplying weapons, recruiting fighters and financing attacks on U.S. troops and bases, officials said.

Later in June, the next offensive, Desert Scorpion, began with scores of simultaneous raids aimed at, among other things, shutting down escape routes available to the former Iraqi leaders. It also went after the secret hoards of cash and jewelry that were financing their operations, and it sought to gather more information about the size and structure of Baathist resistance in the Sunni triangle.

That series of raids yielded information on what analysts said was a surprisingly large network of Hussein loyalists. "We call it the gang of 9,000," said a senior Army official, adding that that figure was just an estimate of the number of Baath Party operatives, former intelligence functionaries and their allies active in the Sunni region and in Baghdad.

As a result, U.S. commanders changed their minds about sending the entire 3rd Infantry Division home, as they had hoped to do by the end of last month. "As we began to see the extent of Baathist pockets in the Sunni triangle, it became clear that we couldn`t draw down forces as quickly as we liked," said a senior Central Command official.

The raids also led to a sharp increase in U.S. casualties in June, with a soldier dying nearly every day. This official estimated that close to 60 percent of U.S. casualties came in the course of offensive operations by the U.S. troops or Baathist responses to those attacks.

The third offensive, Soda Mountain, conducted this month, was the first aimed at capturing and interrogating the resistance leaders -- the mid-level Baathists who U.S. officials had come to believe were behind most of the attacks on American forces. That operation began with a smaller series of raids by the 4th Division, called Ivy Serpent.

The mid-level operatives who were captured turned out to be knowledgeable about how the top targets on the U.S. list were evading capture. "There was a snowball effect," a senior Army official said today.

Put together, the information helped breach the wall of protection around Hussein and his sons, a U.S. official said this week. He said the information the United States now has is far more solid than that which led to last month`s Special Operations raid near the Syrian border. U.S. officials initially thought that raid might have hit Hussein or people close to him, but it appears only to have damaged the smuggling network that was being used by fugitives to travel in and out of Iraq.

Despite their recent success, U.S. military officials here caution that the fighting is far from over, and they predict that the nature of the attacks could worsen. They worry that the more they succeed, the more desperate Baathist remnants will become. So, they fear, the next phase of attacks might rely more on car bombs and other terrorist methods than on direct attacks on U.S. forces. Two officials here this week, for example, expressed concern about the possibility of an Oklahoma City-like bomb attack on U.S. officials and Iraqis working with them in the capital.



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Two U.S. Soldiers Killed in Attacks



The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 23, 2003; 4:17 AM


BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks on convoys Wednesday, the military said, including one on the outskirts of the northern city of Mosul, where the sons of Saddam Hussein were killed in a firefight the day before.


© 2003 The Associated Press

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Members of Iraqi Political Council Seek Help at U.N.
Officials Ask for Reconstruction Aid and Promise to Act Swiftly to Make Way for Elected Government

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A18


UNITED NATIONS, July 22 -- Representatives of a U.S.-approved Iraqi political council made their international diplomatic debut today, appealing before the U.N. Security Council for help in funding the country`s reconstruction and pledging to move swiftly to pave the way for an elected Iraqi government.

Speaking on behalf of the 25 members of the Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, an Iraqi foreign minister before Saddam Hussein`s rise to power, sought to assure the council that the emerging political leadership represents the legitimate aspirations of Iraq`s 26 million people. He said his group`s primary goal is to "shorten the duration" of the political transition in Iraq and to "constitute an elected government under a constitution to be endorsed by the population in a free election."

Pachachi was accompanied by Ahmed Chalabi, a former exile leader who enjoys strong Pentagon backing, and Akila Hashimi, who served in Hussein`s foreign ministry. Their appearance followed a campaign by the Bush administration and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to persuade the Security Council to recognize the group`s legitimacy and to help restore Iraq`s security and resuscitate its battered economy.

"We owe a debt to the people of Iraq that can best be honored by our demonstration -- in our word and deed -- of our collective and cohesive commitment to supporting the rehabilitation of their country, now and into the future," Annan`s special envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, said in his first extensive briefing to the council on Iraq. "The people of Iraq deserve no less."

Today`s meeting -- which was designed to present a united Iraqi face to the world -- revealed some tensions within the ranks of the new Iraqi leadership. Chalabi initially threatened to boycott the event because he was not selected to address the council.

Members of the 15-nation Security Council generally expressed support for the July 13 establishment of the governing council as a first step toward self rule. But the representatives of several Security Council members made it clear during today`s meeting -- which was briefly interrupted by two protesters who challenged the group`s legitimacy before being dragged out of the gallery by U.N. security guards -- said that Iraqis would have to be given more freedom to chart their political future.

"We . . . acknowledge that the governing council is broadly based, composed of many groups of the Iraqi people and may provide the international community with an Iraqi partner with whom she can engage," said Gunter Pleuger, Germany`s ambassador to the United Nations. "However, the most important decision, whether the governing council is accepted as the legitimate transitional representation of the Iraqi people, has not been taken yet. This decision will have to be taken by the Iraqis themselves."

Germany joined France and other key council members in insisting that the United States and its military allies must bear chief responsibility for meeting the Iraqis` basic needs and restoring stability. Their position complicates the administration`s efforts to solicit foreign aid to help finance the reconstruction and to recruit foreign troops for peacekeeping duty in Iraq.

Germany`s stance also reflected the reluctance of council members to make a major commitment to Iraq`s reconstruction without assurances that their companies would have access to the Iraqi market.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week that he is exploring the possibility of pursuing the adoption of a new Security Council mandate that would provide potential troop contributors, including India, with sufficient political cover to participate. Germany, France, Russia and other council members indicated a willingness to restart the negotiations on a resolution that would strengthen the United Nations` role in Iraq.

But U.S. officials and U.N. diplomats in New York said the administration has no immediate plans to introduce such a resolution. "I don`t think there`s anything quite going to the point yet of whether somebody -- us or somebody else -- might put forward a resolution," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "It`s a matter of discussion."



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Nur was hilft das, wenn die Amerikaner zum Frühstück gleich wieder zwei tote Soldaten gemeldet bekommen.

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A Good Day in Iraq




Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A22


AFTER A LONG, hot season of seemingly relentless stories about guerrilla warfare, sabotage and mounting American casualties, U.S. commanders in Iraq finally had some good news to announce yesterday -- and it was very good news indeed. The confirmation that Saddam Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusay, had been killed by U.S. troops who surrounded their hideout in Mosul meant a serious blow to the diehard resistance that has plagued the postwar administration, and a huge boost for the majority of Iraqis, who hated and feared the old dictatorship. Most Iraqis support the U.S. forces in their country because they want Saddam Hussein and the remains of his regime to be eliminated; many also have hesitated to cooperate with the U.S.-led administration because they worry that the dictator will stage a comeback. With the death of men who organized and directed Saddam Hussein`s death squads and were his chosen political successors, there is considerably less to worry about.

An opportunity exists for the United States to make this a turning point for the postwar administration. As it happened, the successful operation by troops of the 101st Airborne Division coincided with the first appearance of the new Iraqi Governing Council before the United Nations Security Council, another step by that body in establishing its authority and credibility. The occupation authority under L. Paul Bremer showed flexibility in agreeing to grant the Iraqi council more powers than originally intended. The Pentagon has also embraced one of the Iraqis` ideas in forming militia units that can take over some of the patrol and guard duty now done by Americans. This process of replacing American with Iraqi faces and modifying U.S. plans to accommodate Iraqi initiatives should be accelerated in the coming weeks. And Mr. Bremer ought to be clearer and more aggressive in communicating with Iraqis about when and how they will get a full-fledged representative government.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces must pursue the Iraqi resistance aggressively: Despite yesterday`s breakthrough, the recent predictions by U.S. commanders that the guerrilla war would continue and even worsen may well hold. But Mr. Bush should also aggressively seek stronger international support, including that of traditional U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere who did not support the war. Many countries are holding back potential contributions of troops, civilian advisers and financial resources because they object to the administration`s insistence on monopolizing authority over the postwar administration, command of peacekeeping forces and even the distribution of reconstruction contracts. Just as Mr. Bremer has accommodated the desire of Iraqis to play a larger role in the evolving postwar government, the White House should create room in Iraq for all who can help. The time for making the postwar administration work is running short. Yesterday`s success ought to be the cue for broadening and accelerating the effort.



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The Democrats` War Trap


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A23


Dick Gephardt deserves Howard Dean. In a sense, he created him.

If anyone has personified the failure of the Democratic establishment to provide the party with a distinct profile during the Bush presidency, it`s Gephardt. As House Democratic leader, Gephardt clung to Bush`s Iraq policy until it all but unraveled over the past month. Gephardt`s endorsement last fall of the administration`s war resolution effectively derailed a bipartisan effort in the Senate to require the White House to win more international backing.

There was supposedly a method in this madness: By taking the war issue off the table, Gephardt argued, the Democrats could turn the midterm election campaign to questions of domestic policy, presumably their strong suit. We`ll never know if this could have worked, because Gephardt and his fellow congressional leaders never developed a domestic message.

To millions of die-hard Democrats, it looked as if their party had sacrificed its principles on the altar of pragmatism and then had nothing pragmatic to offer. Neither conscience nor opportunism was given its due, and the rank-and-file was mightily indignant.

Howard Dean`s genius was that he was the only serious Democratic presidential candidate to hear that rage and amplify it -- partly because he spent less time inside the Beltway and more on the road than any other candidate last year. Indignant himself about the Democrats` acquiescence in the war, he became the vehicle for the activists` indignation, too.

Dean`s critics have argued that his antiwar vehemence makes him unelectable in a general election; they may be right. Democratic Leadership Council stalwarts Al From and Bruce Reed have raised the specter of another McGovernesque debacle -- the liberals, like locusts, returning at 32-year intervals to devour their own party.

But Democrats don`t lose only when they move left as they did in 1972. In fact, Democrats also lose when liberals are so vexed with the party establishment and its nominee that they stay away from the polls, as they did in 1968 when the nomination went to Hubert Humphrey, who`d been the leading defender of Lyndon Johnson`s war in Vietnam until just a few weeks before the November election.

Besides, Dean is a poor facsimile of the forthrightly progressive George McGovern. On matters economic, he`s often a model DLC centrist. Asked on "Meet The Press" last month about supporting a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, he answered, "I go back and forth on that one."

If that`s liberalism, Calvin Coolidge was a pinko.

The candidate whom Dean more nearly resembles is the 1968 antiwar insurgent, Eugene McCarthy. Like McCarthy (and unlike McGovern), Dean directs much of his fire at fellow Democrats` backing for a questionable war. Like McCarthy, his supporters are overwhelmingly white middle-class professionals. Like McCarthy, he is more moderate than his supporters think he is, and surely more moderate than they are. And like McCarthy, he is likely not the strongest candidate the Democrats could put forth in November.

But how much like Humphrey`s candidacy are those of the current Democratic hawks, Gephardt and Joe Lieberman in particular? The radicalism of George W. Bush has concentrated Democratic minds, but are there liberals who would still hesitate to support a pro-war nominee even against Bush, as their forebears hesitated to support Humphrey even against Richard Nixon?

A look at some numbers from last month`s MoveOn "primary" suggests that might be the case. The left-leaning, antiwar online organization polled its members on their presidential preferences, and a clear plurality of voters favored Dean. Just as important, however, MoveOn also asked its voters which Democratic candidates they could enthusiastically support if those candidates won the nomination. Dean ran first here, too, with 86 percent backing, but the pro-war candidates fared notably less well. John Edwards came in fourth with 56 percent, Gephardt fifth with 53 percent and Lieberman eighth with 42 percent. (Al Sharpton ran ninth: MoveOn voters clearly thought him an implausible president, and Lieberman, an implausible Democrat.) The surprise was John Kerry, who ran a strong second with 75 percent. MoveOn voters -- a significant, if not necessarily representative, sample of liberal Democrats -- seem to have established a hierarchy of pro-war candidates. At the bottom is Lieberman, the most conservative candidate in the field; then Gephardt, the architect of the party`s support for Bush`s war; then Edwards, a not very critical supporter of that war; and finally, at the top, Kerry, who managed both to vote for the war and criticize it simultaneously. Some might call that incoherence, but of all the Democrats, Kerry is probably the best able to win support from all quadrants of the party. In message and manner, Kerry often still fails to connect with his listeners. But if he can put his own house in order, he`s the candidate best positioned to unite a party that`s not been this angry at itself since 1968.

The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect.



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Parallel Universes


By Anne Applebaum

Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A23


Late last week Tony Blair made a speech in Washington. Afterward various British journals of record summed up their prime minister`s performance. The Daily Mirror found "something quite nauseating" about the speech, in which Blair once again "backed America in what many now view as a war based on lies." The Daily Mail sneered at "Blair the brilliant contortionist, trying to have it both ways." The Guardian, meanwhile, declared that the speech represented a "significant softening" of the prime minister`s position on Iraqi weapons, and described the event this way: Blair "stood before hundreds of members of Congress to admit that he may eventually be proved wrong."

Is that what he was doing? Funny, but if you`d been reading the American press, you`d have had quite a different impression. "Bush, Blair Defend Motives Behind War," read the headline in The Post, which failed to detect any "significant softening" in the prime minister`s words. The New York Post -- the closest thing Americans have to the Daily Mail -- failed to see anything remotely "contortionist" in the speech either, writing that "Blair`s address clearly reflected a nuanced appreciation of America`s role in the world." Far from sounding "nauseating," Blair "heralded the role the United States has played in fighting the broader war on terrorism," wrote the Los Angeles Times. Not since Mikhail Gorbachev simultaneously became an international superstar and the most hated politician in Russia has a political leader enjoyed such disparate reputations at home and abroad.

In part these remarkably different descriptions of the same speech reflect the vagaries of domestic politics. The issues that actually make Blair unpopular in Britain, such as the travails of the National Health Service, are not issues here at all, and some of what we see as his better attributes are considered failings in Britain. Here he`s thought eloquent; there he`s thought slippery. Here he`s thought statesmanlike; there he`s thought to be too interested in foreign countries, and not enough interested in his own.

But they also reflect a larger phenomenon that is not much better understood. America and Britain -- along with America and France, America and Russia, America and Botswana, America and anywhere, really -- live in parallel informational universes. By that I mean that the media produced in different cultures don`t merely reflect different opinions about the news, they actually recount alternative versions of reality.

Different countries have always had different perspective on the news, of course. But in the world of globalized information, where just about any newspaper or television program in any language is available at the click of a mouse, this isn`t supposed to happen anymore. Nowadays we`re all supposed to know what everybody else is thinking, to have access to the same images and information, and some of us do. Peasants in rural India gather around village television sets to watch reruns of "Dallas." In different time zones, Japanese and German bankers watch the same images on their Reuters screens. It is often said now that events are monitored around the world in "real time," or that we all live in a "global informational village," as if such a thing had already come to pass.

During the Iraq war, a few Americans and Europeans, at least, began to notice how tiny that village actually is. It wasn`t hard to see that the war as broadcast by the BBC or Deutsche Welle was quite different from the war as broadcast by NBC or CNN. Fewer understood that this is not only a Euro-American problem: A German friend visited Poland during the war and was surprised by how much less blood seemed to appear on the Polish evening news. And the differences run much deeper than a disagreement over Iraq, or portrayals of a single event. It isn`t just that Europeans have different opinions from Americans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, they actually learn different facts and read about different events, and therefore they reach different conclusions. When George Tenet fell on his sword earlier this month over that now infamous piece of British intelligence that made it into the president`s State of the Union speech, the story played here as "White House Dumps on CIA." In Britain, it played as "White House Dumps on Britain."

Strangest of all, the availability of alternative points of view doesn`t appear to have mellowed anyone`s prejudices -- quite the contrary. Nowadays, we all live under the illusion that we are receiving many different types of information, but that we select only the most plausible. In fact, as information multiplies, it grows ever easier to choose to read (or watch) whatever best matches your particular bias, whether national or ideological. If you hate network television`s right-wing bias, you can click onto, say, www.globalexchange.org or www.moveon.org. If you hate network television`s left-wing bias, you can always watch Fox. Having done so, you`ll labor under the illusion that you`ve picked the most truthful version of events -- but how would you know? Have you actually compared and contrasted the arguments of both sides and come to a judicious conclusion?

What is true here is even more true internationally. If British newspaper readers learned anything of Blair`s rapturous reception here last week, they learned it from British articles denouncing the slavish U.S. media. If French television viewers learned anything about American perceptions of the war in Iraq, they learned it from French news items on the jingoistic U.S. media. The prophets of globalization once spoke of a seamless, borderless world, in which national differences would magically disappear. They were wrong.



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Gone AWOL on leadership


By Robert Kuttner, 7/23/2003

FTER SEPT. 11, even George W. Bush`s harshest critics credited him for leading. Lately, Bush has been doing the opposite.


What does it mean to lead? A real leader puts his own prestige on the line - to educate public opinion, to pursue necessary policies that are sometimes unpopular, and to take responsibility.

Lyndon Johnson took huge risks to redeem the promise of Emancipation and to lead America into a dubious war. He might have survived the bruises of the former were it not for the latter. But in both cases the policies were his own.

Richard Nixon, not America`s most honorable president, took responsibility for controversial policies - opening to China, using temporary wage and price controls, attempting to convert welfare to a guaranteed annual income. He won some, lost some, and was reelected overwhelmingly in 1972. Bill Clinton put his presidency at risk to raise taxes on the rich and balance the budget, to end welfare as we knew it, and to get NAFTA enacted. When Clinton failed to get universal health insurance, he didn`t blame Hillary.

Now, consider Bush.

He declared that he wants to expand Medicare to include (very) limited coverage of prescription drugs. His political Rasputin, Karl Rove, views this as a top priority to upstage a leading Democratic issue. The House Republicans want to use drug coverage as a wedge to begin privatizing Medicare. Senate Democrats consider that gimmick a deal breaker. A little presidential leadership is in order if Bush really wants a bill. Have you heard him say boo?

Remember the child tax credit? Under the latest tax cut, refund checks go out July 25. But not to some 6 million kids in families where the breadwinner pays payroll tax but no income tax, including many GIs serving in Iraq. Bush pledged to fix this lapse. The Senate voted, 94- 2, to make the change. But the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, says no way. Where is Bush on this one? Who is setting the agenda, Bush or DeLay?

How about Head Start? Candidate Bush pledged to expand it. The radical right wants to end Head Start as a federal entitlement and shift responsibility for the program to the states, where it can be converted to glorified day care (with for-profit and religious sponsors) rather than the effective child development program it has always been.

Last week DeLay temporarily postponed a floor vote because he faced defeat. Which side is Bush on? Finally, there are the famous 16 words in the State of the Union Address. That piece of deliberate deception was blamed on CIA Director George Tenet - except that Tenet had warned the president against relying on the bogus Niger-uranium report as long ago as last October.

It was New York`s great mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, who famously said, ``When I make a mistake, it`s a beaut.`` George Bush`s equivalent is, ``When I make a mistake, it`s Tenet`s fault.`` (This habit seems to run in the Bush administration. When ground operations in Iraq bogged down, Defense Secretary Rumseld suddenly began describing the war blueprint as ``Tommy Franks`s plan.``) Bush is becoming evader-in-chief. Even the electorate is starting to notice.

There is a rule that a column is about one thing. Excuse me for violating it, but I really wanted to write three different columns today, so here is a sampler of the other two:

Did you notice the groundswell of support in Congress for legalizing drug imports from Canada? This is an idiotic way to do the right thing. Drug prices are cheaper up north not because manufacturing costs are lower there but because the Canadian national health program controls drug company prices and profits.

Congress doesn`t need a detour via Canada. It just needs to do the right thing directly. Regulate drug prices, and Americans will save not just money on their prescriptions but on needless shipping charges, too. No need to punish the local drugstore just because Congress lacks the nerve to do this reform properly.

Do you find it worrisome that the deficit is the biggest ever and interest rates the lowest in half a century - and the economy is still very soft? I do, and George Bush should. Were it not for the still-reverberating shocks from the deregulation orgy and the stock market bust, 5 percent mortgages and $500 billion deficits should be pushing the economy into the stratosphere. But not this time. Just imagine what a little imported inflation might do. This economy, and this presidency, are a lot shakier than they look.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 7/23/2003.
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Posted on Wed, Jul. 23, 2003

JANE EISNER
Troops keep dying -- but for what?

We all remember the scene, and if not, the political strategists will remind us of it again and again. President Bush dramatically helped pilot a Navy jet onto an aircraft carrier returning home from the Persian Gulf, and the commander-in-chief, who never actually saw combat, was greeted as if he were a conquering hero.

Saddam Hussein had been toppled. The United States and its allies had prevailed.

``Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,`` Bush declared, his voice cracking with emotion.

``Our mission continues,`` he went on to say, but that modest reminder surely was lost under the blare of a huge banner held aloft by the sea`s breeze and the nation`s fervent hopes: ``Mission Accomplished.``

That was May 1.

Since then, American servicemen and servicewomen have been dying in Iraq at a rate exceeding one a day -- 87 deaths in 76 days, as of this writing.

Their names probably are not familiar to you; there`s no Jeffrey Zahn or Jessica Lynch celebrity among them. Just Marine Lance Cpl. Cory Ryan Guerin, 18, of Santee, Calif., who died July 15 in an accident. And Army Sgt. Michael T. Crockett, 27, of Soperton, Ga., killed in action the day before.

Not everyone died in the kind of combat situation for which he or she volunteered when joining the military. Army Sgt. Jaror C. Puello-Coronado, of Pocono Summit, Pa., perished in an accident on July 13. On the same day, an Army captain from Michigan, Paul J. Cassidy, died of unspecified noncombat injuries.

Both those men were 36 years old. It`s easy to imagine the contours of the lives they left behind; families perhaps, hobbies and passions, places in their communities. Many of the occupation casualties are young -- 18, 20 years old -- and their deaths represent the loss of promise. But by the time one is 36, the promise is partly fulfilled, the rest a detectable outline almost within reach.

Now it`s over, and their loved ones must be asking: For what? The entire nation ought to be asking the same question.

The fact that some of these men and women died in accidents outside the official realm of combat and after the war was technically ``over`` makes not a whit of difference. They died in service.

They died because Iraq is an anarchic mess, because the enemy has not been vanquished, and because those who prosecuted this war from the safety of their Washington offices did not prepare properly for the aftermath and have stubbornly refused to share the responsibility with other nations.

Guerin and Crockett and Cassidy were combatants. They also were victims.

As such, their families deserve at least as much attention and perhaps even more sympathy than those of the 115 who died when the war was hot, because this part was not in the script. The mission supposedly was accomplished months ago. The worst was over. The president said so.

Yet the death count climbs.

Army Spec. Joshua M. Neusche, 20, of Montreal, Mo., died on July 12. Army Spec. Christian C. Schulz, 20, of Colleyville, Texas, died on July 11.

Those of us who initially were ambivalent about this war have only grown more doubtful in light of the administration`s misleading statements and unproved predictions about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq`s ties to al Qaeda. Still, there`s a job to finish in Iraq, and it looks as if the United States is the one to do it.

Granted, some of these men and women might have died no matter where they were stationed -- in an accident in Germany, or in Texas -- and no political leader can be held accountable for all of life`s unfairness and unpredictability. But we cannot consign these casualties to public oblivion. During the initial military campaign, the public knew more about the lives of ordinary servicemen than ever before, thanks to embedded reporters and the stunning use of technology. The angry distance that marked the relationship between soldier and civilian during the Vietnam conflict was replaced by a cheerful solidarity.

That`s pretty much over now, because the war was supposed to be over. Only it`s not. And even if the powers that be don`t realize that, the public ought not lose its focus or compassion.

The ranks of the killed and injured inch upward, toward a time when the whole nation will have to ask itself: How many casualties are too much?

Jane R. Eisner, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/6361643.ht…

[Joerver]

In der amerikanischen Presse habe ich keinen Bericht gesehen. Morgen wird der Untersuchungsbericht des Senats zu 911 veröffentlicht. Also vielleicht bringen sich noch einige anderen Leute aus der Schußlinie.

Uran-Niger-Affäre

Condoleezza Rice übernimmt die Verantwortung

Nach CIA-Chef Tenet hat sich jetzt auch George W. Bushs stellvertretender Sicherheitsberater Stephen Hadley für falsche Informationen in der Rede des US-Präsidenten entschuldigt. Sicherheitsberaterin Condoleezza Rice übernehme persönlich die Verantwortung für die Panne bei der Begründung des Irak-Kriegs.


Washington - In einem der seltenen Pressegespräche sagte Hadley, er habe im Oktober zwei Notizen von der CIA und einen Anruf von CIA-Direktor George Tenet bekommen, in denen Zweifel an dem Bericht laut geworden seien. Deshalb sei ein Hinweis auf die vermeintlichen Urankäufe auch aus einer Bush-Rede am 7. Oktober gestrichen worden. Dabei geht es um eine inzwischen diskreditierte Passage, in der dem Irak vorgeworfen wurde, er habe versucht, in Afrika atomwaffenfähiges Uran zu kaufen.

Bis zur Rede zur Lage der Nation am 28. Januar habe er dies aber wohl wieder vergessen. "Die hohen Standards, die der Präsident gesetzt hat, wurden nicht erfüllt", sagte Hadley. Er habe sich am Montag bei Bush entschuldigt. Seine Chefin, Condoleezza Rice, übernehme persönlich die Verantwortung dafür, dass Präsident George W. Bush den Vorwurf dennoch im Januar in seiner Rede zur Lage der Nation erwähnte.

Hadley sagte, er selbst übernehme für den Mitarbeiterstab des Präsidenten die Verantwortung für diesen Fehler. Für die CIA hatte schon Tenet erklärt, er hätte stärker darauf dringen müssen, dass die strittige Passage aus der Rede hätte gestrichen werden müssen.

Damit vollzieht das Weiße Haus eine Kehrtwende: Vor zwei Wochen hatte das Weiße Haus der CIA noch den Schwarzen Peter für die Passage zugeschoben. Die Rede sei vom Geheimdienst abgenommen gewesen. CIA-Chef George Tenet hatte daraufhin persönlich die Verantwortung übernommen.

Die US-Regierung bemüht sich in der Debatte über die Begründung des Irak-Kriegs inzwischen um Schadensbegrenzung. Angesichts der wachsenden Kritik der Demokraten erhalten republikanische Abgeordnete und Senatoren Einblick in Geheimdienstunterlagen. Gleichzeitig werden sie angehalten, die positiven Aspekte des Kriegs hervorzuheben.

Die Demokraten werfen Bush eine Irreführung der Bevölkerung vor dem Irak-Krieg vor. Ihre Kritik konzentriert sich auf die Rede zur Lage der Nation, als Bush die Gefährlichkeit des Irak betonte und dabei auf angebliche britische Erkenntnisse verwies, wonach Saddam Hussein versucht haben soll, große Mengen Uran in Afrika zu kaufen.


© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

[Joerver]

Amerikaner schließen Zeitung im Irak

22. Juli 2003 Die amerikanische Verwaltung im Irak hat erstmals eine Zeitung geschlossen. Die Redaktion von „Al Mustakil“ (Die Unabhängige) sei am Montag versiegelt und ein Büromanager festgenommen worden, gab ein Sprecher der Verwaltung am Dienstag in Bagdad bekannt.

Das Blatt habe am 13. Juli einen „klar aufhetzerischen, gefährlichen Artikel“ veröffentlicht. Darin seien nach Angaben des Sprechers Sätze wie wie „Tod allen Spionen und Verrätern! ... Sie zu töten, ist unsere religiöse Pflicht“ enthalten gewesen. Die Schließung der Redaktionsräume, die Beschlagnahme von Materialien und die Festnahme des Büromanagers erfolgten durch Beamte der irakischen Polizei.

Die Maßnahme stützte sich auf eine Verordnung der amerikanischen Verwaltung, die die Grundlage für freie Presse- und Medienaktivitäten bildet, zugleich aber Aufrufe zur Anwendung von Gewalt untersagt. In diesem Falle habe es sich um eine „kristallklare Aufhetzung zum Mord“ gehandelt, betonte der Sprecher.

Das amerikanische Militär hält offenbar seit drei Wochen zwei Reporter des iranischen Fernsehens fest. Suhail Kerimi und Said Abutalib seien am 1. Juli von Soldaten in oder in der Nähe von Diwanija festgenommen worden, erklärte ein Korrespondent des iranischen Fernsehens am Dienstag in Bagdad. Nach Auskunft von Soldaten in Diwanija seien sie ins amerikanische Gefängnis am Flughafen von Bagdad gebracht worden. Seitdem fehle von ihnen jede Spur. Auch sei der Grund für ihre Festnahme und ihre anhaltende Inhaftierung nicht klar.

Text: dpa
http://www.faz.net/s/Rub117C535CDF414415BB243B181B8B60AE/Doc…
Das freie Wort im Irak
Von Majid Sattar

22. Juli 2003 Amerikaner und Briten haben Erfahrung im Umgang mit Medien in einstigen Diktaturen. So wie heute im Irak, so gingen die Alliierten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg auch in ihren Besatzungszonen des untergegangenen Deutschen Reiches ans Werk, die nationalsozialistische Propaganda mundtot zu machen und Westdeutschland zu demokratisieren.

Doch anders als in den Westzonen gibt es im Irak weder eine Lizensierungspolitik noch ein Presse(verbots-)gesetz. So sind zwar auch im Nachkriegsirak Presseorgane der Militär- und Zivilregierung auf dem Markt, in denen die jüngsten Verordnungen veröffentlicht werden (etwa jene, die die fünf staatlich gelenkten Zeitungen des Baath-Regimes verbot). Ansonsten aber herrscht Chaos. Zig Zeitungen, Tages- und Wochentitel, zirkulieren zwischen Euphrat und Tigris - in kleinen Auflagen, darunter sicherlich auch Eintagsfliegen, geschrieben meist von journalistischen Neulingen und nicht selten finanziert von religiösen und politischen Parteiungen.

Irakischer Diskurs

Die Jahrzehnte der Diktatur und des wirtschaftlichen Elends haben es indes nicht vermocht, das einstmals reiche intellektuelle und kulturelle Leben gänzlich zu zerstören. Das Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), eine in Washington beheimatete Organisation, die nun auch ein Büro in Bagdad eröffnet hat, um die irakischen Medien zu beobachten und durch Übersetzungen dem Westen zugänglich zu machen, hat dieser Tage erste Exzerpte aus der neuen irakischen Presse vorgelegt. Die Themen, die die irakischen Schlagzeilen bestimmen, liegen auf der Hand: die Überwindung der wirtschaftlichen Not und die Erlangung politischer Unabhängigkeit. Der Diskurs der Iraker, soviel scheint klar, ist noch unstrukturiert. Anschlußfähig an den Westen ist er aber durchaus.

Freiheit und Unabhängigkeit

Und ironische Spitzen läßt er nicht vermissen. So erinnert etwa ein Kommentar in der Zeitung Al-Adala, die von der schiitischen Bewegung Sciri von Scheich Ajatollah Muhammad Baqir Al Haqim herausgegeben wird, an das „lächerliche Mißverhältnis“, das offenbar wurde, als amerikanische Soldaten am 4. Juli im Irak ihren Unabhängigkeitstag feierten. „Wir beglückwünschen das amerikanische Volk (...), aber wir fragen uns, ob sie an der Freiheit anderer Völker ebenso interessiert sind wie an ihrer eigenen.“ Dabei interessiert den Autor die im Westen so intensiv diskutierte Frage nach den Kriegsgründen nicht. Die nach den Kriegsfolgen umso mehr.

Eine irakische Verfassung

Ein Editorial in der Tageszeitung Al-Bayan, Organ der islamistischen Dawa-Partei, verbindet den Wunsch nach einem baldigen Ende der alliierten Besatzung mit einer Verfassung für den Irak und von den Irakern: „Es gibt keine Rechtfertigung dafür, diese den Irakern zu oktroyieren (...) Der nationalen Einheit wegen ist eine irakische Verfassung, die den Willen der verschiedenen politischen Kräfte innerhalb des Volkes reflektiert, dringend geboten.“ Die Kritik richtet sich gezielt an den amerikanischen Zivilverwalter in Bagdad, Paul Bremer, der zwar einen irakischen Regierungsrat einberief, die Einberufung einer verfassungsgebenden Versammlung aber einmal mehr verschob. Al-Adala sieht in der Einrichtung des provisorischen Regierungsrates indes einen Schritt in die richtige Richtung.

Der Widerstand

Faris Al-Kateb, Chefredakteur der unabhängigen Tageszeitung Al-Yawm Al-Aakhar, widerspricht in seinem Kommentar dem Urteil General Abizaids, Oberbefehlshaber der amerikanischen Truppen im Irak, der Widerstand gegen die Besatzungsmacht trage Züge einer Guerilla-Taktik: „.(...) Was wir sehen, kann nicht Guerilla-Krieg genannt werden. Was tatsächlich passiert, sind private Aktionen von eifrigen Jugendlichen, die es ablehnen, die Gegenwart amerikanischer Streitkräfte in den Wohngebieten der Hauptstadt und der Provinzen zu akzeptieren.“ Nach Ansicht der unabhängigen Tageszeitung Al-Shira wird sich die Sicherheitslage auch dann nicht verbessern, wenn die Amerikaner die Besatzungstätigkeit an die Nato delegieren. „(...) Das wird nicht nur dazu führen, daß die Amerikaner die Sicherheitskrise los sind. Wichtiger noch, es wird zwei Hauptgegner des Krieges in den Konflikt verwickeln, Frankreich und Deutschland.“

Drei Monate nach dem Fall des Regimes von Saddam Hussein ist die politische und wirtschaftliche Lage im Irak weit davon entfernt, Amerika zufriedenzustellen. Die junge irakische Presse steht ihren Befreiern nicht feindlich, aber kritisch gegenüber. Das sollte die Reedukatoren in Washington freuen.

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub117C535CDF414415BB243B181B8B60AE/Doc…

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Wenn jemand am fallen ist, wird jeder Dreck ausgegraben. Zu dem Wahrheitsgehalt kann ich mir kein Urteil bilden.
Ich habe diese Seite bisjetzt noch nicht unseriös erlebt.

U.S. media still REFUSES to mention
Bush sexual assault lawsuit
http://fp.enter.net/~haney/jt071803.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://fp.enter.net/~haney/jt071803.htm

By: Jackson Thoreau - 07/18/03



A Texas woman continues to pursue a lawsuit she filed last December against George W. Bush alleging that the White House inhabitant sexually assaulted her.

Contacted by phone at her home in mid-July by this writer, plaintiff Margie Denise Schoedinger said I was one of the first media members to attempt to contact her about the case. In case you’re counting, that’s more than seven months after she filed the legal brief in a Fort Bend County court.

"I am still trying to prosecute [the lawsuit]," said Schoedinger, a 38-year-old African-American woman who lives in the Houston suburb of Missouri City. "I haven’t had a court date set, yet….I want to get this matter settled and go on with my life."

I must say at this point that I’ve been a journalist for mostly mainstream publications for more than 20 years. In my time, I’ve dealt with my fair share of crackpots, probably more than my fair share. I’ve been around the block a few times – and have survived so far.

But Schoedinger didn’t sound like the average crackpot. She sounded intelligent, articulate, soft-spoken, and yeah, even honest over the phone, for whatever that’s worth. I know many people who sound honest – like a certain White House occupant at times – are really not. But my point is that Schoedinger didn’t sound like she was on drugs, although being drugged by federal agents is part of her lawsuit.

Anyways, I could only unearth one U.S. mainstream newspaper that has mentioned the lawsuit - a December 2002 story by the Texas-based Fort Bend Star. And that paper even later ran a nasty letter by a reader recommending it fire the reporter for simply doing her job and covering the story.

Not even scandal sheets like the National Enquirer will report on this lawsuit, to my knowledge, although they cover the latest allegations about Clinton and other Democrats. Hell, I once read a story in one of those scandal sheets that said Clinton was dating a woman with three breasts. And they can’t find the space to mention a sexual assault lawsuit against our latest White House occupant?

If Schoedinger had filed a lawsuit against Clinton, do you think the story would be at least mentioned in every U.S. media outlet from Maine to Hawaii to Alaska to Florida? I’d bet my mortgage on it. Can you say mainstream media double standard, once again?

Look at the way the national and local U.S. media has run with the sexual assault allegation against NBA star Kobe Bryant. The 19-year-old woman who alleges that Bryant assaulted her in June did not even go to the trouble and expense of filing a lawsuit. She just reported it to police, who actually arrested Bryant without filing any charges.

The story ran on the national news for numerous days. Bryant, who denied the charge in published reports, is not known as being politically active, and a Federal Elections Commission search did not reveal any contributions to political candidates. But his coach, Phil Jackson, has given money to several Democratic candidates, including Bill Bradley, who he played with in the NBA.

Could that link to Democrats, as well as Bryant’s African-American background, be why the mainstream media pounds this Bryant assault allegation into the ground before the facts are clear, and ignores allegations filed in a public court case against the Caucasian Republican Bush? More on that question later.

When I asked about the lack of media coverage, Schoedinger said she wasn’t seeking publicity. She did not even know about the Fort Bend Star story, although that article said the paper tried to contact her [funny, I had no problem reaching and speaking to Schoedinger on my first attempt]. She said she was surprised the case wasn’t covered more because "it is true……People have to be accountable for what they do, and that’s why I’m pursuing it."

To be sure, Schoedinger’s accusations – which include being drugged and assaulted numerous times by Bush and men purporting to be FBI agents - are bizarre enough and hard for the average, television-media-brainwashed drone to believe. But to those of us who search beyond our conventional media and go places relatively few dare, her story could be true. Who the hell besides Schoedinger and Bush and a few others really knows?

Strange things have occurred in human history, probably stranger than we can imagine. The U.S. government – like most governments – contains its share of evil bastards who would think nothing of doing more than assaults to people. These are people without consciences, without caring about any cosmic, karmic principle that you reap what you sow.

I’ve learned about too many strange deaths and mind-control experiments and sex orgies that the CIA and other parties play around with to know that they occur. Each one I hear about makes me madder and more determined to do something to stop the madness. My contribution is to keep trying to expose these bastards’ evil deeds to the light of day, to side with the truth-and-justice seekers, even if we are sorely overmatched, even if we are laughed at and discredited in an attempt to divert attention from what’s really going on. Evil bastards hate the light – they like to operate in the dark, behind the scenes.

One of my favorite movies is one that many critics raked over the coals as too shallow and corny and unbelievable to the point of making them vomit. But I don’t give a damn what such critics think. Amazing Grace and Chuck [1987] starred former NBA player Alex English as a pro hoopster who quit and joined a protest by a Little League baseball player to rid the world of all nuclear weapons.

Many people believe that will never happen, especially now with Bush-Cheney in control, coming up with "smaller" nuclear weapons, space weapons and lies to develop and use them like the kind they told to justify killing some 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians – not to mention the war combatants on both sides - earlier this year. But that’s not the point. The point of movies like Amazing Grace and Chuck is to show us what a different way of life would be like and give us some ideas on how to begin the process of getting there. The point is to give us some hope.

Yes, with Ted Turner as an executive consultant, the movie was preachy. You may be laughing now, thinking, you tough-sounding, cussing, hard-ass reporter/writer enjoyed a sappy movie like that? I guess there still is that other Gemini side to me, a more optimistic side that likes to dream big, even if that dream seems unreachable. Like many people, I’m not a simple, one-dimensional human being.

The movie had some good ideas on how to reach the masses to really make a dent – namely through our modern-day gladiators who find their social consciences and really listen to what kids think. In real life, English is a cool guy who actually supports the views of his character on the issue of nuclear disarmament. When someone told his character ridding the world of such weapons was unrealistic, he didn’t try to overwhelm them with numbers and frightening scenarios. He simply said, "Maybe so, but wouldn’t it be nice?"

English’s character knew how to operate in the light, to disarm critics, to reach people. He also knew how to be tough, to stand up to the evil nuclear weapons barons. After personally threatening one, English’s plane was blown apart. But his spirit lived on and kept inspiring others to keep working towards the seemingly unreachable goal - just as the spirits of JFK and RFK and MLK and Wellstone and the others our real-life evil bastards assassinate live on in those of us who choose to keep remembering them and keep working for the principles for which they stood and fought.

As a freshman reporter for my junior college newspaper in 1978, I met a witness of the John F. Kennedy assassination who saw the president’s head explode a few feet in front of him. He was convinced Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. That meeting propelled me to an investigation that has yet to stop.

As a senior for my college paper in 1981, I took a phone call from a representative of a D.C. CIA watchdog organization. He said Steve Gorman, one of my college’s political science professors, worked for the CIA and used some of his students for such research. I didn’t hang up on him. By then, I had read too many books, interviewed too many people, thought too much on the topic of government skullduggery and conspiracy to not follow through here.

I confronted Gorman, who denied doing any work for the CIA or using his students, as expected. But I sensed an underlying uneasiness – he was too casual, almost joking in his denial. Further research showed Gorman was a member of the Latin American Studies Association, which has ties to the CIA. He also had lived in and researched four Latin American countries – Peru, Ecuador, British Honduras and Mexico - in which the CIA did its dirty work.

Still, I didn’t think I had enough for a story then. I pretty much forgot about it until a couple of years later when I read a short story on Gorman’s weird death.

He had been run over by a train in the middle of nowhere early one morning.

A bomb exploded in my mind, and they have yet to stop exploding.

So what does the above have to do with Schoedinger’s lawsuit against Bush? There is a method to my madness here. If you read through Schoedinger’s briefs on the surface without knowing much about how "intelligence" and other government agencies really work, you might laugh at her allegations that Bush was behind a campaign to harass her into committing suicide to cover up the sexual assaults he allegedly committed. But if you knew the level of harassment that Bush and his minions committed against, say, J.H. Hatfield, author of an explosive bio on Bush who supposedly committed suicide in 2001 shortly after the book’s publication, you might not laugh so loudly.

If I was to coldly do a just-the-facts news story on this lawsuit and not give you some personal anecdotes like the strange Gorman death that leads me to believe there might be more to this than meets the eye, you might not give this story much thought. You might just think, man, there are a lot of wackos out there. So I’m breaking some of the rules I learned back in j-school and inserting my personal experiences and observations here. I’ve never enjoyed writing those impersonal articles, anyways. This is more my style.

In her court petition, Schoedinger said police in Sugar Land, another Houston suburb where she said some assailants linked to Bush attempted to unsuccessfully abduct her from her car shortly before the 2000 election, refused to take a report or do anything about that incident. She filed a lawsuit against the Sugar Land department and said that in preparing its defense, Sugar Land police found out that she dated Bush as a minor. I didn’t get a chance to ask Schoedinger about that tie and didn’t meet her in person, but her driver’s license lists her as being 5-foot-8 and weighing 125 pounds, for what that’s worth.

The Fort Bend Star story quoted a Sugar Land police captain saying his department had no record of any complaints by Schoedinger. All he had to do was what I did – go to the Fort Bend County Internet site and do a simple search on Schoedinger’s name in the area of civil court records. I found the lawsuit Schoedinger filed in December 2000 against Sugar Land police, and it even had numerous responses by the department’s attorneys in that case.

So someone in that department knew about Schoedinger.

Somebody is lying.

And something strange is going on here.

When I started asking Schoedinger about certain details on the case, such as alleged surveillance at her home and if she was still legally representing herself, she politely ended our conversation. "I need to see what has been written," Schoedinger said. "I feel like it’s best for me to end our conversation."

Obviously, she had learned to be careful about what she said and to whom she said it. I could understand her being leery about talking about her situation with a stranger over the phone.

But some media members besides me and the Fort Bend Star need to attempt to talk to Schoedinger and investigate this situation. Hello, Houston Chronicle? Hello, 60 Minutes? Hello, 20/20? Hello, Washington Post? Hell, hello, Geraldo Rivera and Jerry Springer?

Do your jobs. Please.

Remember how much you played up Monica Lewinsky’s blow jobs and Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton in the 1990s, while ignoring or downplaying extramarital activities by the hypocritical Republicans who served on Clinton’s impeachment committee like Henry Hyde and Bob Barr? Remember how much you covered Gennifer Flowers’ affair allegations – which did not even include a lawsuit – against Clinton, while ignoring or downplaying affair allegations against more prominent Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Bush Jr.? (The GWB one was by a 39-year-old Texas woman, Tammy Phillips, a former stripper who was quoted in the National Enquirer in 2000 saying she had an affair with Bush that had ended in 1999. I have yet to track her down. There are just too many Republican mistresses and not enough hours in the day.)

Remember how much you covered Democrat Gary Condit and Chandra Levy, while ignoring or downplaying the allegations of extramarital affairs committed by Republicans Jeb Bush and Joe Scarborough, who even resigned from Congress and was rewarded with his own MSNBC show? Remember how you reporters staked out Democrat Gary Hart to catch him with a woman who was not his wife and end his presidential ambitions, and downplayed or ignored allegations of affairs committed by Republicans Reagan, Bush Sr. and others?

Quick now, has anyone heard of Randy Ankeney? He was a rising star in Colorado Republican circles until he was arrested in 2001 and accused of trying to have sex with a 13-year-old girl he met through the Internet. Police said he even warned the girl he’d ruin her life if she told anyone. Does that sound familiar? That’s how many of these Republicans keep their affairs quiet – they threaten a bunch of people. Another 17-year-old girl said Ankeney sexually assaulted her while working on a political campaign. Last year, he pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault of a child.

What about Republican hypocrite John Fund, who was moved to the Wall Street Journal’s Internet magazine after reports came out that he impregnated the daughter of an old girlfriend and then the supposed anti-abortion-supporter looked the other way when she aborted his child? Does Republican Marty Glickman, one of those rabid dog conservative talk radio commentators in Florida who was arrested in 2001 and charged with giving drugs and money to underage girls in exchange for sex, ring a bell?

How about Parker J. Bena, a Virginia Republican activist who proudly cast one of his state’s electoral vote for Bush in 2000, being indicted for possessing child pornography in 2001? Anyone hear of Kevin T. Coan, a Republican director of the St. Louis Election

Board who was charged with trying to solicit sex from a 14-year-old girl in cyberspace? Or Virginia Republican activist Richard Delgaudio who was sentenced to two years probation in 2003 after pleading guilty to a child pornography charge?

Then there is Philip Giordano, the former Republican mayor of Waterbury, Conn., who was recently sentenced to 37 years in prison for soliciting sex with underaged girls and violating their civil rights. It’s more likely you’ve heard of him since this case has received ample media coverage unlike most of the other sex stories involving Republicans. Another case that got some attention was Beverly Russell, a leader in the Republican-based Christian Coalition and Pat Robertson’s former presidential campaign who allegedly molested children-drowner Susan Smith.

Supposedly, it is relatively common among Religious Right nuts to read sexual material under the guise of knowing what’s in it so they can keep it from their children. Yeah, right, the fucking hypocrites. Many Religious Rightists also believe a man can have sex with his wife anytime he pleases, whether she wants to or not. Some would call that rape, but I’m sure these nuts have another word for it.

What about Bill Thomas, Bob Livingston, Dick Armey, Dan Burton, Charles Canady, J.C. Watts, Helen Chenoweth, Sue Myrick, Ken Calvert, John Peterson, Dan Crane, Donald Lukens, Jim Gilmore, Scott McInnis and Arlan Stangeland – all Republican politicians accused of various sexual misdeeds? Most of these hypocrites attacked Clinton for his affairs and expressed outrage when people put a microscope on their private sexual lives.

For details on their cases, as well as some on various Democrats – I’m not by any means excusing Democrats, just pointing out the hypocrisy of many Republicans and mistaken belief of many people that mostly Democratic politicians commit affairs - go to Comedy on Tap’s excellent compilation at http://www.comedyontap.com/features/congress.html. Connie Cook Smith has also detailed other such Republicans, such as Katrina Leung, a California Republican fund-raiser who sold secrets to the Chinese while working as an FBI informant and reportedly had extramarital affairs with two FBI agents, on her blog at http://www.conniescomments.blogspot.com.

I’m sure if you asked the average person who was most likely to have had an affair, (a] Democrat Gary Condit, or (b] Republican Sue Myrick, Condit would be the overwhelming choice. But the correct choice is [c] all of the above.

So c’mon, mainstream media. At least make an effort to balance the scales.

Here’s your chance. I’ll even help you on finding Schoedinger’s contact information. Go to http://ccweb.co.fort-bend.tx.us/imgcache/CCCIVIL217038-1-7.p…. Read all the way to the last page. Call her. Call Bush. Call the Sugar Land police. Call the FBI. Mention Schoedinger’s name and make them squirm some.

For the record, I contacted Bush’s media office and have yet to hear back. That’s fine. I don’t really want to speak to those lying bastards, anymore than they want to speak to me. I just want them out of the White House.

Media members, do your god-damn jobs, like you did when Clinton was legitimately in the White House.

Or are you too damn intimidated, too afraid of you and your family being harassed by CIA-Mafia spooks? [That’s a legitimate concern. Remember that classic line in War’s song, "Why Can’t We Be Friends?" I know you’re working for the CIA – They wouldn’t have you in the Mafia. A lot of truth there.] Too afraid of losing your jobs and prestige and White House dinner invitations when Bush and Co. dry up your political sources? Too afraid of losing your jobs and prestige when the big Bush-supporting bosses upstairs come down hard on your ass for covering another Bush scandal? Or do you just not want to deal with all those hateful phone calls, emails and letters by conservatives who blindly believe Bush and Co. are the second coming of Christ, when they are really more like the anti-Christ?

Oh I know a few of you do your jobs. More of you are following the Iraqi war lies trail. That’s good. But get on these Republican sex scandals, as well. Show the American people that Republicans commit just about as many dirty sexual deeds as Democrats. Help get these Republican Religious Right hypocrites who chirp about morals, honor and dignity while their actions speak otherwise off their god-damn high horses.

Schoedinger’s allegations, which include possible assaults against Schoedinger’s husband while they were drugged and possibly losing a child Bush might have fathered, may turn out to be figments of an overactive imagination or exaggerated claims. But they need to be investigated and aired with the same zeal as the allegations against Clinton when he was in the White House. That is only fair.

Sure, I hope this story helps lead to Bush’s defeat in 2004. I’d like to see anyone who committed a crime be brought to justice, but I’d also like to see this case hurt Bush. I’m open about my motives, unlike many conservatives who said they supported prying into Clinton’s private life because it was a matter of "justice." Those were civil legal actions brought on by partisan Republican conservatives. Gimme a fucking break.

I want to see Bush and Cheney fall because, if not, they will continue their idiotic, selfish plans to use the American military to dominate the world. It’s weird that many Americans can stomach a president lying about military matters and saying stupid things like "Bring ‘em on," although they end up causing more deaths, pain and suffering as the Iraqi quagmire is doing. But lying about having an extramarital affair? That’s another matter.

Anyways, the Schoedinger case is about more than a private alleged affair – it’s about alleged crimes, cover-ups and harassment campaigns. Some say her story is typical of the treatment inflicted on CIA mind-controlled slaves, of which there are more than most people realize. Remember that Bush is a member of the secret order of Skull and Bones, an exclusive Yale-based club for the elite that practices weird, Satanic-like, sexual initiations and ceremonies. Such strange sexual ceremonies are used as blackmail to guarantee Skull and Boners do what the power elite wants (there are even rumors that Bush has had sexual relations with a male Skull and Boner), just as some elitists are alleged to commit unspeakable sexual trauma on their kids to assure obedience. Several books document these practices, including TranceFormation of America by Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips http://www.trance-formation.org.

The bottom line is that Schoedinger’s lawsuit deserves much more investigation than it’s received in the last few months. Maybe we need a liberal legal firm to represent Schoedinger, like the conservative Rutherford Institute supported Paula Jones. Hello, ACLU? Hello, NAACP? Schoedinger is also alleging race-based discrimination. Maybe then, it will get some national coverage.

If you can send a link to this story or this entire essay to your local or national media outlet or any other place you think might be interested in it, by all means, do it. The universe, the cosmic forces of good, will thank you. Yes, I operate from a spiritual perspective, as well as political. You have to when you do this kind of work. Even the most evil bastards have the potential to recognize somewhere inside them that I might, just might, be right about this metaphysical, reap-what-you-sow, karmic philosophy, and they might face dire consequences in their afterlives if they continue on their present courses. [Yes, I believe in God, just not the way most in organized religion do.]

Do I really think this Schoedinger case will help defeat Bush in 2004? With the ability to fix elections through electronic voting machines that leave no paper trails and other means, and the inability of many Americans to get news from more sources than TV, maybe not.

But like Alex English’s character said in Amazing Grace and Chuck, wouldn’t it be nice?



Jackson Thoreau, a contributing writer for Liberal Slant, is co-author of "We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House". The 110,000-word electronic book can be downloaded at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html or at http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html Thoreau also co-authored a book on Dallas history from the perspective of African-Americans, civil rights advocates, and others.
His articles can also be found at: www.americaheldhostile.com
Thoreau can be emailed at: [e-mail] or [e-mail]

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Who would make a better president Bush or a box of Tic-Tacs?
An objective analysis.

...................................................VS.......................

http://maddox.xmission.com/tictacs.html

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Key West, FL (IWR Satire) - Saddam Hussein (left) finished second in the 2003 `Papa` Hemingway Look-Alike Contest held during Key West`s annual Hemingway Days festival.

"We called the local FBI Office, but they were too busy following up on tips about people reading subversive literature at Starbucks," said one of the contestant judges, Phillip T. Bucket.

Key West, FL (IWR Satire) - Saddam Hussein (left) finished second in the 2003 `Papa` Hemingway Look-Alike Contest held during Key West`s annual Hemingway Days festival.

"We called the local FBI Office, but they were too busy following up on tips about people reading subversive literature at Starbucks," said one of the contestant judges, Phillip T. Bucket.

http://www.internetweekly.org/iwr/cartoons/cartoon_saddam_sa…

GOP Most Wanted Cards List

http://www.internetweekly.org/iwr/cartoons/cartoon_gop_playi…

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Avoiding Plato`s Republic in America: Anarchy is the only hope

By John Stanton
Online Journal Contributing Writer

July 21, 2003—The philosopher Plato was right when he opined that democracy ultimately leads to anarchy and then tyranny. But he was wrong to dismiss anarchy which, arguably, is the happy medium between failed democracy and treacherous tyranny.

The USA has begun its flirtation with anarchy. But anarchy, like democracy, is anathema to the ruling classes and can`t be tolerated for any length of time. As a result, the ruling classes will create a crisis and will attempt to implement a society as described in Plato`s Republic—an alternative to representative government. The USA will transition from anarchy to a Platonic tyranny sometime during the second term (2004–2008) of George Bush II.

That is, unless anarchy takes hold.

Anarchy would be a positive development for the USA and the world. In time it would erode the power of the public and private national institutions that are the oppressive tools of control for the wealthy and those who exercise political and military power. But the opponents of change have read their Plato, too. And they know that Plato`s answer to democracy, anarchy and tyranny was to design a Republic that would solidify the position of the ruling classes. Plato`s Republic provides for a system which, among other things, depends on proper breeding and training of the ruling and ruled classes, placating the military leaders, and authoritarian and paternal control of the masses.

In Plato`s Republic, leaders commune with the gods and find meaning in nature`s movements that are invisible to the vast backwash of humanity. When the rulers speak, the ruled listen and obey without hesitation. All know their place in Plato`s society.

The USA is ripe for such a system and those who rule know it. Americans believe what they are told to believe. For example, fully 80 percent of the Americans believed George Bush II when he stated that pre-invasion Iraq had scores of unmanned aerial vehicles armed with biological weapons ready to rain death on the continental USA, and that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks in New York City and Arlington, Virginia on September 11, 2001. Thomas Jefferson`s quaint statement about the American public being "intelligent" was wildly off the mark. Of course, then again, he was not referring to the public but to his well-to-do peers.

Plato had it right for he knew that the endgame of all governing and profit/war-making classes has always been to entertain each other on the domestic and foreign stage. He also knew that those who rule need the masses as they serve as both pawns and audience for the powerful. But like most elites, Plato feared anarchy and democracy as too untidy.

A Few Meals Away from Barbarism

How far have we come since Plato`s time? Oh, we can splice a few genes, build faster computers and automobiles, and destroy with precision. But the human race is as barbaric as ever, led in 2003 by the most "enlightened" nation on earth, the USA, which operates a death camp at a military base in Cuba and concentration camps in Iraq. Bloodthirsty competition for goods and resources still drive nations into the madness of war. Powerful nations bribe weak nations for favors. Mercenary armies span the globe and offer services. Corporations employ slave labor. The poor are still poor. Income disparity has reached record levels. Women and minorities must constantly remain vigilant as their rights are always at risk. Ethnic conflicts plague the world. The appeal of authoritarianism, the "good tyrant" as Plato termed it, in this environment remains. After all, how can the common person know what`s good for him/her?

Most of humanity is just a few meals and a paycheck away from the despair of begging the employer, the bank, the credit card company, the government for help. In short, they are at the mercy of powerful interests. And, alas, that is the trick that every ruling class throughout time has mastered. It is easy. Keep the masses on edge. Apply the hot poker of foreign and domestic threats to their base drives of greed, hunger, domination, control, competition and accumulation. It is great sport and makes for wonderful theater. Folks like Alan Greenspan, George Bush, Don Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks, Tom Daschle, and Dick Gephardt must feel the power of Plato`s Republic. Which of them haven`t thought themselves the equal of Plato or one of his select few? They revel in the reality that they have the power of life and death in their words. And in this they are, indeed, Gods. That view allows, for example, Alan Greenspan to opine that 10 million unemployed Americans don`t matter in the greater scheme of the global economy.

Imagine a system that eroded the power of the institutions through which these people ruthlessly rule. Ruling classes fear anarchy.

Good Riddance Representative Democracy

Representative democracy was always an iffy proposition and, contrary to popular belief, was never really about broad based representation. For example, James Mill believed that active participation by the majority of the people in a democracy had little value. He suggested that only males over 40 years of age be allowed to vote, figuring that the expense, and theatrics, of voting was too expensive. He would have shaken his head at US democracy. It costs an average of $1 million (US) to run for a House of Representatives seat. It is roughly $5 million to run for and keep a Senate seat. Include the perks these elected folks get and the US Congress is little more than a $1 billion dollar business enterprise. Toss in a couple of hundred million for the US presidency and, for someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft, the allure of knowing that, for a mere $2 billion dollars, the US Congress and the White House could be purchased outright. And, in fact, that`s just what corporations and the wealthy do. And these days, they boast outright about which representative or piece of legislation they own.

From 12 zip codes in the United States, according to opensecrets.org comes almost 80 percent of the funding for the Republican and Democratic frontrunners for president. Only 30 to 40 percent of Americans who are registered to vote actually schlep to the polling place. And their reward? An "I Voted" sticker sponsored, appropriately enough, by a corporation. Little wonder fewer and fewer Americans bother to vote.

And what does a vote get an American these days? Schizophrenic public policy that one is not expected to challenge. Trust in us, say the Platonic Rulers of 2003. Tomorrow it is regime change in "evil" Iran. But it is just fine for General Electric and Halliburton do business in Iran through offshore companies. Today, US troops will be sent to "assist" Liberia (a country with lots of registered oil tankers and making claims to the Gulf of Guinea`s oil reserves). But why not US troops for Burundi? Why not go into Zimbabwe and clean up the mess there? Why not a Marshall Plan for Africa? One month, it is a new US first strike nuclear weapons doctrine and new live-fire nuclear testing plans at the Nevada Test site. The next month the Bush administration lectures the world about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. Today the US economy is recovering. But manufacturing data shows it isn`t. But Americans are chided for not spending enough and, in so doing, chastised for not fulfilling their patriotic/economic duty. Last month, US troops in Iraq were coming home. But this month their tour has been extended because the war "wasn`t planned right." Today, Bush and Congress are talking about job creation for millions of Americans. But tomorrow, Bush, Congress, defense contractors and the Pentagon oppose buy-American provisions in the Pentagon`s Defense budget, which would create millions of jobs for Americans. And, oh yes, the US Congress voted to eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans. And did you know about "Mission Accomplished" in Afghanistan and Iraq?

As reported by the Guardian, Americans are more inclined in 2003 to believe rap stars than US politicians or business and military leaders. They also know that lies and damn lies are endemic to their society and that there are few consequences for the most wretched systemic failures. Politicians, military personnel, corporate executives are beyond reproach for negligence leading to some of the most nefarious events in US history. Pension theft, election fraud, corporate corruption, and leading the nation to war under false pretenses are not punishable offenses.

Godwin`s Anarchy

Representative democracy in America has run its course. The only palatable option remaining is anarchy. In 1793, William Godwin`s work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, set forth a workable system of anarchy. This was not the stuff of violence that is typically associated with anarchy, but, instead, the slow disintegration of governing political and economic institutions and the gradual erosion of the policies of competition, dominance and accumulation. Godwin recognized that the ruling classes and their institutions stand as the greatest barrier to freedom. Government was nothing more than a tool of the wealthy and well-connected. Such is the state of affairs in the USA.

"Government, under whatever point of view we examine this topic, is unfortunately pregnant with motives to censure and complaint. Incessant change, everlasting innovation, seems to be dictated by the true interests of man kind. But government is the perpetual enemy of change. What was admirably observed of a particular system of government is in a great degree true of all: They lay their hand on the spring there is in society, and put a stop to its motion. Their tendency is to perpetuate abuse. Whatever was once thought right and useful they under take to entail to the latest posterity. They reverse the genuine propensities of man, and, instead of suffering us to proceed, teach us to look backward for perfection. They prompt us to seek the public welfare, not in alteration and improvement, but in a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the human mind always to degenerate, and never to advance," Godwin wrote.

Godwin`s system of anarchy is all that stands in the way of the tyranny of Plato`s Republic.

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security matters. He and Wayne Madsen are the co-authors of "Americaﾒs Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II." He can be reached at [e-mail].

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/072103Stanton/072103…

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-…
NEWS ANALYSIS


Sons` Deaths a Turning Point in Campaign
U.S. assault is likely to weaken motivation and perhaps coordination of Iraqi resistance as well as change the subject in Washington.
By Robin Wright
Times Staff Writer

July 23, 2003

WASHINGTON — The deaths of Saddam Hussein`s powerful sons Tuesday is a badly needed boost for the Bush administration, a major strategic gain for U.S. forces battling Iraqi resistance and a boon for the fragile new governing council in Iraq.

The raid in the northern city of Mosul, perhaps the most dramatic event in Iraq since the toppling of Hussein`s statue in downtown Baghdad more than three months ago, signals a psychological turning point, according to U.S. officials and experts on Iraq, because the United States has proved that it can achieve key postwar goals.

The killing of Uday and Qusai Hussein in a six-hour siege might also be more important in the long term than capturing or killing the aging former Iraqi leader.

"As long as his sons lived, there was always the danger that the dynasty would try to make a comeback. Symbolically, it`s very, very important to have eliminated the sons," said Henri J. Barkey, an expert on Iraq and a former member of the State Department`s policy planning staff.

Three years ago, Hussein anointed as his political heir his second son, Qusai, who ran military and intelligence units for his father, according to Amatzia Baram, an expert on Iraq and a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

In a brief written statement, the White House said Hussein`s two sons would "no longer cast a shadow of hate on Iraq."

But officials and analysts differed over the role the brothers might have played in planning or coordinating attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Some said the brothers were spending too much time hiding to be involved, while others said the two remained active.

The attack is "clearly important politically. But it could be operationally too," deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters.

There is little evidence of centralized command in the daily guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces, many of which have occurred in the so-called Sunni triangle north of Baghdad.

Hadley said it is unlikely but not inconceivable that Hussein`s sons played a coordinating role.

But Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst now at the National Defense University in Washington, said, "This is the big break the U.S. needed.

"It doesn`t stop all the violence against us, but this could cut it significantly on the widely held assumption that Uday and Qusai were encouraging or running some of the groups that have been attacking us."

Even though the deaths of the second- and third-most-wanted figures from Hussein`s regime are unlikely to change the desire of many Iraqis for the United States to leave as soon as possible, it will help Iraqis focus on the future.

"This may not make Iraqis any fonder of us, but it does allow them to focus on progress in reconstructing the country politically and physically," Yaphe said.

The 22 men and three women on the new Iraqi governing council, which was established this month, were chosen to broadly represent Iraq`s major ethnic and religious communities as the country struggles to craft a post-Hussein era.

They will help form policy as Iraq embarks on a process that is expected to establish an interim administration, a constitutional convention, elections and a new government.

In Washington for consultations, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief U.S. administrator for Iraq, said the fact that Baghdad`s night sky was lighted by celebratory gunfire demonstrated that Iraqis were happy to be rid of an "odious regime."

Bremer said the successful strike was the culmination of growing cooperation between Iraqis and U.S. forces, which he expects to increase further.

"It`s quite possible that what we`ll find is more people who will be willing to come forward," he said.

He also predicted that "it won`t be long until Hussein is also captured or killed."

The removal of Hussein`s sons is welcome news at the White House.

Coming as the administration faces mounting questions over intelligence discrepancies and the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the operation may shift the focus in Washington as well.

The White House has been struggling to take back political ground lost during the debate about President Bush`s claim in his State of the Union address that the Iraqi regime had tried to acquire uranium from Africa to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.

"It sucks up all the air and reminds us once again of the great victory that we had over there," Yaphe said.

Even though Hussein and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden remain at large, the United States no longer appears so stymied by elusive enemies.

Republicans were euphoric about the military operation.

"Iraqis can celebrate the removal of yet another remnant of the Baathist regime that brutalized their long-suffering country. The frequent, dreadful discovery of mass graves containing the victims of Saddam and his family is a reminder of the justness of our cause that removed a horrible tyranny," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz).

But Democrats cautioned that the United States still had a long way to go.

"As important as today`s events are, we cannot ignore the fact that as long as Saddam Hussein is alive, or perceived to be alive, we have not won this war," said John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Experts cautioned that many of the big issues, notably the search for weapons of mass destruction, are still unresolved. Finding such weapons might have been easier if Hussein`s sons had been captured rather than killed. Uday Hussein is widely believed to have known a great deal about the regime`s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

Yet Barkey predicted that the demise of Hussein`s sons "definitely means the beginning of the end for Saddam as well."

"This will sap the morale of all those Baathists loyal to Saddam, as they will now see that the United States is doing its utmost to find him," he said. "And Saddam is much more difficult to hide than his sons."

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-911repo…
THE NATION


9/11 Report: No Evidence of Critical Mistakes
By Richard B. Schmitt and Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writers

July 23, 2003

WASHINGTON — A long-awaited congressional report looking into the events leading up to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, broadly criticizes the U.S. intelligence community for failing to anticipate the possibility of such an attack, but finds no specific evidence that officials ignored or missed warning signs that would have enabled them to foil the plot that killed about 3,000 people, congressional and law enforcement sources said Tuesday.

The 900-page report is to be released Thursday after months of haggling between congressional investigators and intelligence authorities over which portions of the hefty document should be declassified or remain top secret. A preliminary version detailing a summary of the concerns was published last winter.

The report is the product of months of hearings and testimony last year before a joint intelligence panel, which unearthed evidence that the FBI and CIA mishandled clues and warnings in the years and months preceding the attacks. The hearings gave impetus to the creation of a bipartisan federal commission being led by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean that is separately investigating the attacks. The commission is due to complete its work next year.

The congressional report provides new hues and shades to an already dim portrait of U.S. preparedness before the attacks.

Although the report`s general outlines have been previously known, the timing of its release and the light it is expected to shed on what Bush administration officials knew in advance of the attacks comes at a politically sensitive time — as the administration attempts to fend off criticism that it relied on faulty intelligence about Iraqi plans to develop weapons of mass destruction before going to war.

Some Democratic presidential contenders are already attempting to make hay from that. During a quick swing through Los Angeles on Monday night, Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, criticized the administration`s unwillingness to release the full body of the report.

"I am a very angry man tonight, being informed of what portions of the report are going to be withheld from the public," Graham told about 40 members of Democratic Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, a group of young Democrats gathered in a dimly lighted cabaret on Wilshire Boulevard.

"I start from the premise that in a democracy, the people should know as much as the government knows unless there is a very compelling case that the information threatens American security interests," Graham said. "I think a different standard has been applied to this report, and that is, `What is it that reduces the embarrassment to agencies that acted in an incompetent manner?` "

Still, the report takes the intelligence community to task for failing to share terrorism-related information they had independently gathered before Sept. 11, including a previously reported episode in which the CIA failed to pass along to the FBI and other agencies intelligence linking two of the hijackers living in the San Diego area to the Al Qaeda network and the 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen until a few weeks before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The men were among those who commandeered the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon.

The report asserts that intelligence forces failed to fully appreciate and anticipate the threat posed by Al Qaeda before the attacks and, according to one person familiar with the report, paints a "fairly startling" picture of how Al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed freely traveled to and from the United States in the years before the attacks.

It also provides tantalizing details about the two hijackers` relations with a San Diego man suspected of having ties to the Saudi government and an FBI informant who was also their landlord. The FBI has asserted that the informant had no way of knowing that the men might have been involved with terrorism, and that he subsequently passed a polygraph test.

Although the report apparently does not find clear evidence that the Saudis may have even indirectly bankrolled the hijackers, it raises more questions than it answers about the link and criticizes the FBI for not investigating more aggressively, people familiar with the report said. A 28-page section that includes criticism of the Saudi government and the level of its interest in Muslim extremism, moreover, has been heavily censored in the final version, these people said.

"This inquiry has uncovered no intelligence information in the possession of the intelligence community prior to the attacks of 9/11 that, if fully considered, would have provided specific advance warnings of the details of those attacks," the report found, according to a person who has read it.

But it continues: "The task of the inquiry was not, however, limited to a search for the legendary, and often absent, `smoking gun.` "

Some of its recommendations are already being implemented, including creation of a terrorism information center that will fuse all known intelligence into a central location and improvement in the FBI`s domestic intelligence-gathering capability.

Senior FBI officials say that they have received ample indications that the report will single the bureau out for much of its harshest criticism, saying agents failed to try to "connect the dots" and possibly uncover the 19 hijackers` activities in the U.S. before the attacks.

In the report, the FBI is sharply criticized for not aggressively investigating the activities of several Saudi men living in San Diego who spent time with the two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. Among those men is Omar al Bayoumi, who was suspected by some local Muslims of being an agent of the Saudi government.

The report, according to the FBI official, details how Al Bayoumi aided the two future hijackers, including helping them pay their security deposit and rent on a San Diego apartment. An unidentified FBI source, the report said, told agents that Al Bayoumi appeared to be an "intelligence officer" for Saudi Arabia or another Islamic country.

According to the FBI official, the report discloses that, on the same day he met Almihdhar and Alhazmi by chance at a Los Angeles restaurant, Al Bayoumi met with officials at the Saudi consulate. The report says that Al Bayoumi overheard the two men speaking Arabic in the restaurant, befriended them, and invited them to San Diego, another person familiar with the report said.

But the FBI official said congressional investigators were not able to determine the details of the consulate visit, including with whom Al Bayoumi met and what was discussed.

FBI officials have said they investigated Al Bayoumi and weren`t able to establish he had any terrorist leanings or posed a threat or was involved in the hijackings. For years, the FBI and CIA have been concerned about the Saudi government`s funding of radical Islamist causes, including some in the U.S.

"We don`t know that he`s an agent," said one FBI official, who confirmed that the report goes into great detail speculating on Al Bayoumi`s possible links to Saudi authorities and the two hijackers. "That is the assessment based on one individual`s feelings because of his contacts with him. But it`s not based on any substantive knowledge that he was working for or with the Saudis."

Another senior federal law enforcement official said the congressional report jumps to conclusions that cast an unfairly harsh light on the bureau`s counter-terrorism agents, particularly by questioning whether they failed to detect some as-yet unproven link connecting Al Bayoumi, the Saudi government and the hijacking plot.

"That`s a big stretch," said the senior federal law enforcement official. "The Saudis provide a lot of financial assistance to students and other visitors. It doesn`t imply complicity."

Nail al Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said the Saudi government fears that it will be made a scapegoat in the report because of its long-standing history of providing aid to any and all Saudis in the U.S. He said that Saudi officials did nothing to knowingly help anyone involved in terrorism, particularly the two hijackers, and that Al Bayoumi has never worked in any intelligence-gathering capacity for the Riyadh government.

"We`re not going to comment on something we haven`t seen, and it is unwise to speculate," Jubeir said of the congressional report. "Sadly, [almost] no one has actually seen the report but everyone has an opinion about it, and about things that may or may not be there. We have seen that in the past, that people run with things that are difficult to refute that in some cases turn out to be not true."

Al Bayoumi has "no connection" to the Saudi government, said Jubeir, who noted that Al Bayoumi was detained in the United Kingdom for a week after Sept. 11 at the request of the FBI and that its agents questioned him before letting him go.

"He was not an intelligence officer," Jubeir said. "He is not and was not an intelligence officer. But we have made it clear that if the FBI wants to question him [again] and any other Saudi Arabian citizen, they can come through us and we will make them available.

"People are jumping through hoops here trying to make connections where there is no connection," Jubeir said. Al Bayoumi, he added, "was a student in Los Angeles; and in Saudi culture, like other cultures, people congregate around other people from the cultures they know."

*
Times staff writer Matea Gold in Los Angeles contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-memo…
THE WORLD

White House Admits CIA Warned It Before Speech
An official takes responsibility for Iraq nuclear claim in Bush`s State of the Union address, saying he forgot about two memos.
By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

July 23, 2003

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration admitted for the first time Tuesday that the CIA warned senior White House officials in writing last fall that it had doubts about allegations that Iraq tried to procure uranium from Africa, a claim President Bush made in his State of the Union address three months later.

Deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters that he received two memos from the CIA in October that cast doubt on intelligence reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger to use in developing nuclear weapons. Hadley said Tuesday that as the White House drafted Bush`s State of the Union address in January, he did not remember reading either memo. But he said he should have, and he took the blame for the assertion`s inclusion in that speech.

"I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue," Hadley told reporters in an unusual, on-the-record briefing at the White House`s Roosevelt Room.

Both memos were also sent to chief speechwriter Michael Gerson and one was sent to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Hadley said.

He said he did not know whether Rice read it.

The White House had previously blamed the CIA for failing to raise objections to the language in the January speech.

Hadley said that in recent days, Gerson and the CIA had uncovered two classified CIA memos that cast doubt on the uranium claim.

He said he is certain he read both memos when they were sent in advance of a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati in October on Iraq.

The White House previously had acknowledged that, based on a verbal warning from CIA Director George J. Tenet, the claim had been removed from the Cincinnati speech.

But until Tuesday, Tenet had taken the blame for the inclusion of the assertion in Bush`s State of the Union speech as well.

"I am the senior-most official within the NSC staff directly responsible for the substantive review and clearance of presidential speeches," Hadley said Tuesday. "The president and national security advisor look to me to ensure that the substantive statements in those speeches are the ones in which the president can have confidence. And it is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility."

CIA officials declined to comment on Tuesday`s revelations.

Hadley said he had already met privately to discuss the failure with Bush but declined to say whether he offered his resignation.

White House communications director Dan Bartlett insisted that Hadley had the president`s "complete confidence" and would remain on the job.

The president "accepts the explanation of his NSC staff, as well as the director of intelligence," Bartlett said. "He is obviously not pleased when the high standards he expects to be met have not, but he has the highest level of confidence in the national security team as well as the director of intelligence."

The White House, stung by the recent revelation that one of Bush`s arguments for launching a war against Iraq was based on questionable intelligence, has been conducting an internal inquiry into why the dubious claim made it into the State of the Union speech.

Hadley`s acceptance of the blame in effect protects Rice, his boss and one of Bush`s closest confidants, from direct responsibility for the error.

Rice has previously insisted that no high-ranking White House officials were aware of CIA doubts about the intelligence.

"No one knew at the time, in our circles — maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery," Rice said June 8 in an interview on "Meet the Press."

Hadley said the first of the two CIA memos was found Friday by Gerson, who was also listed as an addressee. In the memo, the CIA commented on an early draft of the Cincinnati speech and asked that the African uranium reference be removed because the agency had doubts about aspects of the claim: the amount of uranium Iraq allegedly sought.

The second CIA memo, sent to the White House situation room, said the evidence for the claim — drawn from a British intelligence dossier — was weak. The situation room distributed the memo to Rice and Hadley.

Hadley said, however, that in neither memo did the CIA cast doubt on the overall assessment that Iraq was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

Hadley said that strictly speaking, the president`s assertion — 16 words in his State of the Union address — remains factually accurate because it was attributed to British intelligence officials, who stand by the claim. And he insisted that the purported uranium purchase was only a small part of an "overwhelming" case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.

"The real failing is that we`ve had a national discussion on 16 words, and it`s taken away from the fact that the intelligence case supporting concerns about [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq was overwhelming," Had- ley said.

In the end, he said, there were two breakdowns that led to the inclusion of the uranium claim in the State of the Union address: He and other White House staff members failed to remember the October memos during the drafting of the speech, and the CIA failed to bring up the issue again.

"There are a number of people who could have raised a hand, and a hand didn`t get raised," Hadley said.

Bartlett and Hadley denied suggestions that White House officials may have discounted the CIA memos because the documents undercut an argument for attacking Iraq. They also denied that administration officials may have put so much pressure on CIA officials to back up administration claims that the agency was cowed into submission.

Bartlett said that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the administration was being accused of doing the opposite — of failing to "connect the dots" in intelligence reports on the possible threat posed by Osama bin Laden`s Al Qaeda network.

"Now it`s the flip side, and I don`t think that`s fair," Bartlett said. "I think there`s a relationship and a confidence level between the White House and the director of the CIA that if he felt there was pressure coming from the White House on intelligence matters, that he would pick up the phone and call."

The controversy has damaged the White House at a time when the occupation of Iraq has been plagued by problems. Even as news that Hussein sons Uday and Qusai had been killed in northern Iraq, Democratic presidential hopefuls seized on the new White House admission.

Campaigning in Portsmouth, N.H., former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean called for the resignation of those White House officials responsible for failing to properly vet the uranium claim.

"It remains to be seen whether the president himself was misled, whether those around him intentionally kept the information from him, or whether the president knowingly misled the American people," Dean said. "I sincerely hope that the latter is not the case."

Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry accused the administration of continuing to "pass the buck."

"This is a familiar story from the Bush White House. It`s more bureaucratic finger-pointing, more failures of leadership and more politics as usual."

*

Times staff writers Greg Miller and Mark Z. Barabak contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-unir…
THE WORLD


Delegation From U.S.-Backed Iraqi Council Welcomed at U.N.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

July 23, 2003

UNITED NATIONS — Top U.N. officials and Security Council members welcomed delegates of the U.S.-backed interim governing council on Tuesday as a first step toward Iraqis reclaiming control of their country, and urged the U.S. to end its military occupation as soon as possible.

In the first U.N. assessment of Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion, special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello told the Security Council how the U.N. could assist the ruling administration in Iraq, which is struggling to secure order and restore public services while fending off guerrilla attacks. But he emphasized that the U.N. cannot replace the Coalition Provisional Authority or the rightful role of the Iraqis in shaping their future.

"There will need to be a clear timetable, laid out as soon as possible, for the earliest possible restoration of sovereignty," De Mello said. "Iraqis need to know that the current state of affairs will come to an end soon. They need to know that stability will return and that the occupation will end." Underpinning the session — but hardly mentioned — was the debate over whether the U.S. needs a new resolution to explicitly authorize other countries to contribute troops and money to Iraq`s reconstruction.

After several nations have refused to help the coalition stabilize Iraq without a more specific U.N. mandate, Washington has been talking quietly with France, Russia and Germany about what it would take to secure their backing. The U.S. hoped the presence of the three members of Iraq`s governing council at Tuesday`s session would reassure other nations that the coalition is quickly transferring power to Iraqi hands, and that the more help the Iraqis receive, the quicker the occupying forces can leave the country.

U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte appealed again on Tuesday to Security Council members to join the coalition in "establishing the conditions for security, which will allow prosperity and democracy to flourish." Despite increasing pressure from some members of Congress to internationalize Iraq`s reconstruction, even if it means returning humbly to the U.N., American diplomats insist that the existing Resolution 1483 recognizing the U.S.-led forces as an occupying power provides enough authority for other countries` assistance.

"We want to hear from other countries what more they would need to start helping the people of Iraq," said a U.S. diplomat. "If 1483 allowed the U.S. to go in and occupy Iraq, why doesn`t it allow the French to go in and help?" But German and French diplomats say no money or troops will be sent until the U.S. hands over more power to the U.N. and Iraqis. German Ambassador Gunter Pleuger called again on Tuesday for a separate multilateral fund for donors who didn`t want their money to be spent by the coalition.

In the crisis, others see opportunity. While the U.N. has been largely sidelined to coordinating humanitarian relief after the U.S.-led invasion, the gradual recognition by the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, that the occupation is more costly and complicated than it expected may provide an opening for the U.N. to reassert itself, U.N. officials say.

The U.N. is already working to deliver food and medicine throughout Iraq. The next steps for the country are writing a constitution, preparing for eventual elections, setting up war crimes tribunals and training police to establish law and order — all elements the U.N. says it can help with, De Mello told The Times.

"I think as they proceed, as they realize the magnitude of the task, they also realize that the U.N. is there in a supporting role, in a complementary role," he said. "We are not there to compete. We are there to achieve the same goals that the CPA has in mind, which is full sovereignty for the people of Iraq as soon as possible."

Until the CPA hands power over to an elected Iraqi government — a process estimated to take one to two years — the 25-member governing council will have a key role in the transition. The group can appoint interim diplomats and ministers, approve budgets and propose policies, but authorities can veto any of its decisions.

The three members of the U.S.-backed interim group making its diplomatic debut before the Security Council on Tuesday were: Adnan Pachachi, a widely respected former foreign minister who had been in exile for three decades; Akila Hashimi, Iraq`s longtime liaison to the United Nations and one of three women on the council; and Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial head of an exile organization and the Pentagon`s favored candidate to lead the country.

While Syria said that recognizing the group would only delay the creation of a legitimate Iraqi government, the rest of the 15-nation Security Council — as well as Secretary-General Kofi Annan — offered support for the temporary body. The leader of the trio, 80-year-old Pachachi, told the council that the Iraqi body`s "primary goal is to shorten the duration of the interim administration" and to create a new constitution and elected government in Iraq.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-sons23j…
EDITORIAL

Death and Hope in Iraq
U.S. forces eliminate Saddam Hussein`s two most likely successors: sons Uday and Qusai.

July 23, 2003

American troops have struck a major blow to those hoping for the return of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his fanatical entourage. The killing of Hussein`s two sons in a firefight Tuesday also should boost hopes for the beleaguered American occupation in Iraq.

Two weeks ago, L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, called Saddam and sons Uday and Qusai "among the most evil men the world has known," and their record of torture and murder attests to that description.

Bremer`s announcement of a $15-million reward for information leading to the capture of each of the two sons demonstrated their importance. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said troops attacked a house in Mosul, in northern Iraq, after getting a tip that the sons were hiding there. That underscores the value of good intelligence and the need for Iraqi cooperation.

The deaths of Saddam`s sons could lessen the daily attacks on U.S. troops as Iraqis see further evidence that the old regime is gone for good. Saddam`s capture or death would be the most visible evidence of that; still, more than 30 of the 55 Iraqis most wanted by U.S. forces have been captured or killed.

Occupation forces blame most of the continuing guerrilla attacks on former Iraqi soldiers and Baath Party leaders loyal to Saddam and his sons, who played major roles in the feared security services. Testimony from Iraqi defectors portrayed Uday as a psychopath; he was so volatile that Saddam reportedly removed Uday`s designation as heir apparent and shifted his favor to Qusai, every bit as dangerous but lower key. It will be important for the Bush administration not to gloat over these deaths. Opponents of the war will shed no tears for the duo. But for many nations, the evil done by Saddam and his sons did not justify the preemptive U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even Iraqis happy to have Uday and Qusai gone may be unhappy that it was the American invaders who killed them.

But if the sons` absence diminishes attacks not just on Americans but also on utility installations, the restoration of lights and water will improve life in Baghdad and elsewhere and reduce the hostility toward U.S. soldiers. The widespread postwar looting surprised occupation forces and has made life more difficult for many Iraqis than it was under Hussein. Threats against "collaborators" also have scared many Iraqis from cooperating with Americans. Those fears should now diminish, but occupation forces still need to increase security and employment for Iraqis.

Osama bin Laden continues to tape exhortations to his followers, and Saddam Hussein has taped his own rallying cries against the infidels. Mullah Mohammed Omar remains free in Afghanistan. U.S. forces can derive satisfaction in hunting down at least two of the most wanted, even as they hunt the others.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Ich bin ein wenig misstrauisch, denn seit gestern abend wird immer wieder behauptet, es wäre eine DNA-Analyse gemacht worden, die Agenturen berichteten davon, nur hat der Presseofficier immer wieder erklärt, die DNA-Analyse würde gemacht, aber er habe wohl keine Ergebnisse. Es gab auch Berichte über Feuer, denn warum sonst die Zähne usw.zur Indentifizierung. Haben sie kein DNA von den beiden Söhnen und wenn nicht und die Leichen verbrannt sind, wie wollen sie diese zweifelsfrei identifizieren. Die Reutersmeldung über die PK von Gen.Sanchez:
In Baghdad, the top U.S. commander, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said positive identification had been established through dental records and other means and that the United States would provide proof to the Iraqi people that Saddam`s sons were dead.[...]
Sanchez said Uday and Qusay were holed up on the fortified second floor of the villa with two others, who U.S. officials say were a bodyguard and a teenage grandson of Saddam.
Armed with AK-47 assault rifles, they wounded four soldiers trying to detain them and held out for hours against a devastating array of U.S. weaponry. Sanchez said 200 soldiers pounded the house using grenades, rocket-firing Kiowa attack helicopters, heavy machineguns and anti-tank missiles.

He said 10 anti-tank missiles were fired at the villa. A-10 Warthog tankbuster ground-attack planes, Apache helicopters and even a psy-ops team were on standby to help if needed.

Sanchez said the three adults inside were probably killed by the missile strikes, leaving only the teenager, who was killed when he fired at troops who burst in. It may have been Qusay`s 14-year-old son Mustapha, U.S. officials said.
Ich möchte nicht wissen, was nach dieser Behandlung von den Körper übriggeblieben ist. Und wenn die USA den Tod nicht einwandfrei beweist werden die Beiden, wie ihr Vater schnell zu Wiedergängern, und dadurch noch viel gefährlicher, als als Lebende.




Dennis Rahkonen: `Gunfight at the Mosul Corral`
Posted on Wednesday, July 23 @ 10:21:10 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Dennis Rahkonen

It may be entirely true that Saddam Hussein`s two sons were killed by U.S. special operations forces in a raid in Northern Iraq.

Or, it could all be a grand ruse intended to offset the public-opinion damage inflicted on George Bush by the total collapse of his WMD claims.

Lies and disinformation, after all, are the Bushies` nefarious trademark. No deceit is beyond them, including planting spurious weapons and then smirkingly saying "we told you so."

This development comes hard on the heels of Tony Blair and Paul Wolfowitz both suggesting that WMD didn`t really matter since the Iraqi regime was surpassingly horrific and ostensibly deserving of violent overthrow, the sooner the better. Notice how the toady media are playing along with this abrupt rationale shift. CNN and MSNBC are virtually dueling in their news accounts to see which network can best portray Saddam`s boys as nothing short of Satan`s spawn. (I don`t watch Fox anymore, but I can imagine what a severe slant Murdoch`s minions are putting on this.)



Forget the very definite and precise WMD assertions by Rumsfeld, Cheney and others, delivered with such ominous alarm.

"Aw shucks, maybe the whole Western world wasn`t gonna get nuked, gassed or poisoned by Saddam, any second, after all. But, by God, Iraq was ruled by devils. Thank God our Christian soldiers have now riddled two of them with bullets!"

If the dead men are in fact Uday and Qusay Hussein, the Bush bunch is presented with a fresh dilemma.

A chief administration propaganda aspect has been that the Iraqi freedom fight against Washington`s objectively imperialist assault is nothing more than a last-ditch effort by Baath Party diehards. That resistance, we were told, would evaporate if either Saddam or his sons could be captured or killed.

Following that reasoning, the escalating guerrilla war that`s taken so many U.S. lives in recent weeks should now dissolve into a belated show of flowers and kisses from a grateful Iraqi populace. Actually, be prepared to expect some variation of the orchestrated sham that accompanied the pulling down of Saddam`s statue outside Baghdad`s Palestine hotel a few months back.

But -- since the undeniable reality of the Iraqi situation is that neo- colonially minded Yankee infidels are trying to take control of the Islamic cradle of civilization for multi-national corporate profiteering -- don`t fall for the gullibility manipulation that all of this is surely aimed at.

We`re still the unprovoked aggressor/dominating conqueror that shamefully wants to thwart authentic Iraqi sovereignty and self-determination to make big bucks for Big Business...the will, wishes and well-being of common Iraqis be damned.

In truth, Saddam and his sons are immaterial.

We`re on the wrong side in a bad war that will bloodily continue until majority opinion in the United States clearly appreciates that reality, and forces a total withdrawal.

Dubya will surely do some immediate gloating, but you can safely bet that Iraq will be his eventual undoing.

Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, WI, has been writing progressive commentary and verse for various outlets since the `60s. He can be reached at [e-mail]

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Is Saddam winning the war?

by Jack Lessenberry
7/23/2003

We are targets of guerrillas.

Forget the foreplay. Here’s the bottom line: How long will the American people put up with having one or two of our soldiers shot in the back in Iraq every day?

That’s what the White House is thinking about. You better believe that’s what the president’s re-election campaign is worrying about. And deep within some cave or bunker or apartment complex, that’s what Saddam Hussein is thinking about too.

Their futures — and perhaps ours — depend on the answer.

Three months ago, George W. Bush looked to most people like George S. Patton. He was billed as a great liberator and a military genius. The Iraqi army had melted away. Casualties had been light; we had occupied Baghdad without much of a fight, and at the beginning of May, the president declared major combat operations over.

Unfortunately, then the war began.

Now, it looks like old Saddam may have been a lot smarter than we imagined. When we started this war, for some reason we expected a conventional series of battles, with fighting in the streets of Baghdad. Had that happened, the “war” would have lasted longer. Lots more people, ours and (mostly) theirs, would have been killed.

But we would have won. Not only do we have lots more fancy military hardware, our military is excellent at winning battles where both sides play by our rules.

What we aren’t very good at is winning guerrilla wars against a foreign enemy on their own territory. We seem also to be fairly slow learners. Thirty years ago, when we were negotiating the Paris peace accords, billed as giving us “peace with honor” in ending the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger supposedly remarked that whenever American forces fought a set-piece battle against the North Vietnamese, our troops had won.

To this, Le Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese counterpart, said something like “So?”

Which was exactly right. Both sides knew then, after years of suffering and false optimism, of imaginary lights at the end of the tunnel, of destroyed presidencies and 58,000 American dead, that what Washington was really bargaining for was, in the title of Frank Snepp’s book, a Decent Interval, before the North overran the South.

We might have learned from all that. But instead, here we are, a generation or more later, occupying a California-sized country that always has been hell on foreign invaders. We went in, it now seems clear, with carefully detailed plans for seizing and protecting the oil fields — but only the sketchiest ideas of how to run the place and get fresh water and food to our 24 million new dependents.

And now — surprise, surprise — we are targets of a guerrilla war. Less than a month ago, Donald Rumsfeld, our pompous, preppy bully of a defense secretary, denied what was happening was guerrilla warfare. Why it was just terrorists, or “common criminals.”

He’s since been contradicted by our latest commander of military forces there, Gen. John Abizaid, who last week flatly said it was a “classical guerrilla-type campaign,” and added that the enemy was becoming “better coordinated and more sophisticated.”

Naturally, he predicted final victory, but said the troops now there had better plan on staying a year. Wonder what he or his successor will be predicting in July 2004?

So what do we do?

The best and most intelligent solution might have been, once we’d ousted Saddam and were still in the happy afterglow of easy military success, to have turned the whole place over to the much-maligned United Nations.

Why, the blue helmets might have come in, got the water supply going, relieved us of the burden, and soon established a schedule for free elections. We could have gone home as heroes, and George W. Statesman would have looked better than ever.

However, that wasn’t on the macho agenda. What you may see happening now is likely to look very familiar to those of us with long memories and a little gray hair.

Watch for some sort of “search and destroy” operation designed to ferret out those few bad guys who aren’t ecstatic about having their nation run by outsiders. If this doesn’t go well, maybe those Iraqis who we think are loyal may be grouped in “strategic hamlets” to prevent their contamination by guerrilla elements.

Eventually, probably fairly soon, we’ll install a full-fledged puppet government. Washington’s preferred puppet, so far as I can tell, is a guy named Ahmed Chalabi, a London banker who hasn’t lived in the country for more than 40 years. He certainly ought to be a cinch to win the hearts and minds of the common people.

What happens after that?

Possibly the Iraqi peasants will all decide to become good citizens of a Western-type democracy, and dream of landing low-wage jobs with multinational firms headquartered in the United States. History suggests, however, that as time goes by, their top priority is far more likely to be ousting the invader and occupier.

And every day we stay there, that’s how more Iraqis will see us.

Which is what Saddam is counting on.

Nuclear follies: The otherwise tame media are now actually challenging Bush’s Iraq policy on the assertion, now clearly false, that Saddam was trying to get a nuclear weapon. Not only was that not true, they have now admitted they didn’t even have any new intelligence indicating that.

Which is a nice way of saying, the president just lied. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put a much better Alice-in-Wonderland spin on it in May. “Intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean something is true ... It doesn’t mean it’s a fact. I mean, that’s not what intelligence is,” Gen. Richard Myers said.

Roger. What is a fact is that the president’s men wanted this war, and if they thought claiming Saddam had killed Jon-Benet Ramsey would have rallied Americans to the cause, Bush would have said that too.



Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times. E-mail [e-mail].

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=5183

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July 21, 2003


Rule by the Blind
Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs
By EDWARD SAID

The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one`s gaze, constructing its history from one`s own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing.

For a while this worked, as many local leaders believed--mistakenly--that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification through unpopular local rulers has so far worked.

At least since World War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors.

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate. These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but that hasn`t prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate.

Several generations of Americans have come to see the Arab world mainly as a dangerous place, where terrorism and religious fanaticism are spawned and where a gratuitous anti-Americanism is inculcated in the young by evil clerics who are anti-democratic and virulently anti-Semitic.

In the U.S., "Arabists" are under attack. Simply to speak Arabic or to have some sympathetic acquaintance with the vast Arab cultural tradition has been made to seem a threat to Israel. The media runs the vilest racist stereotypes about Arabs--see, for example, a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the Wall Street Journal in which she speaks of Palestinians as having "reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors" and of Palestinian culture as "the life force traduced, cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism."

Americans are sufficiently blind that when a Middle Eastern leader emerges whom our leaders like--the shah of Iran or Anwar Sadat--it is assumed that he is a visionary who does things our way not because he understands the game of imperial power (which is to survive by humoring the regnant authority) but because he is moved by principles that we share.

Almost a quarter of a century after his assassination, Sadat is a forgotten and unpopular man in his own country because most Egyptians regard him as having served the U.S. first, not Egypt. The same is true of the shah in Iran. That Sadat and the shah were followed in power by rulers who are less palatable to the U.S. indicates not that Arabs are fanatics, but that the distortions of imperialism produce further distortions, inducing extreme forms of resistance and political self-assertion.

The Palestinians are considered to have reformed themselves by allowing Mahmoud Abbas, rather than the terrible Yasser Arafat, to be their leader. But "reform" is a matter of imperial interpretation. Israel and the U.S. regard Arafat as an obstacle to the settlement they wish to impose on the Palestinians, a settlement that would obliterate Palestinian demands and allow Israel to claim, falsely, that it has atoned for its "original sin."

Never mind that Arafat--whom I have criticized for years in the Arabic and Western media--is still universally regarded as the legitimate Palestinian leader. He was legally elected and has a level of popular support that no other Palestinian approaches, least of all Abbas, a bureaucrat and longtime Arafat subordinate. And never mind that there is now a coherent Palestinian opposition, the Independent National Initiative; it gets no attention because the U.S. and the Israeli establishment wish for a compliant interlocutor who is in no position to make trouble. As to whether the Abbas arrangement can work, that is put off to another day. This is shortsightedness indeed--the blind arrogance of the imperial gaze. The same pattern is repeated in the official U.S. view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other Arab states.

Underlying this perspective is a long-standing view--the Orientalist view--that denies Arabs their right to national self-determination because they are considered incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth and fundamentally murderous.

Since Napoleon`s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery--and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because "that`s the way the Arabs are." That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.

We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.

Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University. He is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair`s forthcoming book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press).

http://www.counterpunch.org/said07212003.html

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July 21, 2003


Return to Florida
Why is George Bush President?
By ALLAN J. LICHTMAN

George W. Bush is president today because the votes counted in Florida`s presidential election did not match the ballots cast by the state`s voters. But the outcome in Florida--which determined the presidency--was not decided by hanging chads, recounts, or intervention by the Supreme Court.

Al Gore lost Florida`s presidential vote because electoral officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid more than one out of every ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state. In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected only about one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide.

This vast racial disparity in ballot rejection rates defeated Al Gore. If black ballots had been rejected at the same minimal rate as white ballots, more than 50,000 additional black votes would have been counted in Florida`s presidential election. Given that more than 90 percent of blacks favored Gore over Bush, Gore would have won Florida by at least 40,000 votes, prevailed in the Electoral College, and become President of the United States on January 20, 2001.

These were the results of a statistical study that I was commissioned to conduct for the United States Commission on Civil Rights and a subsequent analysis published in the Journal of Legal Studies (January 2003). Independent studies by Professors Phil Klinkner of Hamilton College and Anthony Salvanto of the University of California, Irvine have confirmed the finding of major racial disparities in ballot rejection rates as have studies by the New York Times and Washington Post.

My studies pointed no fingers of blame at any official involved in Florida`s 2000 presidential election. But the studies did call for a thorough investigation by federal authorities to find out why ballots cast by blacks were disqualified at such a higher rate than ballots cast by whites.

Two members of the Civil Rights Commission who filed a dissenting report did not substantively dispute the finding of wide racial disparities in ballot rejection rates in Florida. But they denied the need for investigation, placing blame squarely on black voters, who allegedly lacked the education and literacy to fill out their ballots properly.

Analysis showed, however, that blacks were much more likely to have their ballots set aside than whites even after controlling for ballot design, voting technology, education, income, poverty, literacy, and first-time voting--a finding that independent analysis likewise confirmed. According to a New York Times study, "even after these factors [education, income, ballot design] and others were accounted for the study showed a significantly higher rate of rejected ballots in precincts with a large proportion of black voters."

The Right has desperately sought to suppress the truth about Florida`s presidential elections both to silence any questions about the legitimacy of Bush`s victory and to validate their assumption that race no longer matters in America today. Racial problems, they would have us believe, were solved long ago in the era of the civil rights movement. Never mind the wealth of studies documenting racial disparities not only in voting rights but in matters of everyday life including police stops, mortgage lending, heath care, hiring and promotion.

Imagine, however, if Democrats had controlled the government of Florida in 2000 and Al Gore had won the state and the presidency because more than one out of ten white voters had their ballots disqualified, compared to only one out of fifty black voters. This would have been the crime of the millennium for ideologues of the Right demanding investigation by every federal official that could be summoned to the state.

But slumbering liberals are no less to blame than militant conservatives for the lack of national attention to an extraordinary injustice to minorities that determined the outcome of a presidential election. Why no mobilization of protest from the NAACP? The Urban League. The ACLU. The Democratic Party.

Absent public outrage, the United States Department of Justice has never conducted the necessary investigation of Florida`s presidential election to discover the reasons behind racial disparities in ballot rejection rates. So we must wish away what really happened in Florida and never find out why African-Americans disproportionately lost their right to vote or how to make sure this doesn`t happen again--anywhere in America. Unfortunately, despite passage of a federal election reform bill, another Florida remains a tragic risk for 2004.

Allan J. Lichtman is Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC He conducted the study of ballot rejection rates in Florida for the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has been an expert witness in more than 60 federal voting rights cases.

Copyright held by Allan J. Lichtman

http://www.counterpunch.org/lichtman07212003.html

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BuzzFlash Quote of the Week:

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq."

-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,


as quoted by Reuters on Monday July 21 in link




http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/iraq_wolfo…

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Excerpt:
"The Butcher`s sons George and Jeb were believed to have been killed Tuesday in a raid by invading forces
who surrounded the home of a cousin, a senior official said. Two other citizens also were killed.

The invading force has offered a $25 million reward for information leading to the Butcher`s capture and
$15 million each for his sons, who were top leaders in their father`s evil empire.

Jeb was probably his father`s successor, according to invading intelligence officials. He ran much of his
country`s security apparatus in the southeast part of the country, controlling several militias, internal security
services and the military forces of the once-vaunted Republican Guard.

He was described as quiet, smart and level-headed, particularly compared to George, the Butcher`s eldest son,
who had a reputation for brutality, flamboyance and extreme stupidity. George had a reputation for killing while
giggling. They said he made a game of being cruel, often mocking his victims by saying "Please don`t kill me,"
just as he gave the order to execute them. The homeland had never known such cruelty was possible.
George often wore a custom-made flight suit and then strutted around in it like he was `King Shit," as if he were
a legitimate fighter pilot. George controlled his father`s Fedayeen, the paramilitary force that fought foreign
invaders during the war; many of its survivors are thought to be part of the ongoing guerrilla campaign in Iraq.



Women say I`m a treat for the eyes when I wear my Wrangler tight-cuts."


http://www.bartcop.com/

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Robert Fisk: His sons are dead but Saddam lives

07/23/03: (New Zealand Herald)
So they are dead. Or are they? Even Baghdad exploded in celebratory, deafening automatic rifle fire at the news.

The burnt, bullet-splashed villa in Mosul, the four bullet-ridden corpses, America`s hopes - however vain - that the death of Saddam Hussein`s two sons, Uday and Qusay, will break the guerrilla resistance to Iraq`s US occupation troops, all conspired to produce an illusion last night: that the unidentified bodies found after a four-hour gun battle between Iraqi gunmen and US forces must be those of the former dictator`s sons - because the world wants them to be.

Of course, they might be dead. The two men are said to bear an impressive resemblance to the brothers. A 14-year-old child killed by the Americans - one of the four dead - might be one of Saddam`s grandsons. The house was owned by Mohamed el-Zidani, a tribal ally of the Husseins.

Qusay was a leader of the Special Republican Guard, a special target of the Americans. The two men obviously fought fiercely against the 200 American troops who surrounded the house. The Americans used their so-called Task Force 20 to storm the pseudo-Palladian villa on a main highway through Mosul.

Task Force 20 combines both special forces and CIA agents. But this is the same Task Force 20 that blasted to death the occupants of a convoy heading for the Syrian border earlier this month, a convoy whose travellers were meant to include Saddam himself and even the two sons supposedly killed yesterday. The victims turned out to be only smugglers.

And American intelligence - the organisation that failed to predict events of 11 September, 2001 - was also responsible for the air raid on a Saddam villa on 20 March, which was supposed to kill Saddam. And the far crueller air raid on the Mansour district of Baghdad at the end of the air bombardment in April which was supposed to kill Saddam and his sons but only succeeded in slaughtering 16 innocent civilians. All proved to be miserable failures.

And in a family obsessed, with good reason, with their own personal security, would Uday and Qusay really be together? Would they allow themselves to be trapped. The two so-called "lions of Iraq" (this courtesy of Saddam) in the very same cage?

Saddam`s early life was spent on the run. But he always travelled alone. In adversity, the family had learned to stay apart, just as they had during the 1991 Gulf War and during last March`s invasion of Iraq. Even in power, Saddam and his sons were in hiding. Even if DNA testing proves that the corpses are those of Saddam`s sons, will Iraqis believe it? And will it bring the guerrilla war to an end?

Firstly, even if Uday and Qusay are dead, Saddam is clearly still alive. Though Uday was both a cruel man and a psychopath, they were appendages to the king, mere assistants in the monster`s cave. Saddam lives. And his voice is still heard on tape throughout Iraq. It is his fate of which Iraqis are waiting to hear.

Secondly, and far more importantly, there is a fundamental misunderstanding between the American occupation authorities in Iraq and the people whose country they are occupying. The United States believes that the entire resistance to America`s proconsulship of Iraq is composed of "remnants" of Saddam`s followers, "dead-enders", "bitter-enders" - they have other phrases to describe them. Their theory is that once the Hussein family is decapitated, the resistance will end.

But the guerrillas who are killing US troops every day are also being attacked by a growing Islamist Sunni movement which never had any love for Saddam. Much more importantly, many Iraqis were reluctant to support the resistance for fear that an end to American occupation would mean the return of the ghastly old dictator.

If he and his sons are dead, the chances are that the opposition to the American-led occupation will grow rather than diminish - on the grounds that with Saddam gone, Iraqis will have nothing to lose by fighting the Americans.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article4196.htm

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 12:13 p.m. EDT July 23, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

President Bush is hailing the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s two sons as the clearest sign yet that "the former regime is gone and will not be coming back." In remarks in the White House Rose Garden, Bush called Odai and Qusai Hussein "two of the regime`s chief henchmen," responsible for torture, maiming and murder of countless Iraqis.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq says there`s "no doubt" that Saddam Hussein`s sons are dead. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez says officials used "multiple means" to confirm the identities, including dental records, X-rays and four former members of Saddam`s regime. He says the coalition will provide proof "in due time" to skeptical Iraqis.
At a Baghdad briefing, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez described the raid that ended with the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s sons. He says U.S. soldiers tried to enter the three-story home twice, but had to withdraw both times after they were fired on from the home`s fortified second floor. Helicopters then fired missiles at the home. Sanchez says those missiles are believed to have killed the brothers.
Four Americans wounded in the raid on the hideout of Saddam Hussein`s sons. But officials say three of them have returned to duty, and the fourth will do so soon.
U.S. military officials say the head of Saddam Hussein`s Special Republican Guard has been arrested by coalition forces. The commander says the man is No. 11 on the U.S. military`s list of most-wanted Iraqis and a cousin of Saddam.
Hopes that the killing of Saddam Hussein`s sons would calm a bloody insurgency were dimmed Wednesday after attacks claimed the lives of two American soldiers. Several other soldiers were wounded.
While some Iraqis are celebrating the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s two sons, others are vowing revenge against the United States. Some insurgents in western Iraq say they plan to "raise hell" against the United States and Britain. The men -- their faces covered -- appear on a videotape aired on Associated Press Television News, cradling rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Some U.S. soldiers admit they`re worried about revenge attacks after yesterday`s killings of Odai and Qusai Hussein. One Army sergeant says, "if one of my sons was dead, I`d want somebody to pay for it."
During celebratory gunfire over the deaths Tuesday, a U.S. soldier shot a man and a little girl by mistake, thinking troops were under attack.
A new tape has been aired by an Arab satellite TV channel that purportedly was made by Saddam Hussein on July 20, two days before his sons were killed. The voice on the tape calls on fighters loyal to him to continue their uprising against U.S.-led occupation forces.
American officials say the bodies of Odai and Qusai Hussein were taken to Baghdad`s international airport Wednesday to be flown out of the country. They would not say why the bodies were being taken out of Iraq or to where.
U.S. administrators in Iraq are urging the country`s newly formed governing council to start hammering out a constitution. Among the likely stumbling blocks are the issues of federalism, the role of religion and whether Iraq should be a constitutional monarchy.
The U.S. Central command chief, Gen. John Abizaid, is on an introductory visit to Pakistan and news reports Wednesday say he is likely to press Islamabad to send troops to Iraq.
Defense officials say the U.S. Army has approved a plan for rotating new soldiers into Iraq so it can relieve those now serving while keeping troop strength at around 145.000.

CLINTON-IRAQ
Former President Bill Clinton says President Bush`s erroneous reference to an Iraqi-Africa uranium link is understandable. Clinton says that`s partly because Saddam Hussein`s regime had not accounted for some weapons by the time Clinton ended his term in 2001.

BUSH IRAQ CRITICISM
President Bush`s deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley has apologized in connection with a faulty reference to Iraq`s nuclear ambitions that made its way into Bush`s State of the Union address.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



Summary
*********US*****UK*******Total
Total***235**** 44******** 279

07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 7 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE NEAR MOSUL
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 2 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE AT AR RAMADI
07/23/03 British Ministry of Defense
BRITISH OFFICER COLLAPSES AND DIES IN SOUTHERN IRAQ, JULY 18TH
07/23/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES ARMY CASUALTY FROM ATTACK ON JULY 22ND
07/22/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 1 WOUNDED IN RPG ATTACK
07/21/03 CENTCOM
ONE US SOLDIER KILLED, 3 WOUNDED, IN 7-21 AMBUSH IN BAGHDAD

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Bush hails end of regime
Death of Saddam`s sons seen as key moment

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

President George Bush declared yesterday that the killing of Saddam Hussein`s heirs, Uday and Qusay, should demonstrate to Iraqis that the ousted regime had been destroyed once and for all.

In a Rose Garden speech the president said that in Tuesday`s assault on a house in Mosul where the two brothers had been hiding "the careers of two of the regime`s chief henchmen came to an end".

"Saddam Hussein`s sons were responsible for the torture, maiming and murder of countless Iraqis," he said, adding that their deaths should reassure Iraqis "that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back".

Tony Blair also hailed confirmation of the killings as a "very important move forward".

"These two particular people were at the head of a regime that wasn`t just a security threat because of its weapons programme but was responsible for the torture and killing of thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis."

Although there has been delight in London and Washington at the discovery and death of two of the regime`s most hated figures, US officials yesterday had to defend the decision to storm the house in Mosul, rather than embark on a long siege in the hope of capturing Saddam`s sons alive.

A bodyguard and Qusay`s 14-year-old son, Mustafa, were also killed in the assault.

US officials said Mustafa, who had been in a bedroom at the back of the house, was the last to die. He appears to have continued shooting at US soldiers even after his father and uncle were dead.

General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, said the decision to launch the assault was "made by the commander on the ground and that was the right decision".

Gen Sanchez said: "Our mission was find, kill or capture. We had an enemy that was barricaded and we had to take measures to neutralise the target."

A debate was under way yesterday within the administration over whether to release pictures of the dead brothers to help convince Iraqis that they were really dead.

The pictures have been described as "horrific" but Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, argued that their release could undermine guerrilla groups devoted to restoring the old regime.

"The main consideration on our minds," he said, "is that it is saving the lives of American men and women who are on the line."

But US hopes that the deaths of the two would reduce the number of guerrilla attacks appeared premature. Two American soldiers were killed and eight wounded in separate incidents yesterday, although it was unclear whether the attacks were related to the Mosul assault.

The continued presence of Saddam also made itself felt, with the broadcast on a Dubai-based television channel of the latest in a series of audio-taped messages purported to be from the ousted dictator, in which he urged Iraqis to drive out the country`s occupiers.

The tape is believed to have been made two days before Tuesday`s raid in Mosul, but was another stark reminder that America`s main target still appears to be alive.

Mr Bush said a new plan proposed by the US civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, would accelerate progress towards restoring "full Iraqi democracy".

According to early reports of Mr Bremer`s plan, it sets a two-month target for recruiting and training the first battalion of a new Iraqi army, and the creation of eight battalions of a new civil defence force, to help protect Iraqi infrastructure from guerrilla attacks.

By the two-month deadline, a central criminal court would also be established and electrical power would be restored to prewar levels.

Mr Bush also called for greater international support for the reconstruction effort.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[rv_2011]

Der Handel mit dem Feind

Mathias Bröckers 24.07.2003

Die Bush-Familie: Anmerkungen zur neueren Geschichte von Machtpolitik und Verbrechen

Als dem großen Erzähler Mark Twain gegen Ende seines Lebens nicht mehr zum Lachen war, wollte sein Publikum das nicht hören. Seit ihn die Zeitung "Alta California" 1866 für eine Reportage auf die damaligen Sandwich-Inseln, das heutige Hawaii, geschickt hatte, liebten die Amerikaner den Satiriker und Spaßmacher, der Sitten und Gebräuche der Eingeborenen ungeniert verspottete - so auch als er später die erste US-amerikanische Reisegruppe auf einer Tour durch das alte Europa begleitete. Dessen "kultivierte Barbaren" und ihre Gebräuche waren für Twain kaum weniger exotisch als die Bewohner Hawaiis - und in seinem berühmt gewordenen Reisebericht "The Innocents Abroad" (Die Arglosen im Ausland) ließ er es Spott nicht fehlen.

Von Palästen und Prachtbauten fühlte er sich als überzeugter Demokrat abgestoßen, Kathedralen, Kunst und Kirchenprunk des alten Europa lehnte er als "nutzlosen Plunder" ab, der zur Unterstützung der Armen besser verkauft werden sollte. Und für die "schreckliche deutsche Sprache", die er zu lernen versuchte, verfasste er einen Katalog von Verbesserungsvorschlägen ("Zuallererst würde ich den Dativ abschaffen!" ).

So naiv-satirisch Twains Vorschläge daher kamen, so ernst waren sie letztlich gemeint: Dass allein die Segnungen des modernen, pragmatischen Amerika der rückständigen Menschheit aufhelfen, konnten war für ihn vollkommen selbstverständlich. Spätestens mit der amerikanischen Eroberung der Philippinen (1899) aber wandelte sich der humorige Weltenbeglücker und Prediger des amerikanischen Fortschritts zu einem radikalen Kritiker seines Landes.

Dass die amerikanischen Ideale von Demokratie und Freiheit nur als Mäntelchen benutzt würden, um Geschäftsinteressen, Eroberungen und Ausbeutung durchzusetzen, gehörte bis zu seinem Tod (1910) zu Twains festen Überzeugungen - und er wurde nicht müde gegen Imperialismus, Kolonialismus, Korruption und Rassentrennung anzuschreiben, um "sein" Amerika wieder auf den rechten Weg zurückbringen. Doch wenn er auf die Bühne kam, lachten die Leute kaum, dass er nur das Wort erhob. So vermutlich auch bei seinem Vorschlag, mit dem er das Banner seiner demokratischen Ideale, die amerikanische Flagge, vor dem Missbrauch durch die Imperialisten retten wollte:

Wir nehmen einfach unsere übliche Flagge, übermalen nur die weißen Streifen schwarz und ersetzen die Sterne durch einen Totenkopf mit gekreuzten Knochen.

Hundert Jahre später, nachdem die "Arglosen" einmal mehr im Ausland unterwegs sind, um den "Barbaren" Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit mit Bomben einzutrichtern, scheint Mark Twains Vorschlag aktueller denn je. Dass "Skull & Bones" das Weiße Haus geentert haben und einen globalen Piratenfeldzug unter der amerikanischen Flagge tarnen, scheint mittlerweile vielen offensichtlich; ebenso wie die Tatsache, dass die korporierten Medien zu Propagandakompanien mutiert sind und den Raubzug mit billigen Lügen bemänteln und rechtfertigen. In seinem letzten Buch "Der geheimnisvolle Fremde" schrieb Twain dazu:

Als nächstes wird der Staatsmann billige Lügen erfinden, die die Schuld der angegriffenen Nation zuschieben, und jeder Mensch wird glücklich sein über diese Täuschungen, die das Gewissen beruhigen. Er wird sie eingehend studieren und sich weigern, Argumente der anderen Seite zu prüfen. So wird er sich Schritt für Schritt selbst davon überzeugen, dass der Krieg gerecht ist, und Gott dafür danken, dass er nach diesem Prozess grotesker Selbsttäuschung besser schlafen kann.

Diesem Prozess grotesker Selbsttäuschung haben sich die amerikanischen Bürger häufig unterziehen müssen: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesien (1958); Kuba (1959-60); Kongo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Kambodscha (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libyen (1986); El Salvador (1980 ff.); Nicaragua (1980 ff.); Panama (1989), Irak (1991-99), Bosnien (1995), Sudan (1998); Jugoslawien (1999) Afghanistan (2001- ) lautet die Liste der Länder, die von den USA angegriffen wurden, bevor aktuell der Irak erneut zum Ziel wurde. Und wieder, der flächendeckenden Gehirnwäsche aus Brainwashington sei dank, im Inbrunst der Überzeugung, dass es bei diesen Bombardements um Frieden, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit geht - und um die Beseitigung des "Bösen". Und dass gerade die Deutschen und Franzosen doch gefälligst den Mund halten sollten, wären sie doch ohne diese Freiheitsbomben heute eine sowjetische Kolonie....

Die Bush-Familie und die Naziförderung aus den USA

Nun zeigt freilich ein Blick in die Geschichte - nicht der offiziellen "Stars & Stripes", sondern der verborgenen "Skull & Bones" -, dass auch schon der Aufstieg Hitlers mit dem von Figuren wie Osama Bin Laden oder Saddam Hussein durchaus vergleichbar ist: Sie alle waren nützliche Werkzeuge, nette Hurensöhne der USA. Im Zuge der Re-Education Nazi-Deutschlands nach 1945 und der üblichen Neu-Geschichtsschreibung durch die Sieger haben die Historiker der Nachkriegszeit zwar nicht die Geburtshilfe und Alimentierung der NSDAP durch die deutsche Großindustrie ausgespart, sehr wohl aber die massive Förderung aus den Vereinigten Staaten.

Um zu erfahren, dass Hitlers Privatarmee, die SA, schon vor 1933 komplett mit nagelneuen Remington-Pistolen, Made in USA, ausgerüstet war, oder dass das General Motors gehörende, Mitte der 30er Jahre eröffnete LKW-Werk Brandenburg, eine der größten Autofabriken der Welt, die ausschließlich Militärfahrzeuge herstellte, erst ganz am Ende des Kriegs bombardiert wurde, als es der Roten Armee in die Hände zu fallen drohte, um solche Fakten über die Faschismusförderung durch amerikanische Finanziers und Industrielle zu erfahren, hilft ein Blick in die Standard-Geschichtswerke kaum. Auch dass der Großvater des amtierenden US-Präsidenten Prescott Bush wegen seiner Geschäfte mit Hitler-Deutschland vor Gericht stand - und sein Vermögen beschlagnahmt wurde -, ist dort nicht zu finden.


Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush, Knight Woolley und R. Lovett im Jahr 1964

Aus der Familiengeschichte des Bush-Clans bleibt dieses dunkle Kapitel in der Regel ebenfalls ausgespart, ebenso wie die Mitgliedschaft im "Skull & Bones"-Geheimorden der Yale-Universität, dem Prescott, George und George W. Bush angehören und dessen finstere Ideologie in den offiziellen Biographien allenfalls gestreift wird. Dass es der Bones-Bruder Prescott Bush und sein Kollege Harriman waren, die nicht nur das Vermögen des Nazi-Finanziers und Stahlmagnaten Fritz Thyssen verwalteten, sondern auch auf andere Weise gezielt in den Aufbau des Hitler-Regimes und der kriegswichtigen Industriebranchen investierten, findet sich heutzutage nur in der "Unautorisierten Biographie" der Bush-Familie, die gerade deswegen, weil ihr die offizielle Autorisierung fehlt, umso besser belegt und dokumentiert ist (Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin: George Bush:The Unauthorized Biography [1]). Denn unbemerkt blieb aufmerksamen Zeitgenossen das freudige und finanzkräftige Hitler-Engagement des US-Establishments nicht. Der US-Botschafter in Deutschland William E. Dodd bekundete 1937 gegenüber einem Reporter der "New York Times":

Eine Clique von US-Industriellen ist versessen darauf, unseren demokratischen Staat durch ein faschistisches System zu ersetzen und arbeitet eng mit den Faschistenregimes in Deutschland und Italien zusammen. Ich hatte auf meinem Posten in Berlin oft Gelegenheit zu beobachten, wie nahe einige unserer amerikanischen regierenden Familien dem Naziregime sind. Sie trugen dazu bei, dem Faschismus an die Macht zu verhelfen und sind darum bemüht, ihn dort zu halten.

Doch so wenig heute das Foto des Pentagon-Emmisärs und Lieferanten von Massenvernichtungswaffen Donald Rumsfeld auf dem Sofa Saddam Husseins verhindert, dass sich derselbe Rumsfeld 20 Jahre später als Befreier und Abrüster des Irak feiern lassen kann, so wenig änderten die Interventionen des Botschafters oder die Veröffentlichungen von Historikern - etwa: Robert A. Brady: "The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism" (1937); "Business as a System of Power" (1943) oder Journalisten - George Seldes, "Facts and Fascism" (1943), Charles Higham: "Trading With The Enemy; The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949" (1983) - etwas daran, dass sich die Bushs, Harrimans, Dulles, Duponts, Rockefellers, Fords et al. nach 1945 von den Deutschen als Befreier feiern ließen.

Erst in den Neunziger Jahren konnte der ehemalige Staatsanwalt und jetzige Leiter des Florida Holocaust Museum John Loftus ("The secret war against the Jews", 1994) aufdecken [2], was auch den amerikanischen Kontrolleuren bei der Beschlagnahme von Nazi-Vermögen verborgen geblieben war: Auf welchen Kanälen die US-Investionen in das "Hitler-Projekt" hinein- und wie die Profite wieder hinausgeflossen waren.

Die Schlüsselrolle dabei kam zwei Wall Street Banken - "Brown Brother Harriman" und "Union Banking Corporation" - zu, in denen Prescott Bush jeweils als Direktor bzw. Aufsichtsrat fungierte, sowie ihrem Ableger in Rotterdam, der "Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart" . Loftus zeigt, wie es über diese von Thyssen 1916 gegründete Bank, die u.a. 1923 die Baukosten für das "Braune Haus", des ersten NSDAP-Hauptquartiers in München, finanzierte, nach dem Krieg gelang, die Milliarden des Thyssen-Konzerns vor der Konfiskation durch die Alliierten zu bewahren. Die Großwäsche von Nazi-Geld durch "Union Banking" blieb den bis Ende der 40er Jahre ermittelnden Staatsanwälten verborgen. Nach erfolglosem Abschluss der Untersuchung wurden Prescott Bush und seinem Schwiegervater Herbert Walker, dem der amtierende Präsident sein W. verdankt, ihre eingefrorene Beteiligungen an der Union Banking Corporation 1951 mit 1,5 Mio $ restituiert.

Waffen- und Drogenhandel im Dienst der US-Regierung

Sind das nicht olle Kamellen? Schmutzige Wäsche von vorgestern? Keineswegs, denn die schrecklich nette Familie Bush [3] betreibt nach wie vor im großen Stil jenes "Dealing with the Enemy", das schon einst die Großväter reich machte. Der junge George W. erhielt das Geld für seine erste eigene Ölfirma "Arbusto" Ende der 70er Jahre vom US-Vermögensverwalter der saudischen Familie Bin Laden. Und beim Militär-Investor "Carlyle Group", die sein Vater repräsentiert und die von einigen seiner ehemaligen Kabinettskollegen geleitet wird, waren bis Oktober 2001 auch 2 Millionen Dollar des Bin Laden Clans investiert. Der italienische Großindustrielle Carlo de Benedetti, der am 11.9. 2001 einen Vortrag im World Trade Center halten sollte, berichtete dem "Corriere della Serra" (14.12.02) in einem Interview:

Und wissen Sie, wo ich am Abend vor dem Attentat war? Bei einem Abendessen im National Building Museum, mit George Bush senior und der Familie Bin Laden, alle auf Einladung der Carlyle Group, einer amerikanischen Finanzgesellschaft.

"So ist er, der globale Kapitalismus", fügt das Blatt für all jene hinzu, denen bei dieser Nachricht möglicherweise die Kinnlade herunterklappt. Wir wissen nicht, welche Geschäftsentwicklungen der Carlyle-Repräsentant Bush sen. den Investoren bei diesem Dinner in Aussicht stellte, sicher aber ist, dass die Firma als einer der größten Rüstungsinvestoren der USA zu den großen Profiteuren des "War on Terror" von Bush jun. gehört.

Sicher ist auch, dass zur gleichen Zeit, als Reagan, Rumsfeld & Co. in den 80er Jahren den netten Diktator Saddam Hussein gegen den "fundamentalistischen" Iran aufrüsteten, die Ayathollas im Iran ebenfalls mit Waffen beliefert wurden, in einer klandestinen "Special Operation" des US-Militärs und der Geheimdienste, aus dem Weißen Haus geleitet von Ltd. Oliver North. Um die demokratisch gewählte Regierung Nicaraguas zu stürzen, erhielten auf diesem Kanal auch die dortigen "Contra"-Terroristen US-Waffen - und fungierten dafür als Zwischenstation für Lieferungen kolumbianischen Kokains.

Der wohl größte Drogenschmuggler der Geschichte, Barry Seal, brachte auf diesem Weg von 1979-1984 monatlich bis zu 2 Tonnen Kokain in die USA - im Auftrag und unter dem Schutz der CIA. Als er 1986 erschossen wurde, fand man in seiner Brieftasche die Telefonnummer eines seiner Protegés: des Vizepräsidenten und Ex-CIA-Chefs George Bush. Ebenfalls lange bekannt war Barry Seal, der seine Operationen über den abgelegenen Flughafen Mena in Arkansas abwickelte, mit dem damals zuständigen Generalstaatsanwalt des Bundesstaats, unter dessen Augen diese Großimporte stattfanden: Bill Clinton. Der Rechtsanwalt, der die Clintons durch den Whitewater-Skandal boxte - Richard Ben-Veniste - verteidigte auch Seal. Und der Vermögensverwalter, der aus Hillary Clintons 10.000 Dollar im Handumdrehen 100.000 gemacht hatte, war an Seals Tarn- und Geldwäsche-Firmen beteiligt.

Als eine der Maschinen von Seals Schmuggelflotte bei einem Transportflug abgeschossen wurde, flogen die als "Iran-Contra-Skandal" bekannt gewordenen Milliardengeschäfte im staatlich sanktionierten Drogen- und Waffenhandel auf. Ein Untersuchungsauschuss wurde eingerichtet und einige Beteiligte aus dem Reagan/Bush-Statedepartment wurden verurteilt, um wie Richard Armitage oder John Pointdexter von Bush jun. wieder rehabilitiert und mit einflussreichen Ämtern bedacht zu werden. Dass die wahren Zusammenhänge nie aufgedeckt wurden - geschweige denn der Sumpf aus Geheimdiensten und organisierter Kriminalität je trockengelegt wurde -, hat vor allem wohl damit zu tun, dass "Barry & the Boys" so klug waren, Millionen an Schmiergeldern zu verteilen - an einflussreiche Politiker und Strippenzieher beider Parteien.

Barry Seal und der Sumpf aus Verbrechen und Politik

Unter dem Titel Barry & the Boys - The CIA, the mob and the secret american history [4] hat der amerikanische Investigativ-Journalist Daniel Hopsicker eine 500-seitige akribische Recherche über das Leben Barry Seals vorgelegt, die anders als die verschiedenen Hollywood-Adaptionen seiner abenteuerlichen Biographie ("Doublecrossed" mit Dennis Hopper) versucht, diesem Sumpf von Politik und Verbrechen wirklich auf die Spur zu kommen. Der offiziellen Legende nach hatte sich der "frühere Drogen- und Waffenschmuggler" Seal zum "wichtigsten Informanten der DEA" (Drug Inforcement Agency) gewandelt und wurde wegen dieses Verrats von einem kolumbianischen Killerkommando 1986 erschossen.



Hopsickers Nachforschungen und Zeugenbefragungen ergeben indessen ein ganz anderes Bild. Zum einen hatte Seal keinerlei Befürchtungen, von seinen lateinamerikanischen Geschäftspartnern bedroht oder gar ermordet zu werden - stattdessen stand ihm ein von der Steuerbehörde IRS betriebenes Gerichtsverfahren in den USA bevor und er hatte wenige Tage vor seinem Tod gedroht auszupacken, wenn man ihm die Steuerforderung von 30 Millionen Dollar nicht vom Hals schaffe. Als sein Anwalt Lewis Unglesby fragte, wie er ihn verteidigen solle, wenn er die Hintergründe nicht kenne, gab er ihm eine Telefonnummer:

Barry schob mir das Telefon rüber und sagte: "Du willst wissen, was los ist? Hier, wähle diese Nummer. Sag Ihnen Du wärest ich", erklärte Unglesby. Als ich tat, was er mir sagte, war eine weibliche Stimme am Apparat: "Büro von Vizepräsident Bush, was kann ich für Sie tun?" - Ich sagte: "Hier ist Barry Seal." Sie bat mich zu warten, sie würde verbinden, was dann auch augenblicklich geschah. Ein Mann nahm den Hörer auf, identifizierte sich als Admiral soundso und sagte zu mir: "Barry, wo hast Du gesteckt?" Als ich ihm sagte, dass ich nicht Barry Seal sondern sein Anwalt sei, so Unglesby, "knallte er den Hörer abrupt auf die Gabel.

Ist das nur die Geschichte eines - so die Fortsetzung der offiziellen Legende - aus dem Ruder gelaufenen Agenten, dessen Privatgeschäften man auf die Schliche gekommen ist und der nun versucht, seinen Ex-Boss zu erpressen? Hopsickers Recherche dokumentiert, dass es sich bei Barry Seal um alles andere als um einen kleinen Fisch handelte. Wäre die Rolle des fiktiven James Bond mit einem realen Agenten aus der 2. Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zu besetzen, Seal wäre ein Top-Anwärter auf den Posten.

Mit 16 macht er den Pilotenschein und wird Kadett der "Civil Air Patrol", mit 18 fliegt er erste "special operations" (illegale Waffen nach Kuba), kaum über 20 ist er der jüngste Boeing-707 Pilot weltweit und fliegt, unter dem offiziellen Cover als Kapitän der TWA, immer wieder illegale Einsätze mit Drogen- und Waffenlieferungen: Kuba, Honduras, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Bolivien, Kolumbien; Marihuana, Opium, Heroin, Kokain, sowie Waffen und Sprengstoffe aller Art. Seine Flugzeuge - zeitweilig befehligt er eine ganze Flotte - sind mit modernsten Nachtsicht- und Anti-Radar-Einrichtungen der US-Luftwaffe ausgerüstet. Seal und seine Piloten haben zudem stets einen Koffer mit 2 Millionen Dollar in bar dabei, um sich aus eventuellen Schwierigkeiten rauszukaufen.

Der Untersuchungsausschuss berechnete später die Umsätze allein aus der "Iran-Contra"-Operation auf 80 Milliarden US-Dollar. Und die "Contra-Sache" war auch die Drohung, mit dem Seal seinem heimlichen Chef Bush einheizte. Das Foto, mit dem Ronald Reagan vor der Weltpresse seinen Nicaragua-Feldzug gerechtfertigt hatte - es zeigte einen Funktionär der regierenden Sandinista-Partei beim Beladen eines Kokaintransports - war von Barry Seal arrangiert und gemacht worden.

Im Auftrag der Firma

Die "smoking gun" allerdings, den Beweis, dass es sich bei diesem Barry Seal nicht um einen kleinen "Special Op"-Agenten, sondern gleichsam um den Phänotypen eines Feldoffiziers und Frontmanns der verdeckten Kriegsführung und des "Dealing with the Enemy" handelt, lieferte ein ganz anderes Foto. Seiner Witwe Debbie Seal gelang es, die Aufnahme wie auch die Notizbücher ihres ermordeten Mannes vor dem "Cleaning" seiner Unterlagen durch FBI und CIA zu retten und stellte beides Daniel Hopsicker zur Auswertung zur Verfügung.

Das Foto, aufgenommen 1963, zeigt Barry Seal mit neun weiteren Männern in Partylaune am Tisch eines Nightclubs in Mexico City - und die Kollegen, mit denen Seal da feierte, stellen nicht nur eine Art "Who is Who" der amerikanischen Geheimpolitik dar, sie beweisen vor allem, dass der "frühere Drogen- und Waffenschmuggler" Barry Seal schon seit Anfang der 60er Jahre im Auftrag der "Firma" unterwegs war. Vorne links auf dem Bild lacht Felix Rodriguez in die Kamera, einer der berüchtigsten CIA-Killer, auf dessen langer Liste von Morden auch der von Che Guevara in Bolivien steht. Ihm gegenüber, das Gesicht halb verdeckt, sitzt Frank Sturgis, beteiligt unter anderem an der Schweinebucht-Invasion und später einer der überführten Watergate-Einbrecher. Vor seinem Tod soll er einigen Forschern zufolge einem Kardinal der katholischen Kirche ein schriftliches Geständnis über seine Beteiligung am Kennedy-Mord hinterlassen haben.

Neben ihm sitzt William Seymour, der in nahezu jedem Buch über den Kennedy-Anschlag eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Seit den 50er Jahren rekrutierte er Piloten für die CIA, darunter auch den jungen Mann, den Barry Seal in einem Trainingslager der "Civil Air Patrol" 1955 kennenlernt: Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald ist später für die Schüsse auf Kennedy verurteilt worden. Hätte ein Foto wie dieses damals dem Gericht und der Untersuchungskommission vorgelegen, die "One Bullet"-Legende des "kommunistischen" Einzeltäters Oswald wäre so nie in die Geschichtsbücher eingegangen. Vielmehr wäre die Tat eines klandestinen Kommandos des US-Geheimdiensts ruchbar geworden, für den Präsident Kennedy zum Hassobjekt Nr. 1 geworden war, weil er nach ihrer para-militärischen Schweinebucht-Invasion den großen militärischen Angriff auf Kuba verweigert hatte.

Die ersten Waffen, die Barry Ende der 50er Jahre nach Kuba geflogen hatten, waren noch an die Bewegung eines jungen Rechtsanwalts und Aktivisten adressiert, der sich gegen den damaligen Diktator Batista auflehnte: Fidel Castro. Dieser eroberte dann, bestens ausgerüstet aus den USA, zwar die Macht in Kuba, mutierte aber von Stund an vom netten zum gottverdammten Hurensohn, gegen den man nun rechte Guerilleros aufrüstete - und sich dafür mit der aus Havanna verjagten Casino- und Prostitutions-Mafia verbündete.

So waren Barry und die Boys von Anfang an nicht nur ganz oben bestens connected - der Che-Guevara-Killer Rodriguez bekundete später, er sei 1961 für die CIA "von einem Typ namens Bush" rekrutiert worden - sie hatten auch hervorragende Kontakte zur Unterwelt, die sich vor allem Anfang der 80er Jahre als nützlich erweisen sollten, als monatlich bis zu 2.000 Kilo Kokain distribuiert werden mussten.

Dass durch diese Schwemme kein Preisverfall für den gewinnbringenden Stoff eintrat, dafür traf Regierungschef Reagan umgehend Sorge, indem er den internationalen "War on Drugs" ausrief und durch verschärfte Verfolgung und Aufrüstung der Drogenpolizei die Handelsmargen weiter garantierte. Während der Konkurrenz so das Leben schwer gemacht wurde, brachte ein Kilo Kokain, für das Seal bei den Produzenten 2000 Dollar zahlte, im Endverkauf auch weiterhin mindestens das 100-Fache und sicherte so den Etat für die inoffizielle Außenpolitik besser und leichter als jedes andere Handelsprodukt. Die Bargeldmengen, die Barry und seine Piloten in dieser Zeit verschoben waren zu groß, um noch gezählt zu werden - sie wurden sackweise gewogen und in Lagerhäusern deponiert.

So abgrundtief derlei Geschäfte unsere kategorischen Vorstellungen von Moral verletzen - aus der Perspektive der Macht ist der Deal mit dem Feind, das Handeln mit dem Teufel (und dem Teufelszeug) nichts Verwerfliches, solange sie dem Erhalt der Macht und der Ausweitung der Souveränität des Machthabers dienen. Von Machiavelli über Carl Schmitt bis zu Leo Strauss - dem ideologischen Ziehvater der amtierenden Bush-Falken - zieht sich eine Linie der philosophischen Begründungen für eine solche Machtpolitik; und von den Philippinen 1899 über den Sieg im 2.Weltkrieg und im Kalten Krieg 1989 bis heute die Linie eines unglaublichen praktischen Erfolgs: der Aufstieg der Vereinigten Staaten zur einzigen Weltmacht.

Auch wenn die Methoden, die dabei angewendet wurden, nicht sauber waren und der Kollateralschaden beträchtlich ist - durch Ziehsöhne wie Hitler, Saddam, Bin Laden (Pinochet, Noriega & zwei Dutzend Militärdiktatoren weltweit nicht zu vergessen) sowie die Heroin,- Kokain,- und Crack-Wellen -, wäre es naiv zu glauben, diese Methoden seien deshalb jetzt obsolet. Umso wichtiger scheint es, sie nicht länger mit der billigen Parole "Verschwörungstheorie" vom Tisch zu wischen, sondern sie zu studieren und zu erforschen.

Die Geschichte von Barry Seal zeigt diese verborgene Politik wie in einer Nussschale. Die zehn Männer auf dem Foto von 1963 - die Agenten der "Operation 40" der CIA - haben die amerikanische Politik und die Weltgeschichte der letzten Jahrzehnte praktischer und massiver beeinflusst als alle in den "Jahrhundertchroniken" abgebildeten öffentlichen Figuren. Als Barry seinem Anwalt die Telefonnummer des amtierenden Vizepräsidenten zuschob, war das keine Hochstapelei - Bush hatte mehr als einen Grund, vor diesem Agenten zu zittern.

Die Kolumbianer, die Barry Seal auf einem Parkplatz in seiner Heimatstadt Baton Rouge erschossen, sagten vor Gericht aus, sie hätten erst nach ihrer Ankunft in USA telefonische Instruktionen über Opfer und Ort ihres Jobs erhalten. Der Kontaktmann, der ihnen die Anweisungen gab, hätte seinen Namen nicht genannt, sich aber als Offizier der US-Armee bezeichnet. Die Anwälte und viele Kenner des Falls sind überzeugt, dass es sich dabei nur um Oliver North gehandelt haben kann, doch bewiesen wurde das nicht. Als North im Scheinwerferlicht vor dem "Iran-Contra"-Untersuchungsausschuss die Hand zum Eid hob, tönten zwar laute Zwischenrufe von den Zuschauerrängen: "Fragt nach dem Kokain! Fragt nach dem Kokain!" Die Frage wurde aber nicht gestellt.

Ollie North hat heute eine Talkshow und moderierte den Irak-Feldzug für den Propagandasender "Fox News". Das Business aber läuft weiter - aus dem frisch "befreiten" Afghanistan melden die Agenturen soeben eine der größten Opiumernten aller Zeiten; Barry Seals Nachfolger haben wieder reichlich zu fliegen...

Der 11.9. oder: Es gibt Wichtigeres als die Wahrheit

Doch nicht nur was den Drogenhandel betrifft wirft diese dunkle Seite der US-Politik ihren Schatten weiterhin in die Zukunft. Auch die Hintermänner der Terroranschläge des 11.9. entstammen aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach diesem Sumpf von "Special Operations", denn die Attacken auf WTC und Pentagon - soviel ist nach zwei Jahren ostentativer Nichtermittlung deutlich geworden - wären als autonome Tat von Osama und den 19 Räubern gar nicht durchführbar gewesen. Ohne aktive logistische Unterstützung aus Kreisen der Geheimdienste und des Militärs hätte dieser 11.9. die Welt nicht erschüttert - und eben diese "Amtshilfe" für Atta & Co. dürfte auch der Grund sein, warum nach fast zwei Jahren noch kein einziges Ermittlungsergebnis vorliegt.

Der hartnäckige Rechercheur Daniel Hopsicker freilich fühlte sich direkt in die Welt von Barry Seal zurückversetzt, als er ab September 2001 in Florida das Umfeld der "Terrorpiloten" unter die Lupe nahm: Flugschulen, die einem Netz von Tarnfirmen gehören; Flughäfen, auf die die lokale Polizei keinen Zugriff hat; Fluggesellschaften, die kein einziges Ticket verkaufen und nur dadurch auffallen, dass sie Gouverneur Jeb Bush im Wahlkampf zur Verfügung stehen und eine ihrer Leihmaschinen zum Kokainschmuggel benutzt wird.

Und mittendrin ein Mohammed Atta, der in den Zeugenaussagen seiner Vermieter, Fluglehrer, Autovermieter, Kellner und weiterer Kontaktpersonen wie ausgewechselt scheint. Nicht ein "islamistischer" Fanatiker, sondern ein durchaus säkularer junger Mann tritt uns hier entgegen: er wohnt bei seiner Freundin, die pinkfarbene Haare trägt und in einer Bar jobbt, trinkt Wodka und hört "Beastie Boys". Daniel Hopsicker, der für NBC viele Fernsehsendungen produziert hat, konnte seinen Dokumentarfilm über diesen Doppelagenten Atta und die dubiosen Hintergründe der Flugschulen, an denen die Hijacker ausgebildet wurden, in keinem der großen TV-Sender unterbringen.

Auch das dreistündige Interview mit Attas Freundin Amanda Keller, der das FBI nach dem 11.9. dringend unterzutauchen riet und die seitdem verschwunden ist, blieb bisher ungesendet. Müßte sich nicht aber nicht zumindest die "Yellow Press" um Originalinterviews mit der "Braut des 9-11-Terrorchefs" geradezu reißen? In dem Moment, in dem klar wird, dass alles auf die CIA im Hintergrund hinausläuft, so Hopsicker, "machen alle Kanäle zu". Sein Dokumentarfilm " Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus" erscheint Ende Juli zusammen mit meinem neuen Buch Fakten, Fälschungen und die unterdrückten Beweise des 11.9. [5] als CD/DVD.

Die Öffentlichkeit weiß heute über die Tat und die Täter nicht mehr als 48 Stunden danach, als die Liste der angeblichen 19 Hijacker präsentiert wurde. Und die Bush-Regierung tut alles dafür, dass es so bleibt. Der nur auf Druck der Opferangehörigen zähneknirschend ins Leben gerufene offizielle Untersuchungsausschuss wurde denn auch so konzipiert, dass verdiente Geheimdienstler und Militärs nicht in derart peinliche Situationen kommen wie seinerzeit Oliver North: Auf Vereidigung der Befragten in Sachen 9-11 wird grundsätzlich verzichtet. Es gibt Wichtigeres als die Wahrheit.

Die in Telepolis von Mathias Bröckers bereits am 13.9. 2001 begonnene Serie The WTC Conspiracy [6] war das Fundament für sein im letzten Jahr bei 2001 veröfentlichtes Buch: "Verschwörungen, Verschwörungstheorien und die Geheimnisse des 11.9", das zu einem Bestseller wurde. Das neue Buch von Mathias Bröckers: Fakten, Fälschungen und die unterdrückten Beweise des 11.9. [7] ist jetzt ebenfalls im Verlag 2001 erschienen.

Links

[1] http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
[2] http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_world_order/bush_naz…
[3] http://www.thelawparty.com/TheBushFamily.htm
[4] http://www.barryandtheboys.com/books/B0001/B0001.about.html
[5] http://www.zweitausendeins.de/jmp.cfm?dsplnr=2633
[6] http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/wtc/default1.html
[7] http://www.zweitausendeins.de/jmp.cfm?dsplnr=2633

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/co/15280/1.html

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The last moments of Saddam`s grandson
14-year-old may have fought on after anti-tank rockets killed the adults

Julian Borger in Washington and Jonathan Steele in Mosul
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

Saddam Hussein`s 14-year-old grandson, Mustafa, may have been the last to die in Tuesday`s four-hour siege on a house in Mosul, and kept shooting even after Qusay and Uday Hussein, his father and uncle, had been killed, US military officials said yesterday.

According to a detailed account of the assault on the house given by Lt General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad, a volley of 10 anti-tank missiles near the end of the siege "wound up killing three of the adults" in the house. But when US troops made their third and final assault on the building, a sole survivor kept firing until he was shot dead.

US officials believe that the last defender was a teenage boy, identified as Mustafa Hussein, who was known to be travelling with his father.

When US troops approached the villa at 10am, triggering the gun fight, there were four people barricaded into a fortified first floor apartment - Mustafa, Qusay, Uday and an unidentified adult, probably a bodyguard.

According to a military official, the three men took up positions in a bathroom at the front of the building, where they had a line of fire on the streets and on steps leading up to the first floor. The fourth person, thought to be Qusay`s son, was kept in a bedroom at the back of the apartment.

"The three in the front were killed by TOW [anti-tank] missiles," the official said. "The fourth at the back was the last, and yes it looks like it could have been the boy."

Two very different versions of Tuesday`s events emerged yesterday. One, put forward by Gen Sanchez, portrayed an orderly, steadily-escalating siege, in which every effort was taken to avoid harming bystanders. The alternative version, presented by neighbours in Mosul, was of a chaotic free-for-all in which no effort was made to usher local residents to safety.

There was, however, general agreement that Saddam`s sons and grandson had been betrayed by an informant, who some neighbours alleged was the owner of the house, Nawaf al Zaidan, a wealthy businessman and a member of Saddam Hussein`s clan.

Gen Sanchez refused to identify the informant, who now stands to receive a $30m (£18.6m) reward. The general described Tuesday`s assault as a "cordon and knock" operation. The house was surrounded before soldiers with a megaphone ordered those inside to surrender."

US troops went up to the front door and knocked. Nawaf al Zaidan opened the door and was detained. Shalan, his son came up in a BMW and he was also detained", said Raed Mohamed, a 20-year old whose family lives opposite the house. "The Americans went back to the house and were about to break in, when people in the house shot and they were wounded and fell."

Gen Sanchez said that the gunfire had come from an area on the first floor, encased in thick walls and bullet-proof glass. He said four American soldiers had been wounded in that first assault. They were evacuated by helicopter. Over the next two hours, the US troops continued to "prep the objective", in Gen Sanchez`s words, with an onslaught on the hardened first-floor room using grenades, rockets and heavy machine guns. After that failed to dislodge the defenders, Kiowa helicopters were called in to target the room with rockets.

At midday, a second attempt was made to storm the building. American soldiers managed to reach the ground floor but once more came under fire as they tried to move up. They withdrew and again resorted to yet heavier weapons. At about 1pm, the US assault team fired 10 TOW anti-tank missiles at the strong-room.

General Sanchez insisted everything had been done to avoid harming local civilians. But several residents wondered why the American troops did not opt for a slow siege and allow people to escape in safety before the onslaught began.

As it happened in mid-morning, most homes only had women and children in them. "We ran from room to room trying to find the best place to shelter. We were crying and calling out Allah Akbar (God is Great)," said Leila Mohamed, Raed`s mother, a secondary school teacher who was with her daughters, aged 12 and 13.

Nabil Ahmed, a local resident, had his left arm in a sling. He said he had been shot by an American soldier when he was on his way home from night duty at the town`s electric power station. "An American soldier let me through, but then another one nearer to the house got out a pistol and shot at the car. My friend who was with me drove me to hospital," Mr Ahmed said.

Two bullet holes are visible in the car, one of them through the windscreen. As he spoke, four US soldiers and an Iraqi civilian came into the house to check damage and offer either to make repairs or give compensation. Upstairs glass and rubble littered the bed and a huge chunk of masonry had been eaten out of the roof parapet.

A hole the size of a football had been punched through the house wall. But Mr Ahmed did not want to let the soldiers in to survey the damage. "The people who shot me, I don`t want them in my house," he muttered. "They should have informed people once they`d surrounded the villa so everyone could get out."

Although the porticoed mansion is an imposing building on a street corner, the houses behind it in the al Masaraf district of Mosul are modest with small front yards. Umm Yahya, a mother of four, who lives two doors from the gutted mansion, recalled how eight US soldiers came into her house, did a quick search with their guns pointing at her before going on to her roof. All her front window glass was later blasted out and the black front gates are peppered with bullet holes.

She displayed the twisted metal from a rocket which she found in her front garden. "I`m definitely glad that those two men are dead and I would like their father to go too", she said. "But it was terrifying. The shooting was non-stop."

Gen Sanchez said that multiple techniques were used to verify that Saddam`s two sons were among the dead. Pictures were shown to four members of the ousted regime, including Saddam`s former personal secretary, General Abid Hamid Mahmud. X-rays of one of the corpses were also found to be consistent with Uday`s injuries uffered in a 1996 assassination attempt.

Thirdly, the teeth of the dead men were compared with dental records. In Uday`s case there was a 90% match, Gen Sanchez said, because of injuries to his face. In Qusay`s case, the match was 100%. The US military authorities were confident enough to identify Uday and Qusay on Tuesday before DNA tests, but the Pentagon was yesterday debating whether to release pictures that might help convince Iraqis that the two brothers were dead. Some officials believed the pictures were too horrific to publish.



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Silence of the grave
Saddam`s two slain sons can tell no tales

Leader
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

As Jack Straw says, it would have been preferable had Uday and Qusay Hussein not been killed. Many may feel that Saddam`s odious sons richly deserved their fate at the hands of US special forces in Mosul. But had they been taken alive, they might in time have provided invaluable information about Iraq`s arms programmes, the whereabouts of any extant weapons of mass destruction, the former regime`s view of al-Qaida or, for example, Saddam`s past dealings with US governments. They might even have revealed their father`s whereabouts.

A public trial in which the two men were called to account for their crimes might have proved a cathartic moment for the Iraqi nation, demonstrating that war can bring justice. None of this is now possible. It is unclear how hard US forces tried to obtain a peaceful surrender. Little thought seems to have been given to mounting a siege or subduing the men by non-lethal means after they initially opened fire. It is disappointing that the many sensitive questions upon which the two men might have shed light remain unanswered as a result.

Uday and Qusay`s deaths have a symbolic value for the Bush administration akin to the toppling of Saddam`s statue during the final assault on Baghdad. Demoralised US soldiers who would rather go home may now feel a bit better about their mission. Ordinary Iraqis may feel greater confidence that the Saddam era really has ended. It is possible that the promised, large reward for the Mosul informant who tipped off the Americans may encourage the betrayal of Saddam himself. For George Bush, facing rising Democratic party criticism of his pre-war intelligence claims and falling public support for his costly and confused postwar policy, the killings are undoubtedly politically opportune. He will chalk them up as another signal victory in his "war on terror". If Mr Bush were a fighter pilot (which he sometimes seems to think he is), he would paint two silhouettes on his fuselage with crosses through them. This is the simplistic approach ridiculed by Democrat Dick Gephardt when he warned this week that "foreign policy isn`t a John Wayne movie, where we catch the bad guys, hoist a few cold ones, and then everything fades to black".

Despite White House self-congratulation, there is no evidence at present to suggest that Uday and Qusay directed, or were involved in the ongoing armed resistance to the occupation; and thus, no reason to conclude that this resistance will now necessarily fade. Two more US soldiers were killed yesterday in renewed attacks. Iraqis` frustrations over a basic lack of security and functioning infrastructure is growing. This will not be diminished by events in Mosul. Nor will a keen and spreading resentment that the occupation seems to be stretching out indefinitely, that real political control remains firmly in American hands, and that promises of a swift handover have not been honoured. The new, US-approved governing council has yet to demonstrate independence of action to Iraqis or even agree on a leader.

Perhaps the most significant Iraq-related event this week occurred not in Mosul but in New York, where Kofi Annan warned the US that "democracy cannot be imposed from the outside" and that a "clear timetable" was required for a restoration of sovereignty. "Iraqis need to know that the current state of affairs will come to an end soon," said UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. The governing council "must be empowered" without delay. As he blows away the smoke from the barrel of his six-shooter, Mr Bush would do well to heed those words.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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There is no defence for Guantanamo
Goldsmith`s US trial concessions are a sham and he should resign

Louise Christian
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

When it was first announced that two British citizens, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, were to stand trial before a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, it appeared that at long last Tony Blair would do something to stand up for their human rights. The government came under parliamentary pressure, with 200 MPs of all political parties, including senior Tories and Labour loyalists, signing a motion calling for the men`s repatriation to this country. Government ministers Chris Mullin and Baroness Symons were authorised to say that vigorous representations would be made and the government dispatched its most senior law officer, Lord Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general to the US for talks.

Now, however, it appears Tony Blair has done a u-turn and is not to stand up to the US government at all. The "concessions" announced by the attorney general yesterday - that British citizens will not face the death penalty and that a British lawyer may be allowed on to the defence team as a "consultant" - cannot disguise the simple fact that the proposed trial will breach all international norms.

It will be in front of judges who are military officers. They will be wearing the same uniforms as those who have held Feroz and Moazzam captive for over 18 months incommunicado and in conditions which can only be described as inhuman and degrading.

Detainees are incarcerated in wire cages 8ft by 6ft 6in, with no privacy and with the lights on all night. They are allowed out for exercise only twice a week for 20 minutes in a small, enclosed exercise yard. These are conditions which would challenge anybody`s mental health. During this time the detainees have been intimidated and coerced into speaking to interrogators without a lawyer being present. The situation is already one of grave abuse of human rights.

After 18 months of doing nothing about this, despite pleas and even court proceedings in the UK and US brought by the families, it finally appeared that the British government would have to do something. The attorney general will have been well aware that military commissions that are not independent of the US government (George Bush is head of the US armed forces) cannot satisfy the basic requirement for a fair trial as set out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 14, to which the US is a signatory. It is inconceivable that he will not have pointed this out to US officials and asked for a fair trial in a civil court. His representations have gone unheeded.

What should happen, and should have happened long ago, is for the British government to make formal diplomatic protests. The Pakistani government has done this and has secured the release, with no requirement for domestic court proceedings, of 30 to 40 of its nationals. A Pakistani passport is a better protection than a British one against US abuses.

Instead of making diplomatic protests, or even indicating that the concessions he has won are not enough, the attorney general appears to have been given instructions to present the situation as acceptable. The first hint that this would be the case was when Tony Blair told a television interviewer over the weekend that military commissions would be accepted provided they met our standards. It may be a long time since the prime minister practised law but surely he cannot be ignorant that a military commission is not capable of meeting the most fundamental requirement of all that a criminal court must be independent of the government.

The spectacle of the attorney general, the government`s most senior and respected law officer, appearing to agree that British citizens can be placed on trial in such a totally unfair tribunal is sickening. Twenty-five years ago he and I gave free advice together one evening a week at a legal clinic in Bethnal Green. The Peter Goldsmith I knew then was an idealistic young barrister doing pro bono work for the poor and oppressed. He would have been appalled at the racism that motivates the unfair treatment of these young Muslim men and the discriminatory treatment of them compared to US citizens, none of whom are in Guantanamo Bay. I cannot believe that he has changed so much that he will now allow his professional skills to be used to defend the indefensible.

People may choose to stay in government and not to criticise it because they think they are doing more good that way. But there has to be a bottom line. If Peter Goldsmith is unable to persuade Tony Blair to do the right thing by British citizens and say openly to the US that military commissions are wholly unacceptable, I believe the only decent thing he can do is resign.

· Louise Christian, of Christian Khan solicitors, is acting for the families of Feroz Abbasi, Tarek Dergoul and Martin Mubanga who are detained in Guantanamo Bay
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President Blair
Americans love our leader but may cause his downfall

Timothy Garton Ash, Washington
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

Seen from here, Tony Blair is certainly right and probably wrong. He is probably wrong about the moral and legal justification for the Iraq war, which he - more than anyone - presented as a crusade to prevent a rogue state imminently acquiring usable, long-distance weapons of mass destruction. He is certainly right that only by speaking with sympathy and passion to the bleeding heart of the US - as he did quite brilliantly to a joint meeting of Congress last Thursday - can we Europeans hope to influence American policy for the better.

I`m not sure how far people in Britain have appreciated just what an amazing performance that speech was. The assembled members of both houses of Congress are generous with their standing ovations on these occasions, but here they were jumping like a gym class. (17 times according to Fox News, 19 according to the Guardian.) At one point I saw Colin Powell give a little, incredulous shake of his head, as they rose to their feet yet again. It must have been good for their cholesterol levels.

Blair played all the old Anglo-American chords. There was the language of the King James Bible, familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers and recycled through the semantic mill of first and second world war transatlantic patriotism: our soldiers in Iraq "did not strive or die in vain". There was a touch of the Shakespearean: "11 September was not an isolated event/but a tragic prologue, Iraq another act/and many further struggles will be set/upon this stage before it`s over". (As so often with Blair, the syntax is a mite sloppy - what in this sentence is "it"? - but never mind. New Labour, New Shakespeare.) There was even an elfin smidge of Tolkien: "In another part of the globe there is shadow and darkness." In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.

And, of course, there were the obligatory little jokes about being a British prime minister in Washington. Having been shown the place where the British had burned the congressional library in 1814, he quipped: "I know this is kind of late, but sorry." That colloquial "kind of" is already halfway to the American conversational use of "like". Next time a British prime minister speaks to a joint session of Congress, following Churchill, Attlee, Thatcher and now Blair, he or she - brought up on a diet of the TV sitcom Friends - will probably say: "I know this is, like, late, but we`re, like, sahrreee."

More seriously, the speech was soaked from start to finish in that "language of liberty" which has made a common Anglo-American political discourse for four centuries. On my count, the words "freedom", "free" and "liberty" appeared 27 times. Would a homily by any other European leader come anywhere near that freedom count? It ended with this astonishing hymn to America: "Tell the world why you`re proud of America. Tell them that when the star-spangled banner starts, Americans get to their feet - Hispanics, Irish, Italians, central Europeans, east Europeans, Jews, Muslims, white, Asian, black, those who go back to the early settlers and those whose English is the same as some New York cab drivers` I`ve dealt with, but whose sons and daughters could run for this Congress. Tell them why Americans, one and all, stand upright and respectful. Not because some state official told them to, but because whatever race, colour or creed they are, being American means being free." Small wonder many Americans think that Blair is the best president they`ll never have.

Yet in between the purple flourishes, Blair delivered a fine, substantive speech about the state of the world today, making several sharp points of which all Europeans would be proud: that poverty is a major cause of terrorism; that America should want to work with Europe as a whole; that this partnership with Europe must be based on "persuasion, not command". "Yes," Blair said, adopting Donald Rumsfeld`s formula, "it is not the coalition that determines the mission, but the mission the coalition. But let us start by preferring a coalition and acting alone if we have to, not the other way round. True, winning wars is not easier that way, but winning the peace is." Again, he got them to applaud, while the camera cut to Rumsfeld, looking wry. So it went on: the need for a viable Palestinian state, supporting reform in Iran, war on want in Africa, environmental protection "beyond Kyoto".

A truly gobsmacking performance - and behind it there is a consistent strategic approach, on which he has now gambled his political future. Blair, alone among European leaders, has fully realised what 9/11 means to America: that Washington is at war, that this is America`s blitz - a fact of which you`re reminded every time you have to take off your shoes at the ferocious airport security controls, in case you`re a shoe-bomber.

Blair has calculated that you can only influence the hyperpower`s response by engaging fully with it. Influence? What influence? you may ask. The influence of a lapdog? But I think that`s wrong. I doubt that Bush went to the UN for the first time over Iraq because of Blair; he certainly did the second time. Blair has constantly pressed him to take seriously the Middle Eastern peace process between Israel and Palestine; now Bush is doing so, to no obvious electoral advantage. Cause and effect would be too large a claim, but a little influence may justly be inferred.

This is not much, but does anyone have a better way to influence a wounded giant? Can you name me a single point on which Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schröder have modified American policy for the better? If all Europe adopted Blair`s approach then the "but" in his emotionally sincere but also calculated "yes, but" would be more effective.

However, the logic of this post-9/11 strategic choice led him to join in a war that now looks increasingly difficult to justify on the grounds that Blair himself offered - emphasising, far more than the Bush administration did, the centrality of weapons of mass destruction as compared with regime change, Saddamite genocide or alleged links to al-Qaida. It`s a Shakespearean irony that Dr David Kelly, the British defence scientist caught in the crossfire between Alastair Campbell and the BBC, apparently committed suicide on the very day that Blair delivered his missionary speech to Congress. I`m sure that Blair always acted in good faith; I`m sure he convinced himself that the intelligence evidence credibly suggested a real and present danger of usable, deliverable weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But unless they find some more evidence soon, I cannot believe that it was true.

As I write, here in Washington, the White House is busily disowning the claim about Saddam`s uranium supplies from Africa that President Bush ascribed to British intelligence ("the British government has learned") in his state of the union address from that same congressional pulpit, a claim that Blair himself repeated standing next to the President at their joint press conference only last Thursday.

Were Blair to fall over the justification of the Iraq war, his Washington induced toppling would be just the latest in a rich line of Anglo-American ironies. We would then lose the best president America will never have - but Europe still might.

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This BBC row is not about sources - it is about power
Downing Street and Rupert Murdoch want revenge on the corporation

Jackie Ashley
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

What a difference a day makes. The daily skirmishes between the government and BBC have seen both sides at various points claiming victory. On Sunday, when the BBC confirmed Dr David Kelly had been "the source" for its claims about the mishandling of intelligence information, the government was bullish. Now, following reports that the Newsnight`s Susan Watts has a tape recording of her conversation with Dr Kelly, ministers are sounding less confident.

Yet the question now being asked is this: even if the BBC wins the battle (in other words is vindicated by the Hutton report), will it lose the war? Has the BBC, in defending Andrew Gilligan so robustly, brought about its own downfall?

For the word that recurs is "revenge". Downing Street insiders, ministers and backbench MPs are saying privately that No 10 intends to wreak vengeance on the BBC, whatever Lord Hutton decides. Forget palm pilots or tape-recordings; the real agenda now is to humble and curb Britain`s public service broadcaster. This is not a row about journalistic standards. It is a fight about power.

No 10`s original excuse for its attack on the BBC was the Gilligan story. At first it looked as though Alastair Campbell had a genuine spasm of anger at a particular act of reporting; that this then bubbled through his irritation at the corporation`s handling of the war; and after that - well, things got out of hand. He lost it on Channel 4 News. To start with, the government seemed to have blundered into a fight and couldn`t find a way back. Now I am not so sure. I think it wanted this row all along.

There were so many moments in the story of the reporting of the government`s selling of the Iraq war when No 10 could have calmed things down. On every occasion, instead, they ratcheted it up again. Even now, in the gloomy pause after Dr Kelly`s death, while Blair is saying little in public, New Labour operators are charging around briefing in private, upping the odds. They want to get the governors. They want to get Greg Dyke. They want a new system of regulation. The licence fee is far too generous. Get the message, BBC? As Chris Smith pointed out in the Financial Times yesterday, any attempt to link recent events to the BBC`s future is little short of blackmail.

The BBC prime crime has not been sloppy reporting or an anti-war agenda. Its crime is to have pointed the finger at gaping holes in the government`s case for going to war to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. If Gilligan had reported a single source to the effect that WMD were a threat, and that Campbell et al should have been more bellicose, would this row have happened? Don`t be absurd. It is not the detail of language the government objects to; it is the whole story.

The BBC has done what good journalism ought to do: probing and questioning insistently - things that the government would rather not discuss. During the war it reported and commented about what was happening in the sand and cities of Iraq. It did not do what some US broadcasters - notably Fox - did, and act as a patriotic national cheerleader.

Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is what Blair must have fantasised about having on his side. The network was raucously pro-administration, delivering to George Bush the rightwing commentaries and inspiring pictures he needed to help him conduct the war. How convenient it would be for any centreright, interventionist British leader to have his own, Union Jack-branded Fox.

If you doubt the influence of the Murdoch agenda on all this, look at any newsstand. The Murdoch papers have acted as the most amazingly disciplined attack force on behalf of the government, savaging the BBC in identical terms, from the Sun, to the Times, to the News of the World, using columnists, editorials and front-page splashes to pursue the cause. The attack on the BBC, orchestrated by No 10, has animated News International like nothing since its move to Wapping.

The stakes are almost as high. This time, with the communications bill soon to become law - even as amended - Murdoch has a chance of getting into terrestrial British TV. If he was able to curb the BBC in its funding and its journalism, shoving it into a narrow little box, from which timid establishment- style reporting and dreary documentaries were all that trickled out, he would be in business. He hates the BBC not because of the licence fee or its alleged liberal bias, but because it is popular and trusted. Everything his papers are now doing is designed to attack that popularity and trust.

Those papers have been intertwined with New Labour ever since it became clear that Blair would be in Downing Street. Blair wooed them, and from the first Murdoch, sensing a winner, responded.

Sun and Times journalists were courted and favoured with leaks, which they could promote as scoops; Murdoch editors were treated as visiting royalty when they were entertained at No 10 and Chequers. It is shameless, unabashed, and was driven both by Blair and by that high-minded socialist and critic of journalistic standards, Alastair Campbell.

Why do they do it? Because the deal is frank, and even on its own terms, honest. Murdoch wants media power and Blair wants reliable media support. So long as nobody takes journalistic principle or the public interest too seriously, then there is a deal to be done. One day, if Murdoch gets his way, he will be in a position of terrifying influence over any future government. So this is a dangerous time for the BBC. In some ways it has been here before. In the wake of the Falklands war, when Alasdair Milne was director general, Margaret Thatcher berated him about BBC funding and journalism in terms almost identical to those we hear from Labour now. John Birt had his rows too.

But this is worse. Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke have refused to play their allotted role as New Labour toadies. This is brave since they must know that they, and the BBC, have nowhere else to go. The Tories would privatise them like a shot. Now that the Conservative manifesto is likely to suggest slashing the licence fee, it is not hard to see a vengeful New Labour starting a Dutch auction, cutting and cutting. Then it will be curtains for the governors and the hunt will be on for a more reliable director general.

The excuse will be, no doubt, all those rubbishy game shows, pop quiz programmes and yoof channels. The assault will be muffled by high-minded essays by Peter Mandelson and Gerald Kaufman on the subject of journalistic standards - they both have PhDs in that - and numerous journalists who are miffed that they haven`t been given enough airtime will go along for the ride. But no one should be in any doubt that New Labour is now deliberately menacing the independence of one of the bastions of British pluralism. This is a moment when the BBC needs its friends.

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Wenn man bei Politikern anfängt von Geschichte zu reden, bedeutet das meist nichts anderes, als eine Ablagerung auf der Müllhalde der Geschichte.

An elusive judgment
David McKie
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair, as he keeps telling us, is content to be judged by history, a court to which others from Hitler to Castro have also been happy to entrust their ultimate reputations. But since it`s not clear how long history is likely to take to arrive at its ultimate judgment on Blair, and since I could not remember reading its verdicts on either Hitler or Castro, I thought it might be worth going down to the court of history to try to discover the likely timescale.

To those who have not been there before, the court of history comes as a bit of a shock. I`d expected to find an imposing modern building with computer screens whirring away behind every window. But in fact what I finally found, at the end of a dingy alleyway, was something more like an early Victorian warehouse overdue for redevelopment.

The scene within was even more disturbing: a huge room, crammed with people who seemed to be clerks, many with beards reaching down to their knees and a few with beards grown so long that they drooped through the cracks in the floorboards into the cellars beneath. Everywhere disconsolate claimants were milling about, some in the uniforms of second world war generals, some dressed as crusaders, a handful in woad.

At the very far end of the rostrum one could just discern a tribunal of sapient figures seated around a table. A benevolent elderly gentleman, noting my amazement, came forward to offer his services.

"Who are all these people?" I asked. "They are waiting for the judgments of the court of history," he replied. "You`ve heard of the law`s delays? Well, here they`re particularly serious. We have cases waiting here which go right back to Cain and Abel.

"Look, there`s the emperor Nero. His advisers have put in fresh evidence: a new biography which says he was never the villain public opinion thinks he was and Tacitus cannot be trusted. Many people here have come, like him, to appeal to the court of history against the verdicts of the court of public opinion.

"That woman in red, who`s whispering in his ear, for example, Lucretia Borgia. Look, I`ve got a photocopy of her latest submission: a piece from the Daily Telegraph article, `Lucretia Borgia: sex-mad poisoner or stateswoman?` It seems there was an exhibition in Rome last year at which an expert said the Borgias were victims of biased accounts based on malicious rumour. `Lucretia poisoned no one,` this fellow apparently said. `She was poisoned by the pen of history and 19th-century romanticism ... nor were claims that she had an incestuous relationship with her father true, probably.` "

"Don`t you just love that `probably`?" I exclaimed. "Of course", my mentor replied, "so do we all. But you see how difficult it makes things for the court of history. It`s had this case before it for the best part of 400 years and even now it has to consider fresh submissions."

"Would that," I asked "be the case the court is hearing today?" My adviser laughed so uproariously at this question that even Lucretia and Nero appeared alarmed. "Why, bless you, no," he replied. "I`d say they`d get round to that in around the year 2050. Today it`s Henry II and the death of Becket. I gather Henry`s advisers put in new evidence some years ago that when he expressed his wish to be rid of his turbulent priest he was trying to save his kingdom from rule by religious fundamentalists."

But surely, I protested, that matter had been settled. Within 18 months of Becket`s murder, Henry had been reconciled with the church after admitting that, while he`d never wished for or ordered the killing of Becket, his wild words might well have occasioned it. My mentor smiled kindly on my naivety. But that, he said, was really a political deal, shored up with appropriate penances. Political deals might be good enough for the 12th-century papacy, but the court of history had to deal with the deeper realities.

At this point an agitation at the far end of the room signalled that the hearing was over. The judges swept silently out to the street. I thought that I recognised Herodotus, Thucydides, the Venerable Bede and Macaulay. They did not announce their ruling, but rumour carried it down the hall: case adjourned for 100 years. "This is not the court of public opinion, you see," my mentor said admiringly. "There it`s verdict first, and evidence afterwards. We at the court of history don`t do things so precipitately."

I thought of Blair, not to mention Castro and Hitler, and the long wait they might face. "Do these people ever decide on anything?" I asked in agitation. My mentor simply smiled. And as he did so, the whole assembly - the clerks with their beards, the litigants and their advisers - suddenly melted away. In their place, I now saw simply a throng of historians, young and old, dead and alive, all strenuously disputing each other`s conclusions. "You have understood!" said my mentor. "There is no court of history. There are no objective, indisputable conclusions. Take our friend Bede, for instance. Even he is sometimes contentious. Even he sometimes gets things wrong. And he is a saint."

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Three American Soldiers Killed in Iraq

Thursday July 24, 2003 8:29 AM


BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Three American soldiers were killed Thursday when they came under attack from gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in northern Iraq, a military spokeswoman said.

The soldiers were from the 101st Airborne Division. It wasn`t known exactly where attack took place or if any soldiers were wounded, said Spc. Nicole Thompson, spokeswoman for V Corps in Baghdad. Reports were still coming in from the field, she added.

The

participated in Tuesday`s raid a house in Mosul where Saddam`s sons Odai and Qusai were killed, along with a teenager believed to be Qusai`s son, and a bodyguard.

U.S. forces were concerned that the deaths of the brothers would motivate insurgents in Iraq and lead to more attacks.

The deaths brought to 158 the number of American servicemen killed in action since the war began March 20, surpassing by 11 the death toll in the 1991 Gulf War.

On late Tuesday and Wednesday, two American soldiers were killed in separate attacks on their convoys, including one near the Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad, and another in Ramaldi, 60 miles west of the capital, killing one soldier and wounding

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Patrick Cockburn: The killing of Saddam`s sons will not end these attacks on Allied forces
Many of the guerrillas are former Baathists, but they are fighting for their own interests and not to restore Saddam to power
24 July 2003


In December 1996, Uday, the eldest son of Saddam Hussein, was driving in a white Mercedes through the al-Mansur suburb of Baghdad when three men waiting in ambush opened fire with Kalashnikovs, killing the driver. Uday cowered down behind the dashboard. One of the gunmen fired eight bullets into him at almost point blank range. Much to the disappointment of Iraqis, Uday survived after prolonged surgery, but ever afterwards walked with a pronounced limp. It was the nearest any assassins, despite many attempts, had come to killing a member of Saddam`s immediate family, of whom Uday was unquestionably the most hated. Not surprisingly, the news of his death, along with that of his younger brother Qusay, was greeted with fusillades of joy in Baghdad.

The White House showed almost equal enthusiasm. It is, after all, the first really good news that the US administration has had out of Iraq since the fall of Baghdad on 9 April. Suddenly the great lumbering American army in Iraq is shown to be doing something effective. It will also have an impact within Iraq for the same reason. The great majority of Iraqis may be fairly sure that Saddam is not coming back. But when the first tape recordings of his voice started being broadcast a month ago one could sense a mood of caution growing in Baghdad. That Saddam was demonstrably still alive increased the sense that the US was not quite in control.

At the same time, the fact that Uday and Qusay could not find secure hiding places shows the lack of the support for the old regime. They were found staying in the house of a man who claimed to be a relative and who was therefore likely to be under surveillance. Other senior members of the group who ruled Iraq under Saddam have either given themselves up or been captured in their own houses. There is no sign that they remain organised or capable of resisting the occupation.

It is therefore by no means clear that the killing Uday and Qusay by US troops in Mosul - even if it is followed by the death of capture of Saddam himself - will end or seriously affect the escalating guerrilla war against the US occupation. There is no evidence that the attacks were being orchestrated by Saddam or his two sons. Paul Bremer, the chief US official in Iraq, says they are not being centrally co-ordinated. Though at the same time he has repeatedly claimed that the assaults are being carried out by the last "desperate remnants" of the old regime.

This is a little misleading. No doubt many of of the increasingly sophisticated ambushes are the work of former members of the Iraqi security forces, the Republican Guard, army and the Baath party. But this is a reflection of the US attempt, in the over-confident days immediately after the fall of Baghdad, to marginalise these powerful groups which, together with their families, number two or three million. They are fighting for their own interests and not necessarily to restore Saddam to power.

The guerrillas have many motives. There is outraged Iraqi nationalism, sometimes allied to Islamic militancy. So far, at least, this is only beginning to spread to the Shia majority. But this could develop quickly if the Shia clergy decide that the US will not let their community take power through free elections. There is also the natural friction between ordinary Iraqis and the American and British occupation forces. Neither has really come to terms that, for all the ferocious authoritarianism of Saddam Hussein, much of the Iraqi population is traditionally armed. US soldiers drawn from the Florida National Guard even managed to shoot two Iraqis in Baghdad celebrating the death of Uday and Qusay by firing their guns into the air.

For the guardsmen from Florida, Iraq must seem a very strange place. Not only does every Iraqi home have a sub-machine gun, but the family arsenal also often contains a rocket-propelled grenade launcher or a mortar. In the early 1990s, Saddam tried to buy back some of the heavy weapons held by the general population. One tribe in southern Iraq even turned up with three tanks which they had secured during the Iran-Iraq war.

Looting has never really died away since the fall of Baghdad. Iraqis feel the need for personal weapons more than ever. Many taxi drivers in Baghdad now carry pistols, which they never did before. In the countryside farmers often keep all their wealth quite literally under the bed since they have not trusted banks ever since the currency collapsed in 1991. One Iraqi pointed out to me that "if you robbed a house in Los Angeles you would be lucky to find $500 in cash. If you did the same in Iraq you would often find up to $30,000 in hundred dollar bills."

If a US soldier knocks on the door at three in the morning he is likely to be greeted by a farmer with a gun in his hand. Not surprisingly he opens fire, and the farmer is added to the grim statistics issued at the end of search operations of Iraqis killed while resisting the occupation, with the implication that they were fervent supporters of Saddam Hussein. Some of this friction between occupied and occupier is natural in any country. But it is worse in Iraq. It is an extraordinary diverse country. Each town has its own traditions. For instance robbers frequently stop cars at gunpoint just outside the town of Ramadi on road between Amman and Baghdad. This may look as if it has something to do with the present political situation, but in fact Ramadi has been a stronghold of highwaymen for well over a century.

The US and Britain - not that British influence is very noticeable in the councils of the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority - will only gain control of Iraq if they can create a credible provisional government. In the triumphal atmosphere in April and May the US wanted to delay such a council`s formation and give it only advisory powers. It was only as guerrilla attacks intensified in June that prospective council members noticed US officials showing any enthusiasm for a council with real powers.

It might work, but it will not be easy. Iraqi police in Falluja have already staged a protest march demanding that US troops leave the town as a condition for them going back to work. Paul Bremer is still saying that the capture or killing of Saddam Hussein is his main priority. Clearly this would be a boost to George Bush and Tony Blair. But it also has disadvantages. Ever since he invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein has been almost the perfect enemy against whom it was not difficult to rally support. His ostentatious cruelty was easy to demonise.

This was true internationally and also in Iraq. In the three-week war which overthrew him in March and April, most of the Iraqi armed forces - including the supposedly élite Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard - refused to fight. Many Iraqis who dislike the occupation still prefer it to the old regime. But the death or capture of Saddam would remove this threat and a central justification for US and British troops staying in the country.

The writer is co-author of `Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession`
24 July 2003 10:00

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Was soll man davon halten, die beiden haben direkt auf sich aufmerksam gemacht.

Car gives clue to fate of Saddam`s sons

A blue BMW with shattered windscreen and bullet holes stands outside the house in Mosul where Uday and Qusay Hussein were shot dead on Tuesday in a fierce gun battle with American troops. The wreck is a perfect match for a car in which Sergeant Joshua Gilbreth, of the US Army, claims to have spotted Uday Hussein driving through Mosul on Monday night. He says that Saddam’s elder son spotted him staring and smiled and waved before speeding away. Sergeant Gilbreth told his friends about the incident, but they all thought he was joking. “I went over and looked at it,” Sergeant Gilbreth said yesterday, “and I think it’s the same car.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-755063,00.html

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July 24, 2003

Violence of night yields grim crop of bodies
From James Hider in Baghdad



EVEN before the blue metal gate of Baghdad’s mortuary opens at 8am, crowds of stony-faced men and keening black-robed women have gathered in the street outside. Cheap wooden coffins are strapped to taxis or loaded on vans. Night is the deadliest time in Baghdad and there is always a morning crop of bodies.
The Times spent a day inside this grim repository. By the time it closed at 8pm, it had received 23 bodies; 18 were shooting victims. That, the staff said, was a quiet day. On some days they receive 40 bodies, or more.

With just a few poorly equipped police to back them in a city teeming with weapons, American forces have been unable to stem Baghdad’s murder rate. Lawlessness and anarchy remain the norm.

The working day of the mortuary’s six overburdened pathologists — who hack and saw in the crowded laboratory — provides a catalogue of the grisly ways that citizens meet their end in one of the world’s most dangerous cities.

First through the gates was the family of Muhammad Abed al-Hussein, a 17-year-old who had died overnight in hospital. He had been hit in the head by a falling bullet last week, when viewers mistook a defiant television broadcast by Saddam Hussein to be news of his arrest and let off volleys of celebratory fire.

Next came Ahmed al-Najar, visibly in shock, who was collecting the body of his younger brother, Omar, 21. The graduate spoke excellent English and had wanted to help his country to recover from the war, so had signed up as a $10-a-day translator for the US Army. But the military failed to provide him with a flak jacket or helmet and Omar was killed when assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Humvee in which he was riding.

By 9.30am there was a throng of relatives in the concrete courtyard, jostling around coffins, some threatening the tired morticians: many Iraqis dislike the idea of a post-mortem examination, especially when the air is so thick with the odour of putrification and formaldehyde that it is difficult to breathe. But this is the only way to a death certificate and legal burial.

Grieving parents of a ten-year-old boy killed in a hit-and-run on the chaotic streets shuffled in quietly, followed by the body of a young man shot in the street for no apparent reason, the killer unknown and still on the loose. “Iraqis are monsters. We are supposed to be Muslims. What happened to us?” the man’s uncle moaned.

Many blame the Americans and their manifest inability to curtail the carnage. “Is this freedom? It’s freedom to die!” one man spat. Another added, in English: “It’s the people who make the freedom. Why blame the Americans always?”

But the American contribution to the body count soon became apparent. An elderly hospital driver pulled a stiff body from his van, saying that he had been shot dead by US troops the night before. “F*** Bush, f*** America,” he muttered as he slammed the door and pulled away.

Yet others pointed at the blanket-draped corpse and laughed. “Ali Baba,” one man said. A looter, in other words, a breed universally detested by Baghdad’s residents and the scourge of post-war Iraq.

A silver Toyota pulled up, windscreen half-covered in streaks of blood that had leaked from the coffin tied to the roof. Angry men said that the body inside was that of Nasser Salim Rahim, 19, killed by a single sniper bullet the night before as he was riding in a car with four other men.

“It was the Americans,” an uncle snapped. The young men had been passing an American unit in the city centre when the bullet struck, spraying the other passengers with gore.

The bodies rolled in as the morning turned to afternoon: a young man shot dead in the street by thieves; a father of three who was playing football for his local team when three men in the crowd pulled out pistols and shot him. “If his family knows who killed him, there will be revenge killings,” a friend waiting for the body said.

Still the bodies came: a taxi driver shot twice in the head by a thief, who took his car and dumped his body; a mother and son, shot dead an hour before in a tribal dispute dating back 35 years. They arrived together under blankets, a yellow foot sticking out from under the covers.

Next was the body of a man killed at a wedding after the groom’s family took offence at a request from the bride’s side that no guns be allowed in for celebratory fire. The guests pulled their guns, killing three people; the wedding was cancelled.

Then came an elderly woman, blown up when someone threw a grenade into her house, another seemingly random act that could happen only in a lawless metropolis emerging from decades of war and repression, overlaid on centuries of tribal rifts.

A police officer brought in the body of a middle-aged man shot by his brother in an inheritance dispute. “We have 50 policemen in our station, but only two cars and no guns. We can’t keep control,” Sergeant Esam Numer said.

Finally, another policeman pulled up at the wheel of a smart grey BMW, two bullet holes in the bonnet. Slumped in the back seat was the owner, a bullet through his right eye. He fell victim to a well-known criminal released with thousands of others by Saddam in the last days of the war.

At 8pm the morgue closed. Tariq al-Ibrahim, the chief pathologist, swabbed down the floors and locked up for another night. “This was a quiet day, for these times,” he said with a smile.

Out in the city, gunfire crackled in the twilight.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-755027,00.html

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July 24, 2003
F.C.C. Media Rule Blocked in House in a 400-to-21 Vote
By STEPHEN LABATON


WASHINGTON, July 23 — The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation today to block a new rule supported by the Bush administration that would permit the nation`s largest television networks to grow bigger by owning more stations.

The vote, which was 400 to 21, sets the stage for a rare confrontation between the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House, because there is strong support in the Senate for similar measures, which seek to roll back last month`s decision by the Federal Communications Commission to raise the limit on the number of television stations a network can own. The F.C.C. has ruled that a single company can own television stations reaching 45 percent of the nation`s households, but the House measure would return the ownership cap to 35 percent.

Only a few weeks ago, support for the F.C.C.`s move by House Republican leaders had been expected to counter the Senate uprising. But many House members from both parties have evidently taken note of the vocal resistance to the F.C.C. action by many members of the public and a broad spectrum of conservative and liberal lobbying groups — from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization for Women.

Today`s House rebuke of the F.C.C. was embedded in a spending bill. The White House, which has threatened to veto the bill if the network provision remains in it, today sought to play down the lopsided size of the vote. Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said that presidential advisers had recommended approval of the legislation so that it could proceed to a House-Senate conference committee where the network ownership provision might be stripped out.

If, as is becoming more likely, the provision survives in final legislation, President Bush will face a difficult political predicament. He could carry out his veto threat and alienate some of his traditional constituents, which include several conservative organizations opposed to a number of new rules adopted by the F.C.C. Or, he could sign the legislation, abandon the networks and undercut his own advisers who have recommended that he reject the legislation.

A number of Republicans said privately today that they were surprised that the president would be willing to expend significant political capital over the issue; others said the White House felt compelled to defend the decisions of a regulatory agency whose leaders it had appointed.

Judging political sentiment from today`s vote, a veto could be easily overridden in the House, and perhaps in the Senate, where there is also broad support for repealing some of the F.C.C.`s new media rules.

Five weeks ago, the Senate Commerce Committee adopted a provision similar to the one the House passed today. The Senate committee passed the provision by voice vote after a wide majority of Democrats and Republicans on the committee expressed support for it.

At the time of that vote, network executives and top aides to Michael K. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman and architect of the new rules, predicted that the effort to overturn the rules would die in the House because its leadership had supported them. The vote, a clear repudiation of Mr. Powell, suggested that he miscalculated the widespread opposition to the new rules.

One of the main sponsors of the Senate provision, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and other Senate supporters of reversing the rules include Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, and Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on both the Senate Commerce Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the F.C.C.`s budget. Senate officials said they expected that a measure to roll back the F.C.C.`s decision would reach the floor soon after the Senate returned from its summer recess in September.

Supporters of the effort to overrule the F.C.C. said that today`s action demonstrated that the leadership in the House, as well as the White House, had lost control over the legislation.

"The House has now repudiated the F.C.C.`s attempted giveaway of the public airways to national media giants based in New York and L.A.," said Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and author of the network ownership provision in the bill. "I hope the administration is listening and will fix its flawed policy, so citizens can get accurate, free-flowing information — the lifeblood of democracy."

Administration officials appeared committed to the new rules and to opposing Congressional attempts to repeal them.

After the vote, Stephen Friedman, the president`s top economic adviser, dismissed the assertion by the legislation`s backers that further media consolidation would reduce the diversity of voices on the airwaves. He said that if all four networks reached 45 percent of the nation`s homes, that would demonstrate that there is competition in the media market.

Asked in a brief telephone interview how the administration might be able to turn the tide in Congress, he said, "I think we try to educate the members and make the case."

He also conceded that he was not a media specialist and that he was only beginning to understand the political forces at play. "The politics I`m still getting an education on," he said.

A number of Democratic presidential contenders, meanwhile, have criticized the rules and the consolidation in the media industry. They include Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor; Senator John Edwards; Senator John Kerry; and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich.

But traditional allies of the administration, most notably a coalition of religious and conservative groups, have also joined liberal organizations in attacking the new rules. The religious and conservative organizations have said they fear the growth of the media may reduce their access to the airwaves. They also blame the networks for programming that they say is increasingly violent and indecent. The coalition includes the Parents Television Council, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Consumers Union, the Writers Guild of America and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

The concern over the growth of media conglomerates transcends traditional party lines in part because of the personal experiences of many politicians. Congressional aides say lawmakers fear that they could suffer political problems if there are too few media outlets in their home districts, making it more difficult for them to convey their messages to their constituents and increasing the influence of the remaining newspapers and stations.

Mr. Powell and the networks have responded with the assertion that without some regulatory relief for the networks, free over-the-air television could be eliminated. The networks say that they need to find new ways to raise revenues to support expensive programming like the Olympic Games and the Super Bowl, and that owning more stations will give them the money to do so.

Mr. Powell, who had been largely silent during the Congressional debate, today issued a statement defending the F.C.C.`s rules.

"Our democracy is strong," he said, saying that critics have overlooked the various ways the public receives information besides broadcast television. "It would be irresponsible to ignore the diversity of viewpoints provided by cable, satellite and the Internet."

Network executives agreed. They have been unhappy that the commission under Mr. Powell did not relax the rules even further and have suggested that they may bring a lawsuit to challenge even the new rules.

"NBC was disappointed, and today`s action by the House was a huge step backwards in giving broadcasters the regulatory relief needed to compete with cable," Shannon Jacobs, an NBC spokeswoman, said.

There are also signs that investors are nervous about the possible reimposition of the old rules. Stock prices of several of the parent companies of the networks — General Electric, Owner of NBC; Viacom, owner of CBS; and the News Corporation, which owns Fox — have declined slightly from their highs in early-to-mid June, around time of the approval of the new regulations. The broader market indexes, including media stocks more generally, continued to rise through mid-July. The shares of the companies were little changed today.

The networks had sought the elimination of the cap entirely, or at least raising it well above 45 percent. Two of the networks, CBS and Fox, are already slightly over the 35 percent limit and had been allowed to do on a temporary basis, pending the rule change.

The F.C.C.`s rule change had touched off deep divisions within the broadcasting industry.

The networks` local affiliate stations and smaller owners of broadcast stations had sought to keep the cap at 35 percent, saying they feared that any further growth in the networks` power would be detrimental to viewers in a variety of ways: homogenizing entertainment, discouraging local news coverage in favor of national broadcasts, and reducing the commercial leverage of the local stations to offer independent programming.

The networks` stakes in the fight was evident this week as their lobbyists desperately attempted to defeat the House measure. Congressional aides said that lobbyists for the News Corporation helped to circulate a one-sentence petition, endorsed by House leaders, saying that the undersigned members would vote to sustain a presidential veto.

Attached to the memo, the aides said, was a set of policy "talking points" on the merits of the new rule that had been prepared by lobbyists from CBS`s owner, Viacom, and the Walt Disney Company, parent of ABC.




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American soldiers in Mosul watched as flames erupted from a house after it was hit by a missile on Tuesday. A fierce gun battle at the house killed Saddam Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusay, and two other people.

July 24, 2003
U.S. Defends Move to Storm House Where Hussein Brothers Were Hiding
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER


WASHINGTON, July 23 — Military commanders in Iraq and Pentagon officials here today defended the decision to storm the house in Mosul where Saddam Hussein`s sons were hiding rather than try to encircle it and force them to surrender, much as the United States did with Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama in 1989.

"The option to surround the house and wait out the individuals in the house was considered and rejected," Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the allied ground commander in Iraq, told reporters today. "The commanders on the ground made the decision to go ahead and execute and accomplish their mission of finding, fixing, killing or capturing."

He added, "That was the right decision."

In attacking the house after gunfire erupted from inside, American forces killed the two sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, and two other people. Officials said today that while the opportunity to gain intelligence from the two men was lost, the blame for their deaths was their own.

"If a person is determined to fight to the death, then they may very well have that opportunity," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters today. "It was not a choice that the United States or the coalition made, it was a choice that the people inside that building made."

At the White House, President Bush declared that the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s sons was "the clearest sign yet that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back."

But at the same time, appearing in the Rose Garden with L. Paul Bremer III, the senior American civil administrator in Iraq standing at his side, Mr. Bush appealed for far more international military and financial contributions to postwar Iraq. Two of America`s major allies, France and Germany, both of which opposed the war, have said they will not contribute occupation forces under the current United Nations resolutions.

Mr. Bush seized on the deaths of what he termed "two of the regime`s chief henchmen" as evidence that despite continuing American casualties, Iraq would soon be speeding toward elections, a new constitution and a new currency.

Capturing the sons might have yielded an intelligence bonanza and scored propaganda points by permitting the Iraqis to put them on public trial, allied officials said today.

"We wanted them to stand trial, but this happened," Gerard Russell, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office, told Agence France-Presse today in Basra in southern Iraq.

"What matters is that Iraqis now know that Saddam and his regime will not return to power and that there is a transitional Governing Council running Iraq," he said.

Waiting out the two sons posed several risks, military officials said. Escape was one risk. The second-story of the house was fortified with bulletproof glass and barricades, and commanders feared that it might have an escape tunnel to nearby buildings. "The key to success in an operation like that is speed and secrecy," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told reporters at the Pentagon. "That`s the most important thing. I`d just hate to be up here asking the question, `How come it took you three hours and they got away?` "

A prolonged siege could have given guerrillas time to fire on the 200 American forces surrounding the house, officials said. In 1989. Mr. Noriega surrendered after a 10-day standoff with American forces, but he had taken refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama, obviously a much more problematic target than the house in Mosul. Finally, administration officials said, capturing the sons alive could have provided the guerrillas with ready-made symbols of American occupation and a rallying point for resistance. "Nobody is sitting around here second-guessing this one," said a senior administration official. "The important thing is that word spreads in Iraq that these guys are gone for good."

In meetings at the White House today, some top aides said they were relieved that the military operation happened to occur just as new details were coming out suggesting that the White House and the C.I.A. had both mishandled intelligence about Iraq`s nuclear program as they built the case for war.

Mr. Bush met this morning with Mr. Bremer, and reporters gathered in the Rose Garden could see him talking actively to his representative in Baghdad, Mr. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. When they emerged, Mr. Bush described the resistance in Iraq as a tactical annoyance.

"Now, with the regime of Saddam Hussein gone forever, a few remaining holdouts are trying to prevent the advance of order and freedom," Mr. Bush said. "They are targeting our success in rebuilding Iraq, they`re killing new police graduates, they`re shooting at people that are guarding the universities and power plants and oil facilities."

Mr. Bush said Mr. Bremer now has a "comprehensive strategy" to move toward democracy and Iraqi control of the country, though White House officials concede that the strategy bears little resemblance to the one they drew up before the war.

Mr. Bush never discussed the fact that Mr. Hussein had not been caught, though a senior Bush aide said over the weekend that it was still unclear whether Mr. Hussein was alive. One argument in favor of capturing the sons was that they probably knew where their father was hiding — though the chances they would talk were regarded as highly remote.

"Would they be incredibly valuable as intelligence assets? Yes,"said Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former Persian Gulf war commander. "Would it be extremely valuable to put them on trial before the Iraqi people? Yes."

"But it`s also almost nonsensical to risk losing them to escape, risk 40 days of a Waco standoff," he said.

Military officials said today that rules of engagement were established for the mission in the roughly 12 hours between the time an Iraqi informant tipped off the military to the sons` location on Monday night, and when the operation started at 10 a.m. on Tuesday in Mosul.

General Sanchez said today that the Americans initially tried to persuade the suspects to surrender, using an interpreter with a bullhorn. But when soldiers entered the house, they were met with small-arms fire and three Americans were injured.

"They offered the folks a surrender, the guys went in there, they got fired on," Gen. John M. Keane, the Army`s acting chief of staff, said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 23, 2003
Fischer in plea to US over Middle East
By Hugh Williamson, Romanus Otte and Wolfgang Proissl in Berlin


Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister, has urged the US not to lose sight of its responsibility to build a "new status quo" in the Middle East, a task he said could take decades.

"It has always been our view that the US, with its huge power, would find it relatively easy to move into Baghdad. However, it was also always our view that [with victory in Iraq], the US would become not a power in the Middle East but the power in the Middle East, with the ambition to shape a new status quo . . . This is a task to be measured not in weeks or months, but in years or decades." Mr Fischer added: "We are talking here not just about reconstruction, democratisation and modernisation of Iraq, but of the whole region."

His comments come at a politically sensitive time. Despite the killing of Saddam Hussein`s sons, the US still has its hands full in Iraq with security and political problems.

The German foreign minister`s views may receive a frosty reception in Washington, considering Germany firmly opposed the Iraq war and has refused to consider post-war military help unless a new United Nations resolution is adopted. However, in an apparent offer of European help, Mr Fischer stressed that while this task was primarily a US responsibility, it would also need to be based on a "collective effort" and "strategic dialogue" with Europe.

He said he regarded transatlantic relations "as a cornerstone of freedom and stability in the 21st century".

Mr Fischer also called for "creative thinking" on the need to build a more unified grouping of European Union states in Nato, as there will in future be an increasing overlap among European countries between Nato and EU membership.

"I believe we can come to a new approach [on this issue], based on agreement between Americans and Europeans," he said.

The minister recently suggested forming a "euro-group" within Nato, only to quickly bury the proposal after it met with disapproval in Washington. He called on EU member states not to unpick the draft at the EU`s Intergovernmental Conference starting in October, saying each country should set aside their special interests, or "national sacred cows".



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July 17, 2003
Q&A: Who`s Who on Iraq`s Governing Council

From the Council on Foreign Relations, July 17, 2003


What is the makeup of the Governing Council of Iraq?

A diverse mixture of Iraqis--including recently returned exiles, tribal leaders, women, religious Muslim conservatives, and secular political leaders. Shiites, who account for 60 percent of the Iraqi population, hold 13 seats on the U.S.-appointed council; 12 seats are divided among Iraq`s main minorities: Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkmen.

Who is not on the council?

Powerful and, in some cases, stridently anti-U.S. Shiite religious leaders, such as Imam Muqtada al-Sadr, who have been organizing followers through mosques and local religious networks. Also excluded are Sunni Baathists--members of Saddam Hussein`s ruling Baath Party who U.S. officials hold responsible for continuing attacks against American forces. Some experts say both groups could threaten the council`s authority.

Is the council representative of the views of the Iraqi people?

It`s difficult to know. Its ethnic and religious makeup is far more representative than any previous Iraqi government, and the Shiite majority, for the first time in Iraqi history, has a leading voice in politics. The council also includes representatives not closely aligned with American views--including a communist and at least one Shiite representative whose group has ties with Iran. On the other hand, recently returned Iraqi exiles are disproportionately represented, and there is limited representation of tribal leaders, who represent a potent force in traditional Iraqi society, experts say. How the council will be viewed by ordinary Iraqis remains to be seen. A key, some experts say, is whether the council is seen as independent from the U.S.-led occupation forces.

How many council members have recently returned from exile?

Nine--six of the 13 Shiite representatives and three Arab Sunnis. In addition, five Kurdish representatives and at least one other Iraqi on the council have lived in northern Iraqi areas that had been outside of Saddam`s control since the 1991 Gulf War.

How were members selected?

The council was appointed by the occupation authorities, in consultation with the U.N. representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and the main opposition groups that worked with Washington before the Iraq war.

What powers does the council have?

It has been given considerable authority to appoint interim diplomats and ministers, approve budgets, and propose policies, but the coalition authorities can veto any of its decisions.

What will be the main test of the council`s strength?

Whether it can improve security, stability, and the delivery of basic services to the country, experts say. Its fate is thus closely intertwined with that of the U.S.-led occupiers, who have been struggling to improve security and services to Iraq since Baghdad fell to coalition forces April 9. Other major challenges for the council: choosing a leader, devising a process for decision-making, and determining the role religion will play in the new Iraq.

What dangers does the council face?

Like other Iraqis cooperating with the occupation force, the council`s members could be targeted for assassination by rebels opposed to the U.S.-led government. Another risk is that the diverse group will be unable to come to consensus on important matters, leading some members to quit. "It`s going to be difficult to agree on everything--it`s a rainbow coalition that does include major diversity. But they have to fight it out, this is something that has to happen in Iraq," said Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert.

How long will the council serve?

Until a new constitution is written and democratic elections are held, ushering in an official Iraqi government. At that point, full authority will be transferred from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the official name of the occupation government, to Iraqis. There is no set timetable; most estimates range between one and two years.

Who is the highest-ranking Shiite religious figure on the council?

An 80-year-old exile, Sayyed Muhammed Bahr al-Uloum. Experts consider him a moderate Shiite cleric, which, broadly speaking, means that he wants Iraq to be a tolerant, but religiously based, state. After Saddam`s regime killed some of his family, he fled Iraq in 1991 to London, where he headed the Ahl al-Bayt charitable center. Though a respected religious leader, Bahr al-Uloum does not have the rank of ayatollah or the authority of Iraq`s top Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Sistani (who shuns direct involvement in secular politics). How Bahr al-Uloum will be received by most Iraqi Shiites, experts say, is not known.

Who are the other Shiite exiles on the council?

Ahmad Chalabi, 58, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an umbrella organization of political groups that opposed Saddam`s government from exile. A favorite of the Pentagon civilian leadership, he was flown into Iraq with 700 of the INC`s "Free Iraqi Fighters" during the war and will likely play an important role on the council. In the 1990`s, he was found guilty of embezzlement by a Jordanian court, but he says the charges were politically motivated.
Iyad Alawi, 57, head of the Iraqi National Accord (INA), a London-based opposition group of former Iraqi army officers who staged an unsuccessful 1996 coup d`etat against Saddam with CIA assistance. Alawi is a doctor and former Iraqi intelligence officer.
Adbul Aziz al-Hakim, the political leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Based in Tehran since 1980, al-Hakim and his brother, the influential cleric Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, oppose the U.S.-led occupation but worked with both Washington and Tehran to oppose Saddam. His decision to participate on the council, which had been in doubt, could help confer wider legitimacy on the body among Shiites, experts say.
Ibrahim Jafari, a spokesman of the Islamic Da`wa party, a radical Shiite movement active in Iraq since the 1960s that sought Saddam`s overthrow and was brutally rooted out by his regime. Surviving Da`wa members fled to London, Syria, and Tehran; the group`s current political leanings are unclear. Jafari left Iraq in 1980.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former Da`wa spokesman in Britain, neurologist, and human rights activist.

Who are the main Shiites on the council from inside the country?

Wael Abdul Latif, a judge in Basra since 1982 who was named interim governor of the city earlier this month. During Saddam`s reign, he spent a year in prison.
Hamid Majeed Mousa, 62, an economist and the head of the Iraqi Communist Party since 1993. Originally from Babylon, south of Baghdad, he lived for several years in the 1990s in Iraqi Kurdistan. The party was an important force in Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s.
Shiekh Ahmad Shyaa al-Barak, the leader of the Al-Bu Sultan tribe and a lawyer who runs an Iraqi human rights association. He reportedly worked with the Iraqi foreign ministry as a liaison with the United Nations in the 1990s.
Raja Habib Khuzai, a female doctor who heads a maternity hospital in the southern city of Diwaniya. She lived in London from the late 1960s until 1977, when she returned to Iraq.
Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, 46, a member of an important southern tribe who led guerrilla attacks against Saddam`s government for 17 years from Iraq`s southern marshes, earning him the nickname "Prince of the Marshes." He now reportedly heads the Iraqi Party of God (Hezbollah), which some experts say is a newcomer to the Iraqi political scene. The relationship between the organization and Lebanese Hezbollah is not clear.
Akila al-Hashimi, a woman who served as an Iraqi diplomat under Saddam Hussein. She worked on U.N. issues at the ministry of foreign affairs and served as a French translator for Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

Who are the main Sunni exiles on the council?

Adnan Pachachi, 80, who served as foreign minister before the Baath Party came to power in 1968. He founded the Independent Democratic Movement in February to provide a platform for Iraqis who back a secular, democratic government, and returned to Iraq in May after 32 years in exile. Experts say he is respected as the most senior political figure on the council and will play an important role.
Samir Shakir Mahmoud al-Sumaidy, who owns a construction company in China and represents the Sumaidy clan. He is a writer and was a prominent opposition figure in the Saddam era.
Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, 45, a businessman originally from Mosul in the north. He`s the nephew of Sheikh Mohsen Adil al-Yawar, head of the powerful Shamar tribe. He lived for 15 years in Saudi Arabia, where he worked in business, returning to Iraq in June.

Who are the Sunnis members from inside the country?

Naseer Kamel Chaderchi, 70, a lawyer and businessman who leads the National Democratic Party of Iraq (NDP). His father, Kamel, was a leading democratic political thinker in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s and a founder of the NDP. Chaderchi himself was an important political figure until the Baathists seized power in 1968.
Moshen Abdul Hameed, a professor at Baghdad University and head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, about which little is known. He is the author of more than 30 books on the interpretation of the Koran.

Who are the main Kurdish leaders on the council?

Massoud Barzani, 56, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two largest Kurdish political parties. He became a peshmerga fighter in 1963, taking over the party helm on his father`s death in 1979. He has shared power in the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq since 1991 with rival Jalal Talabani.
Jalal Talabani, 70, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the other of the two largest Kurdish political parties. He was born near Erbil and during the 1960s was a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party under Barzani`s control. He split from the party in 1975 to form the PUK, which controls the southeast of Kurdistan; the KDP controls the northwest.

Who are the other Kurdish leaders?

Salahaddin Muhammad Bahaddin, 53, secretary general of the Kurdistan Islamic Union since 1994. The religiously based Sunni party is reportedly the third most powerful Kurdish grouping after the PUK and the KDP.
Dara Nor al-Din, a judge on the Court of Appeals who served eight months in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison after ruling that an edict from Saddam was unconstitutional. He is originally from the northern oil city of Kirkuk.
Mahmoud Othman, 60, originally from Sulamaniyah. He held various posts in the KDP before leaving the group and moving to London, where he founded the Kurdish Socialist Party in 1975. He later moved to Erbil in northern Iraq.

Who represents Iraq`s other minorities?

Songul Chapouk, 35, a teacher of fine arts in the northern city of Mosul and head of the grassroots Iraqi Women`s Organization, represents the small Turkomen minority.
Yonadem Kanna, 50, secretary general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, representing the Christian minority, which is mostly made up of ethnic Assyrians and Chaldeans. He was in charge of transportation in the first Kurdish regional assembly set up in the 1990s.

Sources: Associated Press; Agence France Presse; The Washington Post; The New York Times; interviews with Phebe Marr, author of "The Modern History of Iraq," Yitzhak Nakash, author of "The Shi`is of Iraq," and Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.

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July 24, 2003
Inquiry Into Attack Fuels the Frustration of Some Soldiers` Kin
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON


WASHINGTON, July 23 — Although Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch has returned home to a huge and warm welcome, some families of those killed in the attack on her unit are frustrated with Army leaders for failing to better prepare and protect the group of maintenance and supply specialists attacked on the deadliest day of the war in Iraq.

The brewing dissatisfaction follows the release of findings from an Army inquiry into the attack on the unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, on March 23 in Nasiriya, about 180 miles southeast of Baghdad. The report cited fatigue, faulty routing and shoddy communications as contributing factors in the attack, which left 11 soldiers dead and 7, including Private Lynch, captured by Iraqi forces.

The unit, primarily mechanics, cooks and supply clerks, drove into the hostile area after a commander made a wrong turn, the Army`s report concluded. The soldiers were further caught off guard, the inquiry found, by dead radios and jammed rifles that left them vulnerable under fire.

"This was a maintenance group, not a fighting group," said the Rev. Tandy Sloan of Bedford Heights, Ohio, whose son, Pvt. Brandon Sloan, 19, was among those killed. "Gross mistakes were made and there doesn`t seem to be accountability. I want reprimands handed out in multiplicity."

Families of the dead were briefed individually in late June and early July. A 15-page executive summary of the report became public two weeks ago, even though the Army did not officially release the information until Friday. Army officials have stated that the report was compiled to state facts, not to assess blame.

Some families are calling for further action. Responses to the report range from earnest requests for improved training for noncombat soldiers to demands for punishment of Army commanders.

The families` struggles with the findings — some in public, many in private — underscore the continued grieving beyond the fanfare of joyous homecomings. They also highlight, to some extent, the general public`s increasing struggle with the war itself.

"I`m a man of faith," Mr. Sloan, a Baptist minister, said. "I prayed before this war started for wisdom for our leaders. And if they said they had intelligence, I believed them. Now to have the entire pretext of this war being called into question, that makes it all worse."

Army officials at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, where the 507th was based, said they had received complaints from only a few families. They also said the report was just the first review of the attack. The Army`s Criminal Investigation Division is conducting an inquiry into the possible commission of war crimes by Iraqi soldiers in the attack.

But officials emphasized that they had found no criminal wrongdoing by American commanders, and that no disciplinary action was planned.

"We understand the impulse to want to blame someone in a situation like this, but sometimes it is not appropriate," said Maj. Catherine Morelle-Oliveira, a spokeswoman for the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command at Fort Bliss. "A myriad of obstacles beset them. No one person can be held accountable for the tragedy of that day."

For a few families, though, the Army still has questions to answer and wrongs to right.

Since she heard the details of what happened that day, Arlene Walters of Salem, Ore., has experienced haunting visions of her son, Sgt. Donald R. Walters, under a torrent of Iraqi fire. Alone.

Sergeant Walters, 33, a cook, was one of 33 soldiers in the 18-vehicle convoy that mistakenly entered Nasiriya. The unit, assigned to support a Patriot missile battalion, became separated from a 600-vehicle column pushing northward through the desert in what the report called "the unprecedented rapid advance of the ground campaign toward Baghdad."

Scrambling to catch up, the unit`s commander, Capt. Troy Kent King, misread the planned route and headed into the city. When he realized his mistake, the captain ordered his soldiers to "lock and load" and made a U-turn to get back on route.

But a series of mishaps hindered the retreat. A 10-ton wrecker in the convoy ran out of fuel. Other heavy vehicles were slowed or stopped when they tried to increase speed in the soft sand.

Sergeant Walters was in a five-ton tractor-trailer with Private Sloan when their vehicle became disabled. A wrecker picked up Private Sloan, who was killed later. But the report was unclear on what happened to Sergeant Walters, suggesting that he may have been left behind.

The report then reads, "There is some information to suggest that a U.S. soldier that could have been Walters fought his way south of Highway 16 towards a canal and was killed in action."

An autopsy, Mrs. Walters said, showed that her son was shot twice in the back, once in the right leg, that his left shoulder was dislocated and that he was stabbed twice in the abdomen.

Originally, it was suggested that Private Lynch had fought off Iraqi forces alone. Mrs. Walters, after reviewing details of the report, now believes it was her son.

"I just can`t imagine him being left out there in the desert alone," said Mrs. Walters, 65. "All I want them to do is to admit that they left him out there. And that if Don was standing out there fighting alone, that they give him credit for that."

Army officials maintain that the circumstances of Sergeant Walters`s death cannot be conclusively verified.

Mr. Sloan said he became so enraged upon hearing the report that he walked out at one point during his nearly three-hour briefing.

The information, presented to all of the designated next of kin by Brig. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, commanding general of the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, was delivered with compassion, Mr. Sloan said. But he said the details — especially those outlining the rapid advance in physically difficult conditions — suggested hubris on the part of military planners and insensitivity to soldiers like his son, Brandon, who had less combat training.

Randy Kiehl is not among those calling for punishment. Instead, he is advocating increased training of noncombat soldiers. His son, Specialist James Kiehl, a computer repair technician, who, like most other members of the 507th, had only eight weeks of basic training before he entered computer school, was among the 11 killed.

"Flogging and quartering Captain King or anyone else, what would that accomplish?" said Mr. Kiehl, a former Army specialist who was a staff driver. "Nothing. What is important is that we, as a superpower, learn to train our forces properly, to ready them for combat and to make sure they have the kind of advanced communications that our forces have access to."

Other families are struggling with a mix of feelings. After the attack, Nancili Mata, 35, was haunted by questions about the death of her husband, Chief Warrant Officer Johnny Villareal Mata. Did he die instantly? Did he leave anything behind? On those issues, Ms. Mata said, the report provided some answers.

Her husband, she now believes, died instantly from multiple gunshot wounds, after the truck he was in became disabled. She said she was trying to reason with herself that punishment would not bring her husband back. But she is not quite there yet.

"I remember my husband telling me about soldiers who got punished for not shining their boots or drinking in the barracks," Ms. Mata said. "He said there was no room for error in the Army, that people were punished so everyone would learn."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 24, 2003
Better Alive Than Dead
By SANDRA MACKEY


ATLANTA


The killing of Saddam Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusay, is a tactical victory for the American occupation of Iraq. But it is not a strategic one. By not capturing these odious symbols of the old regime alive and putting them on display, the American occupation authority has denied itself the chance to give absolute proof of their demise to a society that rejects authority and thrives on conspiracy theory. It has also lost an opportunity to give Iraqis a chance to purge their bitterness, and satisfy a deep-seated need for revenge, by confronting their tormentors in court.

Yesterday the United States presented evidence — dental records and identifications by officials of the Hussein regime — to prove that the brothers were indeed killed in a firefight with American forces. But many Iraqis seemed unpersuaded. Even more telling, others voiced disappointment over the two not being captured and subjected to the sort of treatment they meted out to their victims. By denying Iraqis their revenge on the sons of Saddam Hussein, the American authorities have overlooked the needs of a society dominated by the rural values of the diverse tribes that make up much of the country`s population.

This background of revenge may put the lie to the optimistic declarations by United States officials that the corner has been turned in the pacification of Iraq. With the deaths of the two brothers, they predict, Saddam Hussein`s followers will lose their will to resist. And while the officials concede that in the short run the deaths may result in increased guerrilla attacks on American troops, they also argue that soon those passions will be spent.

But another possible series of reactions cannot be ignored, however. Strikes against the American military in Iraq may decline immediately only to re-ignite later. For the Iraqis have long memories. Supporters of Saddam Hussein may lie low before seeking revenge for what the American invasion of Iraq has done to their status in the power structure. More significantly, tribal elements who opposed the regime may hold the United States responsible for not giving them the opportunity to extract their own vengeance on Uday and Qusay Hussein.

It is also uncertain whether the United States will be able to tell its story to the Iraqi people. The American military may control large parts of Iraq, but it does not control the flow of information. The Iraqi media is capable of devising its own narrative of the firefight, and there`s a good chance that this narrative will not paint the United States in a favorable light. (Even the American release of photographs may not confirm that the brothers were killed.)

The United States continues to forget it is dealing with a culture that is far older and far different from its own. Suspicion and distrust of authority is deeply rooted in Iraq. Through Iraq`s long history, conqueror followed conqueror. As a result, the diverse groups of people who lived in what came to be designated as Iraq in 1921 found their only real security in family and tribe. Even though the elite that ran Iraq after independence in 1932 had urban attitudes, the ties of family and group remained enormously important.
In 1968, when the Baath Party came to power, the tribalism that had been a characteristic of Iraq since its inception intensified. The Baath Party itself was the purview of one tribe, the Bu Nasir, the tribe of Saddam Hussein. In 1991, in the service of survival after the gulf war, Saddam Hussein gave tribalism a prominence it had not been accorded since the formation of Iraq. At the same time, repressive politics and economic hardship continued to drive out the old urban elite and much of the urban middle class that had risen during the oil boom of the 1970`s. In the last decade of his regime, Saddam Hussein remade Iraq into a country governed by the rural values of the tribes. Operating according to the values of the tribe, the system sanctioned the age-old principle of revenge.
Saddam Hussein meted out revenge on those who defied the system. They went into the regime`s torture chambers and prisons. Tribes visited revenge on the regime for slights to their honor and for punishment of their members by Saddam Hussein`s security system. The imperative of revenge was no different in late-20th-century Iraq than it had been for the tribes living for generations on the land of Iraq. This is a fact that the Bush administration needs to realize.

In giving up on the attempted capture of the Hussein brothers as too risky, the American administration of Iraq has ignored the dictates of Iraqi culture. At the same time, it also runs counter to the kind of country we want Iraq to become — one built around the rule of law. Under Mr. Hussein`s reign, justice, to the extent it existed, was consistently perverted. It was erratic, violent and retributive, a tool of Mr. Hussein and his Baath Party. By not doing more to allow Uday and Qusay Hussein to surrender, the United States lost an opportunity to show Iraqis that those who have committed the most heinous of crimes can still be brought to justice.

On trial in Baghdad, the Hussein brothers could have recounted the regime`s crimes. Certainly, the effort would have been more drawn-out than a firefight — getting Balkan criminals to The Hague has not been easy — but the results would have been more lasting. An appearance by the brothers would not only have pinned them to their gruesome past, it would have also demonstrated the effectiveness of a sound system of justice.

The deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein are being proclaimed a victory, but it is a temporary victory. And the manner in which they died is yet another long-term complication for the American occupation of Iraq.


Sandra Mackey is author, most recently, of "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Compan

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July 24, 2003
Bush`s Four Horsemen
By WILLIAM SAFIRE


WASHINGTON
On the domestic front, President Bush is backing into a buzz saw.

The sleeper issue is media giantism. People are beginning to grasp and resent the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the Four Horsemen of Big Media — Viacom (CBS, UPN), Disney (ABC), Murdoch`s News Corporation (Fox) and G.E. (NBC) — to gobble up every independent station in sight.

Couch potatoes throughout the land see plenty wrong in concentrating the power to produce the content we see and hear in the same hands that transmit those broadcasts. This is especially true when the same Four Horsemen own many satellite and cable providers and already influence key sites on the Internet.

Reflecting that widespread worry, the Senate Commerce Committee voted last month to send to the floor Ted Stevens`s bill rolling back the F.C.C.`s anything-goes ruling. It would reinstate current limits and also deny newspaper chains the domination of local TV and radio.

The Four Horsemen were confident they could get Bush to suppress a similar revolt in the House, where G.O.P. discipline is stricter. When liberals and conservatives of both parties in the House surprised them by passing a rollback amendment to an Appropriations Committee bill, the Bush administration issued what bureaucrats call a SAP — a written Statement of Administration Policy.

It was the sappiest SAP of the Bush era. "If this amendment were contained in the final legislation presented to the President," warned the administration letter, "his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill."

The SAP was signed by the brand-new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten, but the hand was the hand of Stephen Friedman, the former investment banker now heading the president`s National Economic Council.

Reached late yesterday, Friedman forthrightly made his case that the F.C.C. was an independent agency that had followed the rules laid down by the courts. He told me that Bush`s senior advisers had focused on the question "Can you eliminate excessive regulation and have diversity and competition?" and found the answer to be yes. He added with candor: "The politics I`m still getting an education on."

The Bush veto threat would deny funding to the Commerce, State and Justice Departments, not to mention the federal judiciary. It would discombobulate Congress and disserve the public for months.

And to what end? To turn what we used to call "public airwaves" into private fiefs, to undermine diversity of opinion and — in its anti-federalist homogenization of our varied culture — to sweep aside local interests and community standards of taste.

This would be Bush`s first veto. Is this the misbegotten principle on which he wants to take a stand? At one of the White House meetings that decided on the SAP approach, someone delicately suggested that such a veto of the giants` power grab might pose "a communications issue" for the president (no play on words intended). Friedman blew that objection away. The SAP threat was delivered.

In the House this week, allies of the Four Horsemen distributed a point sheet drawn from Viacom and Murdoch arguments and asked colleagues to sign a cover letter reading, "The undersigned members . . . will vote to sustain a Presidential veto of legislation overturning or delaying . . . the decision of the FCC . . . regarding media ownership."

But they couldn`t obtain the signatures of anywhere near one-third of the House members — the portion needed to stop an override. Yesterday afternoon, the comprehensive bill — including an F.C.C. rollback — passed by a vote of 400 to 21.

If Bush wishes to carry out the veto threat, he`ll pick up a bunch of diehards (now called "dead-enders"), but he will risk suffering an unnecessary humiliation.

What next? Much depends on who is chosen to go into the Senate-House conference. If the White House can`t stop the rollback there, will Bush carry out the ill-considered threat?

Sometimes you put the veto gun back in the holster. The way out: a president can always decide to turn down the recommendation of his senior advisers.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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Das ist das Thema mit dem Nytimes und WaPo heute ihre Onlineseiten aufmachen.

washingtonpost.com
House Votes to Prevent Change in Media Rule


By Christopher Stern and Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A01


The House voted yesterday to block the Federal Communications Commission from imposing rules that would allow the nation`s biggest broadcasting companies to buy more television stations, setting up a potential showdown with the White House.

A bipartisan coalition pushed through the measure by attaching it to an appropriations bill to fund the Commerce, State and Justice departments and several agencies, including the FCC. The spending bill was approved by a vote of 400 to 21, despite a veto threat from the Bush administration and objections from the Republican House leadership.

The legislation would prohibit the FCC from spending any money to carry out its decision last month to allow individual companies to own television stations that reach as much as 45 percent of the national audience. The House measure would keep the limit at 35 percent.

If the House language becomes law, it could have significant repercussions for the corporate parents of the CBS and Fox broadcast networks, which own stations that reach more than 35 percent of the country. Those companies could be forced to sell stations in some of the nation`s largest and most lucrative markets. NBC owns stations that reach 34 percent of the country. ABC, which has stations that reach 24 percent of the national audience, has room to grow under a 35 percent ownership cap.

The major networks say they need revenue from the cash-rich stations to pay for expensive programming.

Several industry lobbyists said yesterday that they expect the Senate to take a similar approach to the House in amending an appropriations bill to roll back the ownership cap. The lobbyists said they would work to strip the language from the legislation when conferees sit down to reconcile differences between the two bills.

"The backdoor efforts by the [House] Appropriations Committee to cut off funds to the FCC needed to implement these rules is very disappointing to us." said B. Robert Okun, NBC`s chief Washington lobbyist.

The House vote would stop the FCC from spending money on its new rule for only one fiscal year. The support the measure attracted may embolden critics of the 45 percent ownership cap to seek a permanent change to the rule.

Opponents of the FCC`s action included conservative and liberal public interest groups worried that further consolidation among media companies would lead to more-homogenized programming and make it harder for unpopular viewpoints to be heard. Many also worried that stations would lose their local identities as they became part of huge media companies.

As the House considered the spending bill yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on the effect the FCC`s rule would have on local ownership of television stations. L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council, a conservative group that opposes the FCC`s action, testified that his members are overwhelmed by the "raw sewage, ultra-violence, graphic sex and raunchy language that is flooding into our living rooms night and day by giant media corporations with no concern whatsoever for community standards."

Yesterday`s vote was a setback for FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell. He has argued that the media business has gone through a dramatic transformation in the past 10 years, making it possible for the agency to relax its limits on corporate ownership.

"Our Democracy is strong," Powell said in a prepared statement. "It would be irresponsible to ignore the diversity of viewpoints provided by cable, satellite and the Internet."

Small and medium-size broadcasting companies opposed the FCC`s decision to allow the major networks to own more stations. They claim that the networks are able to force them to carry shows they don`t want at the expense of local and regional programming.

(Alan Frank, chief executive of The Washington Post Co.`s television unit, Post-Newsweek Stations Inc., is chairman of an alliance of 600 television station owners who lobbied against raising the cap.)

If anything, the Senate is more antagonistic than the House to the FCC`s deregulatory approach.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) supports legislation that would force some of the largest radio companies to sell some of their stations. Other lawmakers want to reverse an FCC decision to allow one company to own newspapers and television stations in the same market.

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) is pushing a rarely used legislative device known as a "resolution of disapproval," which would effectively vacate the entire FCC decision. The resolution is awaiting a vote in the Senate. To go into effect, it would have to be approved by the House and signed by the president.

Many lawmakers and lobbyists expect the Senate`s best chance to undo the FCC`s action would be to follow the House`s lead.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) declined to comment yesterday on his plans for the bill. Other prominent Republicans, such as Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), have joined Democrats in calling for a wholesale reversal of the FCC`s ownership rules.

Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said it is almost inevitable that Congress will send legislation to the White House that rolls back at least some of the FCC`s decision on media ownership. "It`s got momentum in my opinion," Hollings said in an interview.

Staff writer Frank Ahrens in Hollywood contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors


By Peter Slevin and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A01


The deputy secretary of defense said yesterday that some key assumptions underlying the U.S. occupation of Iraq were wrong, tacitly acknowledging the judgment of current and former U.S. officials critical of the occupation planning.

Paul D. Wolfowitz, briefing reporters after a 41/2-day trip to Iraq, said that in postwar planning, defense officials made three assumptions that "turned out to underestimate the problem," beginning with the belief that removing Saddam Hussein from power would also remove the threat posed by his Baath Party. In addition, they erred in assuming that significant numbers of Iraqi army units, and large numbers of Iraqi police, would quickly join the U.S. military and its civilian partners in rebuilding Iraq, he said.

But Wolfowitz, who traveled to southern, central and northern Iraq, reported that the south and north are "impressively stable" and said that throughout the country, "we are making a great deal of progress."

His acknowledgment that some assumptions were wrong faintly echoed one of the primary complaints registered by many current and former U.S. officials since before the occupation began. The reconstruction effort, they said, was also undermined by unresolved logistical problems and secretive decision-making by the Defense Department civilians who led the planning. The planning, they said, was also poorly coordinated by the White House.

In recent interviews, Pentagon leaders acknowledged some setbacks in Iraq, but said that assessment does not recognize considerable progress or account for the inherent unpredictability of the most ambitious U.S. effort to remake a country since the reconstruction of Germany and Japan in the 1940s.

"There`s been a lot of talk that there was no plan," Wolfowitz said yesterday. "There was a plan, but as any military officer can tell you, no plan survives first contact with reality."

Three months after Hussein`s government evaporated, 150,000 U.S. troops are enduring dozens of armed attacks in Iraq each week. The bureaucracy remains dysfunctional. A governing council of 25 Iraqis began sharing limited power with U.S. authorities there only last week.

The U.S. occupation, now costing $4 billion a month, has no clear end. And an assessment by outside experts commissioned by the Pentagon warned last week that the window of opportunity for postwar success is closing.

Officials critical of the occupation planning said some problems could have been predicted -- or were, to no avail, by experts inside and outside the Pentagon.

Before the invasion, for example, U.S. intelligence agencies were persistent and unified in warning the Defense Department that Iraqis would resort to "armed opposition" after the war was over. The Army`s chief of staff warned that a larger stability force would be needed.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his team disagreed, confident that Iraqi military and police units would help secure a welcoming nation.

The State Department and other agencies spent many months and millions of dollars drafting strategies on issues ranging from a postwar legal code to oil policy. But after President Bush granted authority over reconstruction to the Pentagon, the Defense Department all but ignored State and its working groups.

And once Baghdad fell, the military held its postwar team out of Iraq for nearly two weeks for security reasons, and then did not provide such basics as telephones, vehicles and interpreters for the understaffed operation to run a traumatized country of 24 million.

"People always say that sometimes people plan for the wrong war," said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of the State Department`s policy planning office. "One can say in some ways that the administration planned for the wrong peace. In particular, there was an emphasis on preparing for a humanitarian crisis when in fact the larger challenges turned out to be political and security."

Bush administration officials say bad news from Iraq overshadowed extensive planning for calamities that never occurred, such as a chemical weapons attack, a refugee crisis and an oil field disaster.

"Given the magnitude and the complexity of the task, and given how far we have come since the war ended, I think it has been a pretty well-managed process," said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy and a central player in the occupation planning, in an interview. Pentagon policymakers drew on advice from throughout the administration, he said, and Bush`s decision to put the Pentagon in charge of the early postwar period is being "vindicated by events."

But in contrast to the planning for war, other officials said, the Defense Department`s attention to the occupation was haphazard and incomplete.

"There was a serious disconnect between the forces necessary to win a war and occupy a country," said a U.S. official who worked in the initial postwar effort and is still in Baghdad. "We fooled ourselves into thinking we would have a liberation over an occupation. Why did we do that?"

Warnings About Obstacles
Preliminary planning for the occupation began in August, one month before Bush signaled in a speech to the United Nations that he was prepared to oust Hussein by force. National Security Council member Frank Miller quietly received instructions to create a structure to study topics ranging from refugees to financial reform.

By early October, officials drawn from agencies across the government were beginning to meet, amid speculation that the United States could be at war by year`s end. Considerable attention was focused on a potential humanitarian crisis, and how relief and reconstruction would win Iraqi support for the occupation.

"The whole operation is going to rise or fall on whether Iraqi people`s lives are materially improved," said one committee member who reckoned that the Americans would have to deliver visible results within weeks of an invasion.

Veterans of other conflicts soon identified security as the most important requirement for early relief and long-term stability. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell emphasized the need in talks with Bush last fall, aides said, as he urged the president to seek U.N. approval for the war. With U.N. assent, Powell believed, would come troops and contributions from other nations.

Similarly, the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, were "utterly consistent in arguing that reconstruction rather than war would be the most problematic segment of overthrowing Saddam," a senior administration official said. In classified written and oral reports, the official continued, the intelligence community warned the administration "early and often" about obstacles U.S. authorities were likely to face.

In particular, the agencies repeatedly predicted that Hussein loyalists might try to sabotage U.S. postwar efforts by destroying critical economic targets, the official said. One analysis warned that Iraqis "would probably resort to obstruction, resistance and armed opposition if they perceived attempts to keep them dependent on the United States and the West."

Those concerns, however, were secondary among the principal architects of the Iraq policy, who were concentrated in the Defense Department, the White House and Vice President Cheney`s office.

In addition to believing that Iraqi soldiers and police officers would help secure the country, they thought that Iraqis would embrace the American invaders and a future marked by representative government, civil liberties and a free-market economy, and that Iraqi bureaucrats, minus a top layer of Baath Party figures who would quit or be fired, would stay on the job.

Within weeks, if all went well, Iraqis would begin taking control of their own affairs and the exit of U.S. troops would be well underway.

"Everyone thought it could be done on a small investment and that Iraqis could be mobilized to do the bulk of the job," said Tim Carney, a former diplomat recruited to manage an Iraqi ministry.

Through the fall, there was no single coordinator for competing ideas: A proposal to set up a postwar planning office died because the administration feared that it would signal already skeptical U.N. Security Council members that Bush was determined to wage war.

No issue was more contentious than the shape of Iraq`s future governing structure. Central to this issue was the role of exile Ahmed Chalabi, the London-based head of the Iraqi National Congress who was reviled by the State Department and CIA as much as he was revered by senior Defense Department officials and some in the White House.

Prominent Chalabi supporters, including some at the Pentagon, backed his demand to create a provisional Iraqi government dedicated to democratic principles and designed to reassure Iraqis that the United States had no colonial intentions. The State Department argued that Iraqis who had suffered under Hussein`s rule would be alienated by a wealthy expatriate who left Iraq in 1958 -- and would blame the Americans for backing him.

That debate and others remained unresolved as autumn gave way to winter. It was not until January that Bush designated a coordinator to pull together the various plans. On Jan. 20 -- the day the French foreign minister announced that France would not support a U.N. resolution for war -- Bush signed National Security Directive 24, giving postwar control of Iraq to the Pentagon, which had lobbied hard for the job.

Career civil servants who had helped plan U.S. peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo said it was imperative to maintain a military force large enough to stamp out challenges to its authority right away. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then-Army chief of staff, thought several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rebutted him sharply and publicly.

"It`s 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 and to secure the surrender of Saddam`s security forces and his army," Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee on Feb. 27. "Hard to imagine."

Powell and his top aides thought it made sense to allow the Pentagon to control the immediate postwar phase, when security would be the dominant issue. Still, they expected to contribute ideas and staffing to the political side of reconstruction -- they even budgeted for an embassy to become the central U.S. institution in Iraq within a few weeks of Hussein`s anticipated defeat.

But as the Defense Department put together its occupation plans, the State Department felt doors closing.

`So Much Tension`
The circle of civilian Pentagon officials given the task of planning the occupation was small. From its early work, it all but excluded officials at State and even some from the Pentagon, including officers of the Joint Staff.

"The problems came about when the office of the secretary of defense wouldn`t let anybody else play -- or play only if you beat your way into the game," a State Department official said. "There was so much tension, so much ego involved."

The Pentagon planners showed little interest in State`s Future of Iraq project, a $5 million effort begun in April 2002 to use Iraqi expatriates and outside experts to draft plans on everything from legal reform to oil policy. Wolfowitz created his own group of Iraqi advisers to cover some of the same ground.

Defense rejected at least nine State nominees for prominent roles in the occupation; only after Powell and others fought back did Rumsfeld relent. Tom Warrick, leader of the Future of Iraq project, was still refused a place, at the reported insistence of Cheney`s office.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, who was appointed to be the first civilian coordinator in the occupation, said in an interview that he asked Wolfowitz for an expert on Iraqi politics and governance.

Wolfowitz turned not to the roster of career specialists in the State Department`s Near Eastern Affairs bureau, but to a political appointee in the bureau: Elizabeth Cheney, coordinator of a Middle East democracy project and daughter of the vice president; she recruited a State Department colleague who had worked for the International Republican Institute.

While responsibility for developing an occupation plan resided with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith -- along with the National Security Council -- a small defense policy shop called the Office of Special Plans was given a key role in developing policy guidance for on-the-ground operations.

Its staff was hand-picked by William Luti, a former aide to Cheney and Newt Gingrich who headed the Pentagon`s Middle East and South Asia policy office; they worked in a warren of offices on the Pentagon`s first floor. The office held its work so closely that even members of Garner`s office did not realize its role until February, a month after Garner was appointed.

That month, 30 people showed up at a meeting called to share the Special Plans work with Garner`s office and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There, the Special Plans staff handed out spreadsheets on four dozen issues, all policy recommendations for key decisions: war crimes prosecution, the elimination of the Baath Party, oil sector maintenance, ministry organization, media strategy and "rewards, incentives and immunity" for former Baath supporters.

Once a policy was approved by the defense secretary`s office and the interagency principals, it would become the operating guidance for the U.S. Central Command, whose troops would occupy Iraq.

To the outsiders at the meeting, it looked like a fait accompli. "We had had no input into the Special Plans office," said one reconstruction official who was there.

A senior defense official, however, played down the office`s role in occupation planning. He said Special Plans "had influence into the process. We were not the nerve center."

As for complaints that the office was secretive or exclusive, he said: "There are a lot of crybabies everywhere. . . . I cannot account for people`s hurt feelings." To say the office was isolated, he added, "is laughable."

Garner worked closely with Rumsfeld and Feith and met about once a week with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Only seven weeks before the war began, Garner`s staff members could be counted on one hand, but he eventually assembled a staff that drew from a number of agencies. He said they spent 30 to 40 percent of their time planning for humanitarian crises, refugees, hunger, chemical weapons attacks and oil field fires.

By March, after Garner arrived at a staging site in Kuwait, members of his own team believed that the administration had poorly prepared both Iraqis and Americans for what was to come.

One U.S. official recalled, "My uniformed friends kept telling me, `We`re not ready. We`re going into the beast`s mouth.` "

`It Was Just Chaos`
As war drew nearer, the matter of Iraq`s political future became more urgent.

Despite Pentagon support for a provisional government led by Chalabi, Bush rejected that option. Instead, he took the State Department`s view that exiles and internal Iraqi figures should be given an equal chance to prove themselves in an Interim Iraqi Authority to be created immediately after the war.

But Chalabi continued to work closely with Feith and others at the Pentagon, staying in touch by satellite telephone from Iran and northern Iraq. Officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were stunned to learn in early April that U.S. military authorities had flown Chalabi and 700 hurriedly assembled fighters into southern Iraq. The vice president concurred in the decision to airlift him.

Feith said it was strictly a decision made on military grounds by U.S. Central Command, but his Pentagon critics believe that he and Wolfowitz were trying to boost Chalabi`s political prospects.

After the fall of Baghdad on April 9, the scenario on which the occupation plan was based never materialized. If there was no humanitarian crisis, neither were there cooperative Iraqi police, soldiers or bureaucrats. Instead, a security crisis led to a cascade of other crises:

The U.S. military did not stem extensive looting. The looting crippled government ministries and police stations beyond any expectation of the Defense Department`s leaders. With too few soldiers to provide security and logistics to Garner and his team, the military delayed his entrance into Baghdad for 12 days. The crippled institutions, and the delay, left a power vacuum that his staff could not fill.

Lacking virtually any working phones, Garner`s staff members could hardly communicate with one another at their headquarters in Hussein`s 258-room Republican Palace. They were not prepared for an overhaul of Iraqi media. They had few means of projecting a sense of American intentions or authority.

"There wasn`t any way out of the chaos," said a former official who worked in Baghdad. "It was just chaos."

As Garner`s effort faltered, the administration accelerated the deployment of L. Paul Bremer, whose long-planned role was to take command of reconstruction and direct the creation of a new political structure.

Bremer`s "job was to go there and make it clear that we had a grip on this deal, that we were serious, that we were there to stay," a senior U.S. official said. "And to give confidence to the Iraqis and the rest of the world that we had a plan."

Staff writers Glenn Kessler, Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Bush Highlights Iraq Successes
President Cites Slaying of Hussein`s Sons

By Dana Milbank and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A01


The Bush administration made a coordinated effort yesterday to rebuild fading public support for its Iraq policy, using Tuesday`s killing of Saddam Hussein`s sons as a platform to highlight the successes of the U.S. occupation.

In appearances by President Bush and other officials, the administration urged Americans to look beyond concerns about U.S. casualties and questions about exaggerated allegations of the threat Hussein posed. "In the 83 days since I announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, we have made progress, steady progress, in restoring hope in a nation beaten down by decades of tyranny," Bush said.

The president and his deputies spoke of U.S. efforts to rebuild infrastructure, provide humanitarian services, move Iraq toward democracy and defang the remaining Hussein loyalists.

"Yesterday, in the city of Mosul, the careers of two of the regime`s chief henchmen came to an end," a clearly pleased Bush said in a Rose Garden appearance, referring to Tuesday`s firefight. "Saddam Hussein`s sons were responsible for torture, maiming and murder of countless Iraqis. Now more than ever, all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back."

While the administration showcased successes in Iraq, Democrats fought to keep public attention on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and on conflicting administration accounts about how a dubious charge about Iraq`s nuclear ambitions appeared in Bush`s State of the Union address.

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said that "it`s very important for the confusion to end," and called on Bush to hold a news conference explaining the use of an accusation, against the wishes of the CIA, that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. Others called for investigations into the matter.

"Now is not the time for victory laps," Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a Democratic presidential candidate, said in criticism of Bush`s Rose Garden appearance. "The fighting continues in Iraq, and President Bush needs to be straight with the American people about how we are going to win the peace."

Democrats and some arms control advocates also raised questions about the latest account given by the administration about Bush`s charge that Iraq sought uranium in Africa. On Tuesday, White House communications director Dan Bartlett and deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said the accusation was proposed by speechwriters who found a brief reference to it in the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate. At the insistence of the CIA, the charge, based in part on what are now known to be forged documents, was struck from a major Iraq speech Bush gave Oct. 7.

But Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who has been pursuing the Africa uranium allegation, noted that the administration revived the charge not only in Bush`s Jan. 28 State of the Union address, but also in a December "fact sheet" from the State Department and in public allegations made in January by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. "Clearly, this wasn`t the work of a single speechwriter," Waxman said.

Bush received an unexpected boost from former president Bill Clinton, who said errors in using intelligence were understandable because Iraq had not accounted for vast amounts of weaponry. "You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president," he said on CNN`s "Larry King Live" Tuesday night. "I mean, you can`t make as many calls as you have to without messing up once in a while. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now."

Public support for the war has dropped considerably since Bush declared an end to major hostilities May 1, as Iraqi militants attack U.S. troops and investigators fail to find weapons of mass destruction. Two more soldiers were killed in separate ambushes yesterday, bringing the total killed in postwar violence to about 45.

A Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today released yesterday found that 54 percent of Americans thought events were going well in Iraq, down from 86 percent in May, and that 57 percent approved of Bush`s handling of the Iraq situation, relatively steady in recent weeks but down from the wartime high of 76 percent.

The administration, hopeful that the killing of Hussein`s sons Qusay and Uday would boost support for its Iraq policy at home and in Iraq, added Bush`s speech and a briefing by Wolfowitz to a previously scheduled speech by L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The events were designed to present a unified message of success.

Standing with Bremer, Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard B. Myers, Bush said the U.S. military was "on the offensive" in Iraq against "a few remaining holdouts" of the Baathist government.

Later, in a lunchtime speech, Bremer presented a plan for establishing security, restoring Iraq`s economy and building a democratic government with performance benchmarks.

Bremer outlined a 60-day plan in which the administrators would recruit and train the first battalion in a new Iraqi army along with eight battalions in a new Iraqi civil defense corps designed to augment U.S. forces; draft business regulations and property laws; and work toward convening a constitutional convention for Iraq, which now has functioning councils in 85 percent of cities and towns. Bremer said a nationwide Iraqi currency would be introduced Oct. 15, and he said free elections could be conducted "sometime next year."

"This is not a country in chaos, as it is sometimes portrayed," Bremer said, noting that all of Iraq`s universities, all of its hospitals and 95 percent of its health clinics are open. Commerce has returned throughout the country.

But Bremer also spoke of daunting tasks. U.S. engineers estimate that $13 billion must be spent to meet "foreseeable" demands for electricity in Iraq and that $16 billion will be required over four years to modernize Iraq`s drinking water infrastructure, he said. Millions of additional dollars, he said, will have to be invested in health care.

He also spoke of "stubborn resistance" from Iraqi militants in the "Sunni triangle" northwest of Baghdad, where 81 percent of attacks against U.S. forces since June have taken place. Bremer said the attacks are being countered with both aggressive military operations and "quick action" development projects.

"We recognize the importance of having both a carrot and a stick," he said.



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Why Commander in Chief Is Losing the War of the 16 Words


By Dan Balz and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A10


If President Bush`s White House is known for anything, it is competence at delivering a disciplined message and deftness in dealing with bad news. That reputation has been badly damaged by the administration`s clumsy efforts to explain how a statement based on disputed intelligence ended up in the president`s State of the Union address.

How did the White House stumble so badly? There are a host of explanations, from White House officials, their allies outside the government and their opponents in the broader debate about whether the administration sought to manipulate evidence while building its case to go to war against Iraq.

But the dominant forces appear to have been the determination by White House officials to protect the president for using 16 questionable words about Iraq`s attempts to buy uranium in Africa and a fierce effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect its reputation through bureaucratic infighting that has forced the president`s advisers to repeatedly alter their initial version of events.

At several turns, when Bush might have taken responsibility for the language in his Jan. 28 address to the country, he and his top advisers resisted, claiming others -- particularly those in the intelligence community -- were responsible.

Asked again yesterday whether Bush should ultimately be held accountable for what he says, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters, "Let`s talk about what`s most important. That`s the war on terrorism, winning the war on terrorism. And the best way you do that is to go after the threats where they gather, not to let them come to our shore before it`s too late."

White House finger-pointing in turn prompted the CIA`s allies to fire back by offering evidence that ran counter to official White House explanations of events and by helping to reveal a chronology of events that forced the White House to change its story.

The latest turn came Tuesday, when deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and White House communications director Dan Bartlett revealed the existence of two previously unknown memos showing that Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet had repeatedly urged the administration last October to remove a similar claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.

White House officials and their Republican allies in Congress hope the Hadley-Bartlett briefing will help the administration turn a corner on the controversy, and they plan a counteroffensive to try to put Bush`s critics on the defensive. But the administration faces new risks as Congress begins its own investigations, which could bring the bureaucratic infighting into open conflict.

The White House and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are trying to work out ground rules for the collection of information from National Security Council personnel involved in preparing the president`s State of the Union address, according to administration and congressional sources.

"A list has gone to the White House and documents have been requested," according to one congressional aide. On that document list are the two memos cited by Hadley and Bartlett from the CIA, dated Oct. 5 and Oct. 6, which contained comments on specific sections of drafts of the president`s Oct. 7 speech on the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

Tenet testified yesterday in closed session of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and today the CIA inspector general, John L. Helgerson, is scheduled to appear before the Senate intelligence panel to discuss the findings of his ongoing investigation of how the speech was vetted. Tenet was questioned about the State of the Union speech and about the intelligence developed around Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction.

Beyond the memos, one area of potential risk for the administration is an October telephone call from Tenet to Hadley to make certain the offending language had been removed from Bush`s Oct. 7 speech. Hadley said he cannot recall whether that issue was discussed with Tenet on Oct. 5, Oct. 6 or Oct. 7, but a senior administration official familiar with the events said it was "most likely" on Oct. 7, the day of Bush`s speech. Going to Hadley directly indicated Tenet`s fear that his underlings had not been successful.

Another potential problem for the White House is the sharp disagreement between testimony given the committee last Thursday by CIA senior analyst Alan Foley about his conversation with Robert Joseph, a National Security Council staff member, about what was to go into the State of the Union address and how Bartlett described it to reporters Tuesday.

For all the purported discipline and unity within the Bush administration, disputes among members of the national security team have been common, particularly in the run-up to the war with Iraq. Those disputes, however, generally pitted the State and Defense departments against one another, but once Bush made a decision, the combatants generally accepted that and moved on.

What is unusual about this episode is that the combatants are officials at the White House and the CIA -- and that the White House has tried without success to resolve the controversy. The biggest lesson learned so far, said one administration official, is that "you don`t pick a bureaucratic fight with the CIA." To which a White House official replied, "That wasn`t our intention, but that certainly has been the perception."

White House allies outside the government have expressed surprise at the administration`s repeated missteps over the past two weeks, using phrases such as "stumbled," "caught flat-footed" and "can`t get their story straight." Said one senior administration official, "These stories get legs when they`re mishandled and this story has been badly mishandled."

Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton, said he has been equally surprised by the way this White House has dealt with the controversy. "Their every move has resulted in people being more interested in the story rather than less interested," he said.

Mary Matalin, a former Bush White House adviser, said, "It`s impossible to have a consistent message when the facts keep changing. We forsook consistency for honesty, in an effort to be as forthcoming as possible in putting out new facts as they became available."

A senior White House official said there are mitigating circumstances, beginning with the fact that the president was traveling in Africa when the controversy took root, while Tenet was also traveling. The unstable environment in postwar Iraq and the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found provided a foundation for more questions over Bush`s State of the Union claims. "And you learn it`s difficult to control unnamed sources on both sides, including in the White House," he added.

There are plenty of what-ifs about this dispute, the biggest being, what if Bush, while traveling in Africa, had simply taken responsibility for using a disputed claim in his speech, called it a mistake and argued that there was plenty of other evidence to support his determination to remove Hussein from power. Administration officials say that would not have changed things. "[The press] would have asked, how did it get in there," said a White House official involved in the dispute. "This was a process story and [having Bush take responsibility] didn`t answer the process questions."

The first crack in the administration came on July 7, the morning Bush was leaving for Africa, when then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters it was wrong to have used the statement in the speech because the administration had learned after the speech was delivered that the claim was based on forged intelligence documents.

Fleischer`s statement triggered a barrage of questions that followed the presidential entourage through Africa, and his explanation of what had happened was quickly overtaken by new statements coming from the administration.

While in Africa, Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly pinned the blame on the CIA, a decision that in retrospect was clearly a mistake. Tenet, who had spoken to Rice that morning, issued a planned statement in which he took responsibility.

His statement was wrongly interpreted as his acceptance of sole responsibility. But a careful reading of the three-page statement showed that he only took responsibility for his agency`s failure to be more diligent in making sure the language was kept out of the president`s speech, and he pointed to National Security Council officials who wanted to keep the language despite the agency`s protests.

By the time Bush returned from Africa, a new controversy had erupted after revelations that the White House and the CIA had battled last fall over removing similar language from the Oct. 7 speech.

When the White House attempted last Friday to portray Tenet`s intervention in that episode as solely a technical matter involving intelligence sourcing, the CIA responded by letting it be known that Tenet had objected to exactly the same language that was in the State of the Union address.

The fact that it was backed up by memos forced the White House to go through the embarrassment of having Hadley publicly acknowledge he was at fault for not remembering in January that the White House had removed the same language just three months earlier.

Staff writer Mike Allen contributed

to this report.



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Pentagon Unveils Plan to Bolster Forces in Iraq
Year-Long Deployments for U.S. Troops to Be Revived for First Time Since 1985

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A08


The Pentagon unveiled its long-awaited plan yesterday for maintaining troop strength in Iraq that involves the rotation of virtually every remaining active duty unit in the Army plus the activation of National Guard brigades and the creation of three divisions of multinational forces.

The plan assumes that 156,000 U.S. forces battling a stubborn Baathist insurgency will have to remain in Iraq well into next year, showing that defense officials have now abandoned an earlier belief that they could begin to withdraw some U.S. forces this fall.

But the plan is built upon the arrival of a third multinational division in February or March to replace the 101st Airborne Division, even though the Bush administration is trying to complete deployment of the first two multinational divisions later this year.

With more than 60 percent of the Army`s active-duty combat force deployed in Iraq, Army planners were forced to abandon six-month tours for most overseas deployments in favor of year-long assignments to sustain a force of that size. The last time the Army used year-long deployments was Vietnam, except for one peacekeeping rotation in the Balkans in 1995.

But defense officials said the year-long tours at least will give soldiers and their families predictability in terms of how long they will be away from home. The lack of such predictability recently became a contentious issue for soldiers in the 3rd Infantry Division, who fought their way into Baghdad in April. They were led to believe they would soon be going home, only to have their tours repeatedly extended without a specified end date.

Under the plan, the division would be out of Iraq by September and replaced by soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division. At the same time, the remaining Marines from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force would be replaced by a multinational division under Polish command.

Beyond the activation of at least two "enhanced" National Guard brigades, other measures have been adopted to create a large enough rotation base. One is the inclusion of the 1st Cavalry Division, which has traditionally been held in reserve as a hedge against possible hostilities involving North Korea.

Another is inclusion of the Army`s new Stryker Brigade at Fort Lewis, Wash., built around the new eight-wheeled Stryker combat vehicle, which has just been certified in training exercises as combat-ready.

Three Army divisions under the plan will not have seen action in Iraq by the middle of next year: the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based in Korea and focused exclusively on the North Korean threat; the 10th Mountain Division, which is redeploying to Afghanistan after serving there in 2002; and the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, which is to replace the 10th Mountain Division next year.

Given the Army`s standard peacetime three-to-one rotation policy -- in which three divisions are home training, refitting and reconstituting for every one deployed overseas -- the 10-division army would have to double in size to maintain force levels in Iraq on a sustained basis.

"Is the force stressed? Yes, the force is stressing hard to meet its challenges," Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. "Is it overstressed, can it not meet its challenges? We don`t have any indication of that at this point."

Gen. John M. Keane, the Army`s acting chief of staff, who joined McChrystal at the briefing, acknowledged the strain but said that force levels in Iraq can be maintained well into next year as long as the required multinational peacekeeping forces arrive as planned. "If the coalition divisions did not materialize and we had to go back to Army divisions, clearly, that would stress this force."

But Keane, having recently returned from Iraq, insisted that morale remains high because U.S. soldiers, having lived through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, understand that their service in Iraq is related to the well-being of the American people. "They get it," he said. "There really is something different in terms of their intensity and this dogged determination to succeed."

The war in Iraq and the lengthy overseas deployments it has necessitated, he added, have not harmed recruiting. "Our recruiting is very good," he said. "Our retention is very high right now," he said. "Obviously, this is something we watch carefully. Are we concerned about it? Sure, we`re concerned about it with a commitment like that" in Iraq.

After the 3rd Infantry and 1st Marines leave Iraq in September, the plan calls for the Stryker Brigade to arrive in Iraq in October to augment the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is to leave in March. The 1st Armored Division will be replaced by elements of the 1st Cavalry, plus an enhanced National Guard brigade, between February and April. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment will be replaced by a brigade from the 1st Cavalry Division in March or April.

The remainder of the plan calls for the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to leave Iraq in January, with no replacement, and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, also with no replacement, to leave in April.



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Sword-Passing


By Richard Cohen

Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A21


Earlier this month CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for the assertion in George Bush`s State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to secure uranium in Africa. It was said at the time that Tenet had fallen on his sword. It is now clear that he fell on his credibility instead.

In a game of White House sword-passing not seen since the Nixon administration, it now turns out that yet another administration official -- Stephen Hadley of the National Security Council -- has stepped forward to take a piece of the blame himself. He follows Tenet and various White House and CIA underlings -- so many confessions, so many swords, so many people responsible yet none of them accountable.

Hadley now says he was twice warned by the CIA not to include the accusation about African uranium in a speech Bush was set to deliver last Oct. 7 in Cincinnati. One memo was sent on Oct. 5 and another on Oct 6. As a result, the mention of African uranium was deleted from Bush`s speech. Later, of course, it resurfaced in the State of the Union.

Why? Bush`s own response, provided to the media while he was visiting Africa, was that the CIA cleared the speech. Condoleezza Rice said the same thing while winging her way to Uganda: "The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety." In a flash, Tenet took the hint. "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency."

But Tenet had never read Bush`s speech. Why? It`s impossible to say for sure, but maybe -- just maybe -- he had given up fighting with a White House determined to exaggerate the urgency of dealing with Iraq`s nuclear weapons program. Whatever the case, he had twice warned the White House -- and his deputies had issued similar warnings. What more could a CIA director do?

Well, he might have resigned. He might have spoken up. He might have done what in Washington is considered virtually noble Roman behavior and leaked the truth. Instead, he did as the Bush White House wished. He took the blame.

It would be one thing if Tenet had proved himself to be a whiz-bang CIA director. He has not. He was the nation`s premier intelligence official on Sept. 11, which can only be called a massive intelligence failure. The United States was attacked on his watch -- not because the terrorists were so awfully clever but because our intelligence agencies were so awfully inept.

The same could be said for Rice. She had been warned by the Clinton administration`s outgoing NSC head, Sandy Berger, that terrorism -- specifically Osama bin Laden -- would be her number-one priority. Upon taking office, she relegated it to something less than that -- with disastrous consequences. It was her job to keep the FBI and the CIA coordinated. She failed at that, too.

Hadley is Rice`s top aide. He says he forgot about the warnings from Tenet -- two memos and one phone call -- and did not tell her. If that`s the case, he`s in the wrong job. If it`s not the case -- and a reasonable man could have reasonable doubt -- is it possible Rice said nothing to Bush? Maybe not. But if not, why not? That`s her job.

By now it is clear that the White House was so desperate to buttress its unsupportable claims of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat that it was willing to include the most questionable of evidence. That happened not only with the uranium reference but also with another piece of supposedly significant evidence -- those aluminum tubes that turned out to play no role in any nuclear weapons program. Who was behind this? Rice? Dick Cheney? The president himself? The uranium reference kept turning up like a bad penny. It had a sponsor -- someone awfully high up.

Each time the buck passes, another level of incompetence -- or shenanigans -- is exposed. Now in the chain of supposed bumblers we have Hadley and, by extension, Rice. Either they did not do their jobs or the jobs they did were so frankly political that they both ought to move over to the Republican National Committee, where, on a given day, spin and exaggeration are the sole product.

Tenet, though, gets pride of place. He has put a huge dent in the vaunted -- and valued -- independence of the CIA. It`s impossible to see him now as a pillar of integrity, someone who speaks his mind no matter what and values keeping his independence over keeping his job. He`s shilled for the president once too often. He`s got to go.



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Gephardt`s 16 Words


By William Kristol

Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page A21


"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."

-- Rep. Richard A. Gephardt

(D-Mo.), July 22

President Bush`s 16 words on uranium and Africa in his January State of the Union address -- "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" -- have become famous, or infamous. But Dick Gephardt`s 16 words, spoken in the course of a major foreign policy speech this past Tuesday, are the ones that matter.

Bush`s words, though probably a mistake, didn`t change anything. The vote to authorize war had taken place months before. The arguments for and against war had all been made and re-made. The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- even if one accepts the State Department`s modest dissent to one of its findings -- shows that the president acted in good faith in making his case about the danger of Hussein`s quest for weapons of mass destruction.

Dick Gephardt`s 16 words, by contrast, change everything. They reflect the considered judgment of a centrist Democratic presidential candidate, one who voted to authorize the war, that his party must stand in fundamental opposition to the Bush foreign policy. They indicate the capture of the Democratic Party by the pace-setter in the presidential race, former Vermont governor Howard Dean.

Dean said on June 22 that "we don`t know whether in the long run the Iraqi people are better off" with Hussein gone, and "we don`t know whether we`re better off." At the time, Gephardt demurred from Dean`s agnosticism.

Now, exactly one month later, Gephardt is following in Dean`s footsteps.

Actually, Gephardt went further than Dean. I suppose it`s technically possible that things could turn out worse for the Iraqi people, or for us, post-Hussein (though I`d be happy to take that bet, and I`m sure the Bush campaign would too). But Gephardt has laid down an extraordinarily clear marker for judging the Bush administration: He claims we`re less safe and less secure than we were four years ago.

Is this the case? Were we safer and more secure when Osama bin Laden was unimpeded in assembling his terror network in Afghanistan? When Pakistan was colluding with the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia with al Qaeda? When Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq? When demonstrations by an incipient democratic opposition in Iran had been crushed with nary a peep from the U.S. government? When we were unaware that North Korea, still receiving U.S. food aid, had covertly started a second nuclear program? When our defense budget and our intelligence services were continuing to drift downward in capacity in a post-Cold War world?

Are we not even a little safer now that the Taliban and Hussein are gone, many al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, governments such as Pakistan`s and Saudi Arabia`s are at least partly hampering al Qaeda`s efforts instead of blithely colluding with them, the opposition in Iran is stronger, our defense and intelligence budgets are up and, for that matter, Milosevic is gone and the Balkans are at peace (to mention something for which the Clinton administration deserves credit but that had not happened by July 1999)?

Is it reasonable to criticize aspects of the Bush administration`s foreign policy? Sure. The initial failures in planning for postwar Iraq, the incoherence of its North Korea policy, the failure adequately to increase defense spending or reform our intelligence agencies . . . on all of these, and other issues as well, the administration could use constructive, even sharp, criticism. But that we were safer and more secure four years ago?

Gephardt has made a claim that will come back to haunt him and his fellow Democrats.

Bill Clinton understands this. Tuesday evening, hours after Gephardt`s speech, he suggested in a television interview that rather than debate the past, "we ought to focus on where we are and what the right thing to do for Iraq is now." Indeed, he (implicitly) warned his fellow Democrats that "we should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq."

At the same time, however, senior Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel was on another network criticizing the "assassination" of Uday and Qusay Hussein, and asking, "Are you going to sleep any safer tonight knowing that these two bums are dead?" Actually, yes. And our troops in Iraq will sleep safer when their father is dead too.

There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration`s foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush`s foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush`s Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

The writer is editor of the Weekly Standard.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Posted on Thu, Jul. 24, 2003

ELLEN GOODMAN

Fishing expedition in the library




On the whole, I wouldn`t choose to go fishing in a library or a bookstore. The library is a bit dusty, and while the local bookstore may be the final resting place of a forest or two, it`s water-challenged.

Nevertheless, the same phrase keeps coming up again and again. As worriers describe the government`s ability to search through the records of readers, they label it a ``fishing expedition.`` They define it as part of Attorney General John Ashcroft`s all-terrain venture to catch-and-not-release terrorists.

This fish tale began in the anxious weeks after 9/11 when Congress passed the Patriot Act with hardly any dissent. The act became the perfect example of the revised adage: Legislate in haste and repent in leisure.

Deep in the troubled waters of the 340-page law is Section 215, a provision that gives the feds the right to inspect or seize the records of any reader, Web surfer, book buyer or borrower. The government can simply get approval from a secret court without showing probable cause. Moreover, a gag provision means that the librarian or bookseller can`t tell a customer that the government is reading over his or her shoulder.

This expedition resembles ocean dragging more than fly-fishing. Among the first to notice was a group of Vermont booksellers including Linda Ramsdell. She runs the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, population 3,500, where the bestseller this summer is The True Account, a send-up of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Ramsdell, who is also the head of the New England Booksellers Association, doesn`t usually get involved in politics because ``politics involves a lot of meetings, and I don`t like meetings.`` But faced with a law that she found ``really creepy,`` she contacted Vermont`s Bernie Sanders, the only independent congressman.

Sanders then introduced the Freedom to Read Protection Act -- one of those titles that would appeal to even literacy guru Laura Bush. In fact, the bill to amend the Patriot Act and get the big hook out of the reading stream has garnered support from both the civil-liberties left and the anti-Big Government right. There are two similar bills now working their way through the Senate.

This is the first provision in the Patriot Act to get much attention. That, says Sanders, is because this `isn`t about Guantánamo Bay or someone from another country. Ordinary people say, `Wait a minute, you mean to say that the Department of Justice and the FBI can get a list of the books I take out without any evidence of terrorism? Wow, this is going way too far.` ``

AFTER THE `BAD GUYS`

The Justice Department disagrees of course. A spokesman said: ``We`re only going after the bad guys. . . . If you`re not a terrorist or a spy, you have nothing to worry about.``

But when the government has secret, unlimited access to anything you read, any website you surf at the library, it creates the sense that we are all being watched -- and it ups the odds of catching the wrong fish.

What if you`re not a terrorist but you read like one? As Emily Sheketoff of the American Library Association says: ``We don`t agree that if you read a murder mystery, that makes you a murderer; if you read spy stories, that makes you a spy; and if you read science books, that makes you some sort of demented terrorist.``

Hmmm . . . Anyone reading Holy War or Banish Fear of Flying or The Anarchist Cookbook, let alone Treason? Anyone with a foreign name checking out Scourge or The Andromeda Strain?

Read any good books lately? The idea that the government could throw that book at you has led some booksellers to destroy their records and led some libraries to put up signs announcing that they can`t protect your privacy.

A SCARY BUSINESS

Lest you think that they are alarmists, remember when the FBI wanted to check out Monica Lewinsky`s chick lit? Remember when the Denver police tried to find out what an accused methamphetamine maker had ordered from the city`s best-loved bookstore, The Tattered Cover? It turned out to be a book on Japanese calligraphy.

Terrorism is a serious, scary business. Since 9/11, we`ve been trying to figure the proper balance between security and freedom. Just what must we give up for how much safety? But before the Patriot Act, officials already had the right to go through library records if there was probable cause. We need a new law to get back to an old balance.

This is not the last look at the Patriot Act under the dominion of Ashcroft. Indeed, says Sanders, ``A lot of people are nervous about the kind of tools given Ashcroft.`` Fishing tools?

Time to reel that man in.

©2003 Washington Post Writers Group


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Bush`s bad news for the right


By George F. Will, 7/24/2003

WASHINGTONTHIS IS THE SUMMER of conservatives` discontent. Conservatism has been disoriented by events in the last several weeks. Cumulatively, foreign and domestic developments constitute an identity crisis of conservatism, which is being recast - and perhaps rendered incoherent.


George W. Bush may be the most conservative person to serve as president since Calvin Coolidge. Yet his presidency is coinciding with, and is in some instances initiating or ratifying, developments disconcerting to four factions within conservatism.

The faction that focuses on foreign policy has four core principles: Preserve US sovereignty and freedom of action by marginalizing the United Nations. Reserve military interventions for reasons of US national security, not altruism. Avoid peacekeeping operations that compromise the military`s war-fighting proficiencies. Beware of the political hubris inherent in the intensely unconservative project of ``nation building.``

Today a conservative administration is close to asserting that whatever the facts turn out to be regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the enforcement of UN resolutions was a sufficient reason for war. If so, war was waged to strengthen the United Nations as author and enforcer of international norms of behavior. The administration also intimates that ending a tyranny was a sufficient justification for war. Foreign policy conservatism has become colored by triumphalism and crusading zeal. That may be one reason why consideration is being given to a quite optional intervention - regime change, actually - in Liberia.

The conservative faction that focuses on low taxes as the key to economic dynamism and individual opportunity has had two good years. But this faction must be unsettled by signs that the president`s refusal to veto last year`s abominable farm bill (in fact, he has vetoed nothing) was not an aberration. The tax cutting seems unrelated to any thoughtful notion of what the government should and should not do.

Howard Dean, who will say anything while pandering to his party`s activists, says the Bush administration aims to ``dismantle`` Medicare. Actually, the administration is eager to approve the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society 40 years ago.

A prescription drug entitlement is not inherently unconservative unless the welfare state itself is - and it isn`t. If the pharmacological revolution that has occurred since Medicare was enacted in 1965 had occurred by then, some such entitlement would have been included. But the administration probably will approve an entitlement of unknowable cost ($400 billion over 10 years is today`s guess, which is probably low), without reform of Medicare.

The conservative faction that focuses on constitutionalism and democratic due process winced when the president seemed to approve of Justice Sandra Day O`Connor`s opinion affirming the constitutionality of racial preferences for diversity in higher education - and perhaps in many other spheres of life. The concept of group rights - of government complicity in allocating wealth and opportunity on the basis of skin pigmentation - now has a conservative president`s imprimatur.

Finally, this summer the faction called ``social conservatives`` has been essentially read out of America`s political conversation. Their agenda has been stigmatized as morally wrong and constitutionally dubious by the Supreme Court, seven of whose nine members are Republican appointees. Justice Anthony Kennedy - like O`Connor, a Reagan appointee - wrote the opinion striking down a Texas law criminalizing consensual adult homosexual acts. Kennedy asserted, in effect, that laws intended to strengthen a majority`s moral principles - laws of a sort America has never been without - are constitutionally suspect.

The president is rightly reluctant to endorse a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual institution: constitutionalizing social policy is generally unwise. But the administration`s principal objective may be to avoid fights about cultural questions. Two weeks ago the administration reaffirmed the irrational and unfair implementation standards of the Title IX ban on sex discrimination in college athletics. Those standards are now immortal, having received a conservative administration`s approval.

What blow will befall conservatives next? Watch the Supreme Court, the composition of which matters more than does the composition of Congress.

Justice David Souter, nominated by the first President Bush, quickly became a reliable member of the Supreme Court`s liberal bloc. Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel who came with this President Bush from Texas, may be chosen to fill the next court vacancy. The likelihood of a vacancy during this presidency has given rise to a grim joke among conservatives:

How do you say ``Souter`` in Spanish? ``Gonzales.``

George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.

This story ran on page A11 of the Boston Globe on 7/24/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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A TOW missile streaks toward a building suspected by the U.S. Army of harboring Saddam Hussein`s sons Qusay and Uday in Mosul, Iraq, on July 22, 2003. The United States will release photographs of Saddam Hussein`s sons taken after they were killed by American missiles as they resisted arrest in an effort to convince Iraqis they are truly dead, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. Photo by Curtis Hargrave/U.S. Army via Reuters

Ambush Kills 3 from Division That Killed Saddam Sons
Thu July 24, 2003 06:33 AM ET

By Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three U.S. soldiers died in northern Iraq Thursday in the second fatal attack on troops from the 101st Airborne Division since they tracked down and killed Saddam Hussein`s feared sons Uday and Qusay.

Washington had hoped the deaths of the brothers, killed on Tuesday when 200 soldiers stormed their hideout in Mosul, would end a guerrilla war that has claimed 44 U.S. lives since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

But with attacks continuing and many Iraqis still worried the hated former ruling family may rise again, the Pentagon prepared to publish grisly mortuary photos to try to convince them Uday and Qusay really are dead.

The U.S. military said the three soldiers from the 101st died when their vehicles were ambushed close to Qayara, south of Mosul, by gunmen who also fired rocket-propelled grenades.

Wednesday, one soldier from the division was killed and seven were wounded when two vehicles hit a mine on the outskirts of the city, and in a separate ambush, a soldier from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was killed west of Baghdad.

Five U.S. soldiers have now been killed since the deaths of Uday, 39, and Qusay, 37, Saddam`s heir apparent. In all, 11 have died in the past week alone.

U.S. officials had warned of the risk of revenge attacks, and al-Jazeera television aired footage of masked men with rifles and grenade launchers vowing vengeance. "We will make them regret what they did to Uday and Qusay," one said.

But Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said the killing of the brothers would demoralize guerrillas and help tighten the noose around Saddam, who has a $25 million price on his head.

In Baghdad, two Iraqis were killed when U.S. troops opened fire on a car that ignored instructions to stop, local witnesses said. The car burst into flames leaving a charred wreck. Two bodies were taken to hospital, residents said.

U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne stand guard in front of the house which U.S. troops stormed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, late July 22, 2003. Saddam Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a six-hour gunbattle with U.S. troops at the villa after a tip-off from an Iraqi, the U.S. military said. Photo by Stefano Rellandini/Reuters



GRIM PHOTOGRAPHS

After decades of official lies, many Iraqis say they will not believe Saddam`s heirs are dead until they see photographs.

"I don`t know why, but if I don`t see with my own eyes I won`t believe it," said Nairy Bedrosian, an Iraqi woman who works at an Internet cafe.

Ismail Zaiyer, editor-in-chief of Al Sabah, a newspaper backed by the U.S.-led administration, said he would run a special edition if pictures of the bodies were released. The paper is not usually published Friday, the Muslim holy day.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said proof that Saddam`s sons were dead might quell violence against U.S. forces and quash fears Saddam could return to power.

"We are going to make sure the Iraqi people believe us at the end of the day," he said, adding Washington might release "shocking" photographs despite the offence it might cause.

The brothers were tracked down after a tip-off from an Iraqi informant expected to get the two $15 million rewards offered for information leading to their death or capture.

A TOW missile streaks toward a building suspected by the U.S. Army of harboring Saddam Hussein`s sons Qusay and Uday in Mosul, Iraq, on July 22, 2003. Former aides to Saddam Hussein, as well as medical and dental records, confirmed the ousted dictator`s sons were killed in a gunbattle with American troops, the U.S. commander in Iraq said on July 23. EDITORIAL USE ONLY NO SALES REUTERS/Curtis Hargrave/us Army

They were holed up in a Mosul villa with a bodyguard and Qusay`s teenage son, U.S. officials say. Armed only with AK-47 assault rifles, they wounded four American soldiers and held out for hours against a devastating array of U.S. firepower, including attack helicopters, heavy machineguns and grenades.

U.S. commanders said Uday, Qusay and the bodyguard were eventually killed when the house was blasted with 10 anti-tank missiles. The teen-ager made a last stand but was shot as troops raced up the stairs after finally getting into the villa.

The deaths of the brothers, and the capture of a cousin of Saddam who led the elite Special Republican Guard, brought to 37 the number of Iraqis on a list of 55 most-wanted fugitives to have been caught or killed since Saddam was toppled.

France, which led opposition to the war that toppled Saddam, welcomed the killing of Uday and Qusay but said it could spark revenge attacks. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said the United Nations should take over peacekeeping.

"The death of the two sons who were the future of Saddam Hussein`s regime marks the end of an era and we can hope that with the capture of Saddam himself the page will be definitively turned," he said.

"One can also imagine resistance ... intensifying. That`s why for France the key is to press ahead with the political process."


U.S. soldiers watch as flames erupt from a building hit with a missile launched by the U.S. Army`s 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, Iraq, July 22, 2003. Former aides to Saddam Hussein, as well as medical and dental records confirmed the ousted dictato`s sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a gunbattle with American troops at the house, the U.S. commander in Iraq said on July 23. Picture taken July 22, 2003. EDITORIAL USE ONLY. REUTERS/Spc. Robert Woodward/U.S. Army

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Davis Recall Qualifies for Fall Ballot
Governor Vows to `Fight Like a Bengal Tiger` to Remain in Office
By Michael Finnegan
Times Staff Writer

July 24, 2003

SACRAMENTO — The drive to remove Gov. Gray Davis from office qualified for the ballot Wednesday, clearing the way for a campaign unlike any other in California history.

Barring intervention by the California Supreme Court, the certification of the gubernatorial recall, announced by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, meant Davis would face a popular vote of confidence in late September or early October, less than a year after he was reelected.

The recall is endorsed by the state Republican Party and threatens to undermine Democrats` control of the largest state government in the nation.

In the 92 years since California voters added a recall provision to the state Constitution, no statewide official has faced such a vote.

"All of us are very aware that we are making history and setting history," Shelley said.

Already, a handful of Republicans are weighing the prospect of joining the campaign that will decide Davis` fate, a race that will unfold with lightning speed in political terms: Start-to-finish, it will last less than three months.

Shelley`s announcement came just hours after lawyers for a Davis campaign committee asked the California Supreme Court to block the secretary of state from certifying the recall for the ballot. The request, rebuffed earlier in the day by a lower court, drew no immediate response Wednesday from the high court.

In San Francisco, Davis vowed to "fight like a Bengal tiger" to survive a challenge that will be touch, even for a veteran of three decades in California politics.

"One of my greatest strengths is that people have underestimated me since I was born," Davis said shortly before Shelley`s announcement. "Every time they say I`m road kill, I continue to win, because I have great faith that the California voters are fair."

Democratic leaders have publicly vowed to support Davis and have attempted to cast the recall effort as a Republican attempt to push a conservative agenda that could not prevail in a normal election. Privately, however, some worry about Davis` low poll ratings and concede that he faces a difficult time holding off a challenge.

Under the state Constitution, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante must schedule an election to take place 60 to 80 days after Shelley`s certification. That means the election will occur on one of three Tuesdays: Sept. 23, Sept. 30 or Oct. 7.

But what the ballot will look like remains a mystery. The Constitution empowers Bustamante, a Democrat, to call the recall election — as well as an election to choose a successor "if appropriate."

Republicans have planned for months to run at least one candidate to replace Davis. On Tuesday, however, Bustamante said he might not schedule an election for a Davis successor to be held simultaneously with the recall itself. On Wednesday, Republicans voiced outrage at that idea.

If the recall prevailed, that scenario could position Bustamante to fill the vacancy left by the Democratic governor, at least temporarily.

"He`s obviously trying to install himself," said George Gorton, a top political advisor to action-movie icon Arnold Schwarzenegger, a potential Republican candidate for governor. "It`s not just a coincidence that he is a beneficiary of the maneuvers he is making."

Bustamante said Wednesday that he was awaiting legal opinions from Shelley, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer and counsel to the Legislature on whether he needs to call an election for a Davis successor.

"I`m not a constitutional scholar, nor a constitutional lawyer," he said. "I`m going to rely on those attorneys who are — and who represent the best legal thinking in government."

Lawyers at the secretary of state`s office have advised Bustamante that candidates to succeed Davis should be able to run on the recall ballot, said Shelley, who described California`s elections laws as "murky at best."

The governor`s advisors expect that Bustamante will ultimately decide to combine the election of a Davis successor on the recall ballot. Bustamante pledged to take no more than 24 hours to announce the date, and he scheduled a 10 a.m. news conference for today.

Bustamante`s choice of an election date will culminate a recall petition drive that began soon after Davis won a second term.

In November, Davis beat Republican Bill Simon Jr., 47% to 42%, but within weeks, his popularity plunged as the state`s fiscal crisis deepened.

In February, the state GOP embraced a recall petition drive that posed little threat to Davis until Darrell Issa, a wealthy Republican congressman from the San Diego area, started paying professional crews to gather signatures. The recall campaign rapidly gained momentum from that point, with proponents submitting more than 1.6 million signatures to county election offices across California this month.

On Wednesday, potential candidates were pressing forward with campaign plans despite the uncertainty over what form the ballot will take. State Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) filed papers to form an exploratory campaign for governor. He has run twice for state controller and lost.

McClintock said his candidacy "looks very likely." He promised to "roll back the regulation and taxes that are choking our economy."

Schwarzenegger, who was to travel to Mexico City today to promote his new "Terminator" movie, was nearing a final decision Wednesday on whether he would run for governor. His wife, NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver, has been cool to the idea, Gorton said.

"His wife`s concern — quite appropriately — is what effect this would have on their family," Gorton said.

The only Republican already in the race is Issa. He called the recall`s qualification for the ballot "a landmark for California." In a written statement, he pledged to put a stop to "business as usual in Sacramento" and said voters "must recall Gray Davis and clean up the mess he has made of our state."

Republican consultant Sal Russo, who ran Simon`s campaign against Davis last fall, would not say whether Simon would run on the recall ballot. But he said Simon had spent the last few months talking to his family, donors and volunteers about the possibility.

"He`s been doing the due diligence and it looks extraordinarily encouraging," Russo said. "We`re confident that if he got in the race, he would win."

Peter Camejo, the Green Party gubernatorial candidate who won 5% of the vote in November, also has said he would run on the recall ballot.

As would-be successors to Davis assessed their options, the legal challenges played out in court.

Lawyers for Taxpayers Against the Governor`s Recall, a committee organized by the Davis political team, had sought a court order to stop the signature count pending investigation of their claims that recall sponsors broke election laws by hiring petition circulators who live outside California. Late in the morning, a Los Angeles appeals court rejected that request.

The committee`s lawyers appealed immediately to the state Supreme Court, warning in legal papers that Shelley "could certify the recall for the ballot as early as tonight or tomorrow."

"Unless this court acts, a recall election will be certified on the basis of hundreds of thousands of signatures gathered by firms that bused in out-of-state signature gatherers and instructed them to lie on the declaration that must be submitted with each section of the petition," committee lawyers wrote in court papers.

But at 6:33 p.m., Shelley, a San Francisco Democrat, announced that recall sponsors had submitted nearly 1.4 million valid voter signatures on their petition for a special election, far more than the 897,158 they needed.

The state Supreme Court could also be drawn into the recall through the Commission on the Governorship, an obscure state panel led by state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco). By law, the commission can petition the Supreme Court to settle questions on gubernatorial succession.

Burton, elected to the Legislature in 1964, said he had never heard of the commission before last weekend but might convene a meeting of the panel on Monday. The other members would be Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, University of California President Richard Atkinson, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed and the governor`s finance director, Steve Peace.

With the national media spotlight focused on the recall campaign, Davis used the attention Wednesday to make his case that the campaign should focus less on him than on the agenda of the Republicans who might replace him.

Davis also argued that the election, which the secretary of state estimated would cost $30 million to $35 million, would be a waste of money.

Positioning himself for the race, the normally centrist governor has lurched leftward over the last week in an apparent effort to mobilize women, blacks, Latinos, union members and other blocs of the Democratic Party base.

In San Francisco, a Democratic bastion he has visited three times in the last week, Davis appeared with Mayor Willie Brown at a day-care center where Davis sat on the floor in a circle of children for an awkward rendition of "This Land is Your Land."

After the singing, Davis cast himself as a protector of abortion rights, gun control, public schools and health care for children. In the end, he said, California voters "will choose a progressive agenda over a conservative agenda."

Times staff writers Virginia Ellis, Matea Gold, Nancy Vogel, Carol Pogash, Megan Garvey, Dan Morain, Allison Hoffman, Carl Ingram and Jean Guccione contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Speed, Force Marked Lethal Raid
About 200 troops, backed by copters, mounted assault that killed Hussein`s sons. House`s owner may have provided the tip.
By John Daniszewski, John Hendren and David Zucchino
Times Staff Writers

July 24, 2003

MOSUL, Iraq — Sheik Nawaf Zaidan had been looking a bit edgy lately, his neighbors say.

A well-connected building contractor in his 50s, he had complained to merchants in his affluent area of Mosul that he had been unable to sleep much, only about one or two hours a night. When the electricity went out a few weeks ago, he ran over in a panic and begged for an immediate line from a generator.

On Tuesday morning, the probable reason for Zaidan`s anxiety was revealed.

"I`ve got Uday, Qusai and big, big problems," he is said to have told a neighbor, to whose home Zaidan had been spirited by U.S. troops.

It was an understatement. By that time, U.S. forces were already shooting .50-caliber machine-gun rounds through his front door nearby.

After almost four hours of heavy fire, Uday and Qusai Hussein — the two most feared men in Iraq after their father, Saddam — were dead along with a bodyguard, U.S. officials said.

Only one combatant inside the house remained alive: Qusai`s 14-year-old son, Mustafa. The teenager fired a final burst of AK-47 fire at the troops until he too was overwhelmed and killed, officials said.

The assault on Zaidan`s imposing three-story home along a busy thoroughfare out of this northern Iraq city has been hailed as a turning point in the U.S. effort to win the peace in postwar Iraq. During four hours of shooting — U.S. officials initially had said the battle lasted six hours — the three men and one boy inside the home held back a force of about 200 soldiers aided by heavy weaponry and assault helicopters.

A day after the battle, journalists were still trying to piece together an accurate account of the frenetic events at the Zaidan residence. Some questions remain, such as the identity of the tipster who alerted U.S. intelligence on where the Hussein brothers could be found and why American forces opted to use deadly force rather than wait out the fugitives and attempt to capture them alive.

There also may be questions about whether Uday died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. ABC News reported that a U.S. official said there is an exit wound on top of Uday`s head.

But based on statements by the U.S. military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and comments of neighbors and witnesses, a recounting of the day`s events can be made. The circumstantial evidence raises suspicions that Zaidan fingered his houseguests, despite the fact that Zaidan and the Husseins belonged to the same tribe and Zaidan had received business concessions or favors from the regime.

In any case, it was a combination of a speedy reaction to information and overwhelming force that put an end to the two brothers, who — true to their family`s Mafia-like credo — chose to die together with guns in their hands rather than surrender.

After an unidentified Iraqi told U.S. forces on Monday night that Uday and Qusai were inside house No. 6 in the prosperous Falah district, U.S. military commanders scrambled late into the night to craft a battle plan that would begin at 10 a.m.

Fueling the rumor that Zaidan was the tipster, he had made sure ahead of the battle that his wife and daughters were away. Unusual for him, said members of the Ziad Mohammed Katib family, who live two doors up the street, Zaidan had gone out around 6 a.m. Even more strangely, he took his wife, son and young daughters with him.

According to Ziad Katib`s 15-year-old son, Yehia, by the time Zaidan and his son returned — alone, without the female family members — American forces had already arrived outside Zaidan`s house prepared to search it, by force if necessary.

Zaidan and his son, Shalan, returned around 9 a.m., according to another neighbor, Shalan Rashid Khazraji. The Katib and Khazraji families agree that Zaidan and his son were quickly taken into custody by the Americans, but the families give slightly different versions.

According to the Katibs, American troops grabbed the two when they came to a gate.

Khazraji said that at 9:30 a.m., Zaidan dashed out one gate while his son ran out another, and they were swiftly swept up by U.S. soldiers.

Neighbors also said that for detainees, Zaidan and his son appeared to have been given kid-glove treatment. The pair were first allowed to sit in an American vehicle and then they were taken into an elaborate, three-story house nearby. While talking to a son of the owner of that house, Zaidan made his remark about having Uday and Qusai in his home, posing "big, big problems," according to Khazraji, who said the comment quickly reverberated around the neighborhood.

It was the first time neighbors realized who the American troops were after, and it came as a complete shock to Katib, who said he had no inkling that Uday and Qusai were there.

"We did not notice anything," Katib said. Zaidan "always had many guests."

Khazraji said Zaidan was also heard urging the Americans not to enter his house, because they would face fierce resistance.

The accounts of Sanchez and the neighbors were consistent regarding the active part of the siege beginning at 10 a.m. with a bullhorn call ordering those inside to come out. With no answer, Sanchez said later, negotiations were essentially over.

Ten minutes later, troops knocked on the door. Again, there was no response, so the soldiers burst in and immediately faced small-arms fire, apparently from AK-47s wielded by Uday, Qusai, Mustafa and the bodyguard from the barricaded second floor, Sanchez said.

The first volley of gunfire wounded three Americans on the stairs to the second floor and a fourth outside the building. The Americans, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and special operations troops pulled out to evacuate their casualties via helicopter and ask for backup — a quick reaction force and heavier weapons. Inside, the gunmen were lobbing grenades at Special Forces soldiers on the roof.

After the troops withdrew from the house, soldiers riddled it with Mark 19 grenades, AT4 antitank rockets and Humvee-mounted .50-caliber machine guns, Sanchez said.

The "prep" fire still wasn`t done. Reinforcements from the 101st`s 2nd Brigade arrived at 11:22 a.m.

Then, at 11:45, came Kiowa OH58D helicopters, firing 10 2.75-inch rockets. Two struck behind the house, two fell in a vacant lot next door and the rest were direct hits, neighbors said.

Some Iraqis expressed dismay at the firepower.

"If Uday and Qusai were inside that house, 10 soldiers would have been enough. They didn`t have to surround the whole building," said a patron at a grocery store across the street, who declined to give his name.

At noon, according to Sanchez`s timeline, the soldiers burst through the doorway a second time. They cleared the first floor but withdrew, wary of the barricade at the top of the stairs. The four inside were all believed to have survived a three-hour onslaught, Sanchez said.

Commanders huddled on the radio, considering destroying the house with Apache helicopters and A-10 Warthog warplanes hovering nearby, but they feared heavy casualties among the neighbors. Instead, at 1 p.m., they ordered heavy fire with the machine guns, Mark 19s and, for the first time, TOW missiles fired from Humvees.

Uday, Qusai and the bodyguard were dead, Sanchez said. "We believe it was the TOW missile attack that wound up killing three of the adults," he said.

That left young Mustafa.

At 1:21 p.m., the soldiers walked through the door for the third time. Moving cautiously up the stairs, they took no fire — until they reached the top. Mustafa then fired his AK-47, Sanchez said. It was his final act.

Several witnesses said four bodies were taken out of the building — a bearded man and three others under blankets. To some, it seemed far too much firepower for three men and a teenager.

"Why did the Americans kill Uday and Qusai? We wanted them alive so they could be questioned," said Masin Ibrahim, a resident who watched the scene unfold. "They really wanted to kill them, without giving them a chance to surrender."

Knowing that the legend of Uday and Qusai would live on — along with the inspiration to kill American soldiers on their behalf until their deaths were proven — U.S. troops ferried the bodies to the Baghdad airport for a series of identification tests. First, they brought in four unidentified "senior former regime members" who are familiar with the infamous Hussein brothers.

Then they compared old medical X-rays to verify that Uday`s body bore the scars of a previous assassination attempt, Sanchez said. It did, he said.

Then they matched dental records. The results, Sanchez said: 90% match for Uday, 100% for Qusai.

"Autopsies will follow, but we have no doubt we have the bodies of Uday and Qusai," Sanchez told reporters. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that photos of the bodies also would be released.

On Wednesday, a crowd of nearly 200 gathered across the street from the site of the shooting. The tension between them and the soldiers of the 101st Airborne was palpable. At one point, a group of about 20 young men began an old Hussein-era chant: "With our blood and souls, we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam!" Several held up pieces of Iraqi currency — which still bears the fugitive dictator`s image.

"People of Mosul, please leave the area or we will arrest you. We killed Uday and Qusai yesterday. Now we are going to clear the area. Anyone who remains will be considered as a supporter of Uday and Qusai," an Arabic-speaking interpreter for the Americans said through a bullhorn.

After a two-minute warning, the soldiers went in, arresting and then releasing a straggler — who gave his name as Mohammed Refai — who did not run away fast enough.

A few blocks down, a soldier armed with an M-16 ordered another Iraqi, Juma Ahmed Ridha, to stop his van, then shot out his back window and dragged the driver out. As blood streamed from his head down his white tunic, Ridha pleaded to a reporter in Arabic: "I have no idea why they beat me. I just came here to have a look."

What kept curious onlookers milling outside Zaidan`s home, they said, was a number of unanswered questions: What happened to the nearly $1 billion Qusai took from Iraq`s central bank before disappearing? Is Saddam Hussein directing the guerrilla resistance? Is the coalition any closer to locating him?

"I`m not sure I can give you" an exact answer, Sanchez said at a briefing for reporters in Baghdad. "But I will tell you our focus is unequivocal. We know what our targets are The Saddam Hussein regime will never come back into power."

Zaidan and his son apparently remained with American troops late Wednesday for their own protection, and his wife and daughters have not reappeared. A spokesman at the opulent Mosul house of Zaidan`s brother, Salah, said he had no idea where the wife and daughter had gone.

But if Zaidan was indeed the tipster, the family stands to be richer by $30 million — the reward on the heads of Uday and Qusai — and Zaidan`s "big, big problems" may be over.

*

Daniszewski and Hendren reported from Mosul and Zucchino from Baghdad.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Deaths of Hussein`s Sons Elicit Skepticism
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer

July 24, 2003

BAGHDAD — The shopkeeper leaned over the counter, almost chortling with excitement Wednesday as he talked about the killings of Saddam Hussein`s two sons by American soldiers. Then he paused, a look of doubt passing over his face.

"I would like to make sure 100% that they are dead," said Majid Rasheed, 40, the owner of a small shoe store in Baghdad`s affluent Mansour neighborhood. His shop is just a few feet from the spot where a failed 1996 assassination attempt had left the former Iraqi leader`s oldest son, Uday, dependent on a cane.

"I would like to see the bodies, even if they are dismembered into 100 pieces," Rasheed said.

He stopped again. That was not quite it.

"I know I am contradicting myself because I just said I wanted to see their bodies, but really I would have preferred if they had been arrested and tried in court," he said. "There are so many things hidden that the Iraqi people would like to know. So much knowledge of what happened here has vanished with their death."

Rasheed`s conflicted feelings were repeated in a number of interviews with Iraqis on Wednesday as they tried to digest the news that the Americans had killed Hussein`s infamous sons, and as they raised questions about why the pair had been killed rather than captured.

Uday Hussein, 39, and his 37-year-old brother Qusai occupy a place almost as large and nightmarish in the minds of most Iraqis as does their father. Almost everyone interviewed expressed deep regret that the two will never be called to account publicly for their crimes and own up to what they did.

The Iraqis, regardless of their views on Saddam Hussein`s rule, almost unanimously expressed a desire for a court proceeding to help them learn the truth about the regime they had lived under.

"If they could have been tried in court, it would have offered people evidence of the crimes they had committed. People would finally know," said Fazah Ghazi, 42, who was shopping for blouses in a Mansour boutique with three friends. "Without knowing these things for certain, people are doubtful: Did they do this? Did they do that?"

One friend nodded in concurrence, but the other two said they were not yet convinced that the people killed were Uday and Qusai Hussein.

Most Iraqis had not yet heard the lengthy briefing that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander of ground forces in Iraq, gave to the Baghdad media on Wednesday afternoon in which he detailed the methods used to identify the bodies.

In addition to dental records and X-rays of Uday Hussein`s legs, which had permanent injuries from the 1996 assassination attempt, U.S. forces brought in four "senior former regime members to do a visual identification of the bodies," Sanchez said.

"Four individuals independently verified that we had both of Saddam Hussein`s sons," he said. "Autopsies will follow, but we have no doubt that we have the bodies of Uday and Qusai."

In the light of skepticism among Iraqis, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters Wednesday during a visit to Capitol Hill that the U.S. would release photographs of the corpses, which would contradict a long-held practice of the U.S. military to not show photos of captive or dead enemies.

In a statement, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said: "We are going to make sure the Iraqi people believe this at the end of the day, and there are a lot of ways to do that."

Even if Iraqis here become convinced that the Hussein brothers are dead, that could only heighten their sense of having been cheated of the chance to bring the two to justice.

Rasheed, the shopkeeper, was skeptical that the Americans had to go in with guns blazing.

"How can it be that the Americans, who have so much force at their disposal — who have so many different kinds of arms, who have stun guns, who entered Baghdad so quickly — how can it be that it is impossible for them to take just four people alive?" he asked. "I don`t understand it."

A well-known local radio journalist had similar sentiments in an evening broadcast.

"Surely it was possible for a very sophisticated army like the U.S. military to use any kind of weapons, such as tear gas, to catch them," said the journalist, who goes by the name Al Mukh- tar.

Sanchez defended the military`s decision to fire rockets into the house where the two sons were staying and pepper it with machine-gun fire. "We did make an attempt with the interpreter and with bullhorns to try to attempt to get a surrender," he said. "And what we got back was return fire."

However, Sanchez avoided directly answering the question of why the military decided against surrounding the house and waiting out those inside.

"The commanders on the ground made the decisions to go ahead and execute and accomplish their mission of finding, fixing, killing or capturing" top officials of the former regime, he said.

Whatever the military reasons, they will be of little comfort to Iraqis who believe that the U.S. sacrificed critical intelligence information as well as the visceral satisfaction of seeing an enemy alive but in a place where he can no longer do any damage.

"We had hoped that Uday when he was captured would reveal many things — there are so many fathers of girls he raped," said a rug seller who gave his name as Abu Ali, 53. "To hear about the past is painful, but still we have to hear it."

There are many questions about some of the more gruesome chapters in the former regime`s history that now may never be answered, said Rasheed, who is an ethnic Kurd.

"If they had been detained we would have been able to ask them about the mass graves, about the wealth they have taken from Iraq, about the 182,000 Kurds that were murdered," he said.

"Those two created so much violence that even though they are not among us now, we are not feeling comfortable," he said of the Hussein brothers. "You feel as if they are still alive — you feel as if there is a devil in the shape of a man beside you."

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writers David Zucchino in Baghdad and Esther Schrader and Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-andrew2…
COMMENTARY


Sons Gone, Blood Feud Begins
By Andrew M. Cockburn
Andrew M. Cockburn is the co-author of "Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein" (Perennial Press, 2000). He is Alexander Cockburn`s brother.

July 24, 2003

There is no doubt that the deaths of his two sons will be a devastating blow to Saddam Hussein, but those who hope that their loss will leave him a broken man are likely to be disappointed.

He`ll probably release another audiotape in the next few days saying that he has sacrificed his two sons for the struggle and calling on other Iraqis to be prepared to do the same, one veteran of the Iraqi opposition observed.

What was already a life-and-death struggle for Hussein is now also a blood feud.

Even so, his grief must be extreme. Hussein has always been a family man. One of the very few jokes known to have been coined by the ex-dictator of Iraq concerns the late Uday, who, so Hussein used to quip, had been an "activist" from an early age. This is in reference to the time in 1964 when Hussein was in jail and his wife, Sajida Khairallah Telfah, would bring baby Uday for a visit — with secret messages from Hussein`s fellow Baathist conspirators concealed in Uday`s nappies.

Later, when he was cleaving his way to absolute power, Hussein`s primary instruments were close family members — his half-brothers Barzan, Watban and Sabawi, as well as his uncle, Khairallah Telfah, and cousin Adnan. Son-in-law Hussein Kamel Majid emerged as a central pillar of the regime in the 1980s, as did another member of Hussein`s Majid relatives, Ali Hassan al Majid.

It was a classic example of tribal rule.

Proximity to the throne through blood ties, however, was no guarantee of job security. Hussein`s brothers lost their influence — all had been prominent in the repressive security services — after their mother died in 1982. Adnan Khairallah played a vital role as minister of defense in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s — a little too successfully, perhaps, given that he died soon after the cease-fire in a mysterious helicopter crash. Hussein Kamel Majid was executed for his temporary defection to Jordan in 1995.

In the dangerous quicksand of court politics under Saddam Hussein, only his sons were above the law. Others might be punished for particularly egregious crimes, such as the occasion when the family was lined up to watch cousin Luai Khairallah have his arm broken by Hussein for assaulting his school teacher. But Uday and Qusai appear to have enjoyed total impunity. (Hussein did allegedly consider harshly punishing Uday for murdering his food taster in 1988, but soon relented.) They were the only people whom he felt he could totally and unreservedly trust, and now he has lost them.

Further, the manner of their death has ominous implications for the hunted Iraqi leader, given that they apparently were betrayed by their Mosul hosts. The opulence of Nawaf Zaidan`s villa, at least before it was riddled with American gunfire, suggests that he did well under the old regime, but that was evidently no bar to his vastly increasing his fortune by exchanging his guests for the immense reward on offer.

It is also worth noting that the hiding place selected by the two fugitives was hardly obscure, suggesting that the family is not exactly melting into the population.

Abid Hamid Mahmud Tikriti, Hussein`s private secretary, could think of no more imaginative place to hide than in one of his many residences, where he was duly apprehended. If Hussein is lurking in a similar bolt hole, then it seems entirely possible that he will be unearthed in the near future.

Hardly less ominous for Hussein is the rattle of celebratory gunfire in Baghdad at the news of his sons` deaths. He may never have labored under the illusion that the people of Iraq love him, but the fact that Baghdadis at least should express such jubilation at the passing of Uday and Qusai indicates that there is little possibility of a groundswell of support in Iraq for a Hussein regime restoration.

The fact that those guns may tomorrow be turned on the U.S. occupation forces under the inspiration of Iraqi nationalism or Islamic fervor is of little use or consolation to him.

Thus Hussein`s options are ever more limited. All he really has left is his image of himself as the dauntless Arab fighter who will never back away from a duel. Now that almost everything he once possessed, including his family, is gone, he is once again a hunted fugitive, just as he was in the winter of 1959 after his failed attempt to assassinate the then-leader of Iraq.

Under his subsequent rule, the story of that flight, complete with happy ending, became the stuff of legend, books and a movie.

This time there is little chance of a happy ending. All he can hope for is the legend.




Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-alex24j…
COMMENTARY


Bush and Blair Should Avoid Dancing on the Graves
By Alexander Cockburn
Alexander Cockburn writes for the Nation.

July 24, 2003

Short of good news ever since the end of the formal war, George Bush and Tony Blair are naturally exultant that Saddam Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusai, have been finished off in Mosul, presumably victims of someone eager to collar the $30-million reward for turning them in.

But although Hussein`s sons deserve everything they got, and more, the news of their demise should not be cause for great rejoicing in the White House and 10 Downing St. — the war will go on. Even in the event that Hussein soon follows his sons into the Great Hereafter, that would not, in anything other than the short term, be great news for Bush and Blair either.

For obvious reasons, Bush and his entourage have been eager to identify the three Husseins as the instigators of the attacks on the American and British occupying forces, with the attendant steady, demoralizing trickle of casualties.

To suggest otherwise would be to concede that there might be long-term, organized opposition to the allied occupation, which has less to do with Saddam Hussein and his clan and more to do with nationalist, or Islamic-nationalist, opposition to the invaders.

The fact that Uday and Qusai were holed up in the house of a distant relative scarcely suggests that they had elaborate escape preparations, replete with secret command bunkers. It looks as though the only plan they could come up with was a desperate rap on the door of a family friend.

With Uday and Qusai gone, Bush may enjoy a short-term uptick on the polls. Maybe the attacks on U.S. and British troops will slow, but they certainly won`t stop, and in the medium term they`ll probably increase.

Remember, many Iraqis saw the only virtue of the invasion as the end of a hated regime. If Saddam Hussein gets nailed too, that fear will finally dissipate and more Iraqis will focus on the business of driving the Americans and the British out of their country.

More U.S. and British troops will get killed, but the rationale that this is the last-ditch resistance of the cornered Hussein clan will have disappeared.

It`s a cynical proposition, but Bush and Blair will be much better off if Saddam Hussein is not run to ground, at least until some advanced point in next year`s U.S. presidential campaign season.

Even the killing of Uday and Qusai won`t help much in the steady erosion in both Bush`s and Blair`s popularity because of the reasons for their slump. They stitched together a handsome patchwork of lies about Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction, and that patchwork has fallen apart.

It will take a lot more than the killing of Uday or Qusai to turn this tide.




Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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[Joerver]

Das ist ein Cartoon aus der New York Post einer Murdoch-Gazette.

[Joerver]

Guilty until proved guilty, or taken out by US tanks

When the Hussein boys started in with their small-arms` fire, the US military knew just what to do. And by the time the 200-strong assault force, assorted armoured vehicles, and helicopter gunships with anti-tank missiles had finished with the last hideout of Saddam`s sons and heirs it was only a building in the sense that some of the exterior walls still stood.

To paraphrase the American president these were not nice men. In fact, by all verifiable accounts, their wickedness knew very few bounds. Uday, in particular, seems to have been prone to every known excess available to the much-feared son of a cordially loathed father. It is not a popular view, but, despite all of the foregoing, a much more satisfactory outcome would surely have been for those superior forces surrounding these long-wanted men to have sought to take them alive and, ultimately, to have ensured that they answered for their crimes in a court of law.

If we cast our minds back to the early hours of this conflict we might remember that, on the back of flawed intelligence, there was a massive aerial bombardment of premises in a Baghdad suburb where, it was alleged, the Iraqi leader was holed up with some of his closest associates. In the event, the only people to die in that pre-emptive strike were those civilians unlucky enough to be dining or living in and around the targeted area. At that moment, formal hostilities had not begun - in truth, if formal hostilities constitute a declaration of war against a pre-registered foe they technically never actually have. So what the US airforce was engaged upon was the act characterised by one newspaper yesterday as tyrannocide . . . the murder of a tyrant.

That initial assassination attempt also made me deeply uneasy. It is in no sense to be an apologist for the leader of the Iraqi regime to wonder what ever happened to the accepted canons of international law. To enter a sovereign state which has not attacked you and pick off its leader, if not an act of terrorism is certainly not an act which would normally be regarded as militarily legitimate. Most of us are very sanguine about the fact that the former Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, is having the detail of his unsavoury reign laid before an international court.

The process serves several important purposes: it reminds the international community of the ways in which that administration was a stranger to justice and an accomplice to genocide, and it indicates that the arm of international law is long enough to bring to book any dictator who chooses to flaunt human rights. Sadly, there is no current shortage of other candidates for this particular dock. But in the context of Tuesday`s events there would surely have been incalculable benefits in arresting and charging the Hussein family after the normal due process.

For one thing, now Amnesty International has published allegations about ill treatment of prisoners and civilians in Iraq, it would have been a timely reassurance about the need, post-war, to re-establish what the Iraqi people could recognise as a functioning judicial system. For another, here were two men established by the Americans as the most sought-after criminals in the country apart from their father. The erstwhile most powerful men in the country apart from their father. And, therefore, in the case of Qusay at least, one of the most knowledgable men in the country about previous crimes against humanity and the extent of the regime`s ambitions in building a new weapons programme.

If these two men, in the classic manner of most bullies, were essentially cowardly, then you might imagine they would have few scruples about trading invaluable information for their lives. Their killings call into question much wider issues about the way in which the last remaining superpower and its allies now see fit to go about their legal business. The UK`s attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, has just returned from negotiations in Washington on the fate of the nine British detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The Westminster government has hailed as a major concession his agreement with US counterparts that none of these men, if found guilty, will be executed.

While this will bring some immediate comfort to their families, it barely addresses the other problems with what has become a profoundly flawed process. Eyewitness accounts of that Cuban complex reveal it to be no more or less than a concentration camp, except that the conditions in terms of sensory deprivation are probably rather more appalling than that term normally implies. It contains men, and even boys, arbitrarily rounded up in the white-hot heat of American anger following the 9/11 outrage. Some of them may ultimately prove to have had first-hand involvement with terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.

In other cases no compelling evidence will be available. Some, inevitably, will have been wrongfully arrested. Yet all, save those few released to Pakistan, have been held without trial for a year-and-a-half and face the prospect of a military tribunal behind closed doors with testimony from sources who may never be made public.

One of the many contradictions in the reasoning offered for this denial of natural justice, is that because these prisoners were not, in the accepted sense, soldiers, they do not deserve the protection afforded prisoners of war. Yet the people who will decide the fate of these designated non-combatants will be military lawyers answerable to the supreme commander in the person of the president.

We may gauge something of Mr Bush`s grasp of the legal niceties by the fact that standing by the side of our prime minister last week he pronounced them all bad men. Guilty until proved guilty seems to be the new White House take on the judicial process. It is not enough for the government to ensure that these men will not face a penalty no longer available under British law. They should insist on nothing short of extradition and a trial conducted under the law of the land from which they originate. That is, after all, the American way. At least it is where American personnel are concerned.

Let us remember that one of the reasons given by America for opposing any international law court is that it did not want any of its own combatants or generals indicted under a system over which it had no control. Contrast that stance with its stated fears that it does not want Cuban detainees to face British justice in case the courts come up with an innocent verdict. Contrast that with the supreme commander publicly condemning their guilt before a legal shot has been fired.

George Bush is a very powerful man. He does not, as yet, run the UK legal system.

-July 24th

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``U.S. media misleading public on Iraq casualties``
Printed on Wednesday, July 23, 2003 @ 01:02:55 CDT ( )

By Matthew Riemer
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

(YellowTimes.org) – Media outlets have been spinning the information on U.S. casualties in a most curious way. Instead of regularly updating viewers and listeners concerning the number of killed and injured U.S. servicemen and women since the beginning of the war in Iraq, an insidious and disingenuous distinction is being emphasized more than ever: that of the "combat deaths" and the "non-combat deaths." Phrases like "hostile fire," "friendly fire," and "in-action deaths" are now commonplace in Washington`s and the media`s handbook of propaganda and euphemisms.

News agencies are constantly making the above distinction, reporting the number of U.S. soldiers killed by "hostile fire" as well as those killed in other ways but only keeping a running tabulation of those who have lost their lives in combat. Updates are almost unheard of regarding the number of casualties resulting from non-fatal injuries.

As of July 21st, 233 U.S. soldiers have died and over 1200 have been injured since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Yet the media focuses only on those killed by "hostile fire" as if those killed in other ways or those simply injured are less important. An Internet search will reveal a thousand stories about the numbers killed by "hostile fire" to every one that offers the complete details.

For example, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ran a story by Charles Recknagel on July 15th that began, "As the number of U.S. troops killed by hostile fire steadily grows, Washington is becoming increasingly preoccupied with the poor security situation in Iraq and what it means for efforts to stabilize the country. The toll now stands at 32 U.S. soldiers killed since U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over in Iraq on 1 May. Most of the soldiers` deaths have occurred in attacks on patrols and convoys by unidentified men firing rocket-propelled grenades." Nowhere in the remainder of the article is the total number killed or wounded mentioned, though the pressures faced by Washington are the focus of the story.

Such articles are misleading because they exclude important information to the point of being conspicuously incomplete. One of the reasons for concern in Washington is due to the ever-increasing domestic criticism directed towards it by its own soldiers and their families both in Iraq and at home. Much of the time, such criticism emanates from the families, friends, and comrades who have lost friends and loved ones in Washington`s war.

More U.S. soldiers have been killed in "non-hostile" situations than in actual combat since May 1st. This is significant because it is many of these individuals` friends and families -- those not killed in combat -- who are now critical of the Bush administration. So the tension now looming over the occupation of Iraq, whether one is in a firefight in Baghdad or waiting for one`s son to return, is caused by the totality of all the dead and injured, not just those from "hostile fire."

In another, more glaring example, National Public Radio reported on July 20th about new casualties in Iraq and, in a logical manner, closed the report with a tally of the dead. The newsreader said, "That brings the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the war in Iraq to 150." So not only does NPR make the same distinction as their less palatable media brethren (because 233 U.S. soldiers have actually been killed), but they don`t even inform the listener when giving updated casualty figures that their numbers don`t include those killed in any other way except from "hostile fire" -- a clear breach of journalistic integrity.

However, unlike in the first case, this obviously incomplete and vaguely presented information is clearly fallacious. A listener who does not follow international events or politics that closely may have no idea what is really happening in Iraq. Following this NPR report, then, they may believe that only 150 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives while serving in Iraq, that only 150 families are now grieving for their fallen loved ones. They may even refer to such a "fact" in a conversation with a fellow citizen -- and once they have, the radiation of misinformation has begun.

Another half-truth being perpetuated by various news agencies is that more U.S. soldiers have died in the current war in Iraq than in the first. This is true for "hostile fire" deaths only but not for total deaths: as already mentioned, 233 have died so far in Operation Iraqi Freedom while 299 died in Operation Desert Storm. While many reporters do make this distinction, many don`t. The most conspicuous example again took place on NPR on July 21st when Diane Rehm, host of the eponymously named talk show, said in a painstakingly clear and simple sentence that more U.S. soldiers have died this time around than in Desert Storm. And then she stopped speaking and the show went to a break. No qualifying statement, no explanation, no insidious distinctions, nothing. Maybe she was unaware of these facts, but a host of a popular, national talk show has no excuse for such ignorance. So, at the very least, she passed on false information to millions of listeners.

The importance of these partial truths and media spin are significant for two reasons: one apolitical, one political.

First and foremost, the obfuscation of U.S. casualties by very wide swaths of the media is a disservice to the U.S. armed forces, their families, and the American public. Whether or not one considers U.S. servicemen and women heroes without equal, respectable people just doing their jobs, or patriots who have been duped to serve the geopolitical interests of a fairly undemocratic bureaucracy called the U.S. government, shouldn`t change the fact that all of their lives are of equal value.

How does the mother who lost her son to friendly fire or a truck accident feel as the media constantly chatters about "combat deaths" and about how "these deaths" are putting pressure on President Bush and Paul Bremer? Does she wonder if her son`s death is putting pressure on anyone or has forced others to reconsider what`s happening in Iraq? Does her son`s life matter as much? Or is her son half way in between an Iraqi and an American killed by hostile fire on a scale of their worth?

And what about all the injured who go unmentioned? It`s hard to imagine a soldier claiming that his life was not changed forever because of the war, but many have had their lives changed in the most horrible ways. These soldiers are now paraplegics and cripples, blind and deaf, or learning to live with artificial limbs. Are not these victims part of the "cost of war" as well?

Secondly, and finally, this deception is significant for the anti-war movement and, more broadly and accurately, the large and inherently diverse cross-ideological, international resistance to U.S. hegemonic bullying in the Middle East, if only because it seeks to lessen the perceived impact of the war -- and now occupation -- upon the feelings and beliefs of the American public and, to a much lesser degree, the international community. All individuals opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq should highlight this "oversight" on the part of the media so as to make others more aware of the actual impact of this poorly conceived, designed, and executed unnecessary war and occupation.

[Matthew Riemer has written for years about a myriad of topics, such as: philosophy, religion, psychology, culture, and politics. He studied Russian language and culture for five years and traveled in the former Soviet Union in 1990. In the midst of a larger autobiographical/cultural work, Matthew is the Director of Operations at YellowTimes.org. He lives in the United States.]

Matthew Riemer encourages your comments: [e-mail]
http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1496

[Joerver]

Deception with deadly consequences

7/24/2003

By ROD WATSON

The killings of Saddam Hussein`s two sons couldn`t have come at a better time for George W. Bush, as polls show more and more Americans starting to question the war he started.
But even after the White House does its best to change the subject, one fact will remain: There still will be at least 155 American families who no doubt fervently wish he had misled the country about sex, not about war.

The deaths of Odai and Qusai Hussein won`t change that. And unfortunately, there are a lot of other things their deaths - and even the demise of Saddam himself - won`t change as American soldiers continue to get picked off, like the two more reported killed Wednesday.

The only thing that will change - hopefully - is U.S. foreign policy as Americans decide whether it`s worse to be misled about a president`s private life or about public policy with life-and-death implications.

One will get you impeached. The other? Well, we`ll see.

"It absolutely resonates with folks," says Charles Cobb, director of the Western New York Peace Center, which waged a lonely argument against the war and now suddenly feels part of the mainstream as more revelations come out. "Our president has potentially lied about the highest burden a president has: going to war."

It`s why the local center and its sister organizations are laying the groundwork for a national Campaign for a New Foreign Policy, one built on respecting human rights, reducing weapons of mass destruction and supporting international systems like the United Nations rather than launching "pre-emptive" attacks.

It`s an effort to undo a Bush foreign policy that has tried to "erase the 20th century" and its international structures, Cobb said.

Will the effort get sidetracked as the public gets distracted by the killings of Saddam`s sons?

Perhaps temporarily, Cobb concedes.

"(But) when it comes down to the integrity of our presidency," he said, "I think there will be somebody who will blow the whistle here and there to keep (the misstatements) in the headlines."

Of course, the White House will try to change the subject by trumpeting the obvious: Iraqis were no fans of the regime that pillaged their land. That`s true. But they aren`t likely to let the Bush administration and U.S. contractors do it, either.

And to insist that Saddam and his sons would still be in power without the U.S.-British invasion is just one more lie, about as credible as those 16 words Bush uttered in the State of the Union speech.

What is more likely is that after a bit longer was taken to build U.N. support, Saddam`s regime still would have been ousted, but with one big difference: The burdens - in both blood and money - would now be shared instead of borne almost exclusively by Americans.

U.S. soldiers wouldn`t now be sitting ducks, like the two who died only hours after Saddam`s sons were killed. In fact, the retaliation itself probably would be less because there would be less resentment at U.S. arrogance if a true international coalition had mounted the campaign.

And U.S. taxpayers wouldn`t now be the primary donors at the same time the Bush administration has turned the surplus into a deficit, and as French, German and other taxpayers sit on their wallets and smile.

Bush threw all of that away by igniting a war, using false statements as lighter fluid.

Of course, the revelations do answer one question that nagged many of us: What was it that made the United States and Britain so much smarter than all the nations that didn`t see the imperative for immediate war?

Now we know: Those other nations weren`t reading from the same intelligence book, one that turned out to be a fairy tale.

The African uranium allegation, the weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Saddam could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, the Iraq and al-Qaida connection - all gross overstatements, to put it charitably.

Taken together, they demonstrate a clear pattern of deceiving Americans who otherwise might not have supported "pre-emptive" war.

Now 155 young Americans have paid the price for that deception. Their families are learning in the hardest way possible what having morality in the White House really means.


e-mail: [e-mail]


http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20030724/1019202.asp

[Joerver]

Das Thema Stimmabgabe mit dem Computer wird immer dringender. Bis jetzt nur ein Thema in Online Blättern, jetzt auch in der NYTimes.

July 24, 2003
Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
By JOHN SCHWARTZ


The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday.

"We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States.

The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper.

"With what we found, practically anyone in the country — from a teenager on up — could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said.

The software was initially obtained by critics of electronic voting, who discovered it on a Diebold Internet site in January. This is the first review of the software by recognized computer security experts.

A spokesman for Diebold, Joe Richardson, said the company could not comment in detail until it had seen the full report. He said that the software on the site was "about a year old" and that "if there were problems with it, the code could have been rectified or changed" since then. The company, he said, puts its software through rigorous testing.

"We`re constantly improving it so the technology we have 10 years from now will be better than what we have today," Mr. Richardson said. "We`re always open to anything that can improve our systems."

Another co-author of the paper, Tadayoshi Kohno, said it was unlikely that the company had plugged all of the holes they discovered.

"There is no easy fix," Mr. Kohno said.

The move to electronic voting — which intensified after the troubled Florida presidential balloting in 2000 — has been a source of controversy among security researchers. They argue that the companies should open their software to public review to be sure it operates properly.

Mr. Richardson of Diebold said the company`s voting-machine source code, the basis of its computer program, had been certified by an independent testing group. Outsiders might want more access, he said, but "we don`t feel it`s necessary to turn it over to everyone who asks to see it, because it is proprietary."

Diebold is one of the most successful companies in this field. Georgia and Maryland are among its clients, as are many counties around the country. The Maryland contract, announced this month, is worth $56 million.

Diebold, based in North Canton, Ohio, is best known as a maker of automated teller machines. The company acquired Global Election Systems last year and renamed it Diebold Election Systems. Last year the election unit contributed more than $110 million in sales to the company`s $2 billion in revenue.

As an industry leader, Diebold has been the focus of much of the controversy over high-tech voting. Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company`s software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software`s flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.

The list of flaws in the Diebold software is long, according to the paper, which is online at avirubin .com/vote.pdf. Among other things, the researchers said, ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent.

The kind of scrutiny that the researchers applied to the Diebold software would turn up flaws in all but the most rigorously produced software, Mr. Stubblefield said. But the standards must be as high as the stakes, he said.

"This isn`t the code for a vending machine," he said. "This is the code that protects our democracy."

Still, things that seem troubling in coding may not be as big a problem in the real world, Mr. Richardson said. For example, counties restrict access to the voting machines before and after elections, he said. While the researchers "are all experts at writing code, they may not have a full understanding of how elections are run," he said.

But Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited in Mr. Rubin`s paper that he had mentioned to the system`s developers about five years ago as a state elections official.

"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said.

Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computer security at SRI International, said the Diebold code was "just the tip of the iceberg" of problems with electronic voting systems.

"This is an iceberg that needs to be hacked at a good bit," Mr. Neumann said, "so this is a step forward."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Für alle die mehr von diese Thema wissen wollen und gnügend technische Kenntnisse haben, hier ein Link, der auf die Technik eingeht:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064.htm

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[rv_2011]

Eine recht kompetente Darstellung der Problematik und eine kritische Würdigung des Sludge-Artikels über konkrete Sicherheitsmängel findet sich (mit zahlreichen erhellenden Links) bei Telepolis
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/15193/1.html

[Joerver]

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Es wird noch mal nachgelegt in Bezug auf die Voting-Maschinen. Siehe #4863 u. # 4862 der Link zu scoop editor


Voting Machines Blasted by Scientists
Friday, 25 July 2003, 1:05 am
Article: The Scoop Editor

BREAKING NEWS BULLETIN FOR MEDIA AND PUBLIC:

Electronic Voting Machines Blasted by Scientists, Hacked by Author
******************************************************
From: Scoop Media (Scoop.co.nz) and Bev Harris (Blackboxvoting.com)

http://www.blackboxvoting.com
Read The Book…Support The Cause
Pre-Order Your Copy Today

SCOOP EDITOR`S NOTE: What follows is a set of discoveries, the result of the first-ever public examination of a secret, proprietary computer program used to count votes in 37 states. A hundred dollar item allows anyone to stuff the ballot box; remote access was left unprotected, encryption keys were made available to hackers, and passwords, audit logs and votes were easily compromised.

This report, and all information not attributed to others here, was provided by Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century."

CONTENTS
WHY THE BIG DEAL?
WHO TESTS AND CERTIFIES THESE SYSTEMS?
WHO RUNS DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS? WHO WROTE THE PROGRAMS?
WHO ELSE WRITES PROGRAMS FOR DIEBOLD?
IS THERE MORE TO COME?
ENDNOTES

WHY THE BIG DEAL?

You can overwrite votes. You can vote more than once. The system is vulnerable to both inside and outside attacks. Intruders can overwrite audit logs. You can assign passwords to all your friends.

"Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts." -- Researchers from Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities, in paper just released: "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf

"Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say" (New York Times, July 24 2003) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html

These discoveries were made after examining Diebold voting system files left on an open web site, in a security breach somewhat stunning in magnitude. These files had been stored, unprotected, on a company web site for several years. The site appeared to be in continuous use, with new files added frequently, and its design invited visitors into an ftp page, which was available with anonymous access and no password. On January 29, 2003, shortly after Bev Harris found the site (which caused her to interview Diebold employees about it) the web site was removed from public access. By this time, its files had been downloaded by several people in various locations around the world.

On July 8, 2003 an Internet publication called Scoop Media released the location of a complete set of files. Alastair Thompson, the publisher and editor of Scoop Media, says he believed that the files were of critical importance in assessing whether Diebold officials and certifiers have been telling the truth about voting machine security.

Diebold machines are used in 37 states; Maryland just spent $55 million on 11,000 of these machines, and the state of Ohio is considering switching all counties to Diebold machines, a purchase estimated to be as high as $150 million. The state of Georgia bought Diebold machines in 2002, investing $55 million to purchase over 22,000 machines.

The files on the Diebold ftp site indicate that security flaws are not limited to touch screen machines; the problems with Diebold`s GEMS software also exist in Diebold optical scan machines, like those used in King County Washington. For a complete list of locations using Diebold machines as of Feb. 2003, go to the list of Diebold locations found in: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/mfr.pdf, bearing in mind that many new purchases have been made since that time.

State laws typically allow only limited examination of the paper ballots, taking tallies directly from Diebold optical scan machines, even in recounts. Therefore, insecure optical scan software also poses a grave risk to voting security, since tampering is unlikely to be spotted. Under a previous company name (Global Election Systems) Diebold machines counted 40 percent of Florida in election 2000.

Diebold systems go by the name "AccuVote" and "AccuTouch," and the software program is called "GEMS."

[Electronic voting] "places our entire democracy at risk" say experts:


"We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal."
"Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk." More: http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf
Mit vielen Links:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00198.htm

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G.W. Antoinette

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Published on Thursday, July 24, 2003 by the Inter Press Service
Congress Has Second Thoughts On Patriot Act
by Katrin Dauenhauer

WASHINGTON -- Taking a clear stand against anti-privacy provisions in the Patriot Act, the U.S. House of Representatives in an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort last night agreed to an amendment that would bar federal law enforcement from carrying out secret ”sneak and peek” searches without notifying the target of the warrant.

The Otter Amendment, added to the Commerce, Justice and State Departments funding bill and named after Rep. C.L. ”Butch” Otter, an Idaho Republican, passed by an extraordinary margin of 309 to 118, with 113 Republicans voting in favor.

”Not only does this provision allow the seizure of personal and business records without notification, but it also opens the door to nationwide search warrants and allowing the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and NSA (National Security Agency) to operate domestically,” Otter said.

The Patriot Act, which significantly expands the government`s domestic spying powers, was passed within weeks of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The House amendment represents the first major change to the act since it was signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush.

Civil liberties activists immediately hailed the decision as a huge win.

”Congress took a courageous stand last night in its response to widespread public concern over civil liberties--hopefully this is the first trickle in a flood of Patriot fixes,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union`s Washington Legislative Office.

”Congress is beginning to respond to what regular Americans have been saying at backyard barbecues and across their kitchen tables for months now: we can--and must--be both safe and free,” she said.

The amendment would effectively prohibit any implementation of the controversial section 213 of the Patriot Act, which enables federal agents to obtain so-called ”sneak and peek” warrants with far less evidence than was required before the bill was passed..

Under these warrants--also referred to as ”black bag” warrants--agents have the permission to search homes, confiscate certain types of property and monitor computers, without notifying the subject of the search.

The amendment still has to get past the Senate and Pres. Bush before it becomes law.

Yesterday`s House vote was preceded by a unanimous vote in the Senate last week to deny funding for the domestic cyber-surveillance system known as the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project-- recently renamed from ”Total Information Awareness”.

A provision blocking funding for the program was included in the Senate version of a military spending bill currently being considered in Congress. In contrast to the House version, which only restricted TIA`s use against U.S. citizens, the Senate version denies funding for ”research and development on the Terrorism Awareness System.”

The program would use data-mining technology to scan vast amounts of personal ”transactional” data, including looking for and monitoring suspicious patterns in telephone records, credit card transactions, broadcasts, internet use, medical files, relationships, travel details and legal information, among others.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Russ Feingold, from Wisconsin, had pledged last winter to block funding of TIA until Congress has a chance to thoroughly review the project`s implications.

A fellow senator, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, has complained that TIA takes an ”Orwellian approach”--in fact, one of the program`s first logos (since discarded) featured an all-seeing eye casting its gaze out over the globe.

The language agreed to in the Senate last week is even more forceful than that suggested by Wyden and Feingold, and stands in clear contrast to the Bush administration`s active support for the program and the Pentagon`s aggressive lobbying on behalf of TIA.

”Make no mistake, the Pentagon can`t erase history by changing a name--it`s the same program and contains the same pitfalls,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU`s Liberty and Technology Program. ”Luckily the Senate historically stood up to the administration and Pentagon and said `no` to a surveillance society.”

”Terrorism Information Awareness, as it`s now called, seeks to catch bad guys by spying on law-abiding Americans, making it ineffective and inherently offensive to civil liberties,” Steinhardt added. ”Those lawmakers who sought to shut it down deserve applause for supporting Americans` right to privacy.”

Opposition to the program, as well as to several sections of the Patriot Act, is growing and has been unusually broad, including groups as diverse as the ACLU and the American Conservative Union.

Earlier this week, the ACLU kicked off a ”Campaign to Defend Our Libraries,” with the aim of warning patrons about Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The section grants law enforcement the ability to obtain--without an ordinary criminal subpoena or search warrant and without probable cause--a court order giving them access to ”business records” and ”any tangible thing,” including records from libraries, booksellers, doctors, universities, Internet service providers and financial institutions.

Critics see the section as too broad and structured in a way that allows ordinary citizens to be caught up in the net of intelligence investigations.

”The New Mexico Library Association is on record expressing its concerns about the Patriot Act,” said Eileen Longsworth, president of the association. ”The NMLA encourages the library community to educate itself and library customers about the Patriot Act, and the potential dangers to individual privacy and confidentiality of library records resulting from the enforcement of this act.”

Bills are currently pending in the House and Senate that seek to restore privacy in libraries and bookstores.

Opposition to the Patriot Act is also coming from state legislatures. Yesterday, the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia blocked some implementation of the act, joining more than 140 communities, encompassing more than 16 million people in 27 states, that have passed resolutions against it.

Copyright 2003 IPS

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0724-01.htm

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9-11 REPORT OF CONGRESSIONAL JOINT INQUIRY

REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 –
BY THE HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE

July 24, 2003

This report is in PDF format and can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/911rpt/index.html

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 11:21 a.m. EDT July 24, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

U.S. officials are following through on a promise to prove that Saddam Hussein`s two sons are dead. Photos of the bodies have been released in Baghdad. And there`s word that some members of Iraq`s Governing Council have been shown the bodies.
The Arab satellite network Al-Arabiya is airing a videotape of what it says are members of the Saddam Fedayeen militia promising vengeance for the deaths of Odai and Qusai Hussein. One of three masked men shown on the tape says the deaths will only lead to more attacks on coalition forces. The militia was once led by Odai Hussein.
Three American soldiers were killed Thursday when their convoy was hit by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in northern Iraq. The deaths bring to 158 the number of U.S. servicemen killed in action since the war began March 20. That`s 11 more than the death toll in the 1991 Gulf War.
Two Iraqis were killed Thursday when their car approached a U.S. military checkpoint in Baghdad. Witnesses say American troops opened fire.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says the U.S. underestimated the strength of the resistance after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He says some "stupid" mistakes were made. He also says some Iraqis are expecting too much of the U.S. in the aftermath of the war.
The Army has unveiled a troop-rotation plan, which is good news for units such as the 3rd Infantry Division, whose members are expected to come home soon after storming Baghdad in April and helping topple the regime. The division will be replaced by elements of the 82nd Airborne in September. Also being relieved in September will be the 1st Marine Division, by international troops.
U.S. military officials say the head of Saddam Hussein`s Special Republican Guard has been arrested by coalition forces. The commander says the man is No. 11 on the U.S. military`s list of most-wanted Iraqis and a cousin of Saddam.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed


*********US****UK****Total**** Avg/Day

Total***238****44*****282***** 2.24

07/24/03 CENTCOM
3 US SOLDIERS KILLED IN CONVOY AMBUSH NEAR MOSUL ON JULY 24TH
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 7 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE NEAR MOSUL
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 2 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE AT AR RAMADI
07/23/03 British Ministry of Defense
BRITISH OFFICER COLLAPSES AND DIES IN SOUTHERN IRAQ, JULY 18TH
07/23/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES ARMY CASUALTY FROM ATTACK ON JULY 22ND
07/22/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 1 WOUNDED IN RPG ATTACK

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BUSH THE "WARRIOR"
7/21/2003

George W`s chest-thumping, "Me Big Chief" schtick has gone from laughable to pathetic... to dangerous.

Bush – who, as a boy, enjoyed shoving firecrackers down the throats of frogs, tossing them in the air to watch them to explode – now has far more powerful explosives to toss around the world, not only killing thousands of innocent foreigners in the path of his wars, but also killing U.S. soldiers. It would be one thing if he was doing this with reticence, humility, and regret, as other presidents have done, but George W pursues worldwide war with the blustery, frat-boy bravado of one who has never been in one.

First, he strutted out like some character in a wild west movie to declare that he`d make quick work of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, promising to "smoke `em out" and to get Osama "dead or alive." Two years later, it appears that Osama is still alive, al Qaeda is stronger than ever, and thousands of our soldiers are mired in an almost forgotten but still-deadly ground war in Afghanistan`s treacherous mountains.

Meanwhile, George moved on. This draft-dodging son of privilege and former Yale cheerleader used the presidency and outright lies to whip up a sudden war fever over Iraq, declaring he`d "get" Saddam Hussein and cause the Iraqis to "love" us. Well, it appears Saddam`s still alive and those liberated Iraqis are now protesting America and still shooting at our soldiers, even though Bush gloatingly pulled off that Hollywood stunt-landing on a aircraft carrier two months ago, strutting out in a "Top Gun" costume to declare the Iraqi war was "over." Asked later about the fact that hostile forces continue to attack our troops in Iraq, George sneered for the cameras like some puffed up TV wrestler and snarled: "Bring `em on."

This is Jim Hightower saying... While Bush struts, our soldiers are dying. Such shallow presidential bravado kills.



"Franks suggests large force will stay in Iraq," Austin American-Statesman, July 10, 2003
http://www.jimhightower.com/air/read.asp?id=11147

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`If only they could get the boss man, too`
On the streets of Baghdad, a mixed reaction to photos of Saddam`s sons

Jamie Wilson
Friday July 25, 2003
The Guardian

Hussein al Shadidi


Until last night Hussein al Shadidi was not quite sure. But just after 6.45pm his wife called the family to watch the television in their small flat in the Karada district of Baghdad. "For the first moment or two I was a little suspicious, but when I studied the pictures I could see it was them. We were happy. All of us, so happy."

For Mr al Shadidi, the gruesome photographs broadcast on the Iraqi Media Network, the television station set up by the coalition forces, were the final proof that Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein`s feared and hated sons, were dead.

"I thought they probably were, but none of us could be absolutely sure," the 57-year old retired businessman said. "But now I know they are gone from our lives.

"If only they could get the boss man as well everything would be perfect," he said, with a smile.

Saad Yahya


But not everybody in the busy shopping district of the city was quite so sure.

"I think it was Uday, but the other one, I only saw it for a few seconds and I am just not sure. Perhaps it was somebody who looked like Qusay," said Saad Yahya, 42, who was drinking tea with a group of men on a street corner.

Either way, he was not pleased. "They [the sons] are Iraqis and we are Iraqis. We Iraqis should not be being killed by Americans."

Abbus Mohammed


Abbus Mohammed, 31, a driver who was also among the tea drinkers, was also not convinced about the identities of the bodies.

"I am not quite certain that these are them.They looked like them, but not quite the same. I just don`t know."

If it was the brothers he was also unhappy they were dead, but for a different reason from that of his friend, Mr Yahya. "Of course I am happy that they are gone, but they should not have been killed. They are criminals and we should bring them to justice and put them on trial."

Allah Abdullah Allah


Allah Abdullah Allah, 28, a police officer, was in no doubt. "Thanks to God we have got rid of them. But now let us hope that their father is caught as well. If there was no curfew tonight we would be celebrating until the morning."

Ali Abdullah Hadi


As occasional bursts of gunfire - nothing like the volleys that greeted the news of the brothers` deaths earlier this week - sounded across the city, Ali Abdullah Hadi, 50, said: "It is definitely Uday, but I`m not quite so sure about Qusay. But whatever, I am very happy they got killed. This is definitely the end of these criminals."

Shaker Salnun


Further up the street a crowd had gathered inside and outside Shaker Salnun`s butcher shop as the pictures of the two bodies were shown on television.

"Yeah, people seemed happy," Mr Salnun said, as he cut up and weighed a chicken. "It is good for everybody that they are gone."

As he was speaking the shop was plunged into darkness by another of the power cuts that strike the city with monotonous regularity.

"But for us the most important thing is not whether these people are caught," he said. "For us the most important thing is that we have power. Without it the fridges don`t work. Then how can we live?"


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Resistance has its roots in the present
The Iraqis opposing occupation are not remnants of the old regime

Jonathan Steele, Baghdad
Friday July 25, 2003
The Guardian

The young cleric called several thousand on to the streets of Najaf last week The deaths of three American soldiers yesterday, men from the same division which killed Saddam Hussein`s sons, are an early blow to American hopes that resistance to occupation will fade now these key leaders of the former regime are dead. Five Americans have died since Tuesday, and 11 in the last week, the highest rate of killing since the war officially ended.

Some US officials had covered themselves by saying there might be a short "uptick" in the resistance, prompted by a spate of revenge-seeking if the Hussein brothers or their father were captured or killed. But their basic prediction was that resistance would subside.

In other quarters there has been a contrary suggestion that resistance might increase with the Hussein family`s deaths, since some Iraqis might feel less inhibited about opposing the occupation if they no longer felt that they were somehow supporting the old regime. Both positions are predicated on the assumption that resistance is linked to the fate of Saddam Hussein and his closest followers.

US officials tend to argue that some Iraqis are hesitating to work with them out of fear that the old regime might one day return. The deaths of its leaders will lift the last curtain of fear, it is claimed.

Conversations with Iraqis undermined this argument. It was hard to find many who seriously believed the old regime had any chance of returning to power even before the events in Mosul. The family was unmourned even by most members of the Ba`ath party. Many were pressed into the party for career reasons and hated its repression. An earlier generation felt Saddam and his tribal cronies from Tikrit distorted and subverted the party`s original ideals.

Occasional comments by Iraqis that "things were better under Saddam" are not an indication that they want to restore his regime. They are more a rhetorical way of highlighting disappointment at the lack of security, the collapse of public order, problems with water and electricity, fear of unemployment, as well as the daily indignity of seeing foreign troops on their streets.

US officials seem unwilling to accept or admit this in public. It is easier to claim that the resistance comes from "remnants of the past" than recognise that it is fuelled by grievances about the present and doubts about the future.

Some armed attacks are probably conducted by former soldiers and officers, acting out of anger at the abrupt disbandment of the army and the humiliating conditions under which they have to queue to collect small payments. Resistance appears to be localised with no central command.

There is also evidence that resistance is supported by some Sunni mosques, which were not closely linked with the former regime. Indeed the potential rise of Islamist resistance, both Sunni and Shia, ought to be worrying the Americans more than the issue of the discredited Hussein family. The young cleric, Muqtada al Sadr, called several thousand supporters on to the streets of Najaf last week for demonstrations against the Americans. US officials have sought to marginalise him by denouncing him as a hot-headed populist. It is true that he does not represent the mainstream of Shi`ite thinking but he could start to do so if the occupation authorities fail to improve living conditions for ordinary people quickly.

Before the war critics argued that invading Iraq would encourage fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world. This seems to be happening, as al-Qaida elements and other antiwestern groups see the American presence in Iraq as a new source of easy targets.

No wonder the United States would like to internationalise the coalition presence. Only a few small countries which want favours from it have offered help. The best hope remains the United Nations. At the UN security council on Tuesday, Kofi Annan called for a road map and a date for an end to the occupation. "There is a pressing need to set out a clear and specific sequence of events leading to the end of military occupation," he said.

The US needs to take his advice. Officials talk informally of a year before an Iraqi government can take over, based on two months to choose a constitutional commission, eight months to write and approve the constitution, and two months to hold elections. This calendar ought to be spelt out. It could be done under a new UN mandate in which the UN takes overall control of Iraq`s transition to independence. This would make it politically easier for anti-war nations to join a peacekeeping contingent in which the US might remain as the largest member but no longer with supreme control. There is little doubt that US troops would welcome light at the end of the tunnel, as would Iraqis. Whether Bush and Rumsfeld are ready looks more doubtful.
jonathan.steele@guardian. co.uk



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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The war against Hollywood
Attacks on liberal film stars are hilariously wrong-headed. But that doesn`t stop them. John Patterson on mudslinging in Tinseltown

John Patterson
Friday July 25, 2003
The Guardian

Every time I turn on my TV, it seems, I don`t have to listen long before another empurpled, fulminating, rightwing blowhard starts pontificating about all the damage that "the liberal media" is doing to our airwaves, to our children`s future, to our morals, to the institution of heterosexual marriage, to our once-proud schools, to our precious bodily fluids and to our national ability to achieve and sustain workable hard-ons.

Now, I get 300 channels on my telly, and I clock between 10 and 20 hours most weeks, but I cannot find this liberal cabal`s supposedly ubiquitous, evil spoor anywhere, and it`s mainly because there are so many rightwing arseholes on TV blocking my view. To hear the Bush-munchers tell it, TV and movies are chocker with advertisements for the feminist "agenda" and the homosexual "lifestyle", with exhortations to immolate, then urinate on Old Glory, with slanders against the military and the Pentagon, with slurs against our great Commander-in-Chief and those who do his wrathful bidding, and with secular-humanist plots aimed at defaming the name of the Creator.

My God, if only. You`d think the Republicans might give their gums a rest now that they have a ferociously rightwing president, and now that his ditto-heads control Congress. Or now that the cable news networks are all trimming to the right in the hope of catching up with Fox, and now that the publishing industry has discovered that some on the right can actually read books, not just burn them. But no, they still have leftie scalps to collect, and their happiest hunting ground is Hollywood. The recent conflict - the one I call Dubya Dubya Two - showed us how much mileage the righties know they can get out of persecuting the lefties of the movie industry.

These days terms like "Traitor!" and "Appeaser!" are the first rightwing insults to get hurled, whereas they used to be the slurs of last resort. And mainly they got hurled at anyone from Hollywood who dared to suggest that Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Wolfie might be a bunch of oil-lubricated oligarchs with the basest of motives for stampeding us to war. That the revelations of recent weeks might suddenly prove them right is of no consequence to the renta-gobs: these traitors are from Hollywood - there`s nothing good they can say or do. Ever.

This tune is played out relentlessly in a shallow book called Tales from the Left Coast: True Stories of Hollywood Stars and Their Outrageous Politics, by Michael Hirsen. Hirsen, who`s whiter than Strom Thurmond, claims he used to be a touring keyboard player for the Temptations back in the 1970s. These days he teaches at some Christian degree-mill on radio, TV and Hollywood, a triad he appears to loathe. He also shows up on such right-leaning slagfests as The O`Reilly Factor (chaired by fightin` Bill O`Reilly, spiritual descendant of such fine Irish-American Catholics as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Jew-baiting 1930s radio-priest Father Coughlin) and has an anti-Hollywood website from which most of the anecdotes in his book were filched.

His book has one great scoop for us, and here it is: "Hollywood is packed with liberals!" As breaking stories go this one`s right up there with "Langley, Virginia, is a nest of espionage agents!" or "Nashville is full of Republicans! And steel guitars!" Hirsen, however, seems to think he`s uncovered another McCarthy-esque "conspiracy so immense..." and that we should all sleep with rifles under our beds in case Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon knock on the door in the wee small hours. Left Coast is a numbing reiteration of every rightwing bromide about the depravity and venality of anyone in Hollywood who disagrees with Michael Hirsen. Thus we get to hear again how dangerous to our national wellbeing are such pipsqueaks as Mike Farrell and Martin Sheen (The West Wing is, natch, an affront to democracy and the GOP), Sean Penn, Robert Redford, Julia Roberts, Spike Lee, Kevin Costner (who gave large donations to Bush, Sr), Chevy Chase, George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, Oliver Stone, Ted Danson, Cybill Shepherd, Kathleen Turner and the hydra-headed Barbra Streisand.

All of these people are either full of shit, hilariously wrong-headed, downright dangerous or in league with Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden. Hirsen`s Hollywood history is a parallel universe with about as much grounding in reality as Melrose Place. On the blacklist (and note the incandescent prose): "The idea that folks in Hollywood could be `persecuted` for left-leaning rhetoric is so absurd it sends most people into a laughing fit." Those artists who were forced out of jobs and often into exile for 20 years "for their left-leaning rhetoric" might choose to disagree. So might the late John Garfield, hounded to his grave at 38 by the very witch-hunters Hirsen so cravenly venerates.

And Hirsen just loves Elia Kazan, as you`d expect. On The Graduate: "the film introduced promiscuity, incest and serial adultery" (incest?). On Oliver Stone in Cuba: "Attempting to show the softer side of Fidel Castro is like showing the softer side of Jeffrey Dahmer."

And so on. The witchhunts were A-OK, even though they never happened; the Fondas, Henry and Ted Turner included, were all evil dupes; Seven Days in May is mean to upstanding American fascists, Dr Strangelove is horrid to the military-industrial complex; and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger`s work for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) makes them formidable and deeply dangerous. The whole book falls in lockstep with the rebarbitive Gingrich worldview, and no nuance or doubt will interfere with Hirsen`s mania, or his rotten jokes about hot tubs, gurus, plastic surgery and liberal guilt.

In the entire book, I can`t find the name of a single movie he admires. Not one. Not even Forrest Gump or Left Behind. Nor can I find the names of more than 10 Hollywood rightwingers, which Hirsen seems to think bolsters his premise that they`re all afraid to pipe up lest they go on some leftie Redlist.

This is just pathetic research on Hirsen`s part. Anyone who can`t dredge up the names of rightwingers in movies and TV is blinded only by the fact that his head is up his arse. He namechecks Bo Derek, Mel Gibson ("a faith-filled individual"), libertarian Kurt Russell, "legendary model and actress Jennifer O`Neill" (so legendary she hasn`t been seen anywhere since Summer of `42 - except among the blurbs on the back cover of Hirsen`s screed), director Lionel Chetwynd, the dependably gaga Charlton Heston, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Where are Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Kelsey Grammer, James Woods on his bad days, superpatriot Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Walt Disney, Vincent Gallo? Hirsen has his McCarthyite "list of names" on the left, but in order to make his brainless thesis hold water he has to suppress the evidence of his own eyes on the right.

And finally, who are the most prominent people on the book`s cover, a couple who clock up a massive five index mentions between them in a book of 314 pages? Why, Bill and Hillary Clinton, of course, the stars of . . . oh, wait. It`s all clear now. Hollywood funded and voted, unforgivably, for Clinton - and that, in the eyes of Hirsen and his lamebrained ilk, is what it`s really all about. Still, Tales from the Left Coast has a great future in store for itself - hanging on a nail in my lavatory.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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US report on run-up to 9/11 damns intelligence
Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Friday July 25, 2003
The Guardian

The US national security agency picked up "communications that indicated possible impending terrorist activity" between September 8 and September 10 2001 but failed to act on them, according to a congressional investigation into the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington.

The long-awaited 900-page report, which was released late yesterday, criticised the NSA, the CIA and the FBI for a series of intelligence failures that could have prevented the September 11 attacks.

The report also confirms there was no link between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime led by Saddam Hussein, despite claims to the contrary by President George Bush in the runup to war with Iraq.

The investigation into intelligence failures began in February 2002 and was completed in December. Publication has been delayed until now because of internal rows over how much of it could be declassified. All but 28 pages are being released to the public.

Excerpts from the report, released in advance, said the NSA, which is responsible for covert intercepts, had failed to translate the conversations in the run-up to the attacks so was not in a position to disseminate the information.

The report says: "Prior to Sept 11, the intelligence community was not prepared to handle the challenge it faced in translating the volumes of foreign language counterterrorism intelligence it collected ... The intelligence community`s ability to produce significant and timely signals intelligence on counterterrorism was limited by the [NSA`s] failure to address modern communications technology aggressively ... and insufficient collaboration between NSA and FBI regarding the potential for terrorist attacks in the United States."

The NSA intercepted conversations in early 1999 linking two of the hijackers - Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazm, who were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon - to al-Qaida but failed to pass that information to other intelligence agencies, including the FBI, which had an agent with access to them in San Diego who might have been able to learn more.

"As a result, the FBI missed the opportunity to task a uniquely well-positioned informant - who denies having any advance knowledge of the plot - to collect information about the hijackers and their plans," the report says.

The report also criticises the CIA, which expected attacks by al-Qaida on US embassies and interests abroad but not on America itself. In the 10 years leading up to the attacks, the CIA had been relying too much on communication intercepts rather than placing agents on the ground.

"The intelligence community did not effectively develop and use human sources to penetrate al-Qaida`s inner circle," the report says. "This lack of reliable and knowledgeable human sources significantly limited the community`s ability to acquire intelligence that could be acted upon before the Sept 11 attacks."

The report notes that while information had been available since 1994 that terrorists might use planes, "none the less, testimony and interviews confirm that it was the general view of the intelligence community ... that the threatened Bin Laden attacks would most likely occur against US interests overseas".

It adds: "The CIA`s failure to watchlist suspected terrorists aggressively reflected a lack of emphasis on a process designed to protect the homeland."

The Pentagon cited this lack of intelligence as a reason for not mounting substantial attacks on al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Under President Clinton the US launched cruise missiles against suspected al-Qaida camps: while safe for the US military, the strikes proved ineffective against al-Qaida.

The report is also critical of the failures of the FBI, which "was unable to identify and monitor effectively the extent of activity by al-Qaida and other international terrorist groups operating in the United States."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

July 25, 2003



The mutilated eyes of Uday Hussein, in a detail from the picture released by the Pentagon, which shows that he may have committed suicide in the gun battle




Secrets of Saddam`s family at war
From Catherine Philp in Baghdad

Escaped restaurant bomb by ten minutes
Drove past American patrols in ordinary cars
Public prayers at mosque after fall of Baghdad





UDAY HUSSEIN’S personal bodyguard broke a three-month silence yesterday to give the first authoritative account of how Saddam and his sons spent the war.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, the bodyguard claimed that, far from fleeing Baghdad, the three men held out in the capital for at least a week after its fall.

He said that they evaded repeated American attempts to assassinate or capture them, and even appeared in public under the noses of US troops.

During a three-hour interview in a house in a town an hour northwest of Baghdad, the bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in the capital throughout the war, convinced they could hold the city.

When the first bombs fell on a house in a southern suburb, where the Americans believed Saddam and his sons were meeting, he and Uday were on the other side of the city in one of dozens of safe houses belonging to trusted friends and relatives through which the three men were to pass in the weeks to come.

The bodyguard said the Americans’ next “decapitation” strike came a lot closer, and that Saddam survived only because several safe houses had come under attack and he suspected there was an informant within his camp.

Saddam asked the suspect, a captain, to prepare a safe house behind a restaurant in the Mansour district for a meeting. They arrived, and left again, almost immediately, by the back door. “Ten minutes after they went out of the door, it was bombed,” the bodyguard said.

Saddam had the captain summarily executed while the Pentagon was claiming that the strike had probably finished off Saddam and Uday.

The 28-year-old man, who asked for his real name to be kept secret for fear of reprisals, served as one of Uday’s coterie of handpicked personal bodyguards from 1997 until the moment his former boss finally left Baghdad to organise guerrilla resistance further north.

Uday bade him farewell with a $1,000 golden handshake, promising to be in touch again “when he was needed”. On Tuesday US troops killed Saddam’s son in a gunfight in the northern city of Mosul. Yesterday the Pentagon released pictures of his mutilated head.

When Baghdad fell on April 9, the three men were in separate houses in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighbourhood full of loyalists where Saddam had been on a televised walkabout two days before.

Uday’s bodyguard was not present on that occasion, but was there two days later when, to the astonishment of all around, Saddam and his sons appeared at Friday prayers at a mosque in Adhamiya, a few miles from where American troops were patrolling.

“There were crowds all around and an old woman came up to Saddam and asked, ‘What have you done to us?’,” the bodyguard recalled.

“Saddam clapped his hand to his head and said, ‘What can I do? I trusted the commanders but they were traitors and they betrayed Iraq. But we hope that, before long, we will be back in power and everything will be fixed’.”

The men never appeared in public again, but the bodyguard said that they were able to travel freely from safe house to safe house in unmarked cars, sometimes under the noses of the Americans.

“Once we were in Mansour, their convoy was going by and we just drove right past them in ordinary cars. They never saw us,” he said.

For an increasingly anxious Uday, it was a moment of comic relief. “He made fun of them. When he saw a soldier with a red face, he said, ‘That’s not a soldier for war’.” Uday offered an obscene suggestion of what the soldier’s face might be better used for.

The bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in Baghdad in the genuine belief that they could hold the city. Only later, when they believed they had been betrayed by their commanders, did they consider an alternative. “The resistance was not factored in before the war,” he said. “There was a closed meeting five or six days after the war, and that is when they began to discuss the resistance.”

A couple of days afterwards, the bodyguard was summoned by Uday, who handed him $1,000 in cash and said he could go home. Uday would not say where he was going — only that it was time to begin the resistance. “He said you can go. We’ll get you when we need you,” the bodyguard said. “They only kept their relatives with them after that. They didn’t trust anyone else.”

Soul-searching before release of morgue pictures

The Pentagon released photographs of the bloodied, mutilated heads of Uday and Qusay Hussein last night to persuade Iraqis that the sons of the former dictator really were dead.

The decision was made by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, after a heated debate within the Administration. Television crews will be allowed to film the bodies in Baghdad today.

One photograph shows Uday with a wound obliterating part of his nose and upper lip, fuelling speculation that he committed suicide. A Pentagon official told The Times: “We were disgusted when the Somalis televised images of dead US troops being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. There are many here who feel this is no better.”

But Mr Rumsfeld argued that Iraqis were “frightened of Saddam Hussein and his regime. To get closure, to have two vicious members confirmed dead, I believe will contribute to more Iraqis coming forward.”

Readers may find the photographs disturbing.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-756353,00.html

[Joerver]

July 25, 2003

Intelligence mistakes `let in 9/11 hijackers`
From Elaine Monaghan in Washington



US INTELLIGENCE agencies could have prevented the September 11 attacks if they had done their work properly, according to a congressional report released yesterday.

The document, which is more than 800 pages long, reveals no smoking gun or specific intelligence that 19 al- Qaeda militants would hijack aircraft and crash them into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, killing 3,000 people.

A discussion of support for the hijackers by foreign governments, which is understood to focus on Saudi Arabia, was excised on the insistence of the Bush Administration, sparking criticism from the Republican and Democratic senators at the helm of the inquiry.

Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is running for President, said that the hijackers had received “significant assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal”.

He refused, however, to name the country on the ground that it was classified.

Even Richard Shelby, his Republican counterpart, said that the information should have been disclosed. “This might be embarrassing information, but I don’t believe it meets the test of real classification.”

The Saudi Ambassador to the US said that Britain and the US had found to be baseless an allegation that a man who knew two future hijackers when they were living in San Diego was a Saudi agent.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan said that opponents of Saudi Arabia had resorted to criticising the Kingdom for political purposes with “blank pieces of paper”.

Most of the document focuses on the US intelligence failures that predated September 11. It also accused the US military of a reluctance to attack bin Laden. The intelligence community, meanwhile, did not believe that attacks were likely on US soil and failed to share information about the two suspects in San Diego, who later helped to attack the Pentagon.

The report called for an urgent beefing up of intelligence capabilities, and closer ties between top intelligence officials and the President. “It was sort of fortress America,” said Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic senator who served on the joint inquiry conducted by the intelligence committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate. “Americans by nature don’t think something can happen to them

. . . I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson yet.”

The document avoided blaming the White House but gave details about what the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) could have figured out if they had compared notes, pursued leads more vigorously and taken the al-Qaeda leader’s threats to attack America seriously. “The community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot,” it said.

Intelligence officers could have stopped the hijackers from entering the US and given warning of the signals they had of an impending attack on US soil. “No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn,” the report said.

It reveals a litany of available data on the two San Diego-based hijackers. They had contacts with another man in San Diego who was an FBI informant. But the FBI failed to exploit the connection.

Another tip-off about the two men should have come from the CIA, which had discovered that the pair had al-Qaeda links but failed to put their names on a watch-list. It could have alerted immigration, and it failed to tell the FBI.

The NSA also intercepted communications by several hijackers but the information either never surfaced or failed to ring alarm bells, despite the fact that the intelligence community had information in 1998 that al-Qaeda was planning attacks in Washington and New York. In August that year, an Arab plot to fly explosives-laden aircraft into the World Trade Centre from a foreign country was dismissed.

The notion that it could have been launched on US soil was also downplayed on the assumption that the flight would have been intercepted. The following month intelligence pointed to an al-Qaeda attack on an airport. But by 2001, US officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, and the State Department, were focused on the threat abroad.

If these signals had been taken together with a memo by an FBI agent two months before September 11, the attacks could have been averted.

July 25, 2003

Intelligence mistakes `let in 9/11 hijackers`
From Elaine Monaghan in Washington



US INTELLIGENCE agencies could have prevented the September 11 attacks if they had done their work properly, according to a congressional report released yesterday.

The document, which is more than 800 pages long, reveals no smoking gun or specific intelligence that 19 al- Qaeda militants would hijack aircraft and crash them into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, killing 3,000 people.

A discussion of support for the hijackers by foreign governments, which is understood to focus on Saudi Arabia, was excised on the insistence of the Bush Administration, sparking criticism from the Republican and Democratic senators at the helm of the inquiry.

Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is running for President, said that the hijackers had received “significant assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal”.

He refused, however, to name the country on the ground that it was classified.

Even Richard Shelby, his Republican counterpart, said that the information should have been disclosed. “This might be embarrassing information, but I don’t believe it meets the test of real classification.”

The Saudi Ambassador to the US said that Britain and the US had found to be baseless an allegation that a man who knew two future hijackers when they were living in San Diego was a Saudi agent.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan said that opponents of Saudi Arabia had resorted to criticising the Kingdom for political purposes with “blank pieces of paper”.

Most of the document focuses on the US intelligence failures that predated September 11. It also accused the US military of a reluctance to attack bin Laden. The intelligence community, meanwhile, did not believe that attacks were likely on US soil and failed to share information about the two suspects in San Diego, who later helped to attack the Pentagon.

The report called for an urgent beefing up of intelligence capabilities, and closer ties between top intelligence officials and the President. “It was sort of fortress America,” said Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic senator who served on the joint inquiry conducted by the intelligence committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate. “Americans by nature don’t think something can happen to them

. . . I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson yet.”

The document avoided blaming the White House but gave details about what the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) could have figured out if they had compared notes, pursued leads more vigorously and taken the al-Qaeda leader’s threats to attack America seriously. “The community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot,” it said.

Intelligence officers could have stopped the hijackers from entering the US and given warning of the signals they had of an impending attack on US soil. “No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn,” the report said.

It reveals a litany of available data on the two San Diego-based hijackers. They had contacts with another man in San Diego who was an FBI informant. But the FBI failed to exploit the connection.

Another tip-off about the two men should have come from the CIA, which had discovered that the pair had al-Qaeda links but failed to put their names on a watch-list. It could have alerted immigration, and it failed to tell the FBI.

The NSA also intercepted communications by several hijackers but the information either never surfaced or failed to ring alarm bells, despite the fact that the intelligence community had information in 1998 that al-Qaeda was planning attacks in Washington and New York. In August that year, an Arab plot to fly explosives-laden aircraft into the World Trade Centre from a foreign country was dismissed.

The notion that it could have been launched on US soil was also downplayed on the assumption that the flight would have been intercepted. The following month intelligence pointed to an al-Qaeda attack on an airport. But by 2001, US officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, and the State Department, were focused on the threat abroad.

If these signals had been taken together with a memo by an FBI agent two months before September 11, the attacks could have been averted.

July 25, 2003

Intelligence mistakes `let in 9/11 hijackers`
From Elaine Monaghan in Washington



US INTELLIGENCE agencies could have prevented the September 11 attacks if they had done their work properly, according to a congressional report released yesterday.

The document, which is more than 800 pages long, reveals no smoking gun or specific intelligence that 19 al- Qaeda militants would hijack aircraft and crash them into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, killing 3,000 people.

A discussion of support for the hijackers by foreign governments, which is understood to focus on Saudi Arabia, was excised on the insistence of the Bush Administration, sparking criticism from the Republican and Democratic senators at the helm of the inquiry.

Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is running for President, said that the hijackers had received “significant assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal”.

He refused, however, to name the country on the ground that it was classified.

Even Richard Shelby, his Republican counterpart, said that the information should have been disclosed. “This might be embarrassing information, but I don’t believe it meets the test of real classification.”

The Saudi Ambassador to the US said that Britain and the US had found to be baseless an allegation that a man who knew two future hijackers when they were living in San Diego was a Saudi agent.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan said that opponents of Saudi Arabia had resorted to criticising the Kingdom for political purposes with “blank pieces of paper”.

Most of the document focuses on the US intelligence failures that predated September 11. It also accused the US military of a reluctance to attack bin Laden. The intelligence community, meanwhile, did not believe that attacks were likely on US soil and failed to share information about the two suspects in San Diego, who later helped to attack the Pentagon.

The report called for an urgent beefing up of intelligence capabilities, and closer ties between top intelligence officials and the President. “It was sort of fortress America,” said Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic senator who served on the joint inquiry conducted by the intelligence committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate. “Americans by nature don’t think something can happen to them

. . . I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson yet.”

The document avoided blaming the White House but gave details about what the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) could have figured out if they had compared notes, pursued leads more vigorously and taken the al-Qaeda leader’s threats to attack America seriously. “The community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot,” it said.

Intelligence officers could have stopped the hijackers from entering the US and given warning of the signals they had of an impending attack on US soil. “No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn,” the report said.

It reveals a litany of available data on the two San Diego-based hijackers. They had contacts with another man in San Diego who was an FBI informant. But the FBI failed to exploit the connection.

Another tip-off about the two men should have come from the CIA, which had discovered that the pair had al-Qaeda links but failed to put their names on a watch-list. It could have alerted immigration, and it failed to tell the FBI.

The NSA also intercepted communications by several hijackers but the information either never surfaced or failed to ring alarm bells, despite the fact that the intelligence community had information in 1998 that al-Qaeda was planning attacks in Washington and New York. In August that year, an Arab plot to fly explosives-laden aircraft into the World Trade Centre from a foreign country was dismissed.

The notion that it could have been launched on US soil was also downplayed on the assumption that the flight would have been intercepted. The following month intelligence pointed to an al-Qaeda attack on an airport. But by 2001, US officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, and the State Department, were focused on the threat abroad.

If these signals had been taken together with a memo by an FBI agent two months before September 11, the attacks could have been averted.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-756161,00.html

[Joerver]

July 25, 2003

Foreign Editor`s Briefing

The ungovernable state nears moment of truth
By Bronwen Maddox



IF GRAY DAVIS gets thrown out as Governor of California, he could always apply to run Iraq, which is about the same size as the Golden State. But he would have much more power; it’s a much more attractive job.
It has been commonplace to call California ungovernable for decades. It is now part of the state’s folklore that in 1989, when Senator Pete Wilson was tempted by the thought of running for Governor, he was told by the political sage Stuart Spencer that the state was unmanageable and ungovernable.

He won, but his advisers soon acknowledged with a grimace that the warning had been right. It is even more deserved today.

The Governor has been stripped by voters of almost any ability any more to raise taxes or cut spending. Of the six main pillars of the state’s economy, four have weakened or collapsed. And California faces a worse demographic headache than almost any other state, with its population likely to swell from 35 million to 50 million in 25 years.

The recall vote itself is a symptom of the first problem — the way that the passion for “direct democracy” has stripped all room for manoeuvre from the Governor. Californians have seized with delight on the way their constitution allows them to propose new laws directly themselves, spelling out in detail how they will permit themselves to be governed.

As it happens, a Governor was responsible for the notion. Hiram Johnson, who ran the state from 1911 to 1917, was determined to break what he saw as the corrupt grip of the railroad companies on Californian politics. But his reform has taken on a popularity that has paralysed the state’s government.

The 52 “initiatives” passed between 1978 and 2000 — the result of 600 petitions — tackle everything from environmental reserves to prison terms. It is hard to call them either “Republican” or “Democrat”. They come from both ends of the political spectrum, reflecting the deep cultural divisions of the state, from extreme liberals to the firm Republicans of the defence industries.

But the most important ones have set the level of taxes and spending, taking many of these decisions out of the Governor’s hands. One initiative cut property taxes. Another insisted that the state spend 40 per cent of its income on schools. The result is that the Governor has control of only a fifth — at best — of the state’s income and little freedom to raise taxes.

As those powers were steadily removed from his office, the state’s finances were buffeted by unexpected blows, including the droughts of the early 1990s and the riots in Los Angeles after the verdict on the beating of Rodney King. Then, just as it seemed that things might be getting better, they got much worse, with a slump in most of the things California does well.

Silicon Valley has gone from boom to bust. Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, in which California led the rest of the US, are losing to competition from other states with cheaper labour. Legal battles over water are eroding the margins of the once hugely profitable farm business. Shipping has been hit, yet again, by strikes. Only Hollywood and defence are faring well.

Gray Davis blames Washington for the financial mess, and there is a sliver of truth in this. The Bush Administration has imposed some new obligations on all states, such as homeland security and school testing, but demanded that they pay. But most of California’s financial problems are home grown.

It was hardly a surprise that the state was heading for a record budget deficit, even if the headline figure of $38 billion (£24 billion) came as a shock. Anyone with a calculator has been able to see it coming a long way off.

But the state legislature has been paralysed, watching the turmoil in slow motion. More than in most states, there is a bitter gulf between Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature, reflecting the state’s sharp divisions. They agree on nothing.

Maybe that will now change. Davis or his successor will be installed, after all, with something like a mandate to tackle the deficit, and that means rapid cuts in spending.

The test of whether California is governable is whether its politicians — and its voters — use their shrinking room for manoeuvre to make those choices. The bleak alternative is that they stall until indiscriminate cuts are forced on them by lack of cash.

Economies of scale

CALIFORNIA

Population: 35 million
Size:163,695 sq miles
Gross State Product: $1.36 trillion (£843 billion)
State Budget Deficit
(fiscal years 2003 and 2004)
$38 billion and £23.6 billion


BRITAIN

Population: 60 million
Size: 94,147 sq miles
Gross Domestic Product: £868 billion
Budget Deficit for 2004: £25 billion

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-756206,00.html

[Joerver]

July 25, 2003

The second liberation: at last the people of Iraq can see an end to their fear
Rosemary Righter



For what seems like an eternity, the campaign that has dominated British and American newspapers has been the Battle of Duff Intelligence. It has been a firestorm involving excessive firepower and callous disregard for “collateral damage”. Stockpiled in the parlours of the chattering classes, the arsenals of moral outrage accumulated by anti-war brigades are still so formidable that the tragic, unnecessary death of David Kelly may have imposed a pause, but not a durable ceasefire.
By hunting down Uday and Qusay Hussein, US forces have torpedoed their father’s strategy for wresting back power once the demoralised Americans had, as he was sure they would, been forced by pressure back home to pack up their kit and run. For Iraqis that means the first glimpse of the uplands of a genuine peace. For the Middle East, it is the moment when the Ring is destroyed and, with it, Sauron’s brooding capacity for evil. But for the Middle Earth dwellers of Hampstead and Maryland, this dramatic turning-point will be just an irritant.

They care only about the defeat of the victors of the war they opposed, for motives (duff dossiers are a propaganda godsend, not a case against war) that have damn all to do with Saddam’s tyranny, menace to his neighbours and destructive contempt for international law. Because it was never really about Iraq at all, the Western “war debate” has proceeded from false premises, beginning with the charge that Bush and Blair were starting an illegal, aggressive war. Leave aside that the Gulf War was not legally over, because Saddam had not complied with the conditions of the 1991 ceasefire.

For Iraqis, war had been their reality for more than two decades, starting when Saddam invaded Iran 23 years ago. For them the question was not whether war would start but when their draining years of war with the world would end. They said so — terrorised as they were by Qusay’s web of informers and torturers. They said so.

Six months before the US-led campaign an unassuming Arab woman crisscrossed the streets, coffee shops, markets and hairdressers of Baghdad and Basra. A sociologist, she was gathering information for the International Crisis Group. She did not expect to hear the phrase “the day after” on the lips of almost every Iraqi she met. They did not mean the day after the invasion which was taken, in Iraq, for granted, factored into people’s personal plans and accepted, anxiously but also with a hope, as the price of getting rid of Saddam.

The “day after” for Iraqis was the day they could be sure that the dark decades of war, ostracism, terrible mass purges and torture chambers were definitely over and they could start piecing together the shards of what had been a highly urban, civilised society. The day their long war ended.

Saddam’s “day after” was different. It was the day when the Americans, British and Australians put their troops into policing mode and set about winning the peace. That was when the regime’s enforcers — Uday’s Fedayin Saddam, Qusay’s presidential guard, secret police and suicide bombers — would move into action: to murder “collaborators” trying to get the country running again; to keep anyone with knowledge of his banned weapons programmes in mortal fear; and to pick off members of the occupying forces until, he calculated, the “body count” became intolerable to the West’s flabby democracies. He could not stop coalition troops uncovering the mass graves of his victims, or being shown his torture chambers. But he could ensure that rapes and violent crime would become so endemic that Iraqis would begin to think of his police state as “orderly” — and blame the occupiers. Not for nothing did Saddam empty his jails of convicted criminals shortly before the US-led invasion.

To secure an American exit from a chaotic land, Saddam depended on Qusay and Uday to hold together his web of terror. But the strategy depends, too, on “useful idiots” in the West to sound the knell of defeat, in pursuit of domestic political vendettas cloaked with a sickeningly spurious morality.

Saddam’s sons are dead; the US is braced for a “spike” of revenge attacks by their henchmen. Many Iraqis still dare not believe it. Iraq’s “day after” has not dawned yet.

But the fear lifting the first streaks of light are in the sky. What is needed now is a bit more light, a bit more perspective, a bit more humanity, a bit more common sense about the difficulty of obtaining precise intelligence in police states — and a lot more willingness to concede how dangerous, as well as evil, Saddam’s amputated dynasty has been. Is that too much for Iraqis to ask, at this critical moment of returning hope, from the self-styled moral guardians of civilised Western values?

Join the Debate on this article at [e-mail]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-756006,00.html

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July 25, 2003
On Terror, Doubts Anew After a Scathing Report
By ERIC LICHTBLAU


WASHINGTON, July 24 — The report today on intelligence failures may force the Bush administration to confront a vexing question that the White House thought it put to rest months ago: how best to prevent another terrorist attack.

The findings, providing an even more damning indictment of the intelligence community than many had predicted, are already prompting fresh debate over whether the federal government should create a national intelligence czar or even strip the F.B.I. of its domestic intelligence duties in favor of a wholly new agency.

Senior administration officials say they are convinced that they have already developed an effective recipe of reforms to fight terrorism. They include establishing a new center run by the C.I.A. to better coordinate and analyze terrorist threats, redefining the mission of the F.B.I. to prevent attacks, and creating the biggest new federal department in almost a half-century: the Department of Homeland Security.

"Since Sept. 11, 2001," President Bush said in a statement today after the Congressional report was released, "my administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks."

But many analysts said the scathing report is likely to raise doubts about whether the administration has gone far enough, and as President Bush enters the election season, it could give political ammunition to his Democratic rivals.

Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was co-chairman of the joint Congressional panel. At a news conference today, Mr. Graham made clear he believed cultural and "institutional resistance" by government agencies contributed to the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

"If people want to place blame, there`s plenty of blame to go around," Mr. Graham said.

Another presidential contender, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, has advocated creating a new domestic intelligence agency, modeled after MI-5 in Britain, to fill the role now played by the F.B.I.

Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council aide on terrorism who has written extensively on the subject, said it was not clear that the structural changes put in place by the White House would do enough to reverse the longstanding problems in communication and cooperation identified by Congressional investigators.

"The question is whether the administration is prepared to do the kind of bureaucratic head-banging that`s needed to force everyone to work together," Mr. Benjamin said, "and the jury is still really out on that. So far, I`d have to give the changes a pretty low grade."

The Congressional findings paint a picture of a counterterrorism system that was essentially dysfunctional in the months and years before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. did not talk to one another at critical junctures, threats and warnings were sometimes ignored, intercepted conversations between terrorist suspects often went untranslated, and American officials missed chances to "unravel the plot" before it occurred, the report found.

Typical of the missteps was the handling of a memorandum sent by an F.B.I. agent to Phoenix in a memorandum to headquarters in July 2001, outlining concerns about the possibility that Osama bin Laden had started a coordinated effort to send operatives to the United States for flight school training. The agent noted an "inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" taking such training in Arizona and recommended that the F.B.I. compile a list of civil flight schools, discuss the concerns with other intelligence agencies, and consider seeking authority to obtain visa information on flight students.

But Congressional investigators found that senior terrorism officials at F.B.I. headquarters never saw the memorandum until after the Sept. 11 attacks, a reflection of the bureau`s computer woes and its organizational problems. And intelligence officials at other agencies said they were never consulted about the issue either.

The episode demonstrated how important strategic analysis at the F.B.I. — often considered a "poor stepchild" in the bureau`s pecking order — "took a backseat to operational priorities" before the Sept. 11 attacks, the report concluded.

Administration officials said they had tried to create a new mindset toward counterterrorism operations, promoting better cooperation between agencies, carrying out new training programs and reassigning some 1,200 F.B.I. agents to work on terrorism.

The ultimate indicator of how successful those changes have been, administration officials say, is that there have been no further terrorist attacks on American soil to date.

But the joint committee pushed today for still greater changes, including the creation of a cabinet-level intelligence czar, the creation of a national center to maintain a centralized terrorist "watch list," and the elimination of "obsolete barriers" to interagency coordination. It also urged a full review to determine whether anyone should be held accountable for the intelligence failures of Sept. 11.

Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, said his agency had already moved to carry out 10 of the committee`s 19 recommendations, including improved terrorism analysis and better training of agents. But other recommendations, like the idea of a cabinet-level official to oversee intelligence, could meet resistance from the Bush administration.

An even more controversial idea is the MI-5 proposal to create a new domestic intelligence agency, which the administration has opposed.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 25, 2003
Informant for F.B.I. Had Contacts With Two 9/11 Hijackers
By JAMES RISEN


WASHINGTON, July 24 — The F.B.I. may have missed its best chance to prevent the Sept. 11 plot when one of its informants developed close ties to two of the hijackers living in San Diego, yet never alerted the bureau to the impending attacks, according to a Congressional report released today.

The declassified report by a House-Senate committee focuses closely on the incidents in San Diego, where Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi settled soon after arriving in the country in early 2000. The informant told his F.B.I. handler they were "good Muslim Saudi youths" who had come to America to go to school.

The bureau`s failure to grasp the significance of the contacts provides a case study in the lapses of American counterterrorism efforts before Sept. 11. "The informant`s contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on," the report concludes, "would have given the San Diego F.B.I. field office perhaps the intelligence community`s best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot."

The F.B.I. missed the opportunity in large part because the C.I.A. had failed to share information with the bureau about the two hijackers, who had attended a meeting of al Qaeda in Malaysia. The report said that was a major reason that the F.B.I. could not exploit the information it had from its San Diego informant. Moreover, it was not until August 2001 that the C.I.A. urged that the two be placed on a list to prevent their entry into the United States, after they were already in the country.

The episode also raises questions about the role Saudi Arabia may have played in supporting the two while they lived in San Diego.

Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi rented an apartment and obtained California driver`s licenses in their real names and soon began taking flight lessons in San Diego. Mr. al-Midhar left San Diego in June 2000, flying to Oman and did not return to the United States until July 2001, but Mr. Alhazmi stayed in the San Diego area until December 2000, when he moved to Arizona with another hijacker, Hani Hanjour.

While in San Diego, Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi had "numerous contacts with a longtime F.B.I. counterterrorism informant," said the Congressional report, which does not identify the informant.

In the summer of 2000, the informer briefly mentioned to his F.B.I. handler that he had met two young Saudis, and gave the F.B.I. agent their first names. But the agent did not pursue the matter, since he did not see any connection between the two and any terrorism plots.

"During a debriefing in the summer of 2000, the informant told me that the informant met two individuals the informant described as good Muslim Saudi youths who were legally in the United States to visit and attend school," the F.B.I. agent told the committee. "According to the informant, they were religious and not involved in criminal or political activities. At some later point, but before Sept. 11, the informant told me their names were Nawaq and Khalid. The informant did not tell me their last names prior to Sept. 11, 2001."

The informant later told the F.B.I. that he did not know the two Saudis were plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, and the agent told the Congressional committee that he believed the informant was "duped" by the hijackers. Still, the joint committee`s report raises questions about the role of the informant and his credibility.

Several other individuals in San Diego whom the F.B.I. was watching also had contacts with the hijackers, yet those relationships also failed to raise alarm bells at the bureau. A local Muslim imam, who was the subject of a counterterrorism inquiry at the time, acted as the spiritual adviser for the two hijackers.

Meanwhile, unresolved questions surround the strange relationship that developed in San Diego between the two hijackers and a man from Saudi Arabia, Omar al-Bayoumi. Mr. al-Bayoumi met the two soon after their arrival in the United States and helped them settle in San Diego, allowing them to stay at his apartment for several days and co-signing a lease on their apartment.

Just before Mr. al-Bayoumi first met the two men at a Los Angeles restaurant, he held a closed-door meeting at the Saudi consulate, the F.B.I. later was told. And Mr. al-Bayoumi, who worked for the Saudi civil aviation authority, seemed to have access to large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Congressional report said. "One of the F.B.I.`s best sources in San Diego informed the bureau that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power," the report states.

The bureau had earlier taken an interest in Mr. al Bayoumi, but had dropped its inquiry before he developed a relationship with the two hijackers.

The relationship between Mr. al Bayoumi, who is no longer in the United States, and the two hijackers while they lived in San Diego has raised questions about possible connections between Saudi officials and the Sept. 11 attacks, links that Saudi Arabia has strenuously denied. Much of the Congressional report`s discussion of Saudi Arabia was not declassified, and was heavily redacted in the version released today.

What is clear, however, is that the informant`s contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego F.B.I. field office perhaps the intelligence community`s best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 24, 2003
September 11 report raises Saudi question
By Marianne Brun-Rovet and Edward Alden in Washington

The September 11 hijackers received foreign government support while they were in the US plotting the attacks on New York and Washington, according to the head of the US Congress investigation into the attacks.

The conclusion, strongly hinted at in the declassified portions of the 900-page report released on Thursday, will raise new questions in particular about the role of Saudi Arabia, particularly because the administration insisted on deleting a 28-page section of the report that focused on the Saudi link.

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

Senator Bob Graham, the former Democratic intelligence committee chairman who led the investigation, said the hijackers "received, during most of this time, significant assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal." He would not identify the government but he charged that the administration was refusing to release the information "to protect the country or countries that were providing direct assistance to some of the hijackers".

The report also contains new evidence that US intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew far more about the activities of some of the hijackers than has been previously revealed.

While the administration has insisted that the plot could not have been unraveled from the information available, a congressional source who briefed reporters said: "There was no smoking gun in the sense of all the details and the specifics in one piece of intelligence."

She added: "But that is not the same as saying that this attack could not have been prevented."

Despite the deletions, the report contains considerable new evidence regarding the role that Saudi Arabia may have played in supporting and shielding terrorists prior to the attacks.

First, the report quotes a senior US government official and others that the Saudi government had consistently refused to co- operate on any US investigations involving Osama bin Laden.

Secondly, it contains evidence of a more direct link to the attacks, particularly regarding the activities of Omar Al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national suspected of having ties with the Saudi government. Mr Al-Bayoumi was critical in setting up two of the September 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, when they first arrived in San Diego prior to the attacks. The pair was known by US intelligence agencies as early as 1999 to be connected with al-Qaeda, and had attended a high-level meeting of al-Qaeda operatives in Malaysia in January, 2000 that was monitored by the CIA.

The report says that Mr Al-Bayoumi met with the two men in Los Angeles in January, 2000, just after a closed-door meeting that Mr Al-Bayoumi had at the Saudi consulate. The FBI was aware of meetings between Mr Al-Bayoumi and the two hijackers and considered them "somewhat suspicious" but failed to act, the report said.

The report also revealed another major US intelligence failure prior to the attacks, which it called "perhaps the intelligence community`s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot."

It said that the FBI had recruited a counter-terrorism informant in San Diego who had close links to Mr al-Hazmi and Mr al-Mihdhar, as well as with a third hijacker Hani Hanjour. The FBI`s San Diego field office did not act on the information he supplied because the CIA had not made the FBI aware of their suspected links to al-Qaeda.

The FBI agent responsible for the informant told the congressional committee that he would have acted if he had been alerted that the pair were likely al-Qaeda operatives. "It would have made a huge difference," he said . We would have immediately opened investigations. We would have done everything."



© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2003.
"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times

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July 25, 2003
Before and After Sept. 11

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks might have been disrupted if America`s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies had done a better job sharing information they already possessed about the activities of Al Qaeda members. That is the most chilling finding of an unflinching Congressional inquiry into the performance of the country`s spy agencies in the years leading up to the attacks. It would be nice to believe that all the problems had been fixed. Unfortunately, much work remains to be done, and it is not at all clear in some important areas, like reform of the F.B.I., that change is coming fast enough to prevent another terror strike.

The first step toward reform is understanding the failures that preceded Sept. 11. The Congressional inquiry has produced a detailed chronicle of inept work by a multitude of federal agencies. A good deal of fragmentary information about Al Qaeda`s diabolic plan was picked up, but the pieces were never assembled in a coherent way to see whether a pattern or plot could be discerned.

Changes already initiated by the Bush administration look promising on paper, but it remains to be seen whether they can be carried out effectively. Robert Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has declared counterterrorism the bureau`s main priority and doubled the number of agents and analysts assigned to it. A joint counterterrorism center has been set up so F.B.I. and C.I.A. specialists can work under one roof. But transforming the bureau from a law enforcement agency into a terrorism-fighting organization just may not be possible.

The C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, which does electronic eavesdropping, will also have to devote more of their efforts to analyzing international terrorist threats inside the United States, promptly sharing their findings with the F.B.I. and other domestic agencies. The panel concludes that not enough has yet been done to address problems in all of these areas.

The report recommends the creation of a cabinet-level intelligence czar responsible for coordinating the activities of the entire intelligence community. That may help, but only if the position does not turn into a rival power center competing with the office of the director of central intelligence.

The next examination of the government`s conduct prior to Sept. 11 will come from the commission headed by Thomas Kean, the former governor of New Jersey. The administration must give the commission the information it has requested on relevant White House and National Security Council discussions. The White House`s refusal to give Congress unfettered access to information about Saudi Arabia`s links to terrorism was a mistake that should not be repeated with the Kean panel.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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In der gesamten NYTimes ist kein Bericht über den Tod von Saddams Söhnen!

July 25, 2003
Dropping the Bonds
By PAUL KRUGMAN


In his July testimony to Congress on monetary policy, Alan Greenspan was cautious but _ adjusting for his usual funereal demeanor _ quite upbeat. ``Although the uncertainties of earlier this year are as yet not fully resolved,`` he declared, ``the U.S. economy appears to have withstood a set of blows. Not surprisingly the depressing effects of recent events linger. Nevertheless, the fundamentals are in place for a return to sustained healthy growth.``

O.K., I cheated: those quotations come from his testimony in July 2002, not July 2003. Needless to say, ``healthy growth`` failed to materialize. Undaunted, he said pretty much the same thing last week _ and the result was to reinforce a huge sell-off in the bond market, which may undermine the very recovery he predicted.

I used to be a great admirer of Mr. Greenspan. But something has gone very wrong with the maestro.

His testimony last week was surprising on several counts. There is very little evidence in the data for a strong recovery ready to break out. As far as I can make out, Mr. Greenspan`s optimism is entirely based on models predicting that tax cuts and low interest rates will get the economy moving. But that`s what the models said last year, too: the report that accompanied his July 2002 testimony predicted an unemployment rate of 5.25 to 5.5 percent by late 2003 (the rate is now 6.4 percent). Maybe tax cuts mainly for the affluent aren`t as effective as the models say.

Meanwhile, the boost from low interest rates seems to be evaporating. Mortgage rates did indeed fall briefly to historic lows, extending the home-buying and refinancing boom that has helped keep the economy`s head above water. Since mid-June, however, rates have been climbing rapidly. This week rates on 30-year mortgages hit their highest level since January.

And Mr. Greenspan bears some of the responsibility. Until June, Fed officials had helped push down interest rates precisely by not being too optimistic _ by indicating that they took concerns about deflation seriously, that they were not taking recovery for granted. Then they surprised markets with a small cut in the federal funds rate, a move that seemed to suggest that they were taking recovery for granted, after all. Mr. Greenspan`s testimony reinforced that impression. Still, I would be prepared to forgive Mr. Greenspan`s recent fumbles if it weren`t for the huge fiscal damage he has inflicted on the republic in these past few years.

Let`s not forget that back in 2001, Mr. Greenspan lent crucial political aid to the first Bush tax cut, arguing that such a cut was necessary to prevent, yes, excessive budget surpluses and too rapid a payoff of the federal government`s debt. He should have known better _ it wasn`t hard, even then, to figure out that those huge projected surpluses were largely fantasy. But he tied himself in knots to find a way to give his political friends what they wanted.

He could have redeemed himself by changing his mind once record surpluses turned into record deficits, but he didn`t. Mr. Greenspan still talks about the evils of deficits, but refuses to say the obvious: that if we are ever to balance the budget again, many of the Bush tax cuts will have to be reversed once the economy recovers. Instead, Mr. Greenspan offers platitudes about spending restraint: ``I would prefer to find the situation in which spending was constrained, the economy was growing and that tax cuts were capable of being initiated without creating fiscal problems.`` (``I would prefer a world in which Julia Roberts was calling me,`` Representative Brad Sherman replied, ``but that is unlikely to occur.``) In short, the budget is in a mess, and Mr. Greenspan is one of the main culprits. And that, suggest some people I`ve talked to, may explain how he misjudged his recent testimony so badly.

Their theory goes like this: Mr. Greenspan must know that his legacy is in tatters _ at the rate things are going, history will remember him not as the maestro of the new economy, but as an accomplice in America`s descent into debt. For his own self-esteem, he has to believe that things will somehow turn out all right. Thus his sudden, destructive outbreak of optimism.

It`s only a theory. What isn`t a theory is that Mr. Greenspan has a lot to answer for.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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Ist das Thema Irak schon so uninteressant? Keine Erwähnung der toten Söhne oder weiss die NYTimes mehr?

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washingtonpost.com
Cheney Says Failing to Attack Iraq Would Have Been `Irresponsible`


By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A01


Vice President Cheney launched a White House counterattack yesterday against rising criticism of the administration`s handling of Iraq, arguing that failing to confront Saddam Hussein would have been "irresponsible in the extreme" and could have endangered the United States.

Cheney was a main architect of the administration`s case for war, which Democrats are challenging as exaggerated. He asserted that "the safety of the American people was at stake" because of Iraqi efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and "cultivate" ties with terrorist groups.

"At a safe remove from the danger, some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision to liberate Iraq," Cheney said. "The ability to criticize is one of the great strengths of our democracy. But those who do so have an obligation to answer this question: How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?"

Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute two hours before a congressional panel reported on intelligence lapses before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, devoted much of his address to a grave assessment of the continuing threat posed by terrorism. Cheney compared the war on terrorism to the struggles against fascism and communism in the past century.

"The terrorists intend to strike America again," he said. "One by one, in every corner of the world, we will hunt the terrorists down and destroy them. In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror."

Administration officials described Cheney`s remarks as an effort to regain the offensive after more than two weeks of shifting White House accounts of how an allegation about Iraq seeking nuclear materials in Africa landed in President Bush`s State of the Union address in January even though U.S. intelligence agencies had expressed doubts about the claim for months.

One official said the speech, delivered in front of a row of U.S. flags against a severe black backdrop, was aimed at "steadying the ship."

Bush`s aides said the speech was also intended as a warning to congressional Democrats, many of whom had access to the same intelligence, that the White House plans to fight back against criticism of its Iraq policy. Aides said Bush plans to follow up on the Cheney speech next month with a major address on the war on terrorism.

The Cheney speech was part of an administration-coordinated response to Democratic criticism. The effort includes the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill, the national Republican Party and television appearances by well-known Bush supporters. Ed Gillespie, incoming chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggested in a memo to party leaders that they frame the choice as "confronting terrorists in Baghdad or Boston, in Kabul or Kansas City."

The White House`s strategy banks on the willingness of Americans to turn their attention to the benefits of unseating Hussein and away from the intelligence cited by Bush to justify the war. One presidential adviser said it is clear that the White House is losing the public relations war over the specifics of the case against Iraq and so is trying to refocus attention on the broader goals of the war on terrorism.

The vice president`s office was a major force in putting Iraq at the top of the administration`s agenda. Cheney, during an Aug. 26 address in Nashville, made a forceful case that Iraq was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons that would threaten the United States.

In yesterday`s speech, Cheney laid out a detailed rationale for the war Bush launched on March 20, quoting at length from declassified sections of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq issued in October. White House officials have cited the NIE as the basis for pre-war speeches about Iraq. Cheney said three times that it would have been "irresponsible in the extreme" to disregard the warnings.

As part of an effort to rebut criticism that it had exaggerated the threat, the White House last Friday released eight pages of excerpts from the intelligence report.

Cheney quoted some of the declassified passages, saying that Iraq was "continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs," and that Iraq "could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material."

Although Cheney quoted the report as saying that Iraq, if left unchecked, "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," he did not read the next sentence, which referred to a dissent from State Department intelligence experts. They agreed in part but called the available evidence "inadequate."

Cheney cited a passage that said all key aspects of Iraq`s offensive biological weapons program "are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War." He omitted a qualifier at the start of the passage in which intelligence analysts said they "judge" that to be the case.

The speech marked a return to the administration`s emphasis on Hussein as a serious threat to the United States. In recent weeks, with U.S. forces controlling Iraq but failing to locate chemical or biological weapons or clear evidence of a nuclear program, officials had begun pointing to the freedom of the Iraqi people as a worthy end of its own.

Cheney did not mention the continuing U.S. casualties or the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction but said Americans "still have many tasks to complete in Iraq, and many dangers remain." He touched on the human rights crimes of Hussein`s government. "If we had not acted," Cheney said, "the torture chambers would still be in operation, the prison cells for children would still be filled, the mass graves would still be undiscovered."

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Hill`s 9/11 Probe Finds Multiple Failures
Congressional Inquiry Faults FBI Monitoring of Hijackers

By Susan Schmidt and David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A01


In the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, the al Qaeda hijackers were not living isolated lives in the United States, as authorities have asserted. Instead, conspirators were in contact with as many as 14 people who had turned up in previous FBI counterterrorism investigations -- at least four of whom were under active FBI investigation -- according to a partially declassified investigation by the joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence released yesterday.

The U.S. intelligence community "failed to fully capitalize" on information that might have allowed agents to unravel the hijack plot, the joint committee concluded, and bungled clues that should have led the FBI to two or more of the terrorists before they could act.

The joint committee`s report represents the fullest examination so far of the U.S. response to the growing threat from the violent Islamic fundamentalists gathered under the al Qaeda umbrella of multimillionaire Osama bin Laden. Based on an examination of more than 500,000 documents and testimony at nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions last year, the report paints a picture of a poorly organized, understaffed and sometimes half-hearted effort, in agencies across the government, that missed the warning signs and failed to add up the clues.

In more than 800 pages of findings, recommendations and narrative detail, the joint committee amplified existing knowledge of the unsuccessful effort to deal with al Qaeda before the attacks, and cast new light on certain aspects of that effort. Beyond the FBI failures, the committee found:

• CIA Director George J. Tenet was "either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of Intelligence Community resources necessary to combat the growing threat."

• U.S. military leaders were "reluctant to use . . . assets to conduct offensive counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan" or to "support or participate in CIA operations directed against al-Qaeda."

• "There was no coordinated . . . strategy to track terrorist funding and close down their financial support networks"; the Treasury Department even showed "reluctance" to do so.

• The National Security Agency, which collects signals intelligence around the world, took an overly cautious approach to collecting intelligence in the United States and offered "insufficient collaboration" with the FBI`s efforts.

One of the joint committee findings remained classified, but it appeared from surrounding material that the finding dealt with covert CIA actions to disrupt, capture or even kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. While Tenet had spoken of "war" against bin Laden and the CIA had developed a secret strategy known cryptically as "the Plan" for dealing with him, "the CIA`s actual efforts to carry out covert action against [bin Laden] in Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001 were limited and do not appear to have significantly hindered [al Qaeda`s] ability to operate," the committee wrote.

While U.S. agencies failed to come up with a coordinated counterterrorism effort, the report noted, bin Laden trained 70,000 to 120,000 terrorist recruits at other camps in Afghanistan, and intelligence sources reported that al Qaeda was completing a "support structure" inside the United States that could mount multiple attacks.

The joint committee concluded: "Although relevant information . . . regarding the attacks was available to the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, 2001, the Community too often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance."

President Bush praised the "hard work and careful thought" reflected in the report, and said the failings identified in it have been corrected. "Our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working together more closely than ever and are using new tools to intercept, disrupt and prevent terrorist attacks," Bush said in a statement.

But Democratic presidential candidates said the report shows the need for still more reform of the intelligence apparatus, and they criticized the administration`s refusal to declassify large sections of the report.

Committee staff members wrangled for months with the administration and intelligence agencies over how much could be made public. Even so, long passages remained classified, including nearly 28 pages of material on possible Saudi support for the hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. Other passages were declassified only after the committee staff agreed to make undisclosed changes in the text.

An independent, bipartisan panel, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), is in the middle stages of its own investigation of the failure to prevent the attacks.

The inquiry found that the intelligence community recognized before Sept. 11 "that a radical Islamic network that could provide support to al Qaeda operatives probably existed in the United States." In June 2001, according to CIA documents reviewed by the panel, al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- already under indictment for his alleged role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center -- was recruiting people to travel to the United States to "establish contact with colleagues already living there" for the purpose of planning acts of terrorism.

The report contradicts early suggestions by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that the hijackers lived in social isolation while in this country, making their actions and intentions difficult to learn. Instead, the report quotes from an internal FBI analysis that states the six hijack leaders were involved with a "much greater number of associates than was originally suspected."

The group, the report said, "maintained a web of contacts both in the United States and abroad," among them associates from universities, flight schools, jobs and mosques. "Other contacts provided legal, logistical or financial assistance, facilitated U.S. entry and flight school enrollment or were known from . . . activities or training" related to bin Laden.

In particular, the report raises questions about the role of several men who aided hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who moved to San Diego after attending a January 2000 al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the attacks may have been planned. They died when the American Airlines plane they hijacked crashed into the Pentagon.

The two were befriended upon their arrival in California by a Saudi named Omar Bayoumi, an employee of the Saudi civil aviation authority who had been the subject of a counterterrorism investigation begun in 1998. Bayoumi, who had large amounts of cash from Saudi Arabia, put down a security deposit and first month`s rent on an apartment for the conspirators and set them up with a translator, a man whose brother is the subject of a counterterrorism investigation.

After Sept. 11, when the FBI renewed its investigation of Bayoumi, agents found he "has connections to terrorist elements," including ties to al Qaeda, the report said. A search of his apartment turned up jihadist literature, and his salary was paid by a man whose son`s photograph was found in an al Qaeda safe house in Pakistan.

The FBI also determined after the attacks that another Saudi man who had befriended the San Diego hijackers, Osama Bassnan, "is an extremist and a bin Laden supporter." The FBI was aware of Bassnan previously and received reports that in 1993 he hosted a party in Washington for Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric now imprisoned for his role in the first World Trade Center attack. "However, the FBI did not open an investigation" at the time.

Bassnan and his family received charitable support from Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and members of the joint inquiry have complained they have had to press the FBI to determine whether any of those or other royal family funds may have been used to aid the hijackers. The few passages that were declassified portray the Saudi government as uncooperative in the fight against terrorism both before and after Sept. 11.

Bandar rejected any suggestion that his government was doing anything less than cooperating fully.

"In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people," he said in a statement. "The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even knew about September 11th is malicious and blatantly false."

Other people known to the FBI were in contact with Almihdhar and Alhazmi. The two were close to a Muslim cleric in San Diego, identified by law enforcement sources as a Yemeni named Anwar Awlaki.

Awlaki and the conspirators moved from San Diego to Falls Church in 2001 and became associated with Dar al-Hijrah mosque. The report said that German police discovered a phone number for the mosque in the home of self-described hijacking mastermind Ramzi Binalshibh after the attacks.

In addition, the hijackers worked and socialized with two San Diego businessmen who had been investigated for possible ties to terrorist groups.

The FBI was in prime position to unravel the hijacking plot had its San Diego field office known what the CIA and FBI officials in Washington and New York knew: that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had slipped into the United States in 2000. They had rented a room in San Diego from a longtime FBI informant.

In testimony to the joint committee, a San Diego field agent expressed confidence that, if the information had reached him, there would have been a "full court press." The two conspirators would have been found, he said.

And that might have led to cracking the plot.

The San Diego informant has said he did not find the men suspicious and never told his FBI handlers their full names.

Yesterday, it was clear the panel is skeptical of the informant`s truthfulness. The report said that he made "inconsistent" statements to the FBI on Sept. 11, that the results of a polygraph were "inconclusive," and that he failed to tell the FBI of the hijackers` contacts with four people he knew the bureau was monitoring. The FBI refused to produce the informant for an interview, and his lawyer did not respond to written questions, the report said.

In a statement yesterday, Mueller, who took office just days before the attacks, called the FBI "a changed organization" whose primary focus now is preventing terrorism.

An FBI spokesman defended its work in San Diego. "These individuals came into contact with people we were investigating, but there was nothing about them that was suspicious."

He said the FBI is not investigating any of the men with whom the two hijackers were in contact.

Staff researchers Lucy Shackelford and Margot Williams contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
White House, CIA Kept Key Portions of Report Classified


By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A01


President Bush was warned in a more specific way than previously known about intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda terrorists were seeking to attack the United States, a report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks indicated yesterday. Separately, the report cited one CIA memo that concluded there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi individuals provided financial assistance to al Qaeda operatives in the United States.

These revelations are not the subject of the congressional report`s narratives or findings, but are among the nuggets embedded in a story focused largely on the mid-level workings of the CIA, FBI and U.S. military.

Two intriguing -- and politically volatile -- questions surrounding the Sept. 11 plot have been how personally engaged Bush and his predecessor were in counterterrorism before the attacks, and what role some Saudi officials may have played in sustaining the 19 terrorists who commandeered four airplanes and flew three of them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

To varying degrees, the answers remain a mystery, despite an unprecedented seven-month effort by a joint House and Senate panel to fully understand how a group of Arab terrorists could have pulled off such a scheme. The CIA refused to permit publication of information potentially implicating Saudi officials on national security grounds, arguing that disclosure could upset relations with a key U.S. ally. Lawmakers complained it was merely to avoid embarrassment.

The White House, meanwhile, resisted efforts to pin down Bush`s knowledge of al Qaeda threats and to catalogue the executive`s pre-Sept. 11 strategy to fight terrorists. It was justified largely on legal grounds, but Democrats said the secrecy was meant to protect Bush from criticism.

And while the report contains extensive details about counterterrorism policy and operations under President Bill Clinton, it also leaves out substantial material deemed classified. The panel took testimony from former senior advisers to Clinton and Bush but did not interview either president.

Still, the report offers bits of new information about both presidents and the Saudis, and lays out a possible road map for the independent commission charged by Congress to pick up the investigation of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. It also offers pointed criticism of both Bush and Clinton, concluding that neither "put the government or the intelligence community on a war footing before September 11" -- despite ample evidence of al Qaeda`s dangerous designs.

With respect to Bush, the congressional panel indicated that it tried to determine "to what extent the President received threat-specific warnings during this period" -- but obtained only limited information.

Among the only clues cited in the report about Bush`s knowledge of al Qaeda`s intentions against the United States is an Aug. 6, 2001, President`s Daily Briefing (PDB) -- described in the report only as a "closely-held intelligence report" -- that included information "acquired in May 2001 that indicated a group of [Osama] Bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."

The PDB also said "that Bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States for years and that the group apparently maintained a support base here." It cited "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to the report.

In a May 16, 2002, briefing for reporters, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the PDB was a historical look at bin Laden`s methods dating to 1997. She characterized the briefing as an "analytic report" that summed up bin Laden`s methods of operation. "It was not a warning," she said. "There was no specific time or place mentioned."

The CIA declined to declassify the PDB, and the White House, which had the authority to release it, declined to do so, citing "executive privilege." Executive privilege allows the president to withhold from public disclosure all advice and communications he receives from advisers so that they feel free to offer frank advice without fearing that it will become public.

The Aug. 6 PDB came amid a barrage of intelligence reporting indicating that al Qaeda was planning attacks, somewhere, against U.S. interests. The intelligence community has said its focus was on possible attacks overseas.

Deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley, who refused to testify before the panel but submitted written responses to questions, told the panel that the National Security Council held four deputy committee meetings between May and the end of July 2001 in an effort to adopt a more aggressive strategy vis-a-vis al Qaeda. The review was finalized Sept. 4, 2001. Bush had not reviewed the proposal before Sept. 11, Hadley wrote the panel.

The committee also unsuccessfully sought budget information from the Office of Management and Budget to determine where in the Bush administration the decision was made not to provide more funding for counterterrorism activities.

CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a closed-door session on June 18, 2002, that he had told other members of the administration that his counterterrorism budget would be as much as $1 billion short each year for the next five years. "We told that to everybody downtown for as long as anybody would listen and never got to first base," Tenet told the panel.

On the issue of Saudi Arabia, the report cited a CIA memorandum that said connections between some hijackers and some Saudis living in the United States amounted to "incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists" from Saudi officials.

This section of the report refers only to "foreign support." Officials from various branches of the U.S. government said those two words refer to Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, the report said, further investigation of these allegations "could reveal legitimate, and innocent, explanations for these associations."

The report makes no accusation that it was ever the policy of the Saudi government to support terrorism. Rather, the questionable activity involved Saudi citizens, some of whom worked for the Saudi government.

The panel also took the FBI to task for not aggressively pursuing allegations against Saudi individuals, including a network of businessmen and religious figures in San Diego who, together, provided two key hijackers with seemingly unlimited money, an interpreter and other support.

The report said that because Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally, "the United States had not established heightened screening for illegal immigration or terrorism by visitors from Saudi Arabia."

One U.S. official told the panel "he believed the U.S. government`s hope of eventually obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance to the U.S. government on this matter is contrary to Saudi national interests."

Yesterday, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, issued a statement refuting the criticism of his country. "It is unfortunate that false accusations against Saudi Arabia continue to be made by some for political purposes despite the fact that the kingdom has been one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism," he said.

Members of the panel offered differing assessments of the impact of the administration`s efforts to keep secret certain politically sensitive subjects.

"We were never able to get much of the material we requested from the National Security Council," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), former ranking member of the House intelligence committee. "The nation was not well-served by the administration`s failure to provide this critical information."

Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he doubted Bush was complacent about warnings he received. "The intelligence community was providing him information. He wasn`t AWOL," Goss said. "In hindsight, it might take on a little more significance . . . but it`s a huge stretch to say the president had information he should have acted on."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Photos of Slain Husseins Issued; 3 U.S. Soldiers Killed
Officials Hope Images Wipe Out Skepticism

By Anthony Shadid and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A20


BAGHDAD, July 24 -- The U.S. military today took what it acknowledged was an unusual step and released grisly photos of the bloodied and battered bodies of former president Saddam Hussein`s two sons, hours after three U.S. soldiers were killed in northern Iraq in the deadliest attack against American forces of the last 11 weeks.

The attack was carried out under cover of darkness on a remote desert road in the village of Tal Shoak, about 50 miles south of Mosul, the northern city where a force of 200 U.S. soldiers killed Hussein`s two sons on Tuesday. A military spokesman said assailants fired rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at a 101st Airborne Division convoy at 3:30 a.m. Residents said U.S. troops killed four of the attackers.

The clash, along with several less lethal strikes in the past 48 hours, represented a clear spike in anti-U.S. attacks in Mosul since Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed. From President Bush to military commanders in the field, U.S. officials had expressed hope that the brothers` deaths would mark a turning point in the simmering guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-led occupation, which has claimed the lives of 44 American soldiers. In an effort to eliminate any remaining skepticism among Iraqis, U.S. authorities decided to release photos of the two Husseins, whose brutality and unfettered violence stood as testaments to their father`s three-decade rule.

After the firefight that claimed their lives Tuesday, their bodies were shown to four senior members of their father`s government, who confirmed their identities. Along with the photos, officials released comparative pictures of the sons when they were alive and an X-ray of Uday`s leg, which was injured in an assassination attempt in 1996. Earlier in the day, members of Iraq`s Governing Council were escorted to view the bodies at the Baghdad airport, where they were taken after they were removed from the devastated villa in Mosul.

The photos were broadcast hourly tonight on Arab satellite networks and the U.S.-run television station in Iraq.

The photos were released after some debate within the U.S. military, which had been outraged when Arab networks broadcast pictures of dead and captured Americans during the invasion of Iraq. But U.S. officials concluded that only concrete evidence would prove persuasive.

"We`re having to deal with some cultural differences, and it is a policy decision. Normally we do not release photos of this kind," a U.S. official in Baghdad said on condition of anonymity. Another official with the occupation force added that authorities had tried "to balance the standards and expectations of how to behave in a civilized society."

At an electronics store on Karrada Street, one of Baghdad`s commercial thoroughfares, some customers said their doubts were put to rest.

"I believe they were Uday and Qusay. The photos fit them," said Haidar Razzaq, the owner of the Haidar Jad shop.

But even the release of the pictures to international news agencies ran up against some of the same sentiments that have persistently beset U.S. efforts to portray the occupation as an endeavor underpinned by good will. Many Iraqis appear to remain suspicious, even paranoid about U.S. intentions -- a reflection of nationalist resentment and what some contend is a product of a dictatorial culture in which rumors were the sole source of information. Others said they would never be persuaded, a sign of the lack of credibility U.S. statements carry among many Iraqis disenchanted with the progress of reconstruction.

"These photos are not them," said Hassanein Abbas, 16, a high school student shopping at the store.

"I want video that shows the bodies, not just the photos," he said. "I don`t care about DNA or medical reports."

The photos showed the two men with heavy beards, apparently grown in an effort to conceal their identities during 3 1/2 months in hiding. Two photos appeared to show Qusay, his features distinct but bruised. But the two photos of Uday, showing his face bruised and bloodied and a wound running from his eye to his mouth, gave rise to skepticism about his identity.

"I have doubts, and the photos weren`t clear," said Nouri Sabah, 17, a student shopping at another store along Karrada Street, who saw the photos on U.S.-run Iraqi television. "Qusay was in one of the photos, but the other wasn`t Uday."

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said this week that the killing of the two men would mark "a turning point for the resistance and the subversive elements we are pursuing." But after the three U.S. soldiers were killed near Mosul today -- the most deadly incident since major combat operations were declared over on May 1 -- U.S. officials seemed to scale back their assessments.

"We knew that getting the two boys was not going to be the end of this thing, and we`re continuing to aggressively patrol," Col. Guy Shields, a U.S. military spokesman, said at a briefing in Baghdad.

Uday, one of the most despised figures in a government laced together by clan and family, oversaw Saddam`s Fedayeen, a militia that harried U.S. troops in March and April as they moved north through Iraq. In a statement purportedly from the group broadcast today on Al-Arabiya, an Arab satellite network, the group promised to avenge the killings of Uday and his brother.

In the tape, the men held rocket-propelled grenades and rifles, their faces concealed with red-and-black checkered scarves. The statement, read by one of the masked men, portrayed the two sons as martyrs who held out for hours with rifles against a force of 200 U.S. soldiers with machine guns, grenades, attack helicopters and finally a barrage of antitank missiles.

"We promise to the Iraqi people that we will continue jihad against the infidels," the statement said. "The killing of Uday and Qusay will not reduce the attacks against the Americans but increase them."

The statement warned that Iraqis who collaborate with U.S. forces would be their first target.

Eleven U.S. soldiers have been killed in the past week, five in the past two days. In the region around Mosul, military officials said, there have been at least three attacks on U.S. troops since Wednesday, including a bomb attack that day on a convoy that wounded five soldiers and destroyed two Humvees.

Staff Sgt. Joseph Gaskin, assigned to guard duty at Razi Hospital in Mosul, said a homemade mortar shell was remotely detonated about noon Wednesday beneath the convoy, which was carrying supplies to the hospital. Some of the five wounded soldiers suffered shrapnel wounds to the head, Gaskin said, but all returned to duty almost immediately.

Mosul, which was the scene of little combat during the war, had been more or less peaceful. But people there say that the violence that has plagued Baghdad and the towns around it seems to have arrived in their bustling, low-slung city on the Tigris River.

Sullivan reported from Mosul. Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this story.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Im Online Teil der WaPo sind die Fotos derr toten Söhne in Macromedia-Flash in Postkartengröße zu bestaunen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42989-2003Jul…

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Deutch Sees Consequences in Failed Search for Arms


By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A20


Former CIA director John M. Deutch told Congress yesterday that failure to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq would represent "an intelligence failure . . . of massive proportions."

"It means that . . . leaders of the American public based [their] support for the most serious foreign policy judgments -- the decision to go to war -- on an incorrect intelligence judgment," Deutch said during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The impact, he said, would be felt "the next time military intervention is judged necessary to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction -- for example in North Korea -- there will be skepticism about the quality of our intelligence."

The House panel, along with its Senate counterpart, is holding hearings on the handling of intelligence on Iraq`s weapons programs amid complaints by Democrats that the administration may have exaggerated the threat posed by the now-toppled government of president Saddam Hussein to justify war.

Deutch said "it seems increasingly likely" that Iraq may have not continued its chemical and biological weapons programs after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But Deutch and another former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, told the panel that they expected U.S. forces eventually would turn up evidence of chemical and biological weapons production, perhaps along with stocks of chemical and biological agents or weapons.

Former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay, in Iraq to coordinate the weapons search for CIA Director George J. Tenet, has been interviewing lower-level Iraqi scientists and reviewing tons of documents. He has been pulling together outlines of research and development programs and references to chemical and biological precursors, according to senior administration officials.

Kay and Army Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who runs the military side of the program, are scheduled to return next week to brief the Pentagon and appear on Capitol Hill.

At his Senate Armed Services Committee reappointment hearing yesterday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that in recent days U.S. teams had discovered artillery shells with a different type of casings. "Whether or not there were chemicals or biological in there, we don`t know. We have to test that," Myers said.

In a related matter, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to investigate whether Bush administration officials identified the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson as a clandestine CIA officer, an allegation published on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.

Wilson, a critic of Bush`s decision to invade Iraq, carried out a CIA-generated mission to Niger in February 2002 to determine the validity of intelligence reports that Iraq had sought uranium oxide from that country for its nuclear program. Wilson`s report back to the CIA cast strong doubt about the reports.

In the column, Novak named Wilson`s wife as an "agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," adding: "Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson`s wife suggested sending him to Niger" to carry out the investigation.

Schumer said the disclosure of the wife`s name and CIA relationship "was part of an apparent attempt to impugn Wilson`s credibility and to intimidate others from speaking out against the administration." He called for the FBI to investigate Novak`s source, because intentionally identifying a covert CIA officer is a crime.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan has been asked twice this week about charges the information was deliberately leaked to Novak, and both times responded that "this is not the way this president or this White House operates."

McClellan said he has "no idea" who the sources for the information were, and added that "certainly no one in this White House would have been given authority to take such a step."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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What Went Wrong




Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A24


THE REPORT RELEASED yesterday by the joint House-Senate inquiry into intelligence failures preceding 9/11 represents an important contribution to America`s understanding of how the country`s security was rendered so vulnerable to catastrophic attack. Though some of its conclusions will no doubt be debated, the report offers by far the most detailed account yet public of how the plot unfolded, and its central thrust seems both persuasive and well documented: The intelligence agencies were not well positioned to respond to the growth of al Qaeda in the years preceding 9/11, and their flaws led to specific operational failures that proved devastating as the attacks were prepared.

Many of these operational failures were previously known in general terms, but when laid out comprehensively and supplemented with the wealth of new details the report discloses, they are especially disturbing. The CIA, for example, connected to al Qaeda two of the hijackers -- Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who attended a meeting the agency monitored in Malaysia -- but the CIA then failed to place them on a terrorist watch list of people barred from entering the United States. When they came to this country a week later, they lived for a time with an FBI informant. Five of the hijackers had contact with at least 14 people who had turned up in FBI terrorism or intelligence investigations. Some of the subjects of the now-famous Phoenix memo, written by an FBI agent alarmed by the apparent radical Islamist presence at flight schools, appear to have been al Qaeda operatives; one was even connected to one of the hijackers. In short, all sorts of critical information was not shared; nobody`s eyes were seeing enough of the picture to make sense of all the data. Nobody can say whether the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. But to have a fighting chance at stopping an enemy as elusive and sophisticated as al Qaeda, much more has to be going right than evidently was by 2001.

Less spectacular but no less important are the report`s conclusions concerning the systemic problems that led to these operational failures. The FBI`s "reliance on an aggressive case-oriented, law enforcement approach did not encourage the broader collection and analysis efforts that are critical to the intelligence mission." The government and the intelligence agencies lacked "a comprehensive counterterrorist strategy for combating the threat posed by Osama bin Laden," and the director of central intelligence "was either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of . . . resources necessary to combat the growing threat to the United States." The specific failures in the run-up to the attacks cannot be undone. Making sure the intelligence agencies are positioned correctly remains a critical task as the war on terrorism proceeds.

One troubling feature of the report is how much of it the public cannot see. To a certain extent, declassifying a report will necessarily entail removing sensitive information. But significant portions of the redacted material reportedly deal with the role of Saudi Arabia, a country from which 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed -- and the possibility that some received government money. Yesterday, Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan denounced what he termed "outrageous charges" against his country. One way or another, the public is entitled to an accounting of how the country Prince Bandar calls "one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism" really behaved as terrorists launched a war against America.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Hier ein Beispiel der vereinfachenden Sicht der Neo Cons.

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Middle East: The Realities


By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A25


Amid the general media and Democratic frenzy over Niger yellowcake, it is Bill Clinton who injected a note of sanity. "What happened often happens," Clinton told Larry King. "There was a disagreement between British intelligence and American intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence that said it. . . . . British intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I don`t know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying, `Well, we probably shouldn`t have said that.` " Big deal. End of story. End of scandal.

The fact that the Democrats and the media can`t seem to let go of it, however, is testimony to their need (and ability) to change the subject. From what? From the moral and strategic realities of Iraq. The moral reality finally burst through the yellowcake fog with the death of the Hussein brothers, psychopathic torturers who would be running Iraq if not for the policy enunciated by President Bush in that very same State of the Union address.

That moral reality is a little hard for the left to explain, considering the fact that it parades as the guardian of human rights and all-around general decency, and rallied millions to prevent the policy that liberated Iraq from Uday and Qusay`s reign of terror.

Then there are the strategic realities. Consider what has happened in the Near East since Sept. 11, 2001:

(1) In Afghanistan, the Taliban have been overthrown and a decent government has been installed.

(2) In Iraq, the Saddam Hussein regime has been overthrown, the dynasty has been destroyed and the possibility for a civilized form of governance exists for the first time in 30 years.

(3) In Iran, with dictatorships toppled to the east (Afghanistan) and the west (Iraq), popular resistance to the dictatorship of the mullahs has intensified.

(4) In Pakistan, once the sponsor and chief supporter of the Taliban, the government radically reversed course and became a leading American ally in the war on terror.

(5) In Saudi Arabia, where the presence of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina deeply inflamed relations with many Muslims, the American military is leaving -- not in retreat or with apology but because it is no longer needed to protect Saudi Arabia from Hussein.

(6) Yemen, totally unhelpful to the United States after the attack on the USS Cole, has started cooperating in the war on terror.

(7) In the small, stable Gulf states, new alliances with the United States have been established.

(8) Kuwait`s future is secure, the threat from Saddam Hussein having been eliminated.

(9) Jordan is secure, no longer having Iraq`s tank armies and radical nationalist influence at its back.

(10) Syria has gone quiet, closing terrorist offices in Damascus and playing down its traditional anti-Americanism.

(11) Lebanon`s southern frontier is quiet for the first time in years, as Hezbollah, reading the new strategic situation, has stopped cross-border attacks into Israel.

(12) Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have been restarted, a truce has been declared and a fledgling Palestinian leadership has been established that might actually be prepared to make a real peace with Israel.

That`s every country from the Khyber Pass to the Mediterranean Sea. Everywhere you look, the forces of moderation have been strengthened. This is a huge strategic advance not just for the region but for the world, because this region in its decades-long stagnation has incubated the world`s most virulent anti-American, anti-Western, anti-democratic and anti-modernist fanaticism.

This is not to say that the Near East has been forever transformed. It is only to say that because of American resolution and action, there is a historic possibility for such a transformation.

But it all hinges on success in Iraq. On America`s not being driven out of Iraq the way it was driven out of Lebanon and Somalia -- which is what every terrorist and every terrorist state wants to see happen. And with everything at stake, what is the left doing? Everything it can to undermine the enterprise. By implying both that it was launched fraudulently (see yellowcake) and, alternately, that it has ensnared us in a hopeless quagmire.

Yes, the cost is great. The number of soldiers killed is relatively small, but every death is painful and every life uniquely valuable. But remember that just yesterday we lost 3,000 lives in one day. And if this region is not transformed, on some future day we will lose 300,000.

The lives of those as yet unknown innocents hinge now on success in Iraq. If we win the peace and leave behind a decent democratic society, enjoying, as it does today, the freest press and speech in the entire Arab world, it will revolutionize the region. And if we leave in failure, the whole region will fall back into chaos, and worse.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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A Baghdad `Roots` Story


By Jim Hoagland

Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A25


BAGHDAD -- Sleeping in a billion-dollar palace is not what it used to be in the land of Nebuchadnezzar and Nineveh.

American GIs snore away on standard-issue cots in the dim antechambers, once-glittering reception halls and interrogation rooms of the personal citadels of Saddam Hussein, which become barracks when the blast furnace of the July sun shuts down and midnight temperatures plunge to the high 90s.

My home for a visit here was in fact a castle: Hussein`s Abu Ghraib palace, where the blend of megalomaniacal opulence and horror that was the dictator`s essence still hangs in the air. Had there been running water, you would have showered immediately to scrub away the patina of evil.

Baghdad`s residents confront enormous problems in this summer of liberation and discontent. But Baghdad is not a broken city. This is not Berlin 1945, or even Sarajevo 1995. A wounded city struggles back to life if not yet to normality -- whatever that would mean in this traumatized nation -- and begins to experience constituency politics.

Flying low in a Black Hawk helicopter at 9 o`clock one night last week, I was surprised by the thick streams of traffic flowing down many of the Iraqi capital`s main boulevards. Electric lights twinkled across most of a metropolis that spreads willy-nilly into the night like Los Angeles.

Open shops, brutal daytime traffic jams and comfortable, air-conditioned villas coming onto an active rental market for foreigners are signs of an incipient municipal recovery in the slow, difficult awakening from the national 30-year nightmare.

This is actually a tale of two houses: Across town from the Abu Ghraib district stands another residence I visited, this time in search of clues to Iraq`s political future. A sprawling Chinese pagoda of a villa once used by Barzan Tikriti, Hussein`s loathsome half-brother, now serves as a base for Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress.

Chalabi`s constant lobbying, nagging and educating of American politicians, journalists and policymakers over the past 30 years helped pave the way for the war against Hussein launched by President Bush in March. More than any other Iraqi -- except of course for Hussein -- Chalabi is responsible for that war and for convincing the Bush administration that Iraq can become a stable democracy. For that, he is both admired and reviled in polarized postwar Washington.

Chalabi sits at noon in a spacious reception hall, listening to a group of robed tribal sheiks from southern Iraq express support for the INC. A nuclear scientist who once worked for the regime sits waiting for a chance to lay out plans for a new science ministry.

Bobbing through the door next comes a wave of roly-poly Baghdadi businessmen in polyester suits to talk about the economy. Behind them are three Sudanese immigrants in jeans who are forming an association of political independents. And so it goes long after dusk, with visits from the Iranian and Turkish ambassadors thrown in for intrigue.

This is a scene that the Iraq experts at the State Department and the CIA said could never happen. They have consistently painted Chalabi and his organization as not having any local "roots."

These experts deployed the "rootless" argument in an unsuccessful attempt to get Bush to shut down all support for Chalabi, who they (correctly) figured could help provoke a war they did not want. Unfortunately, they were more successful in halting the administration`s effort to train Chalabi`s exile forces as military policemen, soldiers or translators who could have helped save American lives in the war and its aftermath.

Two great discoveries have emerged in the ruins of Baathist Iraq. One is that fierce religious and ethnic hatreds that the experts -- them again -- warned would trigger bloodbaths if Hussein were toppled have been phantoms. For all of its problems, Iraq is not today beset by ethnic or religious warfare.

Second, the predicted great cleavages between "exiles" and insiders have quickly narrowed as Iraqis of all backgrounds seek common solutions. Some of Bush`s own Cabinet members should try that approach. "Iraqis are not a defeated people and should not be treated by American authorities as such," Chalabi tells me at the end of a long day of palaver. "We defeated Saddam, even if it was the Americans who defeated his forces. We survived him. The people did not fight for him."

In the Washington policy battles, Chalabi had his champions and his detractors. Now he is on his own back in Iraq, riding the rapids of his country`s nascent politics. As one of 25 members of the recently appointed Governing Council, he is thriving as he finally gets a chance to show his roots.

Jim Hoagland will discuss this column in a Live Online discussion at 4 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Noble act or political assassination?


By Derrick Z. Jackson, 7/25/2003

NDER ABSTRACT notions of war, our killing of Saddam Hussein`s sons was acceptable. Uday and Qusay Hussein carried out their father`s wishes as genocidal murderers, torturers, and rapists. Their damnable lives made it so easy to praise their deaths.


Paul Bremer, the head of civilian restoration in Iraq, said, ``It`s a great day for the Iraqi people and a great day for the American military, who once again showed their astounding professionalism.`` Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, said the deaths were ``a big win for the people of Iraq, our troops, and the world.`` The headline on a Washington Post editorial proclaimed it was ``A good day in Iraq.``

President Bush said that this day reaffirmed that American soldiers are ``serving a cause that is noble and just and vital to the security of the United States.``

All this forgets the ignoble fact that this unprecedented first-strike war sold by Bush to Americans under the so-far phantom threat of Iraq`s biological and nuclear weapons. Bush was so hungry for this war that he continues to twist the truth or lie before our eyes. Last week, in blaming the war on Saddam, Bush said: ``We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn`t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.``

The fact was Saddam, with 200,000 American and British soldiers surrounding him, did let weapons inspectors in. They were forced to evacuate after Bush said the war would commence. At the beginning of the war, the UN`s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said, ``I do not think it is reasonable to close the door on inspections after 31/2 months.``

This is too much to leave to the abstract. With the stated foundation for a just war lying in ruins, the killings of the sons looks more like a zealous political assassination than a noble act. In 1976, President Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. This was after the CIA was exposed and embarrassed by schemes to kill world leaders in developing countries.

American presidents have skirted the order ever since. In 1986 under President Reagan, American forces bombed and killed the year-old daughter of Libya`s leader, Moammar Khadafy. In the first Gulf War of the first Bush administration, Robert Gates of the National Security Council, a future director of the CIA, said officials at the White House ``lit a candle every night hoping Saddam Hussein would be killed in a bunker.`` In a ceremony for that war, Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, now the vice president, signed a 2,000-pound bomb, ``To Saddam, with affection.`` Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and now the secretary of state, signed the same bomb, ``You didn`t move it, so now you lose it.``

Under President Clinton, NATO forces bombed the bedroom of the Serbian despot Slobodan Milosevic. After the bombing of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Osama bin Laden`s camp in Afghanistan. Clinton said, ``Unfortunately, we missed him.``

Last October, when reporters asked how much the current Iraq war would cost, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, ``The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that.``

Bush took on the responsibility of delivering the bullets at an unforeseen cost. There is no doubt that many Iraqis are happy that Saddam`s sons are gone. But how it came to be may lower the standard even more for lethal force.

The ground force commander, General Ricardo Sanchez, was asked by two reporters similar questions Wednesday if the operation was indeed professional. The first reporter asked whether the mission was something of a failure given the value of the sons and the fact that they were armed with light weapons. Pentagon officials say they stormed the house of the sons only after the sons resisted.

Sanchez said, ``I would never consider this a failure.``

The second reporter said, ``The Americans are specialists in surrounding places, keeping people in them, holding up for a week if necessary, to make them surrender. These guys only had, it appears, AK-47s, and you had immense amount of firepower. Surely the possibility of the immense amount of information they could have given coalition forces, not to mention the trials that they could have been put on for war crimes, held out a much greater possibility of victory for you if you could have surrounded that house and just sat there until they came out, even if they were prepared to keep shooting.``

Sanchez said, ``Sir, that is speculation.``

The reporter said, ``No sir, it`s an operational question. Surely you must have considered this more seriously than you suggested.``

Sanchez said, ``Yes, it was considered, and we chose the course of action that we took.``

The reporter asked, ``Why, sir?``

Sanchez said, ``Next slide - or next question please?``

Once again, America, right or not, answers to no one.

Derrick Z. Jackson`s e-mail address is [e-mail]. Join Jackson today for a live online chat at 9 a.m. on www.boston.com.

This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 7/25/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Posted on Fri, Jul. 25, 2003

A pattern of deception
By WALTER WILLIAMS

Did President Bush lie to the American people in his State of the Union Message when he said: ``The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa``? Technically, no, because ``the statement that he made was indeed accurate,`` said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 13. ``The British government did say that.``

Rice speaks the literal truth, just as her boss does, to distort what is meaningful. Outright lying is not the administration`s modus operandi; willful deception is.

DUPING THE NATION

Bush`s statement on Iraq shows his telltale MO. Moreover, duping the nation into war is only one case of the pattern of calculated deception that has gone on since the outset of his administration.

We need to go back to Feb. 27, 2001, when Bush introduced his first tax cut proposal in a televised speech to Congress and the nation, to see the early duplicity. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed on March 28: ``I can`t think of any precedent in the history of American economic policy (when an administration was) quite this shameless about misrepresenting the actual content of its own economic plan.``

I noted in a March 16 Seattle Times column that what stands out in the Bush speech is the use of the ``Big Lie.`` Such a statement is a technically accurate claim that distorts rather than reveals the truth. Looking into Bush`s MO in his tax legislation illuminates the pattern of deception as used in Iraq.

In his February address, Bush said: ``People with the smallest incomes will get the highest percentage reductions.`` The literally true assertion hid that the tax cut provided little help for most people and that the big winners were the top 1 percent of the taxpayers.

Tax-savings calculations under the Bush proposal made at the time indicated that a young childless couple earning $20,000 would have its taxes reduced by 41 percent. A middle-aged couple with $1 million in earnings would receive a 15 percent reduction. Just as Bush said, the lower-income couple had its taxes cut by a much larger percentage than the wealthy couple.

But Bush`s Big Lie covered up that the young couple would save $410 in taxes, or about $34 a month; the older couple would benefit by $47,114, or about $3,900 a month. The wealthier couple`s tax savings would amount to over twice as much as the other couple`s total annual income. Suggesting that lower-income families fared better than the wealthiest ones surely qualifies as world-class deception.

The Bush MO used to justify the Iraq invasion finally created a veritable firestorm of criticism directed at the president. Things became so bad that CIA Director George J. Tenet took full responsibility for not warning Bush about the shakiness of the British assertion: ``These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.``

Tenet`s statement accepting responsibility, however, also noted that in the fall of 2002, months before the president`s 16 words on the British claim, the CIA ``expressed reservations`` about their validity both to the British and to members of Congress. And the top Bush operatives knew nothing about the uranium story being highly unreliable?

There is much controversy over how the alleged uranium purchase surfaced in the Bush speech. But to me, the strongest candidate is that the 16 words were too tempting to pass up. They fit the president`s MO to a T -- unwarranted by the evidence and hence deceptive, yet offering the cover of technical correctness.

USING PROPAGANDA

A hard truth appears to have escaped the notice of the public and received scant attention from the media: Bush is the first president in American history to use deceptive propaganda as his main means of communications in selling his policies. His pattern of deception continues unabated and in direct conflict with the notion of the public`s informed consent that is central to American democracy.

Walter Williams is professor emeritus at the University of Washington`s Evans School of Public Affairs.

©2003 The Baltimore Sun

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/6378746.ht…

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POLL ANALYSES
July 24, 2003


Congressional Democrats Surge in Public Ratings on Economy
Also improve standing on foreign affairs, federal budget deficit, and situation with Iraq


by David W. Moore
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- A new Gallup Poll shows that since January, there has been a significant shift in public sentiment about which of the two political parties in Congress can best deal with selected issues. The largest shift has been in the area of the economy, with Democrats now favored by 17 percentage points, while Republicans were favored by one point last January. Democrats` ratings have also improved in the areas of foreign affairs, the federal budget deficit, and the situation in Iraq (note: the poll was conducted before the Tuesday announcement that American forces had killed Saddam Hussein`s two sons). On four other issues, there has been no change in ratings.

The poll, conducted July 18-20, asked the public to rate which party would better handle a list of eight issues. Republicans in Congress hold a 26-point edge over the Democrats on the issue of terrorism, as well as a 15-point advantage on handling the situation in Iraq, and a five-point advantage on foreign affairs in general.

By contrast, the Democratic advantages are all in the area of domestic issues: prescription drugs for older Americans, unemployment, the economy, the federal budget deficit, and education.

Die Zahlen im Einzelnen:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030724.asp

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-terror2…

9/11 Report Cites CIA, FBI Lapses
Damning congressional inquiry says failures and poor communication in trailing San Diego-based hijackers hurt the `best chance` to foil the plot.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

July 25, 2003

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence squandered its "best chance" to uncover the Sept. 11 plot by missing repeated opportunities to track two San Diego-based hijackers, according to a long-awaited congressional report released Thursday that documents years of intelligence breakdowns and feckless attempts to penetrate or strike Al Qaeda.

The nearly 900-page report provides a sweeping and damning account — with plentiful new details — of the U.S. government`s counter-terrorism efforts in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

It documents covert CIA missions that never got close to their target, portrays the Pentagon as deeply reluctant to launch missions against Osama bin Laden until it was too late, raises new suspicions about possible links between Saudi Arabia`s government and some hijackers, and cites chronic breakdowns in the sharing of critical information.

The report discloses top-secret communications intercepts in which at least two of the hijackers were identified and linked to a terrorist facility in the Middle East two years before the attacks — information collected by the National Security Agency but not shared in time with the FBI or other agencies.

It sheds new light on the hijackers` activities in the United States, undercutting FBI claims that they did nothing to arouse suspicion once they had entered the country.

And the report produces new evidence that the intelligence community had clues years before the attacks that Al Qaeda was interested in hijacking planes in the United States.

One new disclosure points to a December 1998 intelligence report, from an unidentified source, in which an Al Qaeda operative described plans to hijack U.S. aircraft as "proceeding well" and referred to a "dry run" in which two individuals had successfully evaded checkpoints at a New York airport.

A U.S. intelligence official confirmed there was such a report and said it was shared broadly throughout the U.S. government. But he said that it was unsubstantiated and that the CIA and FBI have never confirmed whether there ever was such a "dry run" at the airport.

The congressional report finds that no agency had specific information that would have enabled it to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed about 3,000 people. Nevertheless, the report strongly suggests that the attacks might have been prevented.

Indeed, a congressional official who briefed reporters on the document Thursday said it would be wrong for intelligence agencies to conclude "that you didn`t have a formal announcement of the details of the Sept. 11 attacks, and therefore you couldn`t have prevented it."

Rather, the official said, "the message should be ... that we cannot afford to wait for formal announcements. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to connect the dots.... And that, unfortunately, was not what we saw in this case."

Relatives of victims of the attacks said they were troubled by the litany of failures cited in the report. "I am just utterly saddened," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed at the World Trade Center. "There are so many links in the chain of failure that day — if those links had held, my husband`s life was one of those that could have been saved."

In a statement, President Bush thanked the joint committee for its "hard work and careful thought" but did not address any particulars of the report. Instead, he cited steps the administration has taken to improve domestic security, such as creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and cooperation among intelligence agencies.

"Our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working together more closely than ever and are using new tools to intercept, disrupt and prevent terrorist attacks," Bush said. "The best way to prevent future attacks is to hunt down the terrorists before they strike again."

The report represents the culmination of a joint inquiry that involved nearly two dozen hearings, thousands of interviews with current and former government officials, as well as the review of about 500,000 documents.

The release of the report had been delayed for months amid intense wrangling between Congress and the White House over how much information could be declassified and shared with the public. Large chunks of material were censored, leaving blacked-out spaces on dozens of pages.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the deletions, saying they affected "only the most sensitive of national security information."

But others accused the White House of withholding information that might have embarrassed the administration or strained relations with foreign governments. Some of the deleted text is said to have explored alleged financial and other links between the terrorists and Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

"I remain deeply disturbed by the amount of material that has been censored from this report," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), co-chairman of the joint inquiry, which included members of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

Although the report traces counter-terrorism efforts dating to the 1980s and the rise of Al Qaeda through the 1990s, many of its key findings center on the activities of two hijackers who were based in San Diego and whose connection to Al Qaeda was known by the CIA — but not by the FBI until too late.

Putting those two hijackers under surveillance "would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the intelligence community`s best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot," the report concludes. "That chance unfortunately never materialized."

The report cites a series of breakdowns that contributed to that failure.

Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had more visible links to Al Qaeda than any of the other hijackers. The CIA had observed both men attending an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. Two months later, the CIA learned that Alhazmi had entered the United States. Indeed, both men had arrived in Los Angeles on Jan. 15.

But the agency failed to put either man on U.S. government watch lists until Aug. 23, 2001, just weeks before the attacks. This information has been previously disclosed, but the report provides a detailed new understanding of the hijackers` activities and the clues that were missed.

But the report also makes clear that the FBI squandered repeated opportunities of its own. The men had repeated contacts with a longtime FBI informant in San Diego, according to the report. The report does not specify the nature of the contacts, but a federal law enforcement source said Thursday that the informant was Abdussattar Shaikh, the two men`s landlord.

The report was sharply critical of the FBI on a number of fronts, challenging FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III`s testimony last year that the hijackers had "contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States" or otherwise aroused any suspicions.

At least five of the hijackers operated "within the scope of the FBI`s coverage of radical Islamic extremists," the report says.

Hijackers Hani Hanjour, Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Alhazmi and Almihdhar all appear to have had contact with individuals who "had come to the FBI`s attention" during counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence investigations. Four of those people were the focus of active FBI investigations during the time the hijackers were in the U.S.

Mueller later acknowledged to the committee that its investigators had brought new information to his attention. The report notes that the director said in a subsequent hearing: "I can assure the committee that I had no intent to mislead."

The FBI had little luck cultivating sources in Islamic fundamentalist communities in the United States, the report notes, partly because only 21 FBI agents spoke Arabic.

The report is also replete with damning quotes about the FBI`s counter-terrorism performance in general.

Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism advisor to Presidents Clinton and Bush, told investigators he was dismayed when he visited FBI field stations around the country to ask what they were doing about sleeper cells.

"I got sort of blank looks.... What is Al Qaeda?" Clarke said.

A senior FBI official called the report a fair and accurate assessment of the bureau`s pre-Sept. 11 shortcomings.

"This report gave us a good overview of where a number of failures took place, not just at the FBI but throughout the government," the senior official said. "But nothing in this report says we really could have stopped it. If we had gotten the information sooner from the CIA, would we have been able to do more? I`m not sure. It is a much bigger picture than even the report indicates. There are any number of ways to second-guess this.... The one thing that`s needed is for FBI and CIA to get together and work together, and that`s what we are doing."

The CIA also comes under harsh criticism in the report, which documents its unsuccessful attempts to penetrate Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.

The CIA was never able to get any of its spies close to Bin Laden, the report concludes, and largely generated only "secondhand, fragmented and often questionable human intelligence information" on the terrorist.

In the summer of 1999, the CIA began assembling what it called "The Plan," a covert strategy to penetrate Al Qaeda and target Bin Laden. But again resources and focus were lacking, the report concludes, and ultimately, "the CIA was not able to mount a single operation against Bin Laden before Sept. 11."

U.S. counter-terrorism officials told investigators that they had "numerous unilateral sources outside" Al Qaeda`s leadership ranks. The report also says the CIA managed a network of informants in Afghanistan that often reported on Bin Laden and the Taliban.

But the agency "had no penetrations of Al Qaeda`s leadership," according to the report. Even when they thought they had a momentary bead on Bin Laden, they advised against acting on the information "because they said their sources were not very good, or not good enough to recommend military action," Clarke is quoted in the report.

The one strike on Bin Laden, cruise missile attacks in Sudan in August 1998 in retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, was unsuccessful.

The Clinton administration never got another opportunity, even though from 1999 to 2001 Clinton had ordered two submarines and Navy ships loaded with cruise missiles on "perpetual deployment" in the North Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan.

The report indicates senior military leaders were reluctant to put U.S. forces much closer than that coastline.

In late 2000, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared a paper with 12 or 13 options for using force against Bin Laden. Several involved "U.S. boots on the ground" in Afghanistan aimed at capturing Bin Laden.

But Clarke told the joint inquiry that when military operations on Al Qaeda were discussed, "the overwhelming message to the White House from the uniformed military leadership was, `We don`t want to do this.` "

Military officials cited the dangers of dropping forces into a hostile country far from any logistical support, but also seemed to have low confidence in U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan.

Said a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs who was not identified by name: "You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence."

The CIA in turn described the military`s intelligence requirements as "absolutely impossible," in the words of one counter-terrorism official. The military, the official said, wouldn`t launch an operation until it knew "which side of the door are the hinges on, do the windows open out or go up and down."

Special operations officers said they were eager to mount an operation against Bin Laden and had the ability to put small teams into Afghanistan.

A CIA document assessing the prospects cited "lots of desire" on the part of lower-level military officials but "reluctance at the political level."

Even so, aspects of the CIA`s plan were instrumental in the success of the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. Clarke said the war represented the agency`s strategy "telescoped and done very quickly in six months instead of three years."

U.S. government efforts to track terrorist funding before Sept. 11 were sporadic and often poorly coordinated, the report found. They were no match for Al Qaeda`s sophisticated use of cash smuggling, international banking and the informal networks of money transfers known as hawalas.

Times staff writers Richard Serrano, Josh Meyer, Adrianne Goodman, Nick Anderson and Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-troo…


Foreign Troops Key to Iraq Plans
Other nations have promised 30,000 soldiers, but U.S. says more are needed to ease strain on its forces.
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

July 25, 2003

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon`s plan for defeating insurgents in Iraq relies heavily on applying "a full-court press" to persuade more countries to send troops to relieve overstretched U.S. forces, senior defense officials said Thursday.

In separate appearances at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States is negotiating with Pakistan, India and Turkey to supply tens of thousands of troops.

Without them, Myers told the Senate Armed Services Committee, the U.S. will not be able to reduce its heavy military presence in Iraq for months, and possibly years, to come.

Referring to the estimated 30,000 troops that other countries have already promised, Myers said: "It needs to be higher than that."

But Myers acknowledged in response to pointed questions from both Republicans and Democrats that no request has been made to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

"We`re just not quite to that point yet," he said.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said that a plan announced by Army officials Wednesday to rotate U.S. troops into and out of Iraq is filled with "unknowables."

"There are a whole series of unknowables that are buried in there," Rumsfeld said. "And I think that what will determine what actually happens will be several things. One is the number of international forces that we`re able to bring in. A second will be how the security environment evolves over a period of time. And it is those things that will determine the actual numbers of U.S. forces that will be needed."

The Pentagon has 144,000 troops in Iraq. More than 30,000 support troops are stationed in Kuwait. The effort to rebuild Iraq is costing $3.9 billion a month just for troop salaries and ongoing expenses, according to Pentagon estimates.

Although 15 countries have troops in Iraq now and 19 more have agreed to send military personnel there, most of the nations have promised small numbers. And many of the countries have not committed combat troops. For those that have done so, Myers told senators, the U.S. has promised to provide airlift and logistical support. Myers did not say how much that would cost.

U.S. efforts to win support from more countries got a boost Thursday, when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul in Washington.

Emerging from the meeting, Powell told reporters that Turkey is giving "the most active consideration" to a U.S. request that it deploy troops in Iraq. Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, requested troops several days ago during a visit to Turkey. The Turkish press said Abizaid raised the possibility of a Turkish contribution of 10,000 troops.

Gul told reporters Thursday that the Turkish government was viewing the request, and other aspects of its relationship with the United States, "in a positive way." He said that the involvement of the United Nations and NATO in Iraq would make Turkey`s decision easier.

A senior U.S. official said the administration would like to see Turkish troops deployed in southern Iraq, where they would not face tensions with Iraqi Kurds or the violence that has beset the so-called Sunni triangle of central Iraq.

Myers told senators that the U.S. troops included in the rotation plan would need to be supplemented with reservists, many of whom have been used repeatedly in recent years.

Myers and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, appeared before the Senate committee on their nominations for second, two-year terms. Senators used the hearing to underscore what they said was the importance of finding a way to relieve the pressure on U.S. forces.

"The internationalization of this force would have consequences of lessening the exposure of our forces," committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) said, "although in no way are we trying to cut and run."

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) told Myers that "an endless deployment is causing a lot of concern" among his constituents.

Myers said that if Turkey or another country does not send a significant force, the Pentagon is considering sending more Marines into Iraq.

Traditionally, significant numbers of Marines have not been asked to engage in peacekeeping.

The Army is shouldering most of the burden in Iraq. Almost all Air Force and Navy personnel left the region weeks ago, and of the Marines, only the 1st Expeditionary Force is still in the country. The Pentagon is scrambling to come up with replacements.

The troop rotation plan announced by the Army on Wednesday relies on foreign troops that have not yet been committed by their governments, on two National Guard combat brigades that have not yet been trained for the mission, on an Army division that just returned from Iraq, and on two new Army brigades that have not been certified by the Pentagon as combat-ready.

Quizzed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) about why NATO has not been asked to contribute forces since the war began, Myers said the Bush administration has no political or strategic objection to making the request. Several NATO countries staunchly opposed U.S. policy on Iraq.

"I don`t think the particular — that our perception of how certain countries might react to it would ever stop us from asking that question and working with NATO, if that`s the right thing to do," Myers said.

"And we`re just not quite to that point yet. But there`s nothing holding us back.

"I`m very bullish in trying to get international forces in," he said.

*

Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-bremer2…
EDITORIAL


A Gust of Realism in Iraq

July 25, 2003

In his briefings to the president and Congress and his appearances on talk shows and at press conferences, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq this week accurately reflected the need to act quickly to make postwar reconstruction a success.

The realistic assessment of L. Paul Bremer III echoed the views of other experts who have visited Iraq recently and concluded that the window of opportunity won`t stay open long. His reports also represented a refreshing change from the Bush administration`s heedlessness of past advice on what would be needed in Iraq when major combat ended.

He said that security remains the top priority. Iraqis are killing U.S. soldiers nearly every day; the combat death toll exceeds 150, more than were killed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Streets are not safe for civilians, either. To improve security, Bremer said that in the next 60 days he would recruit hundreds of soldiers for a new Iraqi army and thousands of officers for a new police force. His plans also call for reestablishing a border guard and resuming court trials.

The occupation forces also need to get utilities operating at prewar levels as soon as possible. Bremer spoke Thursday of a plan to put small generators atop 36 pumping stations, because when the electricity fails, so does water service. That kind of results-oriented planning should produce success, but only if it is executed efficiently and quickly.

Bremer said that decades of Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship left Iraq in worse shape than U.S. officials expected. That`s another intelligence lapse; allied nations kept embassies in Baghdad until shortly before the war and could have reported on the failure to upgrade 1950s electrical equipment and 1960s textile mills.

Last week, a five-person team from two Washington think tanks concluded after an 11-day Iraq visit that Washington had wrongly assumed that the war would cut off the head of the Iraqi government but keep the rest operating.

Instead, entire ministries collapsed. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, said Wednesday that the Pentagon also wrongly expected many Iraqi army units to defect to U.S. forces; his comments were another salutary acknowledgment of error from an administration that was overly confident about war results.

Bremer has been both optimistic and realistic in his speeches this week. He stressed the many billions of dollars required for long-term rebuilding and the problems ahead: Prewar electricity levels will still leave the country about one-third short of its needs.

Bremer has long-range plans, but right now it is the quick fixes, like keeping the water-pumping stations operating around the clock, that will show Iraqis the invaders are trying to make life better and will further diminish support for die-hards firing guns and grenades at U.S. troops.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Watching BushCo Crumble
Ratings slipping, economy tanking, lies spiraling, credibility shot. Try not to cheer
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 25, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/


This is what happens when it`s all a house of cards.

This is what happens when you build your entire presidency on an intricate network of aww-shucks glibness and bad hair and cronyism and corporate fellatio and warmongering and sham enemies and economy-gutting policies and endless blank-eyed smirks that tell the world, every single day, whelp, sure `nuff, the U.S. is full of it.

Shrub`s ratings have dropped below 50 percent for the first (and probably not the last) time since they surged hugely right after 9/11 and he was hoisted in front of a wary America and puffed out his chest and pretended like he could find Afghanistan on a map and promised he would bomb every damn country on the planet that didn`t have a McDonald`s or an Exxon or a secret U.S. chemical-weapons deal.

Shrub`s numbers are down. The nation is catching on. The armor of money and power is cracking. The smirk is waning. Dick`s defibrillator is running on fumes.

And Karl Rove, Shrub`s master strategist, is scrambling, rushing down hallways, sweating hard, mapping out lib-killer tactics and frantically redirecting blame (CIA! FBI! The NSA!) as nine Demo candidates have a field day knocking all of Shrub`s shortcomings out of the ideological park.

Maybe it`s the regular slew of lies. You know the ones: "proof" of uranium purchases, "proof" of Iraqi nuke facilities, "proof" of WMDs, poison gas, plus two quick and "painless" wars, a robust economy, women`s rights, gay rights, America proud and strong and respected the world over, a nice shiny oil-sucking SUV for every flag-waving misguided Fox News-drugged American. Ha.

Funny how the BS can wear you down. Funny how it can make you feel like someone`s been piling huge rocks on our collective chest for the past three years and stomping on them with ugly polished right-wing loafers until we can hardly breathe.

And all you have to do is ask any schoolteacher or grandparent or health-care worker or conscious sensual attuned soulful organism anywhere, and the answer is unavoidable: The nation is gasping for air.

Cities are desperate, basic services are being slashed, schools are broke, the environment`s molested, the GOP has promised a ridiculous array of cuts and dedicated billions they can`t possibly deliver in light of inane tax cuts and the biggest deficit in U.S. history. Hey, how`s your portfolio doing?

Maybe the slip, the change in national timbre, is due to all the recently uncovered and aforementioned misfirings of the GOP machine, that frighteningly rich and seemingly omnipotent team of multibillionaire CEO Bushites who bought the presidency in the first place and who have steered the conservative agenda so brilliantly, so ruthlessly to this point.

Until recently, they`ve managed to stay viciously on message, trashed every liberal cause, demonized every social program, overhyped every fear, desiccated the poor and the elderly and gays and women and called it all Christian largesse, compassionate conservatism, which of course we all now know means, whoops sorry about all the unemployment and the raped environment and the dead Iraqi children.

Or maybe it`s all those U.S. soldiers, more dying every single day, outright brutal guerrilla warfare with no end in sight, tens of thousands of American soldiers stuck in miserable and war-torn Iraq for years to come, proving that BushCo`s policy of perpetual unilateral war in the name of a sovereignty we no longer have is just plain dangerous, if not downright immoral. Iran? North Korea? Liberia? Saudi Arabia? Wanna make your own list?

Maybe it`s that feeling that we`ve reached saturation, that the nation can`t really absorb any more misinformation and misdirection and snide switcheroos, Osama to Saddam, nukes to uranium, WMD to WMD intent, serious threat to "liberation," brutish recession to "temporary downturn."

Maybe we`ve just had enough. Enough of the macho all-American gun-totin` faux-cowboy ethos that says, if we just beat [insert nation/minority/progressive viewpoint here] up enough, they`ll get the message and get in line and start complying with U.S. demands and we can expand our empire and crush all comers and their wimpy objections, too.

It is not yet time for delicious plates of schadenfreude. It is not yet time to relish Junior`s slide into abject failure and scathing ratings and one-term histrionics -- you know, just like those suffered by his dear old dad. We are still too fragile, the feelings too raw, the wounds too recent from the current administration`s mugging of the country.

But we are healing fast. We are coming back to life. We are opening our blackened eyes, realizing we have been massively and systematically and enthusiastically and intentionally duped by some very rich, very impotent white males three years running and it`s damn near time for a domestic regime change and let`s just float a Dean/Kerry (Kerry/Dean?) presidential ticket out there to the cosmic Void, see how it plays, shall we?

Because after all, that whimpering house of cards, it can`t survive much longer.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Friday, July 25, 2003

Let`s cut our losses in Iraq

By HUBERT G. LOCKE
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Since it started, I`ve avoided trying to write anything about our nation`s war in Iraq, primarily because I find it immensely difficult to make much sense of what has taken place. But the nation`s secretary of defense, I`m told, has written a book titled "Rumsfeld`s Rules." I`ve not found occasion (or reason) to read it but, apparently, it contains such gems as "It`s easier to get into a situation than to get out of one" or words to that effect. Clearly, it`s a piece of advice he didn`t share with his commander in chief before they decided to invade Iraq. It also goes a long way in helping me understand what has happened.

It is now more than four months since that ill-fated adventure was launched and almost three since the announcement by President Bush that the military phase of the conquest was at an end. As the cover of the July 14 issue of Time magazine bluntly puts it: "Americans are still struggling to bring order out of chaos." An inside comment is even more candid: "Iraq is a mess" ... 146,000 U.S. soldiers, alongside the 600 civilians working for the Coalition Provisional Authority -- the United States` interim government for the country -- are "still struggling to police Iraq`s streets, restore electricity, fix the economy, rebuild schools." All this in a nation that seems, for some strange reason, disinclined to show much gratitude for our having "liberated" it.

The latest report from the Pentagon indicates the cost of this effort has doubled from its initial estimates -- to $3.9 billion a month. This sum, we are told, is only for military operations. It does not include the costs of reconstruction from the wreckage left by the military campaign. It also does not include the $950 million per month we`re having to pay for operations in Afghanistan where, incidentally, conditions -- with the exception of those in that nation`s capital -- seem to be about the same as they were before we went in there 18 months ago.

So, while state and local governments across the nation totter on the verge of bankruptcy, vital federal programs from AmeriCorps to the National Weather Service have their budgets slashed and unemployment is at a new high, we`re approaching a monthly outlay of close to $5 billion for two wars, neither of which seem to have accomplished their principal objectives.

Now it seems we want to lessen the military burden on our country by persuading our allies to support the rebuilding effort in Iraq. Having gone out of our way to tick off a goodly number of other nations that might have come to our aid, it will be a remarkable achievement if this happens. According to Rumsfeld, 19 nations now have soldiers in Iraq and another 19 have promised to send troops. Rumsfeld states that the allied troops already committed together with those promised totals 30,000; if my math is correct, that averages less than 800 troops per country. That is hardly a display of hearty allied support.

All of this might not be so disturbing were it not for another cost that these wars are incurring. Every day now the morning news brings word of another U.S. soldier`s death -- one and sometimes two or more at a time our young men and women in uniform are having to make the ultimate sacrifice while in the prime of their lives for a cause that remains unclear to vast numbers of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world.

This tragic situation is not likely to change anytime soon -- even the Pentagon acknowledges as much. Yet at some point, we will have to turn Iraq back to its citizens and, given the demographics of the country, inevitably this will mean a nation in which a Shiite majority holds the reins of political power. That reality likely will give us a nation that looks politically, and perhaps religiously, very much like its next-door neighbor -- Iran.

We should get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Why not admit that we`ve accomplished little of what was our announced intent -- we haven`t found any weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein is more likely alive than dead and "democracy" in Iraq is likely to cause as many headaches for the United States as Saddam ostensibly did. Let`s cut our losses, really support our troops and bring them home from the quagmire in Iraq.

Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/132281_locke25.html

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Friday, July 25, 2003

Our Place in the World: Military interventions dangerous, costly

By LAWRENCE D. GREENE
GUEST COLUMNIST

While history does not really repeat itself and the idea that lessons can be learned from it is probably misleading, there are some parallels to the United States` new unilateralism under President Bush about which we might well reflect.

Consider the Hellenistic age (from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era) during which the Romans rose from a local Italian tribe to dominate the whole known Western world. They maintained for several centuries the Pax Romana under the Roman Empire. But they did not originally set out to do this any more than the present U.S. leaders would admit they are trying to establish an American empire.

Like us, the Romans had overwhelming military power that no other power in the Greco-Roman world could match. Historians think it was just the existence of this disproportionate power more than intention to do so that put the Romans in charge of everything in their world. They overcame the Hellenistic kingdoms set up by Alexander`s successors. Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, etc., fell under Roman control.

This may well be where the United States is headed today; after taking over Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps Iran and Syria are next. At some point, the intractable situation in Israel may compel us to move in and occupy that country and enforce the peace that diplomacy for decades has failed to accomplish. Additional acquisitions might be North Korea and reoccupation of the Philippines.

Based on my experience as an American soldier in the occupation of Japan after World War II, it seems the Republican Party is particularly inept in its handling of the Iraq occupation. I was able to move freely throughout Japan as an occupying soldier without ever being in the slightest danger from defeated Japanese lusting for revenge as our soldiers are now exposed to in Iraq. This was because President Truman knew how to use the existing political infrastructure to control the country, including allowing the war criminal Emperor Hirohito to continue in office.

Because of the infatuation of the governing Republican Party with its fanatically held idea of deregulated, laissez-faire capitalism, the United States finds itself in the paradoxical position of having disproportionate power in relation to the rest of the world but with impaired ability to govern because of this ideological peculiarity of its Republican governing class. Obviously, if you hate the very idea of having government do anything, you are not likely to do government well.

This is where the Bush administration finds itself now. It cannot administer its conquests because it is so ideologically opposed to the government effort, including the heavy tax burden to do so. However, the Bush bumbling and fumbling record in the job of occupation is much less important historically than the hugely disproportionate U.S. military buildup in relation to the military power of the rest of the world.

It is naive to think any leadership elite would ever have this kind of power and not use it to exercise domination over world affairs. Regardless of whether it is the Democrats who are ideologically able to use government or the Republicans who are not, our country is headed toward becoming some kind of world empire. Dwight Eisenhower gave us a "heads up" about this development in his famous farewell address when he warned about the coming of an all-powerful American military industrial complex. The rest of the world is not overly happy with this development, but what about our own domestic American political and economic life?

The rise of Roman international power was accompanied by a decline in Roman domestic republican institutions and traditions. A dictatorial figure we call the Roman emperor emerged and ruled with virtually no limitations on his power. Viewed from this perspective, the main question in our current political debates should be: Do we wish to accept the danger to our democratic constitutional traditions of continuing to extend unilateral military interventions that require such a disproportionate level of military capability and expense and threaten our own liberty?

Lawrence D. Greene lives in Kent. Submissions for Our Place in the World, of up to 800 words, can be e-mailed to [e-mail]; faxed to 206-448-8184 or mailed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, P.O. Box 1909, Seattle, WA 98111-1909.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/132277_ourplace25.html

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America, its wars and the truth


James O. Goldsborough
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

July 21, 2003


Democracy depends not only on the consent of the governed, but on a free and honest flow of information to the public. Government does not do this voluntarily, which is why Jefferson wrote that forced to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, "I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

During the Vietnam War, the public was misinformed. The Johnson administration distorted both the war`s causes and its progress in order to shore up patriotic enthusiasm. The media, acquiescent early, eventually understood and exposed the distortions, and the public demanded that the war be brought to an end.

The controversy over Iraq concerns the same issues raised under Johnson. As the Iraq war started, we again found an administration manipulating information. We again found a media going along with the manipulation and a public, that, uninformed, supported the Bush premise that Iraq, like Vietnam, was a threat to America.

Not one editorial page of the nation`s top 50 newspapers opposed Bush`s war, according to Editor&Publisher, and most "big city" newspapers, said E&P, called for "fast-track invasion" of Iraq. Hip, hip, hurray!

Television was worse. As the Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review both concluded, television showed Americans the sanitized and patriotic war "they thought Americans wanted to see."

Take Fox News, which operates as Bush`s unofficial ministry of information. Rupert Murdoch, Fox`s right-wing Australian-immigrant owner, sees his news empire as a means of currying favor with governments that then return the favor. In Fox`s view, media that take the First Amendment too seriously are guilty of suspect patriotism.

Mr. Murdoch, meet Mr. Jefferson.

Americans are beginning to see how much they were manipulated over Iraq. Ask 10 Americans the causes for Bush`s war and you get 10 answers. Or maybe no answer at all. Even the Bush administration isn`t sure of the causes any more, having dropped the pretext of weapons of mass destruction because of the very real possibility they don`t exist.

The problem is that the media and the public supported Bush because of his allegations about Iraq`s WMD. If Bush had not used forged documents and wild exaggerations to justify his war, there is a real possibility there would have been no war. The doubts about war finally bubbling up today are because the WMD – war`s putative cause – have disappeared.

The war, however, has not disappeared and will not disappear for years to come. Before long, more Americans will have died in Iraq since Bush – arriving in full flight regalia on the carrier Abraham Lincoln – pronounced the war over two months ago than died during the war he claimed was over.

Do Americans dying each day believe the war is over? "Bring them on," goads Bush to Iraqis still fighting, words easily said from the Rose Garden or his Texas ranch, but Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new military commander in Iraq, disagrees. Last week he said the war is not over and we will be in Iraq for years to come.

Bush is doing what politicians do. Jefferson knew full well that governments lied and suppressed criticism to protect themselves, which is why he believed so strongly in a free press. He opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which criminalized criticism of the government, because he knew those acts – passed under the Adams administration in emulation of English laws protecting the Crown – virtually nullified the First Amendment, if not the Revolution itself.

But what if the press practices self-nullification? What if all the media were like Fox News, serving as an adjunct to the White House Press Office? What if the press does to itself what Congress and the Adams administration did to it in 1798, and which it took Jefferson to undo?

Had Fox controlled things 38 years ago, there would have been no Walter Lippmann to warn readers of the coming catastrophe in Vietnam. There would have been no Walter Cronkite 35 years ago to tell viewers of a war gone badly wrong.

Even democracies, Jefferson knew, need a free press. Democracies with a press in league with government have no practical difference from dictatorships that control the news.

What Soviet newspaper condemned Stalin in 1939 for his alliance with Hitler? What German newspaper condemned Hitler in 1939 for claiming Poland attacked Germany? What American newspaper warned against Bush`s trumped-up attack on Iraq?

The fault for Iraq lies not with Bush, who got the war he wanted. The fault lies not with the military, which does the job it is given.

The fault lies with the media and with the public – the former for lacking First Amendment skepticism, the latter for accepting that Fox-style news is what the First Amendment is about.

WMD were the pretext for war, not the cause. To get the full truth, Republicans should stop blocking an independent investigation. As we thought we learned from Vietnam, only a full understanding of the causes of a bad war can keep it from happening again.


© Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

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The Core Ingredients of Class Warfare
Why The Religious Rich Are Not Christian

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keysone, South Dakota
Bush Watch, www.bushwatch.com

The American people have now had ample time to see for themselves just what "compassionate" conservatism has contributed to American Democracy. It has destroyed our religious freedom, mangled our civil rights, and crucified multilateralism to leave America standing alone against the bulk of the educated world. It has used religious coercion, fabrications and lies to "legitimize" an overtly immoral war against a nearly defenseless nation, eliminating over 6,000 civilians in the process. Like it or not, this is the work of the religious right wing in America, leave there be no doubt about that. They have usurped all authority in America and all responsibility is now theirs as well.

By destroying the Jeffersonian contract between church and state, the people have lost their guarantee of religious freedom, restricted now to the dictates of "compassionate" conservatism under the bully leadership of George Bush the younger. The religious right wing has largely destroyed what little was left of the political philosophy created by America`s founders, to place America in an old ideological box, beneath and 180° removed from the philosophical position which gave America birth.

It pretty much all distills down to the millennial conflict between Science and religion, and it is worth keeping in mind that Science has never lost a battle to religion when it comes to defining and comprehending the world and how the world works. Thanks to Galileo`s astronomy, we now live in a heliocentric world, in spite of the Roman Catholic objection. Thanks to Lyell`s evolutionary geology, we now know how the earth and its features came to be formed. Thanks to Darwin`s evolutionary biology, we now know how life came to be on the earth. Thanks to Koch and Pasteur`s microbiology, we now know that disease has earthbound causes and nothing to do with the gods. Thanks to Watson and Crick`s molecular biology, we have mapped the human genome and now we know that we are all related and share common earthly origins.

Within the embrace of natural systems and information theory, we now know that life comes of itself, that genomic and ideologic information is directing both biological and cultural evolution from the inside out. The creative potential, the free will, is on the inside, the necessity comes from the outside. About the only question left that Science cannot deal with is where we go when we die, and that is an irrelevancy. The greatest mystery in life is not where we go when we die, but who we are when we are alive.

In honest terms, the millennial battle between Science and religion is long since over and yet, despite the exponentially increasing explanatory value of human knowledge, supernatural religion has taken over the reins of political power and the conflict between Science and religion remains alive and well, if only in America and only under the auspices of the Bush administration.

The religious right has maintained this conflict for millennia by conceding not an iota of ground to human knowledge and by their sheer refusal to allow knowledge to threaten their religious faith. This is their right in America, to believe as they damned well please, but only as long as they abide by Jefferson`s contract and keep their religion at home where it belongs. Because religious faith is unrelated to human knowledge, religious organizations have no right to impose anything on anyone in America. Doing so is tantamount to treason. Welcome to Bush`s America.

So, why do the religious embrace incorrigibility? Why do they fear human knowledge? What makes them think they have a right to impose their religion on the people? Why do they believe in a JudeoRoman god whose earthly administrators have been consistently wrong about how the world works? What are they really protecting in preserving their faith in a personal god? Why this need to get spooky?

The Need for a Personal Guardian (religion for the poor and uneducated)

The most often mentioned reason for religious incorrigibility is the need of some religious people for a personal supernatural guardian, a god who has time (while presumably directing every molecule in the known Universe) to watch over their every thought, word and deed, to provide them protection from life`s "evils" and a guarantee of "life" after death if they are obedient to the rules of the game on earth, a "team player" as it were. Accordingly, the most often mentioned reason for faith in a heavenly afterlife is the subtle inner hope that there must be some reward in death to make up for the oppression here on earth. A half century ago, Aldo Leopold (Sand Country Almanac) pointed out the inverse relationship between the extent of one`s education and one`s need for supernatural faith.

Taken on the whole, these are explanations mostly relevant to understanding the religious poor and the uneducated, those without political power, those whose faith affects very little, if anything, in the real world, those who are in a position to impose only at home. Blessed they be. Given the two-tiered monetary caste system created in America since World War II, and the largest gap between haves and have nots in human history, there is yet another reason behind the need for a personal god, as if you didn`t already know.

The Need for Personal Self-Justification (religion for the rich and powerful)

The primary reason for religious incorrigibility is the need of some religious people for personal justification and defense of their wealth and power. Everyone maintains some internal justification for their existence. Religious people are truly fortunate in that they are able to provide justification apart from how they actually acquired their wealth and power.

This typically stems from a subconscious awareness that they got to where they are for reasons other than personal contribution and merit. These people do not much care for the notion of a meritocracy, as you might guess. Whether considering old or new money, many simply inherited their wealth, many simply married into it, never challenging how grandfather came to acquire it. Many have fallen into lucrative positions with recompense on a per centage basis rather than on a salary or wage basis. Many have fallen into lucrative business operations because of convenient external factors, i.e., the new railroad or the new Interstate came through town. Many simply sued the living hell out of someone with money.

The end result is people with enormous wealth and power who have no personal investment in acquiring that wealth and power. Nevertheless, wealth and power are taken as prima fascie evidence that one`s personal god is most concerned and remarkably thankful for their very existence, no contributions necessary. In other words, one`s wealth can always be ascribed to god`s favoritism, doled out only to those whom god loves enough to grant tangible reward. One can see god`s love shining through the chrome on that new Lexus. One can see god`s love flowing from Congressional approval to attack Iraq.

And this would be the real over-riding reason for religious incorrigibility. It has allowed the wealthy and powerful to justify their possession of wealth and power from the beginning and it has provided them the required self-righteousness to coerce and/or oppress anyone in their path. Wrapping oneself up in the gods in order to conquer and control others was the millennial western way (imperialism and colonialism) until the EuroAmerican Enlightenment and the emergence of American Democracy. It is now going on again, right in America, with the death of Jefferson`s political philosophy and the rise of neofundamentalist crony capitalism, aka "Enronism."

From the time of Constantine, nascent Christian values have been trampled beneath JudeoRoman self-righteousness and an imperial mindset which seldom had any real use for these values. Ever since Constantine, the rich and powerful have been right there to take advantage of religion`s enabling embrace, which invariably meant leaving nascent Christian values out of the equation. It was the Old Testament`s absolutism, the Old Testament`s legalism and penalism, the Old Testament`s vengeance-based morality, and the Old Testament`s spooky god that they required in the name of control.

There are only two options for solving this millennial problem. The first is to eliminate fundamentalist JudeoRomanism and crony capitalism from allowable political discourse (Jefferson`s considered objective). The second is to eliminate the rich and powerful themselves (McGovern`s considered objective). Accomplishing either one of these objectives is to accomplish the other.

Eliminating ignorance in America has traditionally been approached in our educational systems and eliminating the rich and powerful has traditionally been approached in the voting booths. The hard won results of both approaches, however, can be undone (as Americans have recently witnessed) in a matter of months with the full empowerment of the religious right wing and its politically-inspired religiosity.

The traditional American dialectic between liberal and conservative causes has, in fact, been defunct since World War II, when capitalism was in it`s post-war glory. In the joy of victory, both political parties took to operating on the same side of the traditional dialectic between socialism and capitalism, a move that has compromised and frustrated liberal causes ever since by making the traditional left nearly right and the traditional right so far right as to fall off Jefferson`s playing field.

But then, just when one can no longer see light, just when one would consider giving up on all human causes, lo and behold, the the entire scene changes. Almost as if there were a spooky god, the skies darkened and the earth shuddered, and from out of the bowels of crony capitalism rises George Bush the younger with his politically-ordained version of JudeoRoman religion, his inside-trader version of capitalism and his "influence-for-a-fee" version of democracy. Wonder of wonders, this was just what the gods ordered. All hear the great good news!

No administration in the history of the United States has done more to discredit fundamentalist religion and crony capitalism in the eyes of the world. The fact that this administration is still supported by the religious right in America is of little importance in light of the new global awareness which the Bush administration has nourished. The Bush regime was appointed to provide a government "of, by and for" the rich and powerful, and it has already done more to discredit their authority than any administration in history.

Consider the likely result should the Bush administration launch another intervention on the global stage that is seen as being utterly immoral in the eyes of the world (and you know it is coming). No one knows how far the rich and powerful will go to maintain this last hurrah of religious imperialism. When they ultimately fall from grace (there being no other option), the world will suddenly be open to honesty and democracy. It will provide a millennial opportunity for human maturation and self-comprehension. So, hang in there good people. The gods are onto Bush and they are getting more pissed everyday. --07.21.03

http://www.bushwatch.net/bushh.htm

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Esw gibt immer noch Menschen , die sind mißtrauisch. To quote Mark Twain once again: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."



25/07/03
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics

By Pat Brosnan
Reports of their deaths may be greatly exaggerated. Given the dodgy quality of the information that the Americans and the British have been indoctrinating the rest of the world with, there is still a good chance that Qusay and Uday — not to mention the 14 year-old boy — are alive and well.
To convince the world, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld released pictures of the bodies of Saddam Hussein`s sons to prove they are dead.

US Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of the Coalition`s ground forces, said dental records had shown a 90% match in the case of Uday Hussein, although he stressed that damage to his teeth meant a 100% match was impossible.

It would have been far easier to convince us had the Americans managed to arrest the two lads and present them to the world, as well as getting the lowdown on where their daddy is.

In the event, the Americans made sure there was no live evidence left in the house in Mosul where the sons were, according to a tip-off they said they got.

With their characteristically subtle approach, 200 troops were deployed to the house, accompanied by helicopter gunships, armoured vehicles and God only knows what else kind of firepower.

Nobody was getting out of that house alive and they did not, including a 14-year-old boy, believed to have been Qusay`s son, and a bodyguard.

Despite that fact that Lt Gen Sanchez declared they had no doubts that the bodies are those of the two sons, it really seems impossible to believe that by the time the 200 troops, helicopter gunships and the armoured vehicles were finished with their mass destruction of the house that there was anything left to be photographed.

The Iraqi who tipped off the US military stands to gain at least part of two bounties each worth $15m which Washington placed on the heads of Uday and Qusay.

He`s on dead cert, which means he can`t lose. If his information is right, he gets the money, and if he`s wrong the Yanks will still have to give him the bounty, or else admit that they were wrong once again.

He won`t be able to enjoy it for a while, though, if ever. At the moment he`s in "protective custody" in Iraq, and he`s likely to stay there for quite a while if he has any sense.

There is deep scepticism about the triumphalist announcement by the Americans, none more so than in Iraq, and not without good reason.

The fact that Saddam Hussein is broadcasting messages about insurrection would not do much for their confidence either, no matter how many times the Americans say the regime is dead and gone.

Understandably, the news of the "deaths" was a godsend to US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have been under pressure over the failure of the Coalition forces to find any trace of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was their justification for invading the country.

Even though the two sons were numbers two and three on America`s 55-strong `most wanted Iraqis` list for good reason, both the president and the prime minister might have been more statesmanlike in their responses to the news, especially since a young boy was also killed.

It made me a little uneasy to see the gloating that greeted the killings.

Mr Blair did himself no favours, either, by being seen on television doing a duet with Cherie of `When I`m Sixty-four`, or some other Beatles number, during their trip to China. While they regaled the world with their musical effort, the widow of Dr David Kelly, who was driven to suicide by Blair`s government, was making arrangements for his funeral.

WITH Saddam Hussein still at large, it`s hardly unreasonable that Iraqis need concrete proof - not just American propaganda - that the former ruling family will not reappear. They learned that lesson once before.

Another lesson learned is that spin-doctoring is too often represented as the truth, and that was graphically illustrated when President Bush referred to claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa in his State of the Union speech last January.

The British Government had alleged that Saddam Hussein`s regime had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the West African state of Niger.

The UN later said that documents which backed the claims were forgeries.

To quote Mark Twain once again: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Why that should bring to mind our own government, I don`t know.

Tánaiste Mary Harney took exception to a recent editorial in this newspaper because she said it was "gloom-laden" and was subsequently afforded half a page to reply.

Her message, largely, was that there is light at the end of the tunnel which begs the question: how long is the tunnel? I got the distinct impression from her polemic that the light will begin to appear will in time for the next general election in 2007.

By the time that comes round, she believes, the government will be able to present a very credible record to the people on the jobs front.

First of all, to use the word `credible` in the same sentence as the present government, is a gross abuse of the English language. They`re not even closely related.

In this instance employment does she mean that a job will be lost only every 20 minutes instead of every quarter of an hour, as happens at the moment? Or maybe she still believes, as she stated during the Hugh O`Flaherty controversy, that the electorate won`t remember, or can`t remember anything that happened three months previously.

Maybe she can explain how the economy is sound to the hundreds of people who have already lost their jobs and those hundreds who will lose their jobs every week into the foreseeable future.

Losing their jobs is something they won`t forget after three months and no effort on the Tánaiste`s part to induce blanket amnesia, will make them.

According to the Central Bank yesterday, in 2004 the economy will expand by 3.5%, but there is worse news to come on the jobs front in what has already been a difficult year, with over 2,400 job losses since June.

It expects a rise in the rate of unemployment to 5.25%.

But roll on the next general election. The country will be transformed economically until the election is ov

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Write a caption for this photo...

http://www.allhatnocattle.net/

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Showing pictures could turn sons into martyrs

July 25 2003 at 03:41AM




By Robert Fisk


Baghdad - Arabs have never been squeamish about death. They see too much of it.

It is we Westerners - with our dangerous, all-conquering armies and our easy identification of evil - who fall over our moral sensitivities at the mere sight of a mortuary mug-shot.

I cannot think of an Iraqi - or a Palestinian, for that matter - who hasn`t seen, with their own eyes, the decapitated victims of air raids and massacres, the military corpses torn to pieces by dogs in the deserts of Iraq or the mass graves of Kurdistan. Like Hieronymus Bosch and Goya, they`ve seen it all.

So on the streets of Baghdad, Iraqis will pore over the all-too-soon-to-be-iconic photographs of Uday and Qusay, and their reaction will be quite unlike what many of us expect.

Iraqis have spent their lives fighting foreigners
They will say, some of them, that, yes, that`s them, the terrible brothers, the "lion cubs" of the monster of Baghdad. That, of course, is what we, the West, want them to say. And others will ask - a good question this - why they couldn`t see them sooner.

Others will ponder the old Arab belief in the plot, the conspiracy. Did the Americans linger in order to fake the pictures? Have they digitised the brothers` faces in order to make them appear dead while still they are live?

The bullet wound in Uday`s head, for example, the one that knocked out the teeth and part of the nose. Now there`s many an Iraqi who would like to have fired the fatal shot. But what if Uday took his own life rather than surrender to the enemy? What if he went down fighting, saving the last bullet for himself? Now that`s an idea that can appeal to the tribal nature of Iraqi society.

Iraqis have spent their lives fighting foreigners. Wasn`t Uday doing the same? And history, which has an unhappy way of reorganising the most staged of events, might just conspire to turn these photographs into those of martyrs. Which is what - to be sure - the Ba`ath militiamen will do. Cruel the brothers may have been. But cowards? That will be the message.

In other words, the publication of these photographs will prove either a stroke of genius or a historic mistake of catastrophic consequences.

The Americans obviously didn`t care`
The occupation authorities are pondering the idea of plastering the pictures around Baghdad. But be sure, they will soon be used as martyrs` photographs on posters with a somewhat different message. The work of the Americans. The work of the occupiers.

And here, I suspect, will come the rub. For in Iraq, I suspect, there will a growing number of young men who will see the need in these pictures not to content themselves with regime change, but to revenge themselves upon the foreigners in Iraq, to avoid the further humiliation of occupation.

They may have hated the sons of Saddam, but after death can come a remarkable reversal of fortunes for the dead.

Because real life on the streets of Baghdad does not incline Iraqis to love their new occupiers or meekly accept the "democracy" that we wish to thrust upon them, just because we can prove that their old masters are dead.

Take the moment on Thursday day when Mohamed Eadem put his key in the padlock of the Kindi hospital mortuary, placed a tissue over his nose and heaved open the great freezer door to show me two sets of human remains, something infinitely worse that the last pictures of Uday and Qusay.

There on the floor lay Thursday`s forgotten victims of the Iraq war, a pile of blackened bones and incinerated flesh on plastic sheets.

As three more American soldiers were killed in an ambush outside Mosul - revenge comes swiftly in this dangerous country, for the men of the 101st Airborne died scarcely 36 hours after Saddam`s sons were killed nearby - the two shrivelled corpses in the mortuary of the Kindi hospital lay unidentified and uncared for, further reason for Iraqis to hate their occupiers.

Of course, we occupied ourselves with those photographs and with the deaths of the Americans. But no one bothered to ask about the two Iraqis gunned down by the Americans in the slums of Hay al-Gailani.

Down the road, then, at 7am on Thursday, drove two men. They failed to stop. The Americans peppered their car with bullets. The vehicle burst into flames. And the Americans just left. For half an hour, the car blazed out of control.

What is clear is that it was the men and women of Hay al-Gailani who had to wait for the burning car to cool before they could heave the terrible remains from the embers of the front seats.

"There were just bones and flesh," Mohamed Eadem told me. "And of course there were no identity papers left, so they hadn`t the slightest idea who these dead men were, and the Americans obviously didn`t care."

Their car was left in the street, shredded by bullets, a crowd of angry Iraqis banging their fists on the roof. Was there a better way to enlist more men in the battle against the occupation?

Of course, the only bodies in which the Americans were interested were those of Uday and Qusay. As for the remains in the Kindi mortuary - and no photographs of them, please - Eadem was possessed of one idea. "I sometimes have a feeling about the dead who are brought here," he said. "I have this feeling that the two men in the car were brothers. I don`t know why. It`s a feeling."

But these were brothers whom no American was going to care about - and of whose death no Iraqi had to be told. -Independent Foreign Service



This article was originally published on page 4 of The Star on July 25, 2003

http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=196227

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Journalisten im Irak

Freiheit auf tönernen Füßen

Von Susanne Polig

Die Iraker hungern nach Informationen: Seit Mai sind im ganzen Land etwa 85 Zeitungen wie Pilze aus dem Boden geschossen. Doch die neu erlangte Pressefreiheit steht auf wackeligen Beinen. Die politische Instabilität und fehlende Rechtsgrundlagen erschweren die Arbeit der Journalisten.

Bagdad/Hamburg - Die Redaktion der Zeitung "Al-Aswaq" (etwa: Die Märkte) sitzt in einem kahlen Raum mit einem einzigen Computer. Nabil Jasseem, Redakteur der Zeitung, die pro Woche zwei Ausgaben herausgibt, hat nie ein anderes Regime als die Diktatur von Saddam Hussein gekannt. "Früher war Journalist sein gleichbedeutend mit dem Gang über heiße Kohlen", sagte er gegenüber der Menschenrechtsorganisation Reporter ohne Grenzen (RoG). "Wir haben jetzt auf jeden Fall mehr Freiheit, aber noch nicht genug. Es wird viel Druck auf uns ausgeübt."

Jasseem ist nur einer von vielen, die nach der Besetzung des Irak durch die USA die neue Pressefreiheit zu Nutzen gewusst haben. Nicht weniger als 85 Zeitungen wurden seit dem ersten Mai im ganzen Land aus dem Boden gestampft, wie aus einem Bericht von Reporter ohne Grenzen hervorgeht. Nach 30 Jahren als Sprachrohr staatlicher Propaganda genießt die Presse erstmals wieder das Recht, Kritik zu üben - an heimischen Parteien wie auch an den Besatzern. Die Hälfte der Publikationen bezeichnet sich als Tageszeitung, wobei es in der Realität lediglich rund einem Dutzend gelingt, eine Ausgabe täglich zu produzieren. Die meisten anderen erscheinen wöchentlich oder gänzlich unregelmäßig.

Irakische Journalisten sind auf der Hut

Die Wochenzeitung "Habezbouz", die sich selbst als "satirisch und unabhängig" bezeichnet, konnte ihre Auflage bereits von 3000 auf 6000 Stück verdoppeln. "Habezbouz" lehnt sich mit ihren ironischen Seitenhieben auf Alltagsprobleme von Besatzern und Einheimischen weit aus dem Fenster. Ein Kartoon des Zeichners Abdel Hassan zeigte zum Beispiel einen arabischen Fernsehreporter, der eine verschleierte Frau interviewt. "Wie geht es den Irakern?", fragt der Journalist. Ihre Antwort: "Alles ist gut - wir brauchen nur Sicherheit, etwas zum Essen und Saddam."


Die Mehrheit der Journalisten im Irak bleibt dagegen auf der Hut. Da es bisher noch keine gültigen Pressegesetze gibt, bewegen sie sich mit ihrer Arbeit in einer Grauzone. "Es herrscht allgemeine Unsicherheit sowohl bei den Journalisten als auch in der Bevölkerung", bestätigte RoG-Sprecherin Sabina Strunk. "Die Journalisten unterziehen sich einer Selbstzensur, weil sie nicht wissen, was erlaubt ist." Sie fürchteten sich vor den Folgen kritischer Äußerungen gegenüber irakischen Parteien oder den Amerikanern. Dazu kommt, dass auch die Leser misstrauisch sind. "Die Bevölkerung weiß nicht, ob sie den Berichten der Journalisten glauben soll." Niemand kann ihnen versichern, dass nicht teilweise die gleichen Personen an den Schreibtischen sitzen, wie zu Saddam-Zeiten.

Umstrittenes Dekret Nummer sieben

Radio und Fernsehen im Irak bleiben vorerst unter strenger Kontrolle der Briten und Amerikaner. Nach Auflösung des Bagdader Informationsministeriums wurde das Irakische Medien Netzwerk (IMN) gegründet, eine Art Interimsbehörde, die Zeitungslizenzen vergibt. Das Netzwerk unterhält zwei Radio-, einen Fernsehsender und eine eigene Tageszeitung ("Al-Sabah"}. IMN-Fernsehen sendet derzeit täglich sechs Stunden lang eine Mischung aus Seifenopern, irakischer Volksmusik und Fußballspielen. Jeden Abend gibt es eine zehnminütige Nachrichtensendung, die allerdings von Kommentaren des US-Zivilverwalters Paul Bremer dominiert wird.

Kritisch beäugt von RoG wird vor allem Bremers Dekret Nummer sieben, das den Besatzern seit Juni unter diversen Umständen die Macht gibt, Redaktionen zu durchsuchen oder Lizenzen zu entziehen. Diese Umstände sind allerdings recht schwammig formuliert. So können die Truppen zum Beispiel bei "Anstiftung zu Gewalt gegenüber der Interimsverwaltung" oder bei "offenkundig falscher und gezielter Verbreitung von Nachrichten, um Widerstand gegen die Interimsverwaltung zu befördern", eingreifen.

Redaktionsschließung "im Rahmen tolerierbarer Gründe"


Mit dem Erlass beabsichtige man keinesfalls, diese Freiheit einzuschränken, sondern eher im Falle von Gewaltakten eingreifen zu können, erklärte ein Sprecher der Besatzungsmächte. "Wir wollen Pressefreiheit." Zweimal haben sich Amerikaner und Briten bisher auf Dekret Nummer sieben berufen. So musste der Radiosender Sawt Bagdad ("Die Stimme Bagdads"} einen Monat nach seiner Entstehung wieder dicht machen. Die dortigen Journalisten hatten in ihren Berichten den selbst ernannten "Herrscher von Bagdad", Mohamed Mohsen al-Zubaidi, hofiert. Das gleiche Schicksal ereilte die schiitische Zeitung "Sada al-Umma" ("Die Stimme Ummas"}.

Zwar ist man bei RoG misstrauisch gegenüber Bremers Dekret, jedoch seien die bisherigen Schließungen "im Rahmen tolerierbarer Gründe" geschehen, wie RoG-Sprecherin Strunk erklärte. Am Donnerstag wurde eine weitere Zeitungsredaktion geschlossen, ob auch dies gerechtfertigt war, weiß sie bislang nicht. "Abwarten und die Situation beobachten", lautet die Devise.

Neue Pressegesetze: Ein Entwurf existiert

Dass auf eine extrem beschränkte Meinungsregulierung wie im Irak ein Boom von Zeitungs-Neugründungen folgt, sei keine Seltenheit. Auch in Afghanistan war nach dem Krieg Ähnliches beobachtet worden. Viele Zeitungen würden jedoch auch schnell wieder aufgeben.

Im Fall Irak hoffen die Reporter ohne Grenzen auf den baldigen Erlass neuer Pressegesetze, einen Entwurf dazu gibt es bereits. 70 irakische und internationale Experten hatten Anfang Juni bei einer Konferenz in Athen einen Vorschlag erarbeitet. "Wir fordern nun eine schnelle Regelung, die momentanen Dekrete sind viel zu vage", erklärte Strunk. Ob der Gesetzesentwurf tatsächlich umgesetzt werden, steht allerdings in den Sternen. Bis jetzt sei noch nicht darüber diskutiert worden, so die Sprecherin.


© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

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Randolph T. Holhut: `The giant sucking sound of lost jobs gets louder`
Posted on Friday, July 25 @ 10:19:11 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Randolph T. Holhut

DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The recession is over.

So says the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of U.S. business cycles. It announced on July 17 that the recession that began March 2001 ended eight months later in November 2001.

The 2001 recession was one of the briefest since World War II, but the bureau also found that it was followed by one of the weakest recoveries. In the months that followed the end of the 2001 recession, the supposedly recovering economy grew at half the rate of previous upturns.

That might explain why there now are 9.3 million Americans that are jobless and why the U.S. unemployment rate is currently at 6.4 percent - the highest it has been in nearly a decade. In the 19 months since the end of the 2001 recession, more than 2 million jobs disappeared.

This year, President Bush has promised that his $330 billion "jobs and growth" tax cut plan will create 1.4 million new jobs by the end of next year.



The U.S. economy would have to generate an average of 300,000 new jobs a month from now until the end of 2004 to create 5.5 million new jobs - that`s the promised 1.4 million from the tax cuts and the 4.1 million that White House economists earlier this year predicted would be gained with or without the tax cuts.

Think it`s going to happen? Probably not. When Bill Clinton was president, the U.S. economy gained an average of 239,000 jobs per month. Since Bush took office, jobs have disappeared at a rate of 69,000 a month.

It looks like almost a dead certainty that there will not be 5.5 million new jobs by December 2004. If you want some proof, check out the June 9 issue of Fortune. It details a dirty little secret in the American economy - how white collar workers are seeing their jobs outsourced to foreign countries.

The U.S. manufacturing sector has been nearly wiped out by overseas competition. Now, it`s the service sector`s turn. Tasks such as financial analysis, software design, tax preparation are now being done in India and the Philippines. The quality of the work is good. The price is even better. Where, say, an American accountant`s starting pay ranges from $40,000 to $50,000, an accountant in Bangalore gets less than half that.

Forester Research, a Massachusetts-based technology consultant, estimates that 3.3 million service jobs will move to countries such as Russia and China in addition to English-speaking countries such as India and the Philippines over the next 15 years. Information technology and financial services will be the two sectors that should see the most overseas outsourcing.

"The debate of at major financial services companies today is no longer whether to relocate some business functions but rather which ones and where," Andrea Brierce, managing director of the consulting firm A.T. Kearney, told Fortune. "Any function that does not require face-to-face contact is now perceived as a candidate for offshore relocation."

This is a frightening prospect for every person who thinks the U.S. economy can grow its way out of recession. Traditionally, white collar workers have gotten laid off when times are bad and get rehired when things pick up. Now, like their blue collar brethren, they`re watching their jobs get shipped overseas and those jobs are likely not coming back.

It`s equally frightening for people who still believe that a college degree or senior executive experience is protection against long-term unemployment. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 18.1 percent of the long-term unemployed in 2002 had college degrees and 20 percent were from the executive, professional and managerial category. This compares to 14 percent in 2000 for both segments.

The long-term trend of good, stable and well-paying jobs being replaced by not-so-good, unstable and lousy paying jobs is something that few folks are talking about. But it is a trend that all of the tax cuts in the world won`t change.

The code phrase for this trend is "labor market flexibility." When you hear economists and business people say it, they mean a labor environment where - if you are fortunate enough to have a job - you are willing to work longer hours for lower pay and if you aren`t, then your job will go someplace else where someone will do it for even less money.

In the rest of the world, they call this "The American Model." Countries that still insist on quaint ideas like socialized medicine, cradle-to-grave social welfare, unfettered access to higher education, protection of domestic industries and jobs that pay a living wage are doomed in a global economy where corporations want cheap labor, low taxes, no unions and no government regulations.

This is how the world`s economy now works. Productive workers in the U.S. are discarded as companies search for cheap and compliant overseas labor. The average two wage-earner family in the U.S. is working about 300 hours more a year than 20 years ago, with little or no growth in real wages. And most of the jobs that have been created in the past decade are low-wage service jobs that are insufficient for raising a family.

The unrelenting demands of investors to show an ever-greater profit, the demand for cheap consumer goods and services that Americans feel is their birthright and a global economy that has become reliant on producing more stuff at less cost have all combined to siphon jobs out of the U.S.

The only winners in this race to the bottom are the corporations profiting from this global exploitation of workers.

When workers don`t earn enough to buy the products they make and corporations hopscotch the globe searching for ever-cheaper labor, you have a recipe for an economic disaster. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want to talk about this.

Any serious discussion of the economy has to address the hemorrhage of U.S. jobs to other nations and the steady erosion of the standard of living of U.S. workers that has resulted. If not even white collar jobs are safe from overseas outsourcing, what does this mean for the American economy?

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books).
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=12380&mode=nest…

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Fortunate sons
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com

07.25.03 - For every piece of evidence that Bush Administration officials willfully lied to the American public in order to hype their case for an invasion of Iraq, there`s equally compelling evidence that such lies were well and fully believed. Too many people in Washington, up to and including the President of the United States, seem to have believed their own propaganda -- of Al-Qaeda links and weapons of mass destruction and Americans who would be welcomed as liberators, unleashing a bold new era of Western-style democracy throughout a grateful Arab world.

Dream on.

These distinctions scarcely matter in terms of culpability. But they matter a great deal in terms of whether the Bush Administration understands what it faces now that it has assimilated Iraq as a very foreign 51st state. The latest evidence for the delusion theory has been the torrent of pronouncements that what Washington has finally acknowledged to be a real live guerrilla "uprising" ("war" is still apparently too raw a word) would be quelled by Tuesday`s killing of Saddam Hussein`s two sons, Uday and Qusay, in their hiding place in the northern city of Mosul.

All along, the official Bush line has been that Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation has been wholly a function of "bitter-enders," "remnants" loyal to Hussein who were feared and hated by the vast majority of Yankee-loving Iraqis. Bush himself Wednesday called ongoing attacks the work of "a few remaining holdouts" that were "targeting our success in rebuilding Iraq."

It`s a tempting scenario, particularly as one gets farther away from the notable lack of success plainly visible in Iraq itself. Unquestionably, elements of the increasingly sophisticated and deadly attacks against U.S. troops have been planned for a while by people who knew what they were doing. Essential infrastructure -- electricity, oil and gas pipelines, water treatment plants -- has come under repeated attack in recent weeks. Electricity in Baghdad, a city of five million people, is still erratic at best three months after U.S. troops entered the city. With summer temperatures topping 115 degrees, that`s a substantial lack of "success." Smaller, poorer cities and towns have fared even worse. Food and water crises are never far away.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials rarely leave their (captured) palaces, and American troops travel only in convoys -- which are coming under more frequent attack, and more often in broad daylight, with attacks by missiles and rocket- propelled grenades. A transport plane last week was fired on by missile. These are not weapons kept under the bed to ward off looters, nor ones obtained on short notice.

That said, Ba`ath party loyalists aren`t the only ones that could have, and did, anticipate a U.S. invasion that had lurked as a threat for a dozen years. And urban attacks on U.S. troops in broad daylight would be impossible if attackers did not feel confident they could escape safely -- that is, confident that ordinary Iraqis would willingly hide them from American searchers. If the Bush delusion of a public eager for American rule were true, such confidence would be unthinkable.

Instead, attacks like this are now a daily occurrence, spread throughout the country. Areas like Mosul, the Sunni stronghold where Saddam`s sons died, are not the only problem for occupation forces. Last weekend, thousands of angry Shiites marshaled in the formerly calm holy city of Najaf, responding on a few hours` notice to word that the Americans were threatening to arrest a cleric who had issued a public call for an Islamic army to oust the infidels. Throughout the country, Shiites who suffered from 35 years of repression under Saddam`s Sunni Ba`athists have been angered by the Americans` imposition of hand-picked exiles rather than the promised democracy. Such a democracy would almost certainly result in a Shiite theocracy -- something everyone knows Washington isn`t about to allow. Instead, the Americans have been repressive -- attacking new political parties, censoring media, and killing two more Iraqis at a Baghdad checkpoint Wednesday -- and still have not been able to provide either services or security to ordinary Iraqis.

And, so, Uday and Qusay are dead, but the fighting will continue. It`s hard to believe, and distressing to contemplate, that anyone in Washington could expect otherwise. At some point, Saddam himself will doubtless turn up. That, too, will not matter, because even Iraqis who loathed Saddam do not necessarily want Americans -- or American puppets like Ahmad Chalabi -- running the country as their fiefdom instead. Last week`s autocratic U.S. appointment of a governing council did far more to inspire attacks on American occupiers than the death of Saddam`s sons will do to deflate them.

Nobody will miss Uday or Qusay, precisely because they were the heirs -- fortunate sons of a tyrant, men whose lives of cruelty and opulence stood in stark contrast to the misery under which most of the Iraqi population lived.

Planners in Washington would do well to remember that Iraq is still ruled by a fortunate son. And he, too, will be resented by Iraqis until the day he is no longer relevant.

===

http://www.workingforchange.com/printitem.cfm?itemid=15355

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BUSH’S BIG BETRAYAL
by Michael Hammerschlag
HAMMERNEWS.com


The CIA may have done some shifty things, overthrowing and assassinating foreign leaders in the past, but by and large, they are a decent honorable bunch (at least since the Contra War). They not only consider themselves patriotic, they feel they are the embodiment of patriotism. The vast majority aren’t spies or agents, but analysts and researchers who traffic in intelligence and its analysis. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and co. first tried to browbeat and bully the CIA into perverting and distorting their intelligence to portray Iraq as a clear and present threat, making a dozen-odd trips to Langley to coax them in the right direction. When that didn’t work, they essentially created their own shadow “intelligence” outfit, though even that word is a stretch, the Office of Special Plans (didn’t the Nazis have something called this?). Peopled by right-wing zealots, political hacks, and true believers.. they pooled every wild rumor, unsubstantiated report, and generous interpretation that claimed Iraq was an imminent danger and presented it to our over-eager President. Unknown and unvetted by CIA, DIA, State Dept., NSA; this foul stew was injected daily into Bush’s propaganda pronouncements to the American people, which helped persuade our dimwitted electorate that Osama and Saddam were blood brothers, and allowed “patriot” yahoos to shout down objections to an unjustified preemptive attack. Other sources of rubbish were Ahmed Chalabi’s group of distant exile Would-be-Kings, and a similar secret right wing group in Ariel Sharon’s office, dispensing rumors that the Mossad considered baloney.



In the CIA’s eyes, Bush has taken their intelligence product, adulterated it with trash and nonsense, repackaged it, and sold it like a tacky car salesman as the best estimate America can make. Then he used it to fraudulently launch an unnecessary war, a betrayal of the CIA. Their middle name is Intelligence, which precludes lies, except to other nations.



So does GB2 step up to the plate and take responsibility for his deceptions, hubris, and Oedipal obsessions? No, he pins it on the CIA. It was George Tenet’s fault, who is obligated to publicly apologize. There was some good reason for keeping a Democrat in the Administration after all. Who else would have the loyalty to take the fall for his dissembling chicken boss? Over at Langley, there is the distinct hiss of steam escaping, rage at our unelected President’s second and massive betrayal. Our fault? After the CIA actually (with the Special Forces) did brilliant and yeoman work in making the Afghanistan overthrow painless, and also similar work in Iraq. Make no mistake, Bush will pay for his cowardice. The CIA has many ways to hurt him; imperial lies, stupidities, and distortions carefully filed and indexed. These will be dribbled to journalists one at a time over the next year, enough to solidify the picture of Bush as the most dishonest President in history. The networks may even rerun that devastating video of our Commander in Chief catatonically reading to schoolkids for 15 minutes as known terrorist planes homed in on the White House and Pentagon (after the second strike). Spare us the Reaganian stories about who was responsible for feeding the President bad information. The President is a radical zealot who is wedded to bad information. He wanted to take over Iraq, and by God, we were going to do that, whatever it took.



By now Bush should have realized the tides have shifted, and that the lumbering soporific corporate press was finally rousing. But now- heedless, ruthless, and vicious, he embarks on his 3rd betrayal: trying to punish Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who investigated the forged Niger uranium papers in March 2002, reported it was lies- and just blew the whistle… by outing his wife Valerie as a CIA agent involved in secret non-proliferation efforts. This is not just a contemptible violation of national security, it’s a crime with a 10 year prison sentence. The last president who could have been said to betray the CIA was JFK in not supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion, and while we don’t subscribe to Oliver Stone’s thesis (I think the Mafia did it)- Cuban connections to the assassination were many. Bush is still laboring under the assumption that the CIA is a family business, but it’s been many years since his father ruled that roost. You don’t subvert and betray America’s premier intelligence service without paying the price. With no shame, Cheney has been defending and repeating the big lies, even while throwing Tenet and Hadley to the wolves- though no one is ever really sacrificed in this regime.



Blindly and thuggishly, Administration goons are still attempting to punish France and Germany, when the reality is.. they are going to punish us by denying our overextended military, peacekeeping troops. Even India said ‘no’ without UN oversight, why should they expose their troops to certain death in Bush’s Wanton War. Weekend Nat. Guard warriors yanked from their real task as Homeland Security are now sentenced to an unnecessary war without end, and their righteous rancor will increase exponentially. The steady attrition of US troops is increasing- my prediction is that Karl Rove will pull the plug by December, in order to save Bush’s plummeting reelection hopes. We will cut and run from Iraq, but another 200-350 Americans will die, and the devastated country will have another dictator. They know we have no patience. The peace was lost when we stupidly allowed Saddamites and criminals to loot and destroy every institution and installation, which we have no predilection or ability to repair. Incredibly, he radical neo-nuts had no plans for occupation: they assumed, like a Hollywood musical, that the sun would shine and the music swell and problems magically evaporate. And the oil windfall that many hoped was also crippled by looting and a dozen years of sanctions.



Most alarmingly, our freedom of action in dealing with the psychotic threat in North Korea, which now seem to have a secret plutonium reprocessing plant under the China border; or Iran, which has 3 nuclear plants in the works; has evaporated. Treacly stories of Iraq troops with pics of the World Trade Center in their wallets still run, but this war has actually devastated American security: creating 500,000 new potential terrorists across the Moslem world, locking our combat troops in place, emptying the treasury (with the radical tax cuts), losing us vital friends in the struggle against Al Qaida; and tying our hands with respect to the furry freak in North Korea. Horrifyingly, the swift Iraq invasion may have convinced Kim Jong Il that his only defense was an emergency program to build nukes. We are entering the most dangerous period since the Cold War’s MAD, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the probability of a man-made sun rising in an American city is now well into double digits for the next 2-10 years; and our leadership has squandered our intelligence, capital, trust, and resources to deal with it. The reason is Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq and the lies he told to launch it.



Note: The extermination of Saddam’s vermin sons is great news, but whether it will slow guerilla attacks on our troops remains to be seen.



Michael Hammerschlag has written commentaries + articles for Seattle Times, Providence Journal, Honolulu Advertiser, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Channel, & Moscow News, Tribune, and Guardian. He was scheduled to fly over Manhattan on 9-11, and just covered the RI nightclub fire. His website is http://hammernews.com e-mail: hammerschlag@bigfoot.

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Muß Amerika auf die Couch. Die Auswirkungen der Terrorfurcht. Die Seite könnte auch manch einem User helfen.

Overcoming Terror
By Philip Zimbardo with Bruce Kluger -- Publication Date: July 24, 2003

Summary: Is Washington terrorizing us more than Al Qaeda?

og on to the Department of Homeland Security`s Web site, ready.gov, and click on "nuclear blast."

Thanks to the recently formed agency, ordinary citizens can now get a crash course in emergency preparedness in the event that a big bomb is dropped on their block.

Step one, says the terse tip sheet, is to "take cover." Step two: "Assess the situation." Step three? "Limit your exposure to radiation."

While the well-meaning 300-word document goes on to reveal a few other curious dos and don`ts for a doomsday scenario (e.g., ingesting potassium iodide is definitely a bad idea when radioactive iodine is coursing through the atmosphere), what`s missing from the text is an acknowledgment of the psychological damage that such cursorily assembled, blithely disseminated information can wreak on the public. Presumably intended as a mental health balm in this time of unprecedented global stress, these simplistic big-blast CliffsNotes merely skate atop the frozen pond of the nuclear nightmare, ultimately leaving the befuddled citizen to wonder--and often panic--about the real and present danger that lurks just beneath the ice.

Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security`s site is just one example of a national warning system that in the end stirs up more anxiety than it quells. Loaded with scientific terminology, yet woefully bereft of any tangible data, the U.S.` early-warning mechanism has transformed us into a nation of worriers, not warriors. Forcing citizens to ride an emotional roller coaster without providing any clear instructions on how to soothe their jitters, the current security system has had a profoundly negative impact on our individual and collective mental health. I call this a "pre-traumatic stress syndrome," and its effect on our day-to-day lives is debilitating.

Established in March 2002, the U.S. terrorism warning system is broken down into the now-famous color-coded levels of alert--green, blue, yellow, orange and red. The degree of risk changes from level to level, even though the specificity of the threat need not. Beginning with a "low risk" green, the threat levels then graduate to "general," "increased and predictable," "likely" (the notorious Code Orange) and culminate with the red-hot "imminent."

Since September 11, 2001, the state of domestic alert has randomly seesawed through the color spectrum, rising as high as "orange" on at least eight occasions. Each time the color has changed, a public official has stepped before the cameras with explanations that alternate between vague and indecipherable. Goose-bump-inducing terms such as "dirty bombs" and "shelter-in-place" are nonchalantly tossed out, but never are Americans given a soup-to-nuts explanation of exactly what is going on. This exercise in ambiguity doesn`t serve to calm people as intended. Instead, it scares the bejesus out of them. After all, terrorism is not about war in the traditional sense of the word. It is about psychology--about frightening ordinary people, making them feel confused and vulnerable. And, regrettably, the government is unwittingly engaging in this activity as effectively as Al Qaeda.

Like a car alarm that sounds not when a vehicle is broken into, but instead, whenever it passes through a bad neighborhood, the nation`s early-warning system has effectively rendered Americans paralyzed behind the wheel, unable--or unwilling--to step on the gas.

Contemporary clinical data--and my own extended research in this area--prove time and again that to be optimally effective, safety alarms must include four basic components: (1) a credible, trustworthy source communicating the alarm; (2) a disclosure of the specific and anticipated event that has elicited the warning; (3) an effort to reassure those being alerted about the value of unified efforts; and finally, (4) a clearly defined set of actions that citizens can take in order to escape a calamity.

And yet, since September 11, each of these basic principles has been systematically violated in the design and delivery of terrorist alarms issued by the government.

In the first six warnings after the 2001 attacks, different communicators--from Attorney General John Ashcroft to Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge--appeared before the press, alleging that they possessed "reliable" information from "credible" sources that an attack was "imminent." In most cases, the perpetrators were described as anonymous terrorists; their attack would take place sometime in the immediate future; and their target was any number of unnamed locations in the U.S. (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter). As if this fuzzy description of impending doom wasn`t sufficiently stultifying, officials then stopped short of offering any specific action that citizens might take in response to the supposed terrorist attacks, other than to remain on alert and to keep their eyes open.

Eventually, these widely disseminated, narrowly defined warnings created greater levels of fear, which over time morphed into general anxiety.

The psychological situation worsened when the administration delivered--in the same breath as its warnings--a collateral message to "go about your business as normal." Rather than give Americans a hook on which to hang their heebie-jeebies (providing facts, for example, that elucidated the wheres and whens of the threats), this unexpected "hey, don`t worry" footnote induced a cognitive and emotional disconnect. After all, how was it possible not to fret after being told that our personal safety and security were now at stake? Naturally, the resulting sense of confusion spilled over into feelings of helplessness.

While the first six post-9/11 warnings seemed, at worst, insensitive to the nation`s emotional state, the seventh, issued in early February 2003, was downright reckless. After downgrading the level of alert to "unlikely" (from the previous week`s "increased likelihood"), Ridge leapfrogged from the precautionary to the preposterous, recommending ways in which citizens could prepare for an attack by the still-unnamed phantom menace. Among these suggestions was sealing ourselves into our homes using plastic sheeting and duct tape. Americans stormed Home Depot. Jay Leno had a field day.

The fact is, not a single terrorist attack occurred on American soil in the 18 months after 9/11. While this was obviously good news for American security, it wreaked havoc on the nation`s psyche. Where were the thousands of terrorists allegedly comprising mysterious cells throughout our country? Where was the debriefing by authorities to explain why, after all the hand-wringing, nothing ever materialized? The high alerts silently evaporated as quickly as they arose, but the high anxiety remained--and remains--at full throttle.

All of which raises the question: Is it possible for a government to keep its citizens braced for attack without incapacitating them with fear? It is not only possible--it is a historical fact: On the night of April 18, 1775, patriot Paul Revere rode his horse through the countryside from Boston Harbor toward Lexington, warning local Colonial leaders that the British army was fast approaching. Throughout the evening, Revere faithfully adhered to my four-point theory for successful dissemination of public alarms (something of a miracle, I should add, in that I wouldn`t be born for another 158 years). In retrospect, Revere was the perfect messenger delivering the perfect message: (1) He was known to be a highly credible communicator, both expert and trustworthy; (2) his alarm was focused on a specific anticipated event; (3) the alert was designed to motivate citizens to act as a group; and (4) the warning called for a concrete set of actions--namely, fighting back.

As American history books tell you, the day after Revere took his midnight gallop, the Colonial militia trounced the redcoats at Concord. Not a shred of duct tape was needed.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod/PTOArticle/PTO-20…


Transcript

Preemptive War Strategy: A New U.S. Empire?

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Joel S. Beinin
Professor of History, Stanford University
Author, Political Islam

Ivan Eland
Senior Fellow and Director, Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute
Author, Putting “Defense” Back Into U.S. Defense Policy

Edward A. Olsen
Professor of National Security, Naval Postgraduate School
Author, U.S. National Defense for the Twenty-first Century


http://www.independent.org/tii/forums/030625ipfTrans.html

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Uday was negotiating surrender: newsman


By Paul Michaud

PARIS, July 23: A journalist preparing a story on Saddam Hussein and his two sons Uday and Qusay for the French national news weekly magazine Le Point says that Uday was in the process of negotiating his surrender to the US occupation authority when he was killed on Tuesday.

According to Jean Guisnel, who is considered an authority on the Saddam family and Iraq and who was speaking to a reporter for French public TV channel France 3 on Wednesday, "Uday was in the process of negotiating his surrender because he had let it be known that he would prefer being handed over alive to US forces than being discovered by Iraqi nationals whom he feared might lynch him instead of turning him over to US authorities."

Although Mr Guisnel would not divulge the source of his information, he has often based his stories on Iraq on French intelligence sources.

http://www.dawn.com/2003/07/24/int2.htm

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UPDATED: 12:00 a.m. EDT July 25, 2003

IRAQ-POSTWAR

U.S. officials have followed through on a promise to prove that Saddam Hussein`s two sons are dead. Photos of the bodies have been released, and some members of Iraq`s Governing Council have been shown the bodies.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says the pictures of Saddam`s sons are gruesome, but the Iraqi people deserve to know that they`re dead. He says lives may be saved because Iraqis may now come forward with information.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says deciding to release photos of Udai (oh-DY`) and Qusai (koo-SY`) Hussein was easy. Rumsfeld acknowledged the military doesn`t usually show pictures of war dead. But he says Iraqis need proof that the feared Hussein brothers were killed.
Some Iraqis aren`t convinced Saddam Hussein`s sons are dead. After seeing newly released photos said to show the bodies, one Iraqi says he`s not sure the pictures are of the Hussein brothers. Another man says Odai Hussein is tall and thin -- but the photo shows someone who is "short and thick."
President Bush is again applauding the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s sons. On a visit to Philadelphia, he said the brothers were for torture, maiming and the "murder of countless Iraqis."
Vice President Cheney says the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s sons show that killers loyal to the previous regime are being "systematically dealt with."
The latest Saddam Hussein tape appears to be the real thing. A U.S. official says the C-I-A has concluded that the voice -- which calls on Iraq`s former soldiers to rise up against the U.S. -- is probably Saddam`s.
The Arab satellite network Al-Arabiya is airing a videotape of what it says are members of the Saddam Fedayeen militia promising vengeance for the deaths of Odai (oh-DY`) and Qusai (koo-SY`) Hussein. One of three masked men shown on the tape says the deaths will only lead to more attacks on coalition forces. The militia was once led by Odai Hussein.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says there is no guerrilla war in Iraq. He says the word to describe it is "unconventional." Since the war began, 239 U.S. soldiers have died -- 101 since major combat was declared over May first.
Three American soldiers were killed Thursday when their convoy was hit by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in northern Iraq. The deaths bring to 158 the number of U.S. servicemen killed in action since the war began March 20th. That`s eleven more than the death toll in the 1991 Gulf War.
Two Iraqis were killed Thursday when their car approached a U.S. military checkpoint in Baghdad. Witnesses say American troops opened fire.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says the U.S. underestimated the strength of the resistance after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He says some "stupid" mistakes were made. He also says some Iraqis are expecting too much of the U.S. in the aftermath of the war.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



Summary
*********US***UK*****Total****Avg/Day
Total***239***44******283***** 2.23

07/25/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES 4 ARMY CASUALTIES FROM JULY 23RD & JULY 24TH
07/25/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES 4TH DEATH ON JULY 24TH: VEHICLE MAINTENANCE ACCIDENT
07/24/03 CENTCOM
3 US SOLDIERS KILLED IN CONVOY AMBUSH NEAR MOSUL ON JULY 24TH
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 7 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE NEAR MOSUL
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 2 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE AT AR RAMADI
07/23/03 British Ministry of Defense
BRITISH OFFICER COLLAPSES AND DIES IN SOUTHERN IRAQ, JULY 18TH

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
White House, CIA Kept Key Portions of Report Classified


By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A01


President Bush was warned in a more specific way than previously known about intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda terrorists were seeking to attack the United States, a report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks indicated yesterday. Separately, the report cited one CIA memo that concluded there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi individuals provided financial assistance to al Qaeda operatives in the United States.

These revelations are not the subject of the congressional report`s narratives or findings, but are among the nuggets embedded in a story focused largely on the mid-level workings of the CIA, FBI and U.S. military.

Two intriguing -- and politically volatile -- questions surrounding the Sept. 11 plot have been how personally engaged Bush and his predecessor were in counterterrorism before the attacks, and what role some Saudi officials may have played in sustaining the 19 terrorists who commandeered four airplanes and flew three of them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

To varying degrees, the answers remain a mystery, despite an unprecedented seven-month effort by a joint House and Senate panel to fully understand how a group of Arab terrorists could have pulled off such a scheme. The CIA refused to permit publication of information potentially implicating Saudi officials on national security grounds, arguing that disclosure could upset relations with a key U.S. ally. Lawmakers complained it was merely to avoid embarrassment.

The White House, meanwhile, resisted efforts to pin down Bush`s knowledge of al Qaeda threats and to catalogue the executive`s pre-Sept. 11 strategy to fight terrorists. It was justified largely on legal grounds, but Democrats said the secrecy was meant to protect Bush from criticism.

And while the report contains extensive details about counterterrorism policy and operations under President Bill Clinton, it also leaves out substantial material deemed classified. The panel took testimony from former senior advisers to Clinton and Bush but did not interview either president.

Still, the report offers bits of new information about both presidents and the Saudis, and lays out a possible road map for the independent commission charged by Congress to pick up the investigation of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. It also offers pointed criticism of both Bush and Clinton, concluding that neither "put the government or the intelligence community on a war footing before September 11" -- despite ample evidence of al Qaeda`s dangerous designs.

With respect to Bush, the congressional panel indicated that it tried to determine "to what extent the President received threat-specific warnings during this period" -- but obtained only limited information.

Among the only clues cited in the report about Bush`s knowledge of al Qaeda`s intentions against the United States is an Aug. 6, 2001, President`s Daily Briefing (PDB) -- described in the report only as a "closely-held intelligence report" -- that included information "acquired in May 2001 that indicated a group of [Osama] Bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."

The PDB also said "that Bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States for years and that the group apparently maintained a support base here." It cited "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to the report.

In a May 16, 2002, briefing for reporters, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the PDB was a historical look at bin Laden`s methods dating to 1997. She characterized the briefing as an "analytic report" that summed up bin Laden`s methods of operation. "It was not a warning," she said. "There was no specific time or place mentioned."

The CIA declined to declassify the PDB, and the White House, which had the authority to release it, declined to do so, citing "executive privilege." Executive privilege allows the president to withhold from public disclosure all advice and communications he receives from advisers so that they feel free to offer frank advice without fearing that it will become public.

The Aug. 6 PDB came amid a barrage of intelligence reporting indicating that al Qaeda was planning attacks, somewhere, against U.S. interests. The intelligence community has said its focus was on possible attacks overseas.

Deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley, who refused to testify before the panel but submitted written responses to questions, told the panel that the National Security Council held four deputy committee meetings between May and the end of July 2001 in an effort to adopt a more aggressive strategy vis-a-vis al Qaeda. The review was finalized Sept. 4, 2001. Bush had not reviewed the proposal before Sept. 11, Hadley wrote the panel.

The committee also unsuccessfully sought budget information from the Office of Management and Budget to determine where in the Bush administration the decision was made not to provide more funding for counterterrorism activities.

CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a closed-door session on June 18, 2002, that he had told other members of the administration that his counterterrorism budget would be as much as $1 billion short each year for the next five years. "We told that to everybody downtown for as long as anybody would listen and never got to first base," Tenet told the panel.

On the issue of Saudi Arabia, the report cited a CIA memorandum that said connections between some hijackers and some Saudis living in the United States amounted to "incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists" from Saudi officials.

This section of the report refers only to "foreign support." Officials from various branches of the U.S. government said those two words refer to Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, the report said, further investigation of these allegations "could reveal legitimate, and innocent, explanations for these associations."

The report makes no accusation that it was ever the policy of the Saudi government to support terrorism. Rather, the questionable activity involved Saudi citizens, some of whom worked for the Saudi government.

The panel also took the FBI to task for not aggressively pursuing allegations against Saudi individuals, including a network of businessmen and religious figures in San Diego who, together, provided two key hijackers with seemingly unlimited money, an interpreter and other support.

The report said that because Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally, "the United States had not established heightened screening for illegal immigration or terrorism by visitors from Saudi Arabia."

One U.S. official told the panel "he believed the U.S. government`s hope of eventually obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance to the U.S. government on this matter is contrary to Saudi national interests."

Yesterday, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, issued a statement refuting the criticism of his country. "It is unfortunate that false accusations against Saudi Arabia continue to be made by some for political purposes despite the fact that the kingdom has been one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism," he said.

Members of the panel offered differing assessments of the impact of the administration`s efforts to keep secret certain politically sensitive subjects.

"We were never able to get much of the material we requested from the National Security Council," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), former ranking member of the House intelligence committee. "The nation was not well-served by the administration`s failure to provide this critical information."

Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he doubted Bush was complacent about warnings he received. "The intelligence community was providing him information. He wasn`t AWOL," Goss said. "In hindsight, it might take on a little more significance . . . but it`s a huge stretch to say the president had information he should have acted on."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[peace_boxer]

US Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Sec. 8 (g): "The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature."

THROW HIS ASS IN JAIL!!!!!!!!!

jawoll, ab in den knast

[Joerver]

US invites relatives to claim brothers` bodies
Jamie Wilson in Baghdad
Saturday July 26, 2003
The Guardian

The United States authorities in Iraq were last night wrestling with the thorny problem of how to dispose of the bullet-riddled bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein after their "touched up" corpses were shown off to the world yesterday.

In stark contrast to the grisly pictures released by the US military on Thursday, the bodies shown to a small group of journalists in a makeshift morgue at Baghdad airport yesterday had been shaved and their faces reconstructed in an attempt to persuade a sceptical Iraqi public two of the most feared men in the country were really dead.

US officials, trying to grapple with the problem of Islamic custom which calls for burial as soon as possible after death, said the bodies would be stored in the refrigerated tent at the airport until a family member came forward to claim them. This is a not completely outlandish suggestion, considering the size of their extended family, many of whom are not on the coalition wanted list.

A British spokesman for the coalition provisional authority said they were still consulting Iraq`s governing council and religious leaders about how best to preserve the corpses according to Muslim tradition, and no decision had been taken yet.

The one person nobody expects to come forward to claim the bodies is their father. But even without his voluntary surrender, US forces in Iraq believe the net is closing around Saddam Hussein - ace of spades in the pack of cards distributed to US troops to identify wanted members of the old regime.

Following the killing of Uday, the ace of hearts, and Qusay, the ace of clubs, in a gun battle at their hideout in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul on Tuesday, US troops yesterday raided a house south of Tikrit and captured five to 10 people believed to be members of the deposed president`s personal security detail. The raid on the house in Saddam`s home town, where strong support for the deposed regime remains, was carried out after a tip from an Iraqi informant, according to Major General Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division.

Gen Odierno said US troops had also spoken with one of Saddam`s wives, although he did not identify which one. "We continue to tighten the noose," he added.

A group of mainly Arab journalists were taken to view the bodies of Uday, 39, and Qusay, 37. The brothers were lying side by side on metal trolleys, their bruised bodies, riddled with bullets and shrapnel, naked apart from a cloth covering their genitals.

US officials said the brothers were made to look as lifelike as possible, but denied there was any intention to deceive the Iraqi public, many of whom had been sceptical that the pictures of the bloodied, faces released on Thursday were those of the brothers. The officials claimed the touching up was standard military procedure, although it is almost unheard of in the Arab world.

The faces appeared waxy and heavily made up, according to one reporter. Morticians disguised a gaping wound across Uday`s face, but a hole in the top of his head was still visible. US officials said both brothers had been hit by more than 20 bullets during the shootout, and both torsos bore large Y-shaped incisions.

Uday was believed to have died from a head injury caused by a blunt object, while Qusay had two bullet wounds to his head, in and just behind his right ear, medical officials said. This ruled out earlier speculation that the wounds might have been self-inflicted in an attempt to avoid capture.

In Arasaat Al-Hindiya, a suburb of Baghdad, pictures on satellite television last night were met with a mostly positive response. "I thought it was them before, but there can be no doubt now," said Majda Leon, a 40-year-old housewife.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Comment
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Seeing is believing
Why does Bush feel he now has to resort to head-on-a-stick politics?

Mark Lawson
Saturday July 26, 2003
The Guardian

George Bush likes his Bible - as, more quietly, does Tony Blair - and is reported to have scriptural advisers who highlight daily passages relevant to his presidency. These theological bodyguards would have failed in their duty if they did not this week direct America`s highest eyes to John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe."

The most serious religious believers to occupy the White House and Downing Street in recent memory now ironically find themselves facing an entire population of Islamic Doubting Thomases in Iraq. The publication of the gruesome morgue shots of Saddam Hussein`s two sons - the shaven head of Uday giving him, quite inappropriately to his character and actions, the aspect of a battered baby - mark an extraordinary cultural moment: the leaders of two supposedly sophisticated and civilised democracies forced to resort to the most basic head-on-a-stick politics.

The first factor that has led to this savage assault on conventional proprieties and disorderly retreat from the moral high ground is the surely unexpected phenomenon of the vanished enemy.

For thousands of years, regardless of changes in military methods, the rules of invasion remained the same: the enemy leader was beaten and then taken. He might frustrate his planned display through suicide but there would usually be some proof of death. Some said Hitler lived on, false-bearded in the jungle, but the sane knew he was dust in a bunker.

Yet twice now in the war against terrorism, the quarry, though losing, has also managed to get lost: Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein continue to exert a ghostly power over minds if not nations through video, audio, rumour and hope on one side and fear on the other.

Now you don`t see them, now you do. It was once reported that President Bush drew strength from watching the movie Pearl Harbor. We now see that Catch Me If You Can might have been more use as a rule book for modern warfare. Finally, he seems to have caught two but the central duo still elude him.

There`s another east-west irony here. The goal of the US secret service has always been that - in the event of invasion or calamitous attack - a ghostly American government could continue from hidden bunkers and untraceable broadcasts. Though coming from supposedly inferior cultures, Bin Laden and Hussein seem to be piloting a version of this theory of invisible resistance.

But, though the age of the foe who won`t show himself offers an excuse for the Bush administration`s squalid picture-show, politicians can`t merely blame the unseen enemy. The revolting show-and-tell was also necessary because voters have seen through them.

The vigorous printing in this country of the pictures - a detail on the Times front page, full-frontal in the Guardian and Daily Telegraph - raises a different question. The justification for releasing the death shots is essentially cultural: fired by the idea that both scepticism about western claims and tolerance of posthumous photography are greater in the east. To adopt a patronising phrase traditionally used by British ambassadors abroad when the local ruler made an anti-UK speech or jailed the opposition. The snaps were "purely for local consumption".

If so, then why did the images need such widespread dissemination in the west? There are three plausible answers: 1) That British and American voters are secretly as sceptical towards allied press releases as Iraqis are. 2) That we are enjoying - or are assumed to enjoy - gloating over the scalps of those we conquered. 3) That - in order to make a proper judgment of the local response to the images - we need to see precisely what they saw.

With a churning stomach and a troubled conscience, I would claim the third justification and let`s hope the second doesn`t apply. But I fear there may be something in the first and that - for this reason - spin-doctors in Washington and London may welcome the media ghoul-show.

Alastair Campbell, as he holidays and apparently considers his future, ought to reflect on how, in only six years, politics has jumped from a culture in which reality was nothing and perception everything to one in which citizens need to be shown a raw, bleeding corpse before they will even begin to consider the possibility that their rulers are telling them the truth.

President Bush`s Bible guys, if they want to cheer him up, may soon slip into his in-tray John 20:29: "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe." But, politically if not religiously, that day seems a long way off: definitely in Baghdad but also in London and Washington.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Take two
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is it time for Labour to go?
In this week`s email exchange, Glenda Jackson and Stephen Pound are divided about Blair`s credibility and government policy

Glenda Jackson and Stephen Pound
Saturday July 26, 2003
The Guardian

Dear Stephen.
You know that I have called for the prime minister to resign over the terrible events that continue to dominate the news at home and abroad, so for me it would be gratuitous to ask the question, is it now time for Blair to engage in what Claire Short has defined as an "elegant" handover. But perhaps there is stillroom for an exchange of views on the government`s sense of purpose, direction, credibility or lack of all three.

It`s not just Iraq, nor David Kelly - in my opinion, the war`s most recent victim - that is causing such anger and disquiet, and giving rise to a growing disbelief in not only this government, but politics in general, among my electorate. I don`t know how things are in Ealing, but the shortfall in funding for our schools, the nonsense of foundation hospitals and top-up fees, to name but a few, are the issues filling my post bag.

Where are we going, why has "delivery" become a dirty word? Has the power of government really become arrogance, so that criticisms from party activists, from core voters, from affiliated organisations are ignored or dismissed with the cursory rhetorical question "where else do you have to go? If not us, who?".
Glenda

Dear Glenda,
It is good to know that as colleagues and comrades head for the beach there are at least two of us in our gloomy cells at Westminster fighting the good fight! I think that the current clamour is the result of terrible confusion and, dare I say it, false consciousness. Firstly; critics of the government`s policy and of the prime minister assume that the two are as one. This just isn`t the case, as you know.

I can`t remember a single leader of the Labour party or prime minister who did not attract a vocal claque of critics demanding his or her resignation. Equally, I cannot recall a single moment in my 30-plus years in the Labour party when any group of activists sat back and said: "Things are just right in terms of policy and delivery. Fair play to the party." By and large we Labour people are critical perfectionists who subscribe to a vision as well as having a commitment to practical politics.

Yes, I hear the complaints in Ealing North and, yes, some good people have turned away from the party. But three quarters of the primary schools and half the high schools on my patch have been rebuilt or are being rebuilt. There is no unemployment and we`ve got a degree of economic stability undreamed of under the Tories. We are actually doing more than talk in the areas of trade justice and the remission of world debt. Perfection is not to be found in this life and I still see far more about this Labour government and this prime minister that is good than bad. They are certainly better than anything available as an alternative.
Fraternally yours,
Steve.

Dear Stephen,
Now I`m confused, but not, I think, unconscious. Are you suggesting the prime minister is critical of government policies or the government is critical of the prime minister? In either case you could have fooled me. Farewell collective responsibility. And yes, the party has always been a Labour government`s harshest critic. Local activists are equally tough on their own MP, but none of us would be sitting on parliament`s green benches without their dedicated, unpaid, out-in-all-weathers work, so quite right too.

Indeed, we have begun to deliver in those areas you touched on. But that`s what we`re supposed to do. That`s what we are for. Social justice, equality of opportunity, international brotherhood.

No brownie points for tacking poverty, disease, ignorance, prejudice. That`s why we came into being - not to engage in pre-emptive strikes against a deadly threat, whose potency and speed of delivery becomes more hollow every passing day; not to ally the UK with the US in such a subservient position; not to make enemies of European allies.

I`ve not called for a change of government, lifelong yellow-dog Labourite that I am, but I get the distinct impression that the party is viewed by the PM as a somewhat awkward hindrance rather than helpmeet, and the country as UK plc, an unwieldy business requiring tough management.

Not much room for vision plus practical politics in that prospectus. The modernisation or radical reform - I can`t remember the latest buzz word - of public services will only be achieved by engaging the expertise of those who deliver them. If the provider - the doctor, the teacher, the train driver - is perceived as the stumbling block to a better NHS, higher standards in schools, trains arriving and leaving when they should, forget it. It is so simplistic to pit service provider against purchaser. In public services the provider is also the purchaser, so why make unnecessary difficulties? Why push through foundation hospitals in the teeth of almost total opposition from unions and health professionals?

And how will paying £1 to become a member of a hospital - hospitals which I, in my naivety, thought were already publicly owned - produce anything other than the bore of having to find time to pay it or irritation at demands because we haven`t? Education is my next concern in this exchange.

Incidentally, being "better than any available alternative" is faint praise from such a fighter for democratic socialism, surely.
Best wishes,
Glenda

Dear Glenda,
You seem to be saying that we are doing the business in a great many areas but that we should encourage the PM to take a long walk off a short plank because he is not doing absolutely everything.

My point about collectivism was that the PM is not the sole determinant of government policy - just ask the Treasury! - and that we seem to be making the elementary mistake of personalising the issue.

You make very valid criticisms about Iraq, but if Mr Blair has to fall on his sword for this then what about the cabinet ministers who supported him and the MPs who backed him in the lobbies. There would only be you, Bob Marshall-Andrews and Diane Abbott left.

I may come across as a Northolt version of Dr Pangloss but I feel that we are finally moving towards a more collegiate style of government. Look at the way in which the government listened on fox hunting and foundation hospitals. It is tragic that we allowed the paranoia of 1992-97 to bind us for so long, but there is a discernable thaw.

I am entirely in agreement with you in respect of the need for us to engage more closely with the rest of Europe and I weep for a world dominated by America. Can Europe be the Greeks to their Romans? Lofty thoughts to distract me as I struggle with the menace of teenage hooligans on the Northolt Grange estate.
Keep the faith,
Steve

Dear Stephen,
The PM appeared to have no difficulty in presenting himself as sole UK determinant for the war on Iraq, in his "take me, take me I`m yours" speech to the US congress - a war, which, if no WMDs are found, will surely, have been illegal. And verdicts are usually delivered by electorates. Their time span is somewhat shorter than that employed by history.

As a product of that historic government of 1945, my concerns stem not from having not done everything, but from the seeming inability to equate trust in the people of this country with hanging on to power. I`m not arguing for turning the clock back in referring to that radical reforming government of `45, but it believed, as I still do, that the nations greatest natural resource is its people. That given the opportunity, their energy, creativity, humanity and innate decency could transform, for the better, not only their lives, but our country and the world. And yes, everything wasn`t done then, but lives were positively transformed.

Trust has become a suspicion, that so fickle are we, straight talk, verifiable facts, sharing the thinking behind policy announcements and acknowledging the responsibilities that power also brings, must be avoided, at all costs. We`re better, and we deserve better, than that, but until serious concerns are taken seriously, I can`t see it happening. Incidentally, my "education next", was not a call for you to demonstrate yours, with the Voltairean reference; and as for government being all ears with regard to fox-hunting and foundation hospitals - before they heard us on the former we`d shouted ourselves hoarse, and on the latter you are being wickedly ironic, aren`t you?
Glenda

Dear Glenda,
I wasn`t being lairy with the Voltaire reference. Those of us who left school at 15 with no qualifications and damn little hope rather cherish the learning that we manage to scoop up in later life.

You know all about the poverty of expectations and I find it all the more remarkable that someone with your background can set out on a course of action that can only give aid and comfort to the enemy and threaten what Labour has delivered - and can still deliver.

Call for the PM to resign by all means, but please be aware of how that plays outside in the real world. We look fractious and divided, and will lose marginal seats.

I am not a "Blairite" and have never had a conversation with him in my life - I actually voted for Margaret Beckett - but Mr Blair is the leader of our party and I have no nostalgia for the years of opposition when we may have pleasured ourselves with ideological purity but we did nothing for the working people of this country.

You are such an important figure in the party that your words deservedly carry great weight; I pray that you will come to see the corrosive effect that these words have.

Our opponents relish your attacks on the PM, surely that can`t give you any satisfaction?
All the best,
Steve

Dear Stephen,
If, by comfort to the enemy, you mean the official opposition, didn`t they vote for the war? Wasn`t their criticism of foundation hospitals that they won`t be `independent` enough? Independent presumably of the NHS, which they intend, apparently, to starve to death along with every other public service.

What about those other enemies - apathy, cynicism, rejection not only of politicians, but the whole political process, sheer disbelief and mistrust? And perhaps that most dangerous enemy of all, poverty of aspiration, not only for ourselves and party, but country and world. The corrosive effects of these enemies are infinitely more damaging than the opinions of one unimportant (nice try by the way), albeit dedicated, party member.

You must remember those schoolkids who for several days demonstrated outside parliament, voicing their opposition to the war, even while it was being fought. Those I met and spoke with were not playing hooky. They were well informed, deeply concerned and angry. They are close to voting age. Will they actually make it to the ballot box if we seem to be so nervous of rocking the boat, or if we avoid even considering it may have sprung a leak?

I need no reminder of when the party inflicted wounds upon itself, when contemplation of the collective rule book navel seemed to be all we were capable of.

Nor have I forgotten the national mood post Election day `97, nor the PM`s statement that his government was the servant of the people. Isn`t that why we went through the necessary but hard-won reformation of the party, why we joined in the first place, why we stand for election? As John Smith said, "to serve" to the best of our ability.

We, in common, with our backbench colleagues, are frequently dismissed as mere "lobby-fodder". We are not doing our best if that awkward, questioning, persistent electorate becomes "ballot-fodder", an irritant to be handled - not heeded.

I don`t accept your analysis that we`ll lose the next election if critics don`t develop laryngitis, but I`m rapidly developing writer`s cramp, so here`s to the next time.
Glenda

Dear Glenda,
I just can`t accept that there is a diabolical plan within the rarefied reaches of Downing Street to starve public services to death.

There are actually 200,000 more public service workers than in May 1997- and a good thing too!

I am not urging Trappist vows on anyone - not that such urgings would do much good - but some of the attacks on the leadership are so over the top that they debase the currency of political debate. If you`ve given up on the Labour party and this government completely then I regret it but personally but feel the need to keep up the struggle. Not because I believe that a Socialist nirvana is round the corner but because we can build the decent, fair and equal society that this country deserves.

It may never be perfect, and there will be awful errors, but I believe it is worth fighting for.
Yours in the trenches,
Steve

· Stephen Pound is Labour MP for Ealing North. Glenda Jackson is Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

White House urged to reveal Saudi links with al-Qa`ida
By David Usborne in New York
26 July 2003


The White House came under fresh pressure last night to launch an aggressive investigation into claims that Saudi Arabia thwarted American efforts to investigate al-Qa`ida before the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001. Democrats also called for a inquiry into allegations that the kingdom might have, wittingly or unwittingly, channelled money to the hijackers.

The Democrats want President George Bush to declassify 28 pages of a congressional report on the failures of US intelligence in the run-up to the attacks. The censored pages reportedly detail possible Saudi culpability.

Officials who have knowledge of the full report say the missing pages, withheld at the insistence of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for "national security reasons", specifically examine whether one of America`s allies was implicated in the attacks. One declassified section reveals that the investigation found "information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the 11 September hijackers while they were in the United States". The officials were quoted as confirming that one source was Saudi Arabia.

But there still seemed to be no incontrovertible evidence that officials of the kingdom knowingly supported the hijackers. Indeed, the report suggests further investigation of these allegations "could reveal legitimate, and innocent, explanations for these associations".

Even without the missing pages becoming public, the report, which contains the findings of a seven-month inquiry by the Senate and House of Representatives, is critical of Riyadh for failing to help in probing al-Qa`ida. "It was clear from about 1996 that the Saudi government would not co-operate with the United States on matters related to Osama bin Laden," it said.

The CIA reportedly insisted that the 28 pages be kept secret out of fear of damaging relations with Saudi Arabia. Senator Bob Graham, the Democrat presidential hopeful, who was chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said: "I remain deeply disturbed by the amount of material censored from this report."

The report paints a bleak picture of missed opportunities by US intelligence agencies and breakdowns in communications between them. But it does not uncover any "smoking gun" event that would have given US authorities the date and place of the attacks before they happened. The document will be examined by an independent commission charged by Congress to continue investigating what went wrong in the intelligence community that allowed the plot to take its course.

The renewed focus on the alleged link between Saudi Arabia and the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi-born, has prompted a furious response from its government. The allegations were "malicious and blatantly false", the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, said, adding that Riyadh had been trying to investigate al-Qa`ida in co-operation with the US.

That co-operation was stepped up in May this year when Saudi Arabia suffered its own suicide bombings, that left 34 dead.

The Prince said: "Rumours, innuendoes and untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the day. Twenty-eight blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people. Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages."

Richard Clarke, a US counter-terrorism expert, said: "I think the Saudi government was throwing around a lot of money to dubious organisations without trying to determine who was asking for it, and that a lot of the money got to al-Qa`ida."
26 July 2003 09:44

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

Hunt for arms `is being hampered by lack of experienced inspectors`
By Anne Penketh
26 July 2003


Weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq because the "wrong experts" are there, former United Nations weapons inspectors say.

The inspectors said yesterday that inadequate pay, and possibly a disinclination by the US to allow experts associated with the UN to take credit for any weapons finds, were at the root of the problem.

The former UN experts who worked for Unscom teams in the 1990s in Iraq are considered the leading experts in chemical, biological, nuclear weapons and missile technology.

But only now have such experienced hands begun to be sent to Iraq as part of the US-led Iraq Survey Group.

Richard Spertzel, a top American expert on germ warfare who led the Unscom biological weapons team, suggests politics are to blame. He said he was "all set to go in April. But at the 13th hour, someone decided I wasn`t going".

Mr Spertzel was asked by the US authorities in February to draw up a list of former Unscom experts who could carry on the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

He named 20 people, including nine Britons and four Australians. The rest were from America. Only now have three of the British experts on the list arrived in Iraq: Hamish Killop, a specialist in weapons delivery systems, and the chemical experts Peter Hackett and Rod Godfrey.

Another former UN inspector suggested that the delays were caused by pay negotiations, and that the three Britons had obtained big pay increases on the original offer.

"They offered us all the same rate at first, and treated us as temporary middle-grade civil servants," the expert said. "They wanted to pay us half of what we were earning at the UN. I would rather work for nothing than accept those terms. There are people in Iraq who have biology and chemistry degrees. But this is not an easy job. It took us a year to get up to speed. So it doesn`t surprise me if they haven`t found anything."

The experts contacted by The Independent all remain convinced from their own experience of dealing with Saddam Hussein`s regime that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq.

Rolf Ekeus, chief UN weapons inspector, from 1991 to 1997, said the 200 to 300 "searchers" of the Iraq Survey Group seemed to be going about their work in the wrong way. "They are just looking for agents, instead of looking at the capabilities. You cannot do it without the science," he said.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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July 26, 2003

Dilemma of where to bury sons of Saddam
From James Hider in Baghdad



THE United States moved closer yesterday to convincing sceptical Iraqis that its forces killed Uday and Qusay Hussein this week, after cleaning up the bodies of the men and inviting TV networks to film them in a makeshift mortuary.
But the coalition found itself in a dilemma over what to do with the patched-up bodies, keen to respect the Muslim tradition of a swift burial but reluctant to provide graves that could be vulnerable to desecration, or even a shrine for Saddam loyalists.

A spokesman for the coalition-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Hoshyar Zebari, said that the bodies should be handed over to a Muslim cleric for burial away from the spotlight of news cameras.

A media carnival has sprung up since their deaths in a gunfight on Tuesday, as the Pentagon struggled to convince sceptical Iraqis that their oppressors really were gone for good. Initial photographs of Uday and Qusay, released on Thursday under growing pressure from a doubting Iraqi public, were barely recognisable. Their faces were covered in thick beards and in the gore of their final stand against the US 101st Airborne Division in a barricaded villa in Mosul.

Yesterday’s new footage, broadcast on Arabic satellite channels, proved far more convincing. Uday’s disfigured face had been reconstructed with mortician’s putty, and the metal plate inserted into his leg after a 1996 assassination attempt was displayed on the morgue table. Qusay’s waxen face was clean-shaven except for his trademark military moustache, making him recognisable to many Iraqis sitting in cafés after Friday prayers.

“I’m sure it’s them, and I know because I saw them up close several times,” said Hassan Hadj, a former member of the Iraqi Olympic martial arts team who fought matches in front of Saddam’s heirs. “Send our thanks to the US,” he added with a smile.

Coalition officials said that no decision had been made regarding the fate of the corpses, but they said that they were aware of the urgency of the matter, given the Muslim lore that bodies be buried within a day of death. “We’ll do everything to respect Islamic culture, although (Uday and Qusay) didn’t respect anyone themselves,” a spokeswoman said. “It is usual in Islamic society to hand over the bodies to the next of kin,” she added, admitting that that was also a stumbling block as the brothers’ relatives were either on the run or in custody.

The coalition is aware that a public grave could prove an easy target for revenge from Saddam’s many victims, and does not want to find itself in the embarrassing position of having to protect the graves of men who, had they lived, would have faced trial for crimes against humanity.

Many in Baghdad said the solution was to inter the men in unmarked graves, though some bridled at the idea that they should lie in Muslim cemeteries or even stay in Iraq. Mr Hadj said: “Get them out of my country.”

But Sheikh Abdulrahim al-Shumawi, the Sunni head of Baghdad’s as-Sadiq mosque, said: “You must bury them, this is Islamic law. I think they should not be buried in a Muslim graveyard, I do not consider them Muslims. What Saddam and his sons did is beyond the pale of any religion.”

In the predominantly Shia area of al-Qaddumiya, there was more hostility from a community that was for years at the sharp end of Saddam’s repression. Mustafa Ghasul, the Kurdish owner of a television shop overlooked by the domes of the main Shia mosque, said: “Islam says we should bury them, but they were very evil. They should be buried in a garbage heap, not in a Muslim cemetery. Their death was too good for them too. I wish they had been arrested and then all the people of Iraq could have lined up to beat them to death with their sandals.”

But for those Sunnis who still nurse a nostalgia for the leader they saw as a strong Arab standing up to Western imperialism, Uday and Qusay should be given a full burial in a respectable cemetery.

Smoking a water pipe in a popular café, Mukhaled Mohammed, a car dealer, expressed his admiration for Uday and Qusay. “No one can say they’re not Muslims. In any case, I’m sure it wasn’t them,” he said, although his composure started to crack as the café’s TV flashed images of the spruced-up corpses, and the rest of the jubilant clientele pronounced themselves convinced. “They look like plastic, that’s not them,” insisted Mr Mohammed, as his eyes reddened and he struggled to control his emotions.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-757052,00.html

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July 26, 2003

`You can`t be personal, I don`t want to know he had four kids`
by james bone



JIM QUINN tries not to pay too much attention to the radio news when he takes his morning shower. He does not want to know about the bodies he may encounter later in the day.
The beefy US Air Force sergeant works in the only military mortuary in America, in the East Coast state of Delaware. The Dover base receives all the human remains — the military calls them HRs — of American service personnel killed in Iraq.

“You do not want to get personalised with the remains coming through, know who they are and who their families are. I don’t want to know he had four kids,” Sergeant Quinn said. “To do it day after day, you have to maintain the separation. Personally, the most difficult part of the entire operation is the handling of personal effects, where you might find a wallet with a photo in it.”

With the American death toll mounting in Iraq, these are busy days at Dover Air Force morgue, one of only three US military mortuaries in the world — the others are at Landstuhl, Germany, and Kadena, Japan.

So far 44 US soldiers have been killed in ambushes and sniper attacks in Iraq since President Bush declared “major hostilities” over on May 1. On this morning three bodies have arrived for identification, embalming and preparation for delivery in full dress uniform to their families.

“The way I get through it is to look at it this way: all my casualties who come through here gave the ultimate sacrifice in battle,” Sergeant Quinn said. “No matter how hard I worked, I get to go home and see my wife and kids every night. That is my reward.”

Normally, Dover receives only two or three car crash victims or accidental shooting casualties a month from US bases in Europe. At the height of the Iraq war, the mortuary increased its staff from seven to 200. With soldiers being killed almost daily, there are still 50 people working there.

The base’s fleet of 36 giant grey C-5 transport aircraft fly a virtual shuttle service to Germany and Iraq, carrying everything from food to tanks. Their cargo now regularly includes aluminium cases containing body bags packed in ice.

The bodies receive a “dignified transfer” in a flag-draped coffin at Dover on their way to the mortuary. They are X-rayed for explosives, such as a forgotten grenade or unused bullet, and formally identified using DNA, fingerprints or dental records. The embalming is carried out by civilian undertakers employed by the Pentagon. Bob Bauer, a former undertaker who has been at the base for nine years, said: “The trauma is not comparable to the normal civilian death when someone dies in a hospital. There is a sense of satisfaction because I can help.”

The mortuary staff keep a collection of dress uniforms, medals and regimental patches from all branches of the armed services so that the bodies can be shipped to the family, if possible for the customary open-casket funeral.

But some are too badly maimed for that. Sergeant Quinn said: “Maybe three out of four are viewable. If you have a fire it’s a whole different story, like a helicopter crash.”

Everyone who serves at Dover pays the utmost respect to the fallen soldiers. Although the bodies usually arrive by plane at about midnight, people stop their cars and salute as the coffins are driven from the runway to the mortuary.

Major Jeff Yocum, the Commander of 436 Services Squadron, who is in charge of the mortuary, said: “People in the military have a heightened sense of what is going on there because we have all sworn to pay the ultimate sacrifice, as these men and women are doing over there. We all realise that there but for the grace of God, go I.” The continuing casualties distress military families who live near the base. Jay Stuart, whose wife serves in the Air Force, said: “I wish we were not (in Iraq) because we are losing guys for no reason. I hate to think of all the families who are losing people.”

Pam Magagnotti, whose son serves in the military, said that the casualties were bad but “I think we will stay. I hope so, even though I do not want to see people die.”

Aaron Baldwin, whose parents were in the service, said: “As long as they are doing a good mission they should stay there because sometimes casualties will happen in war. But if they are not making a difference and it gets too costly, we should pull back.”


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-757053,00.html

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July 26, 2003

The beginning or the end
Blairism will have to become more Blairite

It was during yet another of those terrible economic crises that hit the 1974 Labour Government that Harold Wilson’s loyal press secretary realised his boss had finally had enough. Wilson turned to Joe Haines and lamented that all he had left were old solutions and old ideas. Inevitably, it was not long before he resigned.
The usual form is for politicians to leave while their allies beg them to stay. Harold Wilson’s close aide Lady Falkender, for instance, was desperate for him to delay his departure. Margaret Thatcher’s team were desolate when she went. Tony Blair seems to be doing things differently. He appears to be settling in for the long haul while his allies head for the exit.

News that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s director of communications and strategy, is considering his options comes on top of similar reports about Jonathan Powell, the Downing Street chief of staff. Anji Hunter, the Prime Minister’s long-serving aide, has already left for industry; Alan Milburn quit on his own terms; and Peter Mandelson and Stephen Byers were forced out. The tight group of Blairites who arrived in power together in 1997 is breaking up.

Mr Campbell’s decision to leave Mr Blair’s side, if and when it comes, will be much the most serious. He has been far more than a press spokesman. He is Mr Blair’s closest adviser, his sounding board and one of few with the courage to tell the Prime Minister exactly what he thinks, occasionally in the most graphic terms. These are all things a top politician needs and are all very difficult to replace.

Often overly aggressive and a person whose obsessiveness can lead to serious errors of judgment, he has nonetheless proved a highly effective manager of the Government’s media operation. For some on the Left, his name is synonymous with betrayal, the replacement of true “radicalism” with media management. For some on the Right he is the master of “spin”, but is also irritatingly good at his job. His recent appearance before a parliamentary select committee emphasised that his political skills were a class above those of the politicians. When he goes, it is his role as a lightning rod for criticism that Mr Blair may miss first.

While these subjective strictures from Left and Right contain an element of truth, they are not the most important criticism of Mr Campbell or the Blair team. The problem is not that they have been too Blairite; it is that they have not been Blairite enough. For all the promises made to modernise Britain and replace the old Left with a new political force, Tony Blair’s Britain remains too similar to the one he inherited. There are also signs that his extraordinary transformation of the Labour Party may not last. The plans to transform public services seem to have given way to a series of small initiatives accompanied by a large spending increase. Labour has once again become the party of higher taxation.

If Mr Blair’s Government is to live up to its initial promise, it needs a burst of creative energy and a good deal of robust courage in confronting the naysayers. The Prime Minister cannot do this alone. He needs to be surrounded by people with enthusiasm, an appetite for success and a genuine belief in his ideas. Those in his team who have lost this appetite would be right to leave. Mr Blair must find worthy successors.

If the Prime Minister elects to play out his political days, surrounded by those (usually highly competent but slightly detached) individuals that the Civil Service machine provides, then the rest of his premiership will be an exercise in mediocrity. He must forge a new team ready to do the things left undone by their predecessors. The Prime Minister can choose — is Blairism almost over or has it just begun?


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-756921,00.html

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G.I.`s arrested several Iraqis Friday in Al Fahhama, a Baghdad suburb. The soldiers said two of the men were suspected in two killings this week.
July 26, 2003
Iraqi Informants` Tips Grow After Brothers` Deaths
By ERIC SCHMITT


WASHINGTON, July 25 — In the three days since American soldiers killed Saddam Hussein`s sons, informants have produced a stream of new tips, some of which have led to major raids in the last 24 hours alone, military officers in Iraq said today.

On Thursday night, American forces raided a house south of Mr. Hussein`s hometown, Tikrit, capturing nearly a dozen people suspected of being his personal bodyguards and enhancing the allies` chances of finding the deposed dictator, officers said. In a second operation, soldiers seized more than 45,000 sticks of dynamite.

"I believe that we continue to tighten the noose, and I believe that we continue to gain more and more information about where he might be," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the Army`s Fourth Infantry Division, said from Tikrit in a video teleconference at the Pentagon.

The seizure of the suspected bodyguards provided another lift to American military commanders in Iraq, who said the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein in a fierce shootout on Tuesday in the northern city of Mosul had coincided with a surge in tips from Iraqis offering information about suspected supporters of Mr. Hussein.

"It is fair to say that we are seeing an increase in people coming forward," said a military official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But it`s too early to say why. They may feel more confident now that the threat has been removed."

General Odierno said that of the 13 people seized in the raid south of Tikrit, "somewhere between 5 and 10 of those — we`re still sorting through it — are believed to be Saddam Hussein`s personal security detachment." He said interrogators had just started questioning the suspected bodyguards, and it was unclear how recently they might have been with Mr. Hussein.

Their capture is significant because it occurred so near to Mr. Hussein`s hometown, an area where many people claim a fierce loyalty to Mr. Hussein, and on whom he lavished money and resources during his long rule. In April, on the eve of his 66th birthday, Tikritis poured into the streets to celebrate.

Even before the deaths of the two sons, General Odierno said, the number of Iraqis passing along information to American forces had been increasing in the last two to three weeks. "They are coming in," he said. "And it`s because they feel confident we will action on it."

An officer with the 101st Airborne Division, which led the assault on the Hussein sons` safehouse on Tuesday in Mosul, said more informants were coming forward in his unit`s area.

"We have had a large number of tips as well," the officer said in an e-mail message. "We have also been conducting an increasing number of raids, partly because of the tips and partly in response to the recent successful attacks against our soldiers."

General Odierno, a native of Rockaway Township, N.J., described in detail a second major raid.

"Last night, we had an Iraqi walk into one of my brigade headquarters and say, `I know where there`s a cache of weapons,` " he said. "He gave us the grid. He said, `There`s a house, and then 200 meters from that house, there is a container buried under the ground.` So we sent our patrol out there."

At a house in the town of Samarra, south of Tikrit, the search party turned up 10 AK-47 assault rifles, 34 grenade launchers and 150 rounds of ammunition for them, 80,000 feet of demolition cord, 45,000 sticks of dynamite and assorted firearms, General Odierno said.

He said attacks against the 27,000 Army forces under his command, in a region that ranges from outside Baghdad north to Kirkuk and east to the Iranian border, had been cut in half in the last month because of incessant pressure by military patrols and the capture of 1,000 Baath Party supporters, foreign fighters and other guerrillas.

"We`ve taken out some of the midlevel leaders that helped to organize them locally," he said.

But General Odierno warned of possible car bombings and suicide bombers, and said that while attacks were fewer in numbers, they were becoming more sophisticated. He said the guerrillas were using remote-controlled bombs that could be detonated from about 500 yards away, and wire-controlled explosives that could be set off from more than a mile away.

Officers in other divisions concurred. "The lethality and sophistication of the attacks has increased in the past week," said the officer assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. "All the intel folks are scrambling to figure out whether this is in retaliation for killing Uday and Qusay, a change in tactics or something else. The culture really values the concept of `an eye for an eye."

General Odierno said the attacks had been organized locally, not nationally, but were the work of guerrilla groups that had specific hierarchies.

"We do believe there`s somewhat of an organization," he said. "There is a very local level where there`s a guy who has money, there`s somebody who`s responsible for caching weapons, and there`s a guy who pays individuals to do attacks on American soldiers."

Die-hard supporters of Mr. Hussein are also stepping up their attacks against "softer targets," nonmilitary ones like civilian Iraqis who are cooperating with the allies.

"We see this more as a desperation move," General Odierno said. "And I think in a way, it`s backfiring, because we`ve found when they do this, it`s causing more Iraqis to come in and give us information."

As for prospects of finding Mr. Hussein, "we continue to police-up individuals that have a relationship with him," the general said, adding that American forces had even talked to one of Mr. Hussein`s former wives about where he could be hiding.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 24, 2003
Q&A: What`s Preventing Other Nations from Sending Peacekeepers to Iraq?

From the Council on Foreign Relations, July 24, 2003


What`s preventing other nations from sending troops to stabilize Iraq?

A key reason is that many nations--particularly those that opposed the war--are reluctant to send soldiers unless steps are taken that would, in their view, increase the mission`s international legitimacy. Discussions have begun on a new U.N. Security Council resolution that could address this issue by strengthening the U.N. role in Iraq, but these talks are at an early stage.

What are some of the other reasons?

The war was broadly unpopular in most countries, so many world leaders fear a domestic political backlash if they agree to contribute to a U.S.-led occupation force. This is particularly true because the mission is dangerous, and casualties among peacekeepers are expected. In some cases, feelings are still bruised from the bitter U.N. debates that preceded the war. Also, some nations are generally reluctant to place troops under a U.S., rather than multinational, command.

What`s the status of negotiations on a new resolution?

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has indicated that the United States could consider another resolution if it would lead to more foreign troops in Iraq. Initial discussions have reportedly begun with France, Germany, and Russia. But the idea was not discussed at length at the July 22 Security Council meeting on Iraq and no resolutions have yet been drafted. "I don`t think there`s anything quite going to the point yet of whether somebody--us or somebody else--might put forward a resolution. It`s a matter of discussion," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Why is the Bush administration considering more U.N. involvement?

Largely because things aren`t going as smoothly in Iraq as some Washington planners had hoped, creating military and political pressures on the administration to share the burdens of peacekeeping.

What are the political pressures?

The administration is taking fire from Capitol Hill for its failure to attract a broader peacekeeping coalition, and the near-daily deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is a political liability, says Lee Feinstein, a U.N. expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

What are the military pressures?

Many U.S. forces in Iraq are worn out and largely unprepared to perform policing and peacekeeping tasks. In addition, the large numbers of U.S. forces makes them an easy target for insurgents, who may be less inclined to attack non-U.S. soldiers. Including soldiers from countries that opposed the war in the peacekeeping force could also help mend the relationships that were strained in the dispute over the war, some experts say.

What are the U.S. reservations toward another resolution?

While President Bush called for more assistance from other nations in an Iraq speech July 23, some experts say the United States does not yet seem willing to yield authority to other nations. "The United States wants to share the burden and risk, promote legitimacy, and yet retain the basic control as the occupying force in Iraq," says Arthur Helton, the director of peace and conflict studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Because there is considerable anti-U.N. sentiment in the Bush administration, many officials are reluctant to award the United Nations greater authority. Prewar rifts at the United Nations continue to contribute to an atmosphere of distrust on both sides, says Edward Luck, a U.N. expert at Columbia University.

What countries have called for additional U.N. authorization?

France, Russia, Germany, India, Pakistan, and Portugal, among others.

What`s the significance of India`s decision to withhold troops?

India`s government announced July 14 that it needed additional U.N. authorization before it would send troops to Iraq. The decision was particularly disturbing to U.S. officials, who had hoped for 17,000 Indian soldiers to help relieve the 147,000 U.S. and 12,000 U.K. troops in Iraq, some of whom have been deployed to the Middle East since well before hostilities began in March. India, some experts say, is also a bellwether for other developing nations that will perhaps follow New Delhi`s lead on the Iraq peacekeeping issue.

Are countries that supported the war already committed to sending troops?

Some are, but there is growing concern in Washington that their contributions will not be enough. Albania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, and Ukraine are expected to contribute some 20,000 to 30,000 troops over the next three months, according to U.S. officials. In addition, some 18 nations have already sent small contingents (totaling about 1,000 soldiers) of mostly non-combat troops to Iraq.

What resolution regulates the current U.S. authority in Iraq?

Resolution 1483, which recognizes the United States and Great Britain as occupying powers in Iraq until a "representative, internationally recognized government" is formed. President Bush--as well as representatives of the Iraqi Governing Council who addressed the United Nations July 22--says this resolution provides nations with all the legitimacy they need to support the occupation.

What would a new resolution say? Some experts predict it could give the United Nations more explicit authority over some aspects of Iraq`s reconstruction, but not hand it full responsibility for peacekeeping. Luck says a resolution could include some or all of the following:

authorize and encourage nations to contribute forces to a U.S.-led occupying authority--or, less likely, create a separate U.N. force that would work side by side with the occupiers;
broaden the U.N. role in forming a new Iraqi government and managing Iraq`s economy;
authorize a formal U.N. mission for Iraq;
require periodic reporting to the Security Council about the progress in Iraq;
recognize the Iraqi Governing Council as a positive step toward Iraqi self-rule.

Would a second resolution persuade many more nations to send troops?

It`s unclear, because so far, even those nations seeking a second resolution--such as Germany and France--have not promised to send troops if one passes, says Feinstein.

It also depends on the resolution`s contents. Some leaders may insist that their soldiers serve as peacekeepers under U.N., rather than U.S., command, while others may be satisfied with contributing to a U.N.-authorized force led by the United States. Money is another concern for some nations; Pakistan`s President Pervez Musharraf, for example, has said he would need financial assistance to send peacekeepers. In addition, some nations may seek concessions from the coalition--such as greater access to lucrative contacts to rebuild Iraq--as part of an agreement to send troops, some experts say.

http://www.cfr.org/

Copyright 2003

[Joerver]

July 24, 2003
Q&A: New U.N. Resolution on Iraq

From the Council on Foreign Relations, July 24, 2003


Lee Feinstein, the Council on Foreign Relations` deputy director of studies and director of strategic policy, says Washington should trade firm financial and troop commitments from other nations in return for U.S. support of a new U.N. resolution. Most countries, he says, "are still reluctant to send troops to be part of an Anglo-American occupation force." What`s needed, Feinstein adds, is a new resolution to create a peacekeeping force that would work side by side with the U.S. and British troops.

Feinstein was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on July 24, 2003.

There has been increasing discussion about getting the United Nations more deeply involved in Iraq, both for financial and security reasons. What is the outlook for an enhanced U.N. role?

It depends on whom in the administration you are listening to. On Wednesday in the Rose Garden, President Bush urged other nations to contribute "militarily and financially" to Iraq. At about the same time, the acting Army Chief of Staff, General John M. Keane, said that unless there are significantly more foreign troops deployed in Iraq, he`ll have difficulty mustering enough forces over the medium and long term. So the administration, having kept foreign participation off the agenda for a long time, has now clearly changed its tune. President Bush also seemed to suggest in the Rose Garden that the existing Security Council resolution, Resolution 1483, provided ample authority for foreign participation.

Does it?

What the president implied is technically true and politically false. The truth is that this war was opposed by most of the rest of the world. And even though Security Council Resolution 1483 passed unanimously, most countries are still reluctant to send troops to be part of an Anglo-American occupation force.

On Thursday, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin urged passage of a new Security Council resolution that would open the way for U.N. control of the occupation. Do you think this is possible, given the American reluctance to give up control?

There are several issues. Secretary of State Colin Powell floated--and seems clearly to support--the idea of an additional Security Council resolution. Presumably, a new resolution would mandate a peacekeeping force under a U.N. umbrella for the participation of non-American, non-British troops. The idea would be, as is the case in the Balkans and Afghanistan, to have a U.N.-blessed operation. It wouldn`t be a U.N.-run operation. It would probably be run by NATO or an individual country.

The United States, for example?

The peacekeeping force would not have to be run by the United States. I think it could be run by somebody else. Of course, the Coalition Provisional Authority has a special status, and its relationship with the peacekeeping force would have to be worked out. The Afghan analogy is the closest. There, you have an American force operating under American command, engaged in what you might call a "stabilization operation." It is really at war still, looking for al Qaeda remnants. You also have ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force), which is a peacekeeping force. It is blessed by the United Nations but not run by the United Nations. [It is currently run jointly by Germany and the Netherlands]. It operates in the same country and at the same time as the U.S.-led war-fighting force. What you would add in Iraq is some kind of command relationship with British and American forces. This is the basic idea that Colin Powell is putting forward. So far, the White House hasn`t said if it is buying it.

Does the Pentagon oppose it?

It is unclear. The Pentagon wants more foreign participation, but it hasn`t yet said what price it is ready to pay for that participation. What you have is a "be careful what you ask for" situation. The United States wanted Resolution 1483 to give it and the British essentially full authority for security and stabilization in Iraq. It got that. But the price it is now paying is reluctance by other countries to lend their military support or even their financial support to the Iraq operation.

What would you advocate?

I think the Afghan analogy is the starting point. You can have a peacekeeping force that exists side by side with the stabilization force. You could structure it in such a way that it would not interfere with the predominant Anglo-American role on the ground.

But I would only do this if I got a commitment from our European allies to make their troops available. Right now, the Europeans are saying they will not participate unless they get this resolution. But they are not saying they will participate militarily or financially even if they do get it. I would want to get the commitment from France and also from Germany. The positions are very interesting. The Germans, for example, are saying they want a new U. N. resolution. They are also saying that if they get the resolution, they still will not deploy any troops. Well, even if they are not going to deploy troops, at least you want to extract from them a very strong financial commitment.

It is hard to see what Villepin is up to. Maybe he is just trying to create some negotiating space. It is a non-starter to give the United Nations authority over all the stabilization in Iraq. First and foremost, the United Nations doesn`t have the capability to do it. Second, the United Nations won`t want to do it. And third, the United States would not allow it.

But a new resolution would allow India to send troops, for instance?

Yes. Clearly, some in the administration were disappointed that the Indians said they would not participate without a U.N. resolution. But this is missing the big picture. It was unimaginable even a couple of years ago that India would send a large number of troops to work side by side with the United States. This is an indication of how dramatically India-U.S. relations have changed. So, [a resolution] is a very small price for getting highly competent troops in the region that would help us out.

We only have 10 active divisions in the U. S. Army right now. As bogged down as it is in Iraq, could the Army deal with North Korea if there is a military confrontation?

There are several issues here. One is numbers. More than a decade after the cold war, people are raising the question whether the army is big enough. Amazingly, this president and secretary of defense are making that point. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, in particular, has been a critic of the army and has been putting pressure on it to trim down. So this would be a 180. But you have a problem, not only with the size but also the composition of the force. For a long time now, predating 9/11, it has been clear that there haven`t been enough policing or psychological-operations troops in the active forces. There haven`t been adequate troops for nation building. It is about time we do something about this. Every time there is a military operation, we have to go through this ad hoc process of looking for spare cops around the world.

What`s the answer? To train a division or so just in militia or police work?

Yes. There`s been a preference to [train soldiers] as war fighters and not to engage in these kinds of civil-policing activities. But it is absolutely clear that you need many more troops trained for this purpose.

Should the United States send peacekeeping forces into Liberia?

Yes. There was an interesting story about President Bush reading an account of the failure of the United States to intervene in Rwanda [in 1994] to prevent genocide. Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winner [and author of "A Problem From Hell"], in writing about this, was told that President Bush wrote in the margins of this memo on Rwanda, "Not on my watch."

And while it is unlikely that we are going to face a genocidal situation in Liberia, it is still unconscionable, and very, very hard to understand why the United States has not yet made a decision to send troops. Particularly coming after President Bush`s trip to Africa, it erodes any credibility the United States might have built up in Africa about our commitment to that continent. The United States does not have to be in the lead in many parts of Africa. We have a situation where the British are in the lead in one place [Sierra Leone], and the French in another [the Congo], and regional organizations in Africa are taking the lead elsewhere. If there is any place in Africa where we have a responsibility, it is obviously in Liberia [founded in 1847 by freed American slaves], because of the historical ties. I think time is an enemy here. The longer we delay, the harder it is going to be to stabilize the situation to finalize the peace agreement. What people are talking about is not a tremendously large number of United States troops--about 2,000--to stabilize the situation and then, eventually, hand off to African troops.

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July 26, 2003
California Chaos

California is now rolling inexorably toward a rendezvous with potential political chaos that it does not need in its present fragile condition and that somebody in authority should have found a way to avoid. On Thursday, Cruz Bustamante, the lieutenant governor, set Oct. 7 as the date when Californians will vote on the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and — at the same time, on the same ballot — choose a new governor to replace him should he be booted from office.

Mr. Bustamante had no choice but to set a date for the recall vote once the required signatures had been collected. It is unclear whether he had any flexibility on the vote for a successor. He had originally indicated that he might limit the Oct. 7 ballot to the recall question. But he said on Thursday that state lawyers, having studied the California Constitution, had advised him to schedule the recall and the potential choice of a successor together.

This is unfortunate. Coupling the recall vote with the selection of a successor invites the election of a fringe candidate who could win with a tiny plurality in a multicandidate field. The reason is California`s low threshold for candidacy. Anyone with 65 valid signatures and $3,500 or, alternatively, 10,000 signatures can be on the ballot. One candidate is Darrell Issa, the Republican congressman from San Diego who helped underwrite the effort to collect the signatures needed to compel a recall, and four other Republicans are thinking of running. Since there is no limit on the number of candidates who can qualify, a new governor could take power with a relatively small fraction of the vote.

Mr. Davis now has 11 weeks to convince the public, for the second time in less than a year, that he is fit to keep running the state, the country`s largest. He promises to fight as fiercely as a "Bengal tiger." Meanwhile, Californians should be thinking of ways to revise their recall procedures. First, they should raise the bar for scheduling a recall — most states require a number of signatures equivalent to 25 percent of the voter turnout in the last election, but California requires only 12 percent.

Next, they should provide for a decent interval between any recall and the election of a successor. Such an interval would give both parties a chance to rally around a single candidate in an orderly manner. It would also produce better candidates. Right now, for instance, Democrats who might make plausible governors do not want to put their names on the ballot because that would legitimize what they understandably consider an unnecessary election.

The supporters of the recall present it as an exercise in direct democracy. But is it truly a democratic outcome when a candidate with a small fraction of the total vote can prevail over a legitimately elected sitting governor? Indeed, one of Mr. Davis`s strongest arguments is that throwing him out of office could open the door for a complete novice with only marginal support to be elected. Given California`s precarious finances, that is the last thing it needs now.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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July 26, 2003
In Iraq, a Justice System Worth Saving
By RICHARD COUGHLIN



CAMDEN, N.J.
When I agreed to travel to Iraq in May as part of a team of judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers to assess the Iraqi judicial system, my expectations were admittedly low. Two decades of Saddam Hussein`s selecting judges and undermining the courts, three wars, 12 years of international sanctions and the presence of an occupying army would put a strain on any legal system.

Thus I was not surprised to find a demoralized and marginalized legal community. The judges were Baath Party members, prosecutors were ineffective and defense lawyers were complacent. Corruption had been encouraged by Saddam Hussein as a way to weaken the courts and make the judges beholden to his whim. And the looting that followed the American-led invasion destroyed most courthouses. At first glance, the situation appeared hopeless.

However, I soon found reasons for hope. Many judges were Baathists in name only; some had reputations for honesty and fairness. Others, particularly older judges, had not been party members at all. The courage they had shown in retaining their integrity, often at great personal sacrifice, was inspiring. We also learned of judges and court workers who, anticipating the post-invasion looting, had hidden legal records in their homes. Some citizens had even guarded courthouses to prevent their destruction.

Our meetings with Iraqi bar associations and lawyers revealed a diverse corps of educated and capable attorneys who were ashamed of what the legal system had become. In two southern provinces, local bar associations had dismissed corrupt judges and elected temporary replacements. In other places, lawyers` groups had reorganized, declaring themselves independent of the Baathist-controlled Baghdad Lawyers Union.

Law students in Basra — many of them women — had formed independent student organizations and had forged links to nascent human rights groups around Iraq in an effort to provide everything from personal security to curriculum reform.

Another encouraging development was that many lawyers and judges had already identified the most pressing areas of reform: the role of prosecutors and the power of the police. Under Saddam Hussein, prosecutors were mere functionaries with no personal authority. They did not direct investigations and could not give orders to the police without permission from the Interior Ministry. In a system that permitted (and even encouraged) the use of coerced confessions, the results were horrifying.

According to the nation`s chief of public prosecutions — a relatively powerless administrator under Saddam Hussein, he cooperated fully with us — in the last five years 30 percent of the cases involved documented torture. The prosecutor told us that although many people convicted were obviously innocent, they were nevertheless sent to prison or killed on the basis of their confessions. As for those who resisted confessing, the consequences were unspeakable.

The coalition deserves credit for keeping the legal system largely in place while making basic changes. These include prohibiting the use of coerced confessions, establishing a suspect`s right to silence, and instituting the right to counsel at all critical stages. Still, over the long term, the Iraqi people will trust the system only if all corrupt judges, prosecutors and lawyers are removed and disciplined; if the workings of the courts become transparent; and if we decentralize a system that had been run with an iron hand out of Baghdad.

The early returns on the coalition`s efforts in these areas are mixed. Military units charged with reopening the courts have done a phenomenal job, from repairing buildings to providing security to seeing that judges and lawyers would be paid to come back. However, the military does not have the money or manpower to provide the training and supervision needed to restore credibility to the court system. Instead of a swift effort to recruit legal experts from America and elsewhere, there has been foot-dragging.

Perhaps the most notable example was the long delay in replacing Saddam Hussein`s laws with the comparatively progressive Iraqi Penal Code of 1969. Despite agreement among the coalition members in April that this was the best option, the change did not occur until last month. The delay, we were told, came because America`s coalition allies wanted the death penalty provisions in the code suspended, while Washington was steadfast in its insistence, apparently, that what`s good for Texas must be good for Iraq.

Likewise, while the coalition deserves credit for allowing Iraqi courts to handle on their own the skyrocketing number of court dockets, the occupiers` decision to establish a new Central Criminal Court in Baghdad to hear serious cases from around the country is a step backward. Not only is the tribunal`s name resonant of the Special Court that Saddam Hussein used to carry out his terror, placing it in the capital reinforced the perception among Iraqis that the coalition is yet another Baghdad-centric regime bent on eliminating local autonomy.

Changing such perceptions is crucial when you consider the legacy of the criminal justice system. When I was in Iraq a doctor from Basra told me that, after being jailed by the police some years ago, he refused to tell his inquisitors whatever it was they wanted to hear. Instead of beating him, he told me, they brought in his 3-month-old daughter. The interrogator tore the screaming infant`s eye out. When the desired answers were still not forthcoming, the questioner hurled the little girl against the concrete wall and smashed her skull.

After decades of such violence in the name of the law, gaining the trust of the people will be as difficult as it is vital. The American occupation carries with it certain obligations. It will take a modest investment of a well-organized group of lawyers and administrators who can work with the Iraqis on modernizing the courts and training judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers. This would not only be the fastest way to provide justice, it would also give the new Iraq a foundation built on respect for the rule of law and human rights.


Richard Coughlin is a federal public defender.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Aid workers rush an injured girl to a clinic yesterday, minutes after Liberian rebels shelled the capital of Monrovia.

Photo Credit: Chris Hondros -- Getty Images

washingtonpost.com
Marines Sent to Liberian Coast
President Directs Limited Role for 2,200 U.S. Troops

By Vernon Loeb and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 26, 2003; Page A01


President Bush directed the Pentagon to position a limited number of U.S. Marines off the coast of Liberia yesterday to assist the arrival of West African peacekeepers, as intensified fighting between government and rebel forces in the country`s capital drew renewed appeals for American help to end the violence.

U.S. defense officials said a three-ship Amphibious Ready Group with 2,200 Marines led by the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima would arrive in the region from the Mediterranean in early August, about the time Nigeria has pledged to dispatch the first battalion of Nigerian peacekeepers into Liberia.

But one senior U.S. official cautioned that the presence of the 2,200-member 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit did not necessarily mean that all or even most of the U.S. forces would go ashore to participate in a peacekeeping mission. Bush noted that the commitment of U.S. forces is only to support West African peacekeepers and said he expects the United Nations to be responsible for "relieving the U.S. troops in short order."

"We`re deeply concerned that the condition of the Liberian people is getting worse and worse and worse," Bush said during a Rose Garden appearance with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. "Aid can`t get to people. We`re worried about the outbreak of disease. And so our commitment is to enable [the Economic Community of West African States] to go in."

The president made his announcement as Monrovia, the Liberian capital, witnessed its worst violence in days as rebel forces bent on ousting President Charles Taylor pressed their offensive. Shells crashed into the U.S. Embassy grounds, and a daybreak mortar attack on a school packed with refugees killed at least 26 people and wounded more than 200, the Associated Press reported.

Bush`s order was broadcast over the radio in the capital while refugee families gathered bodies of men, women and children from the mortar attack. The announcement prompted some residents to question why U.S. forces had not yet arrived. "Why so late when people are dying?" said Momo Barley, standing in a street near the U.S. Embassy, according to the AP.

The delay in assembling a peacekeeping force has caused consternation by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as well as prominent African American politicians who have criticized the Bush administration for failing to act decisively enough to end the fighting.

Annan said he was "encouraged" by Bush`s announcement and that he hoped "it will bring some relief to the people of Liberia."

"I think what is important is to get the troops down as quickly as we can to deal with the humanitarian situation and pacify Monrovia and its environs," he said.

Before leaving for a trip to Africa this month, Bush raised expectations that he was preparing to send U.S. troops to help quell the violence in Liberia. But Pentagon officials and military officers have expressed wariness about sending troops to the country, warning of the dangers of such a peacekeeping mission and pointing to the added strain it would put on U.S. military forces already stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The senior U.S. official said there had been no "hard decision" on whether U.S. troops would actually go to Liberia, and he stressed that the troops would not engage in any peacekeeping mission. Instead, a limited number of troops might be used to make sure humanitarian aid is being distributed should a vanguard of Nigerian troops succeed in stabilizing the situation, the official said. The U.S. troops, if used, would withdraw after a full peacekeeping force arrived, he added.

A senior Pentagon official, however, denied that any decisions had been made limiting the duties to be performed by U.S. forces. The official said the Pentagon wanted to "determine what capabilities may be needed to assist" the Nigerian peacekeepers.

The Nigerians` arrival could be delayed, further complicating the U.S. response. U.N. officials in New York said privately that a senior Nigerian military officer meeting with U.S. and U.N. officials this week in Dakar, Senegal, had placed a number of conditions that would have to be met before Nigerian forces move into Liberia.

They said they need the aircraft to transport troops, assurances of funding to sustain three battalions of West African forces that would take part in the mission, and a plan to extract them if they are overwhelmed by local forces. They also want assurances that the mission will include forces from other countries.

"We are not talking in terms of not going," said Nigeria`s charge d`affaires at the United Nations, Ndekhedehe Effiong Ndekhedehe. But he said "there must be logistical support, and we expect other nations of the world to also contribute. Nigeria can and should not be expected to bear the entire cost."

The Nigerians have informed the United Nations that they are prepared to deploy their forces by Aug. 2 if their conditions are met and be fully operational within nine days. But the United States and the United Nations have not been able to meet their demands.

"I don`t think it`s going to happen," said one U.N. official, referring to the Nigerian deployment schedule. "I don`t blame the Nigerians."

Rebel leaders welcomed word of the American deployment, ordering their forces to cooperate and to cease fire. The rebels have repeatedly broken promises for a cease-fire, as have government forces led by Taylor. Bush repeated his demand yesterday that Taylor, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity by a U.N.-backed court, leave the country.

Leaders of international relief organizations said they thought the administration should send in troops much more quickly to bring about a cease-fire and end the suffering. "The West African troops are pretty close to ready, from what I understand," said Michael R. Wiest, chief of staff of Catholic Relief Services, a Baltimore-based relief organization that works in 90 countries around the world. "We obviously saw American Marines arrive in the embassy compound pretty quickly. From the point of view of humanitarian need, when would we have liked to have seen it? Several weeks ago."

The Congressional Black Caucus also criticized Bush for failing to immediately send troops to help quell the violence. "We expect him to do what is necessary . . . to stop this carnage," said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). "It is stalling at this point."

Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton said in New York that Bush`s plan for sending troops is insufficient. "It seems this administration`s foreign policy is indifferent, absolutely indifferent, when it comes to people of color."

Lynch reported from the United Nations. Staff Writer Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Seeking funds from other countries may be one task for James A. Baker

washingtonpost.com
Changes in Iraq Effort Debated
Ex-Secretary of State Baker May Be Asked to Help Bremer

By Mike Allen and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 26, 2003; Page A01


President Bush is contemplating major changes in the U.S. reconstruction of Iraq for the second time in three months, with the possible addition of one or more prominent figures to work alongside the U.S. administrator in a stepped-up effort to solicit international assistance, administration officials said yesterday.

The plan is being debated as the White House grapples with the enormousness of rebuilding the chaotic country. The administration is under pressure to demonstrate progress in order to maintain domestic support for the effort, which is costing the Pentagon about $4 billion a month.

"We`re confident of long-term success," a Bush aide said. "We need to show short-term success."

As part of the effort, the White House is considering asking several major figures, including former secretary of state James A. Baker III, to take charge of specific tasks such as seeking funds from other countries or restructuring Iraq`s debt. "A lot of different things are being discussed," a senior administration official said. "Nothing has happened yet."

Bush aides put Baker`s name forward yesterday as a prime candidate to work alongside L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq. Later in the day, a senior White House official said Baker was one of several prominent figures who might be asked to play a role and said that no decision had been made.

The official stressed that Bush continues to be pleased with Bremer and that changes in the postwar administration, known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, would be made only with his support. "This is a totally Bremer-driven process," the official said.

The disclosure about another possible restructuring underscores the administration`s concern about the rate of progress, despite assertions by Bush, Bremer and other senior officials this week that the effort is on track.

In another augmentation of the postwar structure, the administration plans to name Reuben Jeffery III, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who is now coordinating the federal aid aimed to help reconstruct Lower Manhattan, as Washington-based coordinator for the Iraq reconstruction effort.

Polls have shown U.S. voters are becoming increasingly impatient at the prospect of a large number of troops remaining in Iraq indefinitely, as the cost of the occupation rises and guerrilla attacks continue inflicting casualties long past the fall of Saddam Hussein`s government. During a visit to Washington this week, Bremer lobbied the Pentagon and Congress for more funds and personnel.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told reporters this week after a visit to Iraq that some important administration assumptions "turned out to underestimate the problem," and that some conditions "were worse than we anticipated." Some officials involved in the occupation planning have complained that the administration underestimated the armed resistance and overestimated the eagerness of Iraqi soldiers and police to embrace the invaders.

The fact that the White House was contemplating recruiting Baker to the postwar effort suggested that some administration officials feel a dramatic gesture is needed to give the postwar effort a boost. The administration also is anxious to retain control of the reconstruction despite pressure from allies such as Germany and France to yield more authority to the United Nations.

A Baker aide said the former secretary of state was on vacation and unavailable for comment. Several administration officials predicted that Baker would not become involved but said the White House might still seek "a Baker-like figure" to work with Bremer.

Bremer, who was saluted by Bush in the Rose Garden on Wednesday as "showing great skill and resourcefulness," said on NBC`s "Meet the Press" Sunday that the postwar effort could last for years, despite progress in restoring services and building a government.

Bremer said at the National Press Club Wednesday that he had presented Bush with "a plan with clear benchmarks for the next 60 and 120 days." He said the three stages he envisions are providing security, including reestablishing courts and law enforcement; putting the country on the right economic path; and promoting political development with the goal of a sovereign democratic government.

Bremer said privately during his meetings in Washington that the administration might need to appoint a high-level official to focus solely on restructuring Iraq`s debt of more than $21 billion, a senior official said.

One administration official said a division of duties for the administration of Iraq had been contemplated as far back as the planning phases of the war. "We knew it would be difficult," the official said, adding that the reality "has given us a lot more to think about."

If Bush called on Baker, 73, the assignment would be the latest of a series of high-profile missions he has undertaken for the family. Baker headed the Republican team during the Florida recount litigation after the disputed election of 2000, and managed President George H.W. Bush`s reelection campaign in 1992.

Baker was secretary of state in the first Bush administration, assembling the international coalition for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He served as treasury secretary and White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan.

Although Bremer was a career diplomat before becoming a private business consultant, he lacks experience in the Arab world. Some administration officials said a better-known figure might be more suited to selling neighboring countries on the U.S. approach to rebuilding Iraq.

Bremer took charge in an abrupt change in May that dismayed some Iraqi leaders. Just a month after U.S. troops ended three decades of Baath Party rule, Bremer was sent to Baghdad to replace Jay M. Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general who had been in charge of reconstruction.

Jeffery, the Goldman Sachs veteran, will become the administration`s Washington face for the operation in Baghdad. His jobs will include lobbying lawmakers and dealing with other parts of the government. Officials said the White House concluded that, given the distance between Baghdad and Washington, Bremer needed a senior aide in Washington who could navigate the bureaucracy and work with Capitol Hill.

Bush named Jeffery special adviser for Lower Manhattan development in March 2002. Jeffery had worked at Goldman for 18 years, living and working in Paris, London and New York, and specializing in the financial services sector. He previously practiced corporate law at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York.

Staff writers Vernon Loeb in Washington and Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Baghdad contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Troops Accused of Killing in Mosul
U.S. Denies Allegation That Its Forces Fired On Crowd After Clash

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 26, 2003; Page A13


MOSUL, Iraq -- Recorded prayers from the Koran echoed through the house. Fifty women in black robes and funeral shawls prayed in the front room. In the garage, where the men were gathered, someone slipped a tape into the VCR, and for a moment it was as if Anas Basil Hamed weren`t really dead.

On the tape, the jovial 21-year-old student drank tea and mugged for the camera, his schoolbooks spread out in front of him. It was too much for the 20 men watching. Almost all of them buried their faces in their hands and sobbed.

"Why did the Americans kill my son?" said Basil Hamed Azawi, 63. "By God, I say to you, I thought it was better to have good relations with the Americans and repair our country. But now the Americans have lost any relationship with Iraq. How can I face them now? What should I do? What can I do?"

Neighbors here said Hamed was killed on Tuesday by U.S. soldiers who fired into a crowd of young, unarmed Iraqis who were throwing rocks at the troops, shortly after the fierce firefight in which U.S. troops killed the two sons of former president Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay.

A military spokesman said the military has no record of any civilians being shot at, or near, the site of Tuesday`s raid, an operation that raised the spirits of U.S. troops, who have been attacked almost daily by unknown assailants.

But at least eight people interviewed here, including two recovering in a hospital from gunshot wounds inflicted Tuesday, said they saw U.S. soldiers fire into the crowd. Several of those interviewed do not know each other, and all provided nearly identical accounts of the incident, which they said has severely damaged the image of U.S. soldiers here.

They said a crowd of 40 or 50 young men had gathered just after 1 p.m., after the firefight had stopped, in an area near a traffic light at least 400 yards from the house where the Hussein brothers were killed. They said the crowd wanted to enter their mosque for prayers, but soldiers kept them away because it was too close to the firefight scene. The men became angry, yelled at the soldiers, and a few began throwing rocks, the witnesses said.

At that moment, from four to eight soldiers fired short bursts into the crowd. The shooting lasted just a second or two, they said, but Hamed and perhaps one other person were killed, and three people suffered gunshot wounds in their arms and legs.

Bashar Ghanim Hamoodi said he arrived on the scene when he heard the big firefight from his shop down the road. As he walked up, he said he saw young people throwing rocks at the soldiers, who "immediately opened fire."

Hamoodi said he saw a soldier shoot and kill Hamed, who fell almost next to him, and witnessed another young man on a bicycle also being hit by gunfire. A soldier initially ordered him to "Get back! Get back!" when he tried to pick up Hamed`s body, Hamoodi said, but after everyone in the crowd had run away, the soldier permitted him to pick the body up. He said he carried it to a taxi and drove it to a hospital.

In repeated public statements, top U.S. military officials here said their troops, from the 101st Airborne Division, used great restraint and limited firepower in Tuesday`s raid in a concerted effort not to injure civilians in the neighborhood.

But many people interviewed here said the soldiers did shoot, and that the incident has destroyed their feelings of goodwill toward the U.S.-led occupation forces.

"My son hated Saddam and he hated Uday and Qusay," Hamed`s father said through his tears Thursday morning. "I have six sons, and Anas was the most brave and clever. And they killed him without any reason. In Arabic we say, `God will be the judge of those people.` "

In this city 220 miles north of Baghdad, which experienced only limited combat during the war, many people said they had cheered the arrival of the army that ousted Hussein. But the death of Hamed, and stories of what many here call heavy-handed tactics by soldiers patrolling the streets, has turned this neighborhood, at least, into a pit of anger toward the United States.

Hamed`s brother filed a written complaint with Iraqi police, as did three other people who said they were wounded in the incident, including Ramzi and another taxi driver, Alyas Hamoudi who is also in the hospital with gunshot wounds in his arm and thigh. He said he was shot while in his taxi. Hospital medical reports filed with the police complaints confirm that the victims were shot on Tuesday.

Police said they had passed all the complaints on to a civilian judge, who would determine how to proceed.

Evidence also suggests that shots were fired away from the building where the Hussein brothers were killed, and toward an area, far from the fighting, where the crowd had gathered.

Ashad Akram Ahmad, a shopkeeper, showed a reporter two bullet holes that he said had been made Tuesday in the facade of his shop. His shop is several hundred yards from the firefight firefight, and there is no direct line of fire from that area. But the shop is exactly behind the bloodstained spot in the road where the witnesses said Hamed was killed.

Iraqi police and a former Iraqi army colonel who examined the tip of a bullet dug out of the concrete wall this morning said it was not from an AK-47, the most common weapon here. Several U.S. soldiers who were shown the bullet said it was not Iraqi, but they said they could not positively identify it.

At Hamed`s house, a black funeral banner hanging in front of the house stated that Hamed was killed "by bullets fired by the criminal Americans." Inside, his family has kept the bloody robes he was wearing when he was shot, along with a death certificate dated Tuesday.

The doctor who examined Hamed`s body said he was shot twice, in the stomach and in the mouth. In an interview, the doctor, Riad Hamdi, said the bullet that entered Hamed`s mouth destroyed most of the back of his head. Hamdi said it was unlike any of the many bullet wounds he has seen in Iraq.

Rashid, the mosque official, said U.S. military representatives have come to the mosque twice in the past two days to discuss Tuesday`s events. He said that both times officials at the mosque complained about the shootings of civilians and the death of Hamed. He said military officials told them they had no evidence of any such shooting.

On Thursday morning at Hamed`s family home, which is in a neighborhood almost directly across the street from the house where the Hussein brothers were killed, grief was hardened by rage at the U.S. soldiers.

"We were happy when the Americans came to Mosul. I went and talked to them and invited them to my house," said Moheb Aladdin Sakal, 32, Hamed`s cousin. "But since then, they have stopped my car many times and searched me. They make me lie on the ground. They treat me like an animal.

"And now Anas is dead. Why was he killed? What did he do? I have no weapons, but if this were my brother and I had weapons, I would not be silent. And we believe that God will never leave the Americans alone because of this."

Special correspondents Souad Mekhennet and Naseer Mehdawi contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Heading Off North Korea




Saturday, July 26, 2003; Page A20


THE STREAM of alarming reports this summer about North Korea`s steps toward producing nuclear weapons is the product, at least in part, of a deliberate effort by an isolated dictatorship to frighten the world -- and increase the pressure on the United States to grant its long and unacceptable list of demands. But that doesn`t mean the threat should not be regarded as deadly serious and urgent, despite the Bush administration`s equally calculated attempt to play it down. As former secretary of defense William Perry pointed out on the op-ed page this week, if it keeps going North Korea soon could be producing five to 10 nuclear weapons a year, and the United States would have no effective way, short of all-out war, to stop it from smuggling some of them to terrorists or other rogue states. It might not be possible to stop the bomb project, either: After all, neither the Clinton administration`s policy of bargaining with Pyongyang nor Mr. Bush`s subsequent attempts to apply pressure from the outside have worked.

Nevertheless, a couple of encouraging developments have occurred in recent days. One is the increasingly energetic involvement in the crisis of China, which for years ducked responsibility for containing North Korea, even though it has the most leverage over the regime of Kim Jong Il. Beijing this month dispatched a senior diplomat for four days of talks in Pyongyang, then shifted him to Washington for follow-up meetings -- a demonstration that the administration`s strategy of engaging North Korea`s neighbors is showing results. More than process is at stake: Unless North Korea gets the message that its weapons program is unacceptable to South Korea, Japan and China and could threaten supplies of food and energy vital to its day-to-day survival, it will continue trying to use the threat of nukes to blackmail the United States.

At the same time, the Bush administration appears to be considering a more pragmatic approach to the question of whether and how to strike a deal with the North. Mr. Bush has rightly rejected the idea of rewarding North Korea with economic and political favors in exchange for promises to stop building weapons, but he has been slow to acknowledge that Mr. Kim is unlikely to give up a nuclear deterrent as long as U.S. policy calls for the overthrow of his regime. The Post`s Glenn Kessler reports that the administration is now considering a formula that would offer a U.S. pledge of nonaggression for an end to weapons of mass destruction programs, while reserving any further U.S. economic or political concessions for a deal that would demand broader steps from North Korea, including steps on human rights. The administration may also agree to break a new round of talks into two stages, beginning with the United States, North Korea and China and expanding to include South Korea and Japan. That approach makes sense. With North Korea seemingly approaching the threshold for becoming a declared nuclear power, talks should be quickly pursued; if they are to succeed, the administration must offer Mr. Kim a secure way back from the brink.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Life on this Boulevard of Broken Diets is not easy. Die USA liebt es radikal, gleich noch mal McDoof verklagen auf einige Millionen. Ein Thema das in den letzten Wochen immer wieder hochkam, auch durch die Versprechen der grossen Companies ihre Produkte mit weniger Fett zu versehen.

washingtonpost.com
The Fat Environment


By Ellen Goodman

Saturday, July 26, 2003; Page A21


BOSTON -- I work in a danger zone. Across the street from my office is a restaurant that sells bagels larger than my hand. Around the corner is a Ben and Jerry`s that scoops an ice cream flavor that is "Phish food" for the whale-sized. This morning the local pizza place put up a sign announcing "all you can eat" night.

Life on this Boulevard of Broken Diets is not easy. After all, like most Americans I subscribe to the "just say no" school of weight control. This is a school that promotes theorists like Will and Power. It offers a school motto of Personal Responsibility.

Even as the ideal body has gotten slimmer and the real body has gotten wider, students of this philosophy react like our Puritan ancestors. We assume that what separates the saved from the damned is virtue.

Well, fat chance for virtue. The only part of our economy that seems to be expanding is the waistline. Sixty percent of Americans are overweight. Twice as many kids are overweight as a generation ago. And in the past few weeks we`ve had health warnings about fat that range from diabetes to Alzheimer`s.

The only good news is that we are beginning to shift from describing obesity as a moral failing to describing it as a public health epidemic. We are beginning to shift at least some attention from self-control to environment-out-of-control.

This change is partly due to the collective, um, weight of scientific studies. Yale`s Kelly Brownell, who coined the phrase "toxic environment," sums them up this way: "When the environment changes, weight changes." When, for example, immigrants from thinner countries come to America they gain weight, while their cousins back home stay lean. When you give moviegoers a big box of popcorn instead of a small one, they eat about 50 percent more.

The change also comes from the discovery that there really were business plans for the fattening of America. We don`t actually have much less will power than we used to. In "Fat Land," Greg Critser details the deliberate supersizing of servings from the Big Mac to the Big Gulp. Instead of expanding the number of customers, they expanded the existing customers.

At the same time, we have learned something from the campaigns against smoking. Yes, it`s up to the smoker to stub out the last Marlboro. But personal responsibility is not a free pass for corporate irresponsibility. It`s easier to just say no when you aren`t being manipulated and marketed to say yes. Willpower is influenced by price, advertising and even lawsuits.

It`s not an accident that Kraft, maker of Oreo cookies and macaroni and cheese, became the first Big Foodie to pledge to help the fight against obesity. The company is, after all, a subsidiary of the much-sued Philip Morris before it changed its name and image to Altria.

As Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says, "Kraft belongs to a tobacco company that knows what the inside of a courtroom looks like." It didn`t take a PhD, she adds, to realize that everyone would figure out that cookies and cheese contribute to obesity.

One of Kraft`s pledges is to stop marketing in schools. Indeed, the public seems most willing to acknowledge the weight of the environment in the weight of kids.

The first step in downsizing Americans may be in the schools. Over the past decade, schools have said yes to soft drinks and junk food in hallway vending machines. Now some large school districts from Los Angeles to New York have banned the sale of sodas. There are bills in Massachusetts and Maine to get rid of junk food in those same machines.

But it`s likely to be a long haul to get smaller portions, labeling in fast-food restaurants and to slim down advertising to kids. Wootan says, "People still haven`t made the connection about how industry practices shape and influence their choices. Your child begs you for junk food, begs you to go to McDonald`s and you think, `That`s kids.` You don`t think, `Shame on that food company.` " Food is one part of a complex obesity problem that includes Game Boys instead of ballgames and TV instead of track. Moreover, it`s still tricky to attack fat as a health issue without attacking fat people, and we`ve had a big enough portion of that, thank you. But Brownell believes, "We are a place where it no longer makes sense to blame people for a problem their environment is causing."

What do we need to change the environment? How about Will and Power?




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL

Missing intelligence


7/26/2003

ESPITE AN indulgence in easy hindsight and regardless of the information withheld by the White House, the joint congressional panel that released its report on intelligence failures before Sept. 11, 2001, did something indispensable in a democracy. It forced secretive agencies and officers of the government to become accountable to their sovereign, the American people. There is wisdom in the panel recommending a Cabinet-level intelligence chief and improved coordination among disparate intelligence agencies.


But the things wrong with the report released yesterday are also obvious. The Bush administration`s insistence that much of the material on Saudi Arabia be redacted only nourishes popular suspicions that the Saudi regime has something to hide and that administration officials with a background in the oil business are covering for their allies.

In this matter, as in others addressed by the report, the best policy would have been to disclose as much information as possible. Where passages about Saudi Arabia might have revealed a source`s identity or sensitive methods of intelligence gathering, deletions are justified. But deletions should not be made merely to hide findings about Saudi financing of terrorists or the insufficient cooperation of Saudi authorities who were asked to assist in US investigations of Osama bin Laden and his Saudi connections.

The White House`s refusal to provide the panel with much of the information it requested on pertinent discussions within the president`s National Security Council also suggests a flight from transparency. The panel properly lamented the president`s failure to turn over information that might have enabled the members to determine what Bush and his advisers knew about the terrorist threat before Sept. 11 and what they did or did not do to counter that threat.

It is only fair to acknowledge that presidents almost always try to preserve a principle of confidentiality concerning the advice they receive from members of their administration. There are sound reasons to protect from public scrutiny what is said to the president by his advisers in confidence. Nevertheless, Bush`s withholding of the threat assessments available to him before Sept. 11 makes it seem he is protecting his own reputation rather than the principle of confidentiality for his advisers.

The panel did well to confirm a lack of coordination and cooperation among intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the ``missed opportunities`` to discover the hijackers` plot, and the failure to ``put the government or the intelligence community on a war footing before September 11.`` But the greatest value of the report is that it invites citizens to scrutinize what government is doing in their name and to take part in correcting past errors.

This story ran on page A10 of the Boston Globe on 7/26/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/207/editorials/Missing_int…

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Irak
SPIEGEL ONLINE - 26. Juli 2003, 11:23

Schiiten-Armee soll Amerikaner verjagen

Scheich Muktada al-Sadr macht sich Sorgen über den "moralischen Verfall" des Iraks. Um diesen zu stoppen, hat der Schiitenführer jetzt zur Bildung einer "Imam-Armee" aufgerufen. Sie soll die US-Streitkräfte aus Nadschaf und anderen Heiligen Städten vertreiben.

Bagdad - Ziel der Armee werde das Ende der amerikanischen Besetzung sein, sagte Scheich Sadr beim Freitagsgebet vor 50.000 Menschen in der südlich von Bagdad gelegenen Stadt Kufa. Mehrere zehntausend Menschen hätten sich bereits für die Mitgliedschaft in der Religionsarmee gemeldet, sagte der Geistliche. Die Organisation wolle ihre Ziele mit friedlichen Mitteln erreichen. Sadr ist der Sohn eines schiitischen Geistlichen, der zusammen mit zwei anderen Söhnen 1999 einem Attentat zum Opfer fiel.

Die US-Truppen errichteten gestern neue Straßensperren zwischen Bagdad und Kufa sowie dem benachbarten Nadschaf. Es gebe Berichte, dass Anhänger von Sadr Waffen nach Nadschaf geschmuggelt hätten, sagte ein US-Offizier. Allerdings habe Sadr nur eine begrenzte Anhängerschaft und könne nicht für die Mehrheit der irakischen Schiiten sprechen.

In Bagdad waren auch am Samstag wieder Schüsse und Explosionen zu hören. Die Lage in der irakischen Hauptstadt blieb heute weiter gespannt. Bei einem Einsatz gegen mutmaßliche Entführer wurde am Morgen der Leiter der irakischen Polizeiakademie, Brigadegeneral Ahmed Kadhim, angeschossen. Fünf weitere Polizisten wurden mit ihm verwundet, einer davon schwer.

Die Debatte um den Tod der Söhne des gestürzten irakischen Staatschefs Saddam Hussein, Odai und Kusai, dauerte unterdessen an. Kritik gab es dabei vor allem an der Zurschaustellung der Leichen durch die US-Truppen. Die USA erklärten, sie wollten die Iraker davon überzeugen, dass die beiden wirklich tot seien und dass ihre Herrschaft damit beendet sei. Muslime kritisierten aber, dass ihre Körper von Bestattern präpariert worden seien und dass sie nicht unverzüglich beigesetzt wurden. Bei der Fahndung nach Saddam Hussein wurden gestern 13 Personen festgenommen, darunter sollen auch einige frühere Leibwächter sein.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-me-arnold26jul26,1,7…

Schwarzenegger Has History of Playing Waiting Game
By Claudia Eller, James Rainey and Michael Cieply
Times Staff Writers

July 26, 2003

During his long reign as Hollywood`s favorite action hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger was famous for what industry insiders called "The Arnold Sweepstakes."

The movie muscleman reveled in putting Hollywood on hold — making A-list producers, directors and writers wait until the last moment before green-lighting one project or another.

Suddenly, California politicians are getting a taste of that Hollywood waiting game. A string of potential candidates in the state`s Oct. 7 recall election are keeping crucial decisions on hold while Schwarzenegger — perhaps relishing the sort of attention he enjoyed in his prime — contemplates whether or not to make a run at the governor`s office.

The decision could come any time, but some of Schwarzenegger`s key political advisers, most of whom spoke on condition that they not be identified, are telling him to wait until as close as possible to the filing deadline, Aug. 9 at 5 p.m., before revealing his decision.

Said one strategist: "He gets the waiting thing."

"The longer he waits to file and engage in this, the better off he is," said the strategist, who has discussed the governor`s race with Schwarzenegger. "As soon as you get out there, the full weight of targeting and opposition research is then brought to bear."

Stalling might also keep big-name Democrats, like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, less time to reconsider their current position that they will not run to replace Davis.

Even though he ranked behind former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan as a recall candidate in recent polls, Schwarzenegger tilts the California political universe like no other candidate because of his outsize public persona, big bank account and ability to draw media attention from around the world.

But the potential advantages of a delayed announcement are countered by considerable pressure from other quarters — a wife who appears to want Schwarzenegger to stay out of the race and fellow Republicans who want an answer now, so they can make plans of their own.

Long-time Republican strategist Allan Hoffenblum said stalling could hurt other Republicans and the party`s attempt to retake the governor`s office, particularly if Schwarzenegger dallies, then drops out.

So far, the Republicans who publicly have said they will run are all from the party`s more conservative wing — opponents of abortion and most gun control measures and advocates of major efforts to shrink the size of government. Members of the party who consider themselves centrist are anxious to have some representation on the recall ballot.

A late decision "is a good strategy only if he is going to run," Hoffenblum said of Schwarzenegger. "To wait until Friday night (Aug. 8) and say he is not going to run would do a big disservice to a lot of moderate Republicans. They would not appreciate that at all."

Among those who expect a decision from Schwarzenegger in "the next few days," is Riordan. The former mayor, who is a friend of Schwarzenegger`s and also shares many of his political views, has said he will only consider running if Schwarzenegger bows out.

Still, Schwarzenegger has been known to keep friends waiting before.

In Hollywood, the actor`s representatives would keep as many as five studios dangling at a time, telling each that some lucky project was likely his next film. Top directors such as John McTiernan, Ron Howard and even Woody Allen lined up behind the prospects. Lawyers made offers, and million-dollar writers went to work on script revisions. Moviedom`s top dealmakers then hung in suspense, waiting months at a time for the superstar`s decision.

Even while Schwarzenegger flirts with the political world — catching welcome press attention for international premieres of "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" — he has continued to bait Hollywood with hints about a next movie.

Less than two weeks ago, he made headlines in the trade papers Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with his reported interest in various film projects, the most prominent being New Line Cinema`s planned family comedy, "Big Sir.`

According to people familiar with the project — about a man trekking cross-country with his future stepchildren while being chased by unsavory characters from his past — Schwarzenegger has taken an active hand in helping land a top director.

Meanwhile, Hollywood`s Creative Artists Agency, which represents the actor, has continued to line up other potential film work. One such prospect is a remake of the science-fiction movie "Westworld" at Warner Bros. Another is a smaller, independent film titled "Cry Macho." All of the projects are in the development stage, and none is a "go" movie at this point.

In Mexico City to promote "Terminator 3" this week, Schwarzenegger, who turns 56 on Wednesday, continued to put off questions about his political future. "Terminator 3," which cost about $175 million to produce and tens of millions more to market, has so far taken in only about $130 million in the United States, signaling a tougher-than-hoped for climb to profitability for its various financiers.

A number of Schwarzenegger`s close Hollywood allies speculated that the actor would ultimately pull back from a run out of personal concerns. He and his wife, NBC TV journalist Maria Shriver, would be reluctant to expose themselves and their four children, whose ages range from 5 to 13, to the intense scrutiny of a campaign, they presumed.

"My gut tells me he`s not going to run," said one film industry associate.

Still, one close friend, film producer John Davis, said Schwarzenegger and his wife could, in fact, stand the heat. "I think both of them are up to it," said Davis, who made the action hit "Predator" with Schwarzenegger.

Riordan agreed, saying, "He is not going to be intimidated no matter what."

A Schwarzenegger gubernatorial campaign is potentially formidable not only because of his money and the fact people know his name. It could complicate efforts by Davis to portray the recall as a Republican attempt to force a conservative agenda on a state that strongly favors Democrats and moderates.

Times Staff Writers Mark Z. Barabak, Michael Finnegan and Eric Bailey contributed to this story.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-japa…
THE WORLD



Iraq Bill Shoves Its Way Into Japan Law
Ruling party pushes through controversial measure to send troops to noncombat areas.
By Evelyn Iritani
Times Staff Writer

July 26, 2003

TOKYO — Despite growing public unease and a last-minute scramble by opponents to put up roadblocks, Japan`s ruling Liberal Democratic Party rammed a controversial bill through parliament early today that allows the government to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq.

Passage of the bill was a big win for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who backed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and advocates a more global role for Japanese peacekeeping troops. U.S. officials — straining to meet demands for troops in the Middle East, the Korean peninsula and Africa — have pressured Japan to increase its military contribution to the Iraq campaign. Japan is already a leading financier of the reconstruction effort, pledging $86 million in aid.

"This law will benefit Japan in the long run," Koizumi was quoted as saying after the vote. He said the government will need to conduct a "thorough study on local conditions" before determining how many troops to dispatch and when they should go. Military officials have said as many as 1,000 soldiers could be sent to help rebuild Iraq.

Washington immediately relayed a message of support to its key Asian ally.

"We think Japan`s ability to play this positive role in Iraq is a reflection of the kind of role it can play in world affairs," Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesman said.

But angry opposition party lawmakers said the measure violates Japan`s post-World War II constitution, which restricts troops to providing defense against foreign attacks, and that it pushes Japan farther down the path toward remilitarization.

Liberal Party member Takuya Tasso accused Koizumi of caving in to U.S. pressure and endangering the lives of Japanese peacekeepers unprepared to take part in armed conflict. The new law limits Japanese troops to noncombat areas in Iraq, but the lawmaker said it is impossible to determine what parts of that country are safe.

"We don`t think our Self-Defense Forces are well-prepared, equipped or trained to do as well as other countries like the U.S. and U.K. in Iraq," Tasso said. "We don`t think we can distinguish safe and dangerous areas in Iraq."

Tempers flared as critics of the Iraq bill succeeded in pushing the vote into the wee hours of the morning. When a committee was debating the bill, opposition lawmakers rushed the panel chairman, and a shoving match ensued.

In further efforts to stall the vote, opposition lawmakers submitted a no-confidence vote against the Koizumi Cabinet and they dusted off an obstruction technique known as the "ox walk," in which they strolled very slowly to the front of the room to cast their votes. Those actions failed.

Security is the arena in which Koizumi has scored his biggest victories since taking office two years ago. On the government`s agenda are plans to extend an antiterrorism law that expires Nov. 1 and to eventually establish a permanent law allowing Japanese troops to support multinational forces. The law allowing Japan to send forces to Iraq will expire in four years.

But Koizumi runs a political risk sending Japanese troops into what is still a combat zone. U.S. troops are the target of nearly daily guerrilla attacks. Japanese troops previously have been limited to participating in United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping operations in places such as Cambodia and East Timor.

Masashi Nishihara, president of Japan`s National Defense Academy, said the prime minister is caught between his desire to strengthen Japan`s alliance with the United States and the growing unease of the Japanese public. To avoid a political backlash, the Koizumi government may delay the dispatch of peacekeepers to Iraq until after the general election, which could be held in early November.

"This is a very, very critical issue," Nishihara said. "Some politicians say if there is a single casualty in Iraq, the minister of defense may have to leave office."

Public support in Japan for the Iraq peacekeepers has dropped dramatically in recent weeks as more questions have surfaced about the validity of U.S. claims that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

That discontent has given new life to Japan`s nascent peace movement. Since the beginning of the year, there have been several antiwar rallies in Tokyo that attracted tens of thousands of people. Tatsuya Yoshioka, director of Peace Boat, a Tokyo-based peace group, said the participation in those rallies was "amazing," given the historic lack of support for grass-roots movements in his country.

Tomoko Ogata, a 64-year-old homemaker and mother of three, joined a small but vocal demonstration near the parliament building in Tokyo this week. Ogata said she had never participated in a political protest but was disgusted by the decision to send troops to Iraq.

"The Japanese government doesn`t listen to people`s voices anymore," said the protester, a Chiba resident, who spent three days perched on a stool on the sidewalk. "They just made the decision themselves. I couldn`t let them do that."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-vo-lytton2…
VOICES / A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES

New L.A. Rail Line Can Lead to a Golden Future
By A. Dennis Lytton
A. Dennis Lytton, a paralegal, is a docent who leads art tours in the Metro Rail system.

July 26, 2003



The Metro Rail Gold Line is scheduled to open today. It will travel between Pasadena and Union Station (the busiest train station west of Chicago) in a little over 30 minutes.

Los Angeles was built and expanded by a rail system just a few generations ago. Land and railroad tycoon Henry Huntington`s Pacific Electric Red Car system heralded development of new neighborhoods. Huntington and others never profited from the revenue from the trains` fare boxes. They made their money by speculating on the land and housing that Los Angeles` trolley system made possible.

During this time, cities such as New York and Chicago also had extensive trolley systems and were working to make their systems faster. New York created its subway system, and Chicago elevated its principal lines in its famous "loop."

In 1925, Pacific Electric opened the Hollywood subway, a mile-long subway for its trolleys that operated until 1955.

For a variety of reasons, all attempts in Southern California during the 1940s and 1950s to modernize and separate the Pacific Electric rail system from traffic were shot down. The last Red and Yellow trolley cars in Los Angeles were abandoned in the 1960s. Los Angeles became the land of the freeway and the car.

If there was a golden period when Los Angeles` freeways worked as great liberators of our time, it has long since passed. The region continues to grow, and freeway speeds continue to slow. By 2025, average rush-hour freeway speeds in Los Angeles County are expected to drop to less than 17 mph.

The age of freeway-building is clearly over. A mere five-mile extension of the Long Beach Freeway to connect it to the Foothill Freeway has been held up for decades by communities that do not want to lose nearly 1,000 homes to make way for it. In May, Caltrans` proposal to expand the Ventura Freeway by four lanes was vigorously opposed by residents who balked at the loss of hundreds of homes — not to mention a price tag of up to $3.4 million. A similar rebellion occurred at the same time in the working-class cities of southeast L.A. County when they were faced with the prospect of widening the Long Beach Freeway through their homes and schools.

The 60-mile Metro Rail system may finally reach a critical mass with the addition of the 13.7-mile Gold Line. Rapid trains will connect communities such as Pasadena`s Old Town shopping and entertainment district, downtown L.A. and the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, Mid-Wilshire, Long Beach, Hollywood, the South Bay and the San Fernando Valley.

More important, concepts for growth have changed. Sprawl is acknowledged as undesirable for many reasons. Continued sprawl is not possible any longer in a region that is running out of developable land. Mixed-use and high-density development — often called "smart growth," combining work, home, shopping and entertainment in communities that are walkable and connected by public transit — are coming into vogue in L.A.

Downtown Los Angeles` renaissance has not been led by more office buildings but by ordinary people moving to Los Angeles` heart and remaking it into a 24-hour city that promises one day in the not-too-distant future to look like San Francisco or, gasp, even Manhattan.

Metro Rail leads the way in this regard with a system to connect a new high-density city and by redeveloping the land around its stations into new mixed-use developments. Metro Rail extensions to East Los Angeles and the Westside are possible in the next several years.

None of this should be surprising, as we are simply going "back" to Los Angeles` future.




Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Troops Bulldoze Saddam Sons` Hideout After Search
Sat July 26, 2003 08:22 AM ET


By Mazen Dana
MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. troops with bulldozers began on Saturday to demolish the villa where they killed Saddam Hussein`s sons this week, after scouring it for clues on the whereabouts of the deposed dictator.

The wall surrounding the fortified villa in the northern city was knocked down and Iraqi workers clambered over the roof, pounding it with sledgehammers. The villa was partly destroyed when U.S. troops attacked it on Tuesday with machineguns, grenades and anti-tank missiles.

Iraqis crowded round newspaper stalls in Baghdad to view gruesome photographs of the bullet-scarred and blood-spattered bodies of Saddam`s sons Uday and Qusay. With no press on Fridays, it was the first opportunity for some to see them.

Officials hope the pictures and television images of the bodies will convince skeptical Iraqis the brothers are dead and demoralize guerrillas who have killed 44 U.S. soldiers since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

But American forces still come under daily attack. Ambushes in the last week have killed 11 U.S. soldiers, five of them in the three days since Uday and Qusay were killed.

After the deaths of his sons, the net might be closing on Saddam himself, U.S. forces said on Friday. Acting on a tip-off, they rounded up several men near his home town of Tikrit suspected of belonging to the presidential bodyguard.

"We continue to tighten the noose," 4th Infantry Division commander Major General Ray Odierno said.

Saddam, ousted by U.S.-led forces on April 9, has a $25 million price on his head. In his family`s home town of Tikrit, between Mosul and Baghdad, U.S. troops have been on high alert for any trace of Saddam and are coming under frequent attack.

SOME IRAQIS VOW REVENGE

At 4th Infantry headquarters in the town, a spokesman played down suggestions operations had been stepped up following the killings of Saddam`s sons. "We are always on a high state of alert," he said.

But local people are angry at the American presence in a town that long enjoyed privileged status under the rule of its most famous son since Saladin, the scourge of the Crusaders.

"All Iraqis are going to seek revenge after the deaths of Qusay and Uday," labourer Mohammed Ali said, standing on Tikrit`s dusty main street.

Soldiers on patrol and manning checkpoints said guerrilla attacks on them -- already bolder and more frequent -- had increased markedly in the few days since the sons` killings.

"Things are worse now," said Staff Sergeant Kenneth Maxwell, from Hartford, Connecticut, as he manned a heavy machinegun atop an armored vehicle, watching over a checkpoint where soldiers searched Iraqi cars for weapons.

"They used to just attack us, mostly at night. But now they are attacking us during the day with AK-47s and RPGs (rocket- propelled grenades), at any American soldiers they can find," Maxwell said, eyes alert under the baking sun, in temperatures above 40 Celsius (105 Fahrenheit).

Blasts and gunfire rang out in Baghdad overnight, but the U.S. military said there were no reports of any casualties.

Iraq`s biggest selling newspaper, Azzaman, splashed color photographs of Uday and Qusay`s corpses on its front page, under a headline proclaiming the brothers were dead.

But Iraqis, raised in a culture of conspiracy theories, were divided on the identity of the waxy-looking corpses.

Two men shovelling sand at a building site said they had heard about the pictures but had no time or resources to read newspapers or watch the news, reflecting the continuing poverty, insecurity and lack of basic services Iraqis still face.

"Some people say the bodies look like Uday and Qusay and others say they don`t," said one sweat-drenched labourer at a Baghdad building site. "If they really are dead, God will deal with them, but who will deal with us?"

U.S. forces took the unprecedented step of inviting a small group of journalists, including two from Reuters, to view the bodies on Friday. The faces of the two men had been retouched, making them more closely resemble Uday and Qusay in life.

Washington says it has proof of the identities based on dental and medical records and visual testimony from aides.

A burning issue is what will happen to the bodies. Muslim tradition demands they be buried quickly, but few in Iraq will want to see them become a shrine. It is possible they could be discreetly handed to clan elders in Tikrit, Saddam`s home town.



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© Copyright Reuters 2002. All rights reserved

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Three U.S. Troops Killed at Iraq Children`s Hospital
Sat July 26, 2003 10:07 AM ET


By Miral Fahmy
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three U.S. soldiers were killed while guarding a children`s hospital near Baghdad on Saturday in the latest in a wave of attacks that have not been stopped by the deaths of Saddam Hussein`s sons.

An army spokesman said four other soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were wounded in the grenade attack in Baquba, 30 miles north of the capital in the restive "Sunni triangle" where ambushes on U.S. troops have been concentrated.

The attack brings to 47 the number of American soldiers killed since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. Eight have died since Saddam`s sons Uday and Qusay were killed on Tuesday in the northern city of Mosul.

U.S. troops with bulldozers began demolishing the villa where the brothers were killed, after scouring it for clues on the whereabouts of the deposed dictator. The wall around the squat concrete mansion was knocked down and Iraqi workers clambered over the roof, pounding it with sledgehammers.

The villa had been badly damaged when U.S. troops attacked it with machineguns, grenades and anti-tank missiles in the fierce battle that killed Uday, 39, Qusay, 37, and two others believed to be a bodyguard and Qusay`s teenage son.

The house belonged to a businessman with links to Saddam`s family. U.S. officials have declined comment on local speculation that it was he who betrayed the brothers in return for $30 million in reward money. Washington says it will pay.

Iraqis crowded round newspaper stalls in Baghdad to view photographs of the bullet-scarred and blood-spattered bodies of the brothers. U.S. officials hope the pictures and television images of the bodies will convince skeptical Iraqis Uday and Qusay are dead and staunch the wave of guerrilla attacks.

TIGHTENING THE NOOSE

After the deaths of his sons, the net might be closing on Saddam himself, U.S. forces said. Acting on a tip-off, they rounded up 13 men near his home town of Tikrit on Thursday night. Some were suspected of being bodyguards of Saddam.

Saddam, ousted by U.S.-led forces on April 9, has a $25 million price on his head. In his family`s home town of Tikrit, between Mosul and Baghdad, U.S. troops have been on high alert for any trace of Saddam and are coming under frequent attack.

Local people are angry at the American presence in a town that long enjoyed privileged status under the rule of its most famous son since Saladin, the scourge of the Crusaders.

"All Iraqis are going to seek revenge after the deaths of Qusay and Uday," labourer Mohammed Ali said.

Soldiers on patrol and manning checkpoints said guerrilla attacks on them -- already bolder and more frequent -- had increased markedly in the few days since the sons` killings.

"Things are worse now," said Staff Sergeant Kenneth Maxwell, from Hartford, Connecticut, as he manned a heavy machinegun atop an armored vehicle, watching over a checkpoint where soldiers searched Iraqi cars for weapons.

"They used to just attack us, mostly at night. But now they are attacking us during the day with AK-47s and RPGs (rocket- propelled grenades), at any American soldiers they can find," Maxwell said, eyes alert under the baking sun, in temperatures above 105 Fahrenheit.

Iraq`s biggest selling newspaper, Azzaman, splashed color photographs of Uday and Qusay`s corpses on its front page, under a headline proclaiming the brothers were dead.

But Iraqis, raised in a culture of conspiracy theories, were divided on the identity of the waxy-looking corpses.

U.S. forces took the unprecedented step of inviting a small group of journalists, including two from Reuters, to view the bodies on Friday. The faces of the two men had been retouched, making them more closely resemble Uday and Qusay in life.

Washington says it has proof of the identities based on dental and medical records and visual testimony from aides.

A burning issue is what will happen to the bodies. Muslim tradition demands they be buried quickly. It is possible they could be discreetly handed to clan elders in Tikrit.

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Heather Wokush: `Who profits from erasing Iraq`s debt?`
Posted on Saturday, July 26 @ 10:32:23 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Heather Wokush

Outspoken Pentagon advisor Richard Perle recently called for Iraq`s debt to be cancelled as a way of teaching banks about the "moral hazard of ... lend[ing] to a vicious dictatorship."

Fair enough. Other countries with "odious debt" incurred under nasty regimes may be granted debt forgiveness. Why not Iraq?

Why not indeed. A war profiteer like Perle lecturing on morality is doubtful enough, but who in today`s occupied Iraq will really profit from debt forgiveness, the Iraqi people or companies like Halliburton?

At stake is more than $184 billion of pending contracts and debts against Iraq, many of which transpired before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. In other words, even deals inked when Saddam Hussein was considered a US ally could now be considered odious debt.



No small coincidence that the countries slated to lose most from an Iraqi write-off include Russia, France and Germany: Bush`s axis-of-just-as-evil for opposing the recent invasion of Iraq.

But taking Perle`s moral high ground for argument`s sake, consider that Chile`s Pinochet, Indonesia`s Suharto, South Korea`s Park Chung Hee, and yes, Iraq`s Hussein were all former recipients of White House largesse. So much for the US government steering clear of vicious dictators.

And of course, today`s "war on terror" has become a goldmine for brutal regimes of strategic US interest.

Take Uzbekistan. Despite an abysmal human rights record and corrupt government, the country received $500 million in US funding last year - $79 million specifically earmarked for "torture as a routine investigative technique." Its proximity to Afghanistan and expanding US military presence guarantee ever more funding to back the savage Uzbek government, step up repression and no doubt create the kind of Islamic fundamentalism the US should be fighting in the first place.

And then there`s Pakistan. General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a 1999 coup, stifling opposition and rewriting the constitution to shore up his dubious power base - not exactly a model of democratic leadership. Regardless, Pentagon ally Musharraf just left Camp David with $3 billion in fresh US grants, for things like upping the nuclear war ante with India.

How ironic that dictatorships like Uzbekistan and Pakistan can cash in on the "war on terror," while fledgling democracies defying Washington`s unilateral excesses are punished. The Bush administration`s recent rampage against the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a case in point: 64 countries receiving US military aid were forced to sign bilateral agreements exempting US troops from prosecution, or else risk losing the aid. The Bahamas, for instance, was warned funds would be withheld for paving and lighting an airport runway, and Caribbean states were told they could lose hurricane relief and rural dentistry benefits if they didn`t support Washington`s attack on the ICC.

In other words, the US government provides funding for "torture as a routine investigative technique" but not necessarily for hurricane relief. No wonder they hate us.

The White House is quick to point out that some countries have demonstrated loyalty to the Bush administration by sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq: Poland, Ukraine, Nicaragua, and El Salvador among others. Rarely mentioned, however, is the fact that US taxpayers will be funding this "coalition of the billing" to the tune of $250 million this year alone.

But who really benefits from massive cash infusions to Iraq, estimated to be costing US taxpayers $3.9 billion every month? And who would benefit from a hasty write-off of Iraq`s past debt?

There`s no doubt the country`s in chaos and needs help. Twelve years of debilitating sanctions have left the population and infrastructure ravaged, while the recent invasion and aftermath have left thousands dead and millions unemployed. Meanwhile, attacks against US service members grow more frequent and bloody every week.

But not everybody`s hurting. Halliburton, the Texan oil company tied to US vice president Dick Cheney, is making a killing on subsidiary contracts to Iraq, doing everything from repairing oil wells to providing housing for US troops. Corporate cronies will also benefit from Bush administration plans to privatize Iraq`s 100 state-owned firms, probably at fire sale prices.

No doubt the lack of financial transparency in today`s Iraq creates unprecedented opportunities. Some US firms have already been charged with bilking millions of dollars in bogus rebuilding contracts, while the integrity of the US-UK controlled fund slated to recover foreign Iraqi assets has been called into question.

Clearly, throwing more cash into this mess makes no sense. How long can US taxpayers shoulder the unilateral burden? What new dictators will be propped up? What assets and national resources will be privatized away from the Iraqi people without their consent? How long before they negate today`s agreements as odious?

Bottom line, until a stable government is in place, truly representative of the Iraqi people, there should be no debt cancellations - reschedulings or delayed payment allowances perhaps, but no write-offs. Same goes for privatizations. The Bush administration`s secretive, unilateral and unaccountable approach to finances is among our biggest moral hazards in Iraq.

Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer. She can be reached via www.heatherwokusch.com
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=12392&mode=nest…

[Joerver]

Posted on Fri, Jul. 25, 2003

Bush`s script leaves Americans helpless
By LEWIS W. DIUGUID
The Kansas City Star

Comedians make fun of how President Bush talks.

But they`re missing the skillful way his words keep people on edge and afraid. Renana Brooks captured that in a June 30 article in The Nation.

She said Bush is a master of "negatively charged emotional language." He uses a "dependency-creating" script as a political tool to dominate others.

Brooks said in an interview this week that many Americans view Bush as stern and authoritarian. He`s the "angry father" on domestic issues and the "holy warrior against the terrorists."

"It doesn`t matter what he says," said Brooks, a clinical psychologist in Washington who leads the Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion. "All of the images blur into one that he`s going to stand up and protect us.

"When you`re terrified and when you`re totally scared your thinking breaks down. You don`t want to do anything except believe he`s doing the right thing."

In The Nation, Brooks wrote: Bush "employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most dominators use verbal abuse to control others."

Brooks said Bush is a heavy user of "empty language."

Examples are such words as righteousness, evil, moral and justice. Those words mean different things to anyone who uses them.

"Empty language is the emotional equivalent of empty calories," she wrote. But it distracts people from scrutinizing and discussing issues.

Because of that we`ve had no nationally televised hearings in the investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"Dominators use empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; to ridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations to others, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and `reframe` opposing viewpoints," Brooks wrote.

Bush`s 2003 State of the Union address contained 39 examples of empty language in which he reduced "complex problems to images that left the listener relieved that George W. Bush was in charge," Brooks wrote.

In that prewar speech also was Bush`s assertion that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium to make nuclear weapons.

Brooks wrote that Bush surpasses other presidents in empty language use. He`s also skilled in "personalization," projecting himself "as the only person capable of producing results."

In her article in The Nation, Brooks wrote: Bush frequently sets up a "negative framework," or pessimistic image of the world. "Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener`s head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower."

It`s a learned helplessness "exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing."

"Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He uses a pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from feeling they can solve their problems."

To further elaborate, the terror alerts and wars keep people uncertain, fearful and dependent. Bush`s language worked in the 2002 elections, causing people to give Republicans control of the House and Senate. Voters overlooked Bush`s failures with the economy.

"To create a dependency dynamic between him and the electorate, Bush describes the nation as being in a perpetual state of crisis and then attempts to convince the electorate that it is powerless and that he is the only one with the strength to deal with it," Brooks wrote. People support Bush out of "despair and desperation."

Breaking the cycle will take a language of hope and optimism, Brooks told me. Civilization has overcome tough times without dominators.

No doubt good people will triumph again.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lewis W. Diuguid is a member of The Star`s Editorial Board. To reach him, call [phone] or send e-mail to [e-mail].

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/news/opinion/63…

[Joerver]

Ein Zeugnis mit welchen Mitteln die amerikanische Presse gearbeit hat, um den Kriegskurs von Bush zu unterstützen. Hier wird sich Judih Miller von der N.Y.Times vorgenommen, die meist Quellen des jetzigen Vorsitzenden des irakischen Verwaltungsrates benutzt hat. Diese Quellen haben sich als unwahr und selbst fabriziert herausgestellt. Für solche Dienste und weitere Fakes hat Chalabi, der auch den Sturz der Saddam Statue mitinziniert(mit Fox und CNN) hat den Vorsitz im neuen irakischen Verwaltungsrates bekommen. Ahmet der Dieb.

The Times Scoops That Melted
Cataloging the wretched reporting of Judith Miller.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, July 25, 2003, at 3:49 PM PT


If reporters who live by their sources were obliged to die by their sources, New York Times reporter Judith Miller would be stinking up her family tomb right now. In the 18-month run-up to the war on Iraq, Miller grew incredibly close to numerous Iraqi sources, both named and anonymous, who gave her detailed interviews about Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction. Yet 100 days after the fall of Baghdad, none of the sensational allegations about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons given to Miller have panned out, despite the furious crisscrossing of Iraq by U.S. weapons hunters.

In a Page One Times piece this week ("A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein`s Weapons," July 20), Miller acknowledges that "whether Saddam possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown." But from there, she serially blames the failure of U.S. forces to uncover weapons of mass destruction on "chaos," "disorganization," "interagency feuds," "flawed intelligence," "looting," and "shortages of everything from gasoline to soap." Alternatively, she writes, maybe the wrong people were in charge of the search; perhaps a greater emphasis should have been placed on acquiring human sources rather than searching sites; and it could be that the military botched the op by not investing the WMD searchers with the power to reward cooperating Iraqi scientists financially or grant them amnesty.

Judith Miller finds everybody associated with the failed search theoretically culpable except Judith Miller. This rings peculiar because Miller, more than any other reporter, showcased the WMD speculations and intelligence findings by the Bush administration and the Iraqi defector/dissidents. Our WMD expectations, such as they were, grew largely out of Miller`s stories.

To be sure, Miller never asserted that Iraq had an illegal WMD program or a stockpile of banned weapons. Far from it: Every time she writes about WMDs, she always constructs a semantic trapdoor allowing her to pop out the other side and proclaim, It`s the sources talking, not me! But thanks to the reporting of the Washington Post`s Howard Kurtz, we now know Miller was a true believer who grew fat on WMD tips from her sources inside Ahmad Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress organization, and that once in-country she threw a bit and saddle on the WMD detectives and rode them like Julie Krone from one end of Iraq to the other to investigate those tips.

That none of the official tips or the ones provided by Miller revealed WMDs indicates that 1) the Iraqis perfectly expunged every site Miller ever mentioned in her reporting prior to the U.S. invasion; or 2) her sources were full of bunk. Either way, if Miller got taken by her coveted sources, so did the reading public, and the Times owes its readers a review of Miller`s many credulous pieces. Thanks to the power of the Nexis Wayback Machine, we can give the Times a few tips on which Miller stories need revision, redaction, or retraction.

The Renovator, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri
The Back Story: Climbing aboard the Wayback Machine, we first touch down on the Dec. 20, 2001, piece by Miller, "Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms." The Iraqi National Congress arranges for Miller to meet defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer whose information seems reliable and significant to the U.S. government, Miller writes.

Saeed claims "to have done repair or construction work in facilities that were connected with all three classes of unconventional weapons—nuclear, chemical, and biological programs" and "personally visited at least 20 different sites that he believed to have been associated with Iraq`s chemical or biological weapons programs, based on the characteristics of the rooms or storage areas and what he had been told about them during his work. Among them were what he described as the `clean room` of a biological facility in 1998 in a residential area known as Al Qrayat."

Many redundant sites were also built, Saeed told Miller, including "duplicate nuclear facilities." Lead-lined storage containers exist under farms around Baghdad, and he tells Miller he worked on 20 such installations.

Miller Caveats: "There was no means to independently verify Mr. Saeed`s allegations," and the government is always suspicious of defectors` claims.

Suggested Remedial Action: Saeed tells Miller he would return to Iraq "tomorrow" if Saddam were gone. As soon as we snuff Saddam, the Times should send Saeed to Iraq, where he can lead them on a tour of the 20 sites and 20 installations.

The Pseudonymous Ahmed al-Shemri
The Back Story: In "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts," Sept. 8, 2002, Miller and Michael R. Gordon publish the allegations of the pseudonymous Ahmed al-Shemri, who claims he was "involved" in chemical weapons production in Iraq before his defection two years prior. He claims that Saddam continued to develop, produce, and store chemical agents in secret mobile and fixed sites, many of them underground, in violation of weapons sanctions.

" `All of Iraq is one large storage facility,` said Mr. Shemri, who claimed to have worked for many years at the Muthanna State Enterprise, once Iraq`s chemical weapons plant."

Shemri speaks of secret labs in Mosul, of the production of 5 tons of liquid VX between 1994 and 1998, and says that it could make at least 50 additional tons of liquid nerve agent. Also, Shemri discloses that Iraq has invented a new solid form of VX that makes decontamination difficult. Both Russian and North Korean scientists are assisting Iraq. Shemri has also heard tell that Iraq stockpiles "12,500 gallons of anthrax, 2,500 gallons of gas gangrene, 1,250 gallons of aflotoxin and 2,000 gallons of botulinum throughout the country."

Miller Caveats: "An [sic] former Unscom inspector called at least some of Mr. Shemri`s information `plausible.` While he said it was impossible to determine the accuracy of all his claims, he believed that Mr. Shemri `is who he claims to be, and worked where he claimed to work.` "

Suggested Remedial Action: Shemri should drop his pseudonym to make his background more transparent and lead the Times to the Mosul lab. He should also introduce his former colleagues to WMD inspectors.

The Bush Administration Case
The Back Story: Miller and Gordon report the Bush administration`s findings in "White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons," Sept. 13, 2002. According to the government, Iraq is attempting to purchase aluminum pipes to assist its nuclear weapons program as well as trying to develop mobile biological weapons laboratories. It also wants to obtain poison gas precursors. And it is trying to hide activities at plants in Fallujah and three other places where poisonous chlorine is made. The report alleges the plants have excess capacity and the Iraqis are diverting chlorine to the military.

Iraq continues to develop missiles banned under the 1991 cease-fire, according to the administration, and is doing prohibited research at its Al Rafah North complex. At the demolished Al Mamoun facility, where the Iraqis intended to make engines for long-range missiles, the Iraqis are rebuilding.

Miller Caveats: Some experts wonder if the aluminum tubes might be for rocket systems, not nuclear weapons work.

Suggested Remedial Action: A Times visit to Fallujah, Al Rafah North, Al Mamoun, and other sites alluded to is called for. Maybe the Times can find evidence that supports or discredits the administration`s claim.

Khidhir Hamza, Nuclear Mastermind
The Back Story: Miller gives credence to the views of Khidhir Hamza, a leader of Iraq`s nuclear bomb project until his 1994 defection in "Verification Is Difficult at Best, Say the Experts, and Maybe Impossible," Sept. 18, 2002.

He estimates that Iraq is within two to three years of mass-producing centrifuges for the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium, a more alarming estimate than that offered by former inspectors. Hamza`s book Saddam`s Bombmaker details Iraq`s proficiency in concealing its nuclear program, Miller writes.

Miller Caveat: None. The piece is mostly about the difficulties of weapon inspections verification.

Suggested Remedial Action: If Hamza really knows the nuclear score, he should take the Times on an Iraqi atomic tour.

The Defectors Complain
The Back Story: Defectors Hamza and Saeed return to complain about U.S. intelligence`s lack of interest in their allegations in Miller`s "U.S. Faulted Over Its Efforts To Unite Iraqi Dissidents," Oct. 2, 2002.

Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle and Ahmad Chalabi enthusiastically slam the CIA for ignoring the Iraqi National Congress. "The I.N.C. has been without question the single most important source of intelligence about Saddam Hussein. … What the agency has learned in recent months has come largely through the I.N.C.`s efforts despite indifference of the C.I.A."

Miller`s Caveat: The government tends not to trust defectors.

Suggested Remedial Action: Either the INC was wrong or the CIA was wrong. If the INC was wrong, the Times should feed Perle`s words back to him with a fork and spoon.

The Atropine Auto-Injectors
The Back Story: Citing administration officials, Miller reports Iraq`s order of "large quantities" of atropine auto-injectors in "Iraq Said To Try To Buy Antidote Against Nerve Gas," Nov. 12, 2002. Atropine is an antidote to sarin and VX.

Miller Caveat: Atropine is also used to treat heart attacks, although the auto-injectors contain five times the normal dose.

Suggested Remedial Action: The Times should track the atropine order to the source, if possible, to see if the request was in preparation for a chemical weapons attack.

Madame Smallpox
The Back Story: In her Dec. 3, 2002, exclusive, "C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox," Miller reported an unnamed informant`s allegations that a Russian scientist had given Iraq a "particularly virulent strain of smallpox." The scientist might have been the now deceased Nelja N. Maltseva, a Russian virologist. (See this "Press Box" for the complete take.) According to Miller, the CIA was brought in to investigate and the president was "briefed about its implications." Miller surmises that this was one reason the administration was so determined to inoculate health workers for smallpox.

Miller Caveat: "The attempt to verify the information is continuing."

Suggested Remedial Action: It`s clear from Miller`s wording that she didn`t know the identity of the informant. Now that Iraq is beaten into the ground, surely no intelligence sources and methods would be compromised by the government revealing its informant. At the very least, a Times reporter should reinvestigate both the Russian and Iraqi ends of this story.

The Defectors, Again
The Back Story: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz publicly credits the Iraqi defectors who have told the United States about Iraq`s secret chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and the efforts to conceal them in Miller`s "Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say," Jan. 24, 2003.

Miller Caveat: Only a dozen defectors are thought to be reliable, and of them only three or four have been offered asylum.

Suggested Remedial Action: The Times should review the credibility of all the Iraqis who defected to Miller. Who are the defectors? What did they tell the United States? How much of it was true? How much was blarney?

The Mobile Exploitation Team Scoop
Miller files her biggest scoop ever: "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said To Assert," April 21, 2003. Traversing Iraq with a Mobile Exploitation Team in search of WMD, they tell her of the extraordinary claims by an Iraqi scientist in their custody. They say he claims Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment just before the war started and that he has led them to buried precursor materials from which illegal weapons can be made.

And more! He says Iraq secretly sent its unconventional weapons and technology to Syria in the mid-1990s; it had recently been cooperating with al-Qaida and turning its focus to weapons R & D and concealment. These are described to Miller by officials as the most important discoveries in the WMD hunt so far.

The precursor elements unearthed can be used to create a toxic agent banned under chemical weapons treaties, Miller alleges, although she is barred from naming the precursor, speaking to the scientist, or visiting his home. Miller reports that she also submitted her story to the military for review and agreed not to publish her findings for three days. The military allows her to view the baseball cap-clad scientist from a distance as he points at spots in the sand where he says precursor compounds are buried.

Miller Caveats: Close to none. Speaking on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer the next day, she says the scientist is more than a "smoking gun." Investigators regard him the "silver bullet" in the WMD search.

Suggested Remedial Action: See below.

The Scoop Melts
Just two days later, Miller`s incendiary scoop begin to fade. In "Focus Shifts From Weapons to the People Behind Them," April 23, 2003, Miller announces a "paradigm shift" by investigators. A new emphasis on uncovering the Iraqi WMD infrastructure now takes precedence over finding the weapons because of what they`ve learned from the scientist, a theme she revisits on April 24 in "U.S.-Led Forces Occupy Baghdad Complex Filled With Chemical Agents." Iraq, the scientist tells investigators, has reduced its stockpiles while increasing its ability to develop new weapons.

The Mobile Exploitation Team and Miller continue to putter around Iraq, searching for intelligence documents and a missing Talmud, investigating tips about mobile germ labs to no avail, and finding a suspicious store of radioactive cobalt-80, which is used in X-ray machines. But neither Miller nor any of the Mobile Exploitation Teams canvassing Iraq find anything in the way of WMDs.

On July 20, 2003, Miller published the extended apologia cited at the top of this piece. Without asking herself if the U.S. government or the defectors whom she so devotedly courted and quoted over the last 18 months might have been shoveling her bull, Miller speculates that the WMD search failed not so much because WMD were not there, but because the military relied on the wrong methods.

What`s more, the "scientist" who was supposed to be the "silver bullet" in April turns out to be a "military intelligence officer," Miller writes in her July 20 piece, without offering one word of explanation about his title change. Might we learn in a subsequent Miller dispatch that`s he`s really a scuba-diving instructor? And yet Miller does not give up on her ultra mysterious source, writing that what he`s told authorities is corroborated by other debriefed Iraqis—that is, Iraq destroyed its stockpiles starting in 1995 but continued its WMD R & D.

Miller Caveats: At this point, every paragraph contains some sort of caveat.

Suggested Remedial Action: Miller should persuade the military to let her identify the "precursor" to a banned toxic compound mentioned in her April 21 piece. Likewise, where were the precursors buried? Why did the military intelligence officer lie and introduce himself as a scientist to U.S. forces? When did the military learn otherwise? Does this mean he lies all the time, or just selectively? Why hasn`t Miller explained the meaning of his deception?

Do the military intelligence officer`s other allegations listed in Miller`s April 21 piece still stand? Did Iraq ship unconventional weapons and technology to Syria in the mid-1990s? Did Iraq cooperate with al-Qaida as he asserted?

The most important question to unravel about Judith Miller`s reporting is this: Has she grown too close to her sources to be trusted to get it right or to recant her findings when it`s proved that she got it wrong? Because the Times sets the news agenda for the press and the nation, Miller`s reporting had a great impact on the national debate over the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. If she was reliably wrong about Iraq`s WMD, she might have played a major role in encouraging the United States to attack a nation that posed it little threat.

At the very least, Miller`s editors should review her dodgy reporting from the last 18 months, explain her astonishing credulity and lack of accountability, and parse the false from the fact in her WMD reporting. In fact, the Times` incoming executive editor, Bill Keller, could do no better than to launch such an investigation.

******

The Miller corpus is so huge I only cited a couple dozen of her stories here. If I missed something good, drop me a line at [e-mail].

Jack Shafer is Slate`s editor at large.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2086110/

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28385-2003Jun24?la…
http://slate.msn.com/id/2074921/

[Joerver]

Die Frage ist, werden sich die Dienste, CIA usw. diese Beschuldigungen gefallen lassen, oder werden sie sich rächen, der CIA hat es noch keinem Präsidenten verziehen von ihm reingelegt zu werden. Siehe Kennedy und Nixon.

EXCLUSIVE!
Tenet tells senators Wolfowitz committee gave White House dubious intelligence

By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Assistant Editor

July 21, 2003—When CIA Director George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it into George W. Bush`s State of the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, set up by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other high-profile hawks, rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help Bush build a case for war, according to three senators on the Intelligence Committee.

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA`s intelligence to say, undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the world`s most lethal weapons. Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various public speeches given by Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the senators said.

Moreover, these senators allege that the Office of the Vice President and the National Security Council were fully aware that the intelligence Wolfowitz`s committee collected may not have been reliable. The senators said they are discussing privately whether to ask Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to determine how large a role his Special Plans committee played in providing Bush with intelligence data on Iraq and whether that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for war.

A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibility for allowing the White House to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush`s State of the Union address. Last week, these senators and a CIA intelligence official said the Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the uranium claim in Bush`s speech.

But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on Iraq`s weapons programs.

Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information coming out of the Office of Special Plans. A day before he was set to appear before the United Nations on Feb. 5 to argue about the Iraqi threat and to urge the Security Council to support military action against the country, Powell omitted numerous claims provided to him by the Office of Special Plans about Iraq`s weapons program because the information was unreliable, according to an early February report in U.S. News and World Report.

Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of experts to review the information he was given before his speech to the U.N.

Much of the information in Powell`s speech was provided by Wolfowitz`s Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA`s intelligence on Iraq.

Powell`s team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq`s banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the magazine said. At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I`m not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the vice president all denied the accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to believe the information isn`t accurate. Tenet`s spokespeople would not return several calls for comment.

Separately, the CIA, earlier this year, brought back four retired officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine the agency`s pre-war intelligence and reporting on the Iraqi threat. Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President`s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board is also probing the issue, but whether any of the investigations include the Office of Special Plans is still undecided.

Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for the New Yorker, wrote an expose on the Office of Special Plans in May. In his story, he claims a Pentagon adviser told him that the committee "was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States."

Feith, in a rare Pentagon briefing in May, denied that the Office of Special Plans was cherry-picking intelligence information to build a case for war in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans "was not involved in intelligence collection," Feith said. "Rather, it relied on reporting from the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community. Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policymakers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism . . . in the course of its work, this team, in reviewing the intelligence that was provided to us by the CIA and the intelligence community, came up with some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda."

To date, however, the Pentagon has failed to provide any proof of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Still, the OSP or "The Cabal," as the group calls itself, according to the New Yorker story, played a significant role in convincing the White House that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East and to the United States. But the intelligence information and the Iraqi defectors the group relied heavily upon to prove its case were widely off the mark. For example, according to one CIA intelligence official in charge of weapons of mass destruction for the agency, the OSP is responsible for providing thee White House with the information that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program.

Bush said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous at best. It was later determined by the International Atomic Energy Agency that the tubes were designed to build rockets rather than for centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Furthermore, the Iraqi defectors feeding the OSP with information about the locations of Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction were said to be unreliable and responsible for sending U.S. military forces on a "wild goose chase," according to another CIA intelligence official.

Case in point: In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, told the OSP he had visited 20 secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Saeed, a civil engineer, supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contracts, complete with technical specifications. Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations—and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs. He claimed that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in hospitals and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely untrue, when the locations were searched.

The OSP provided the National Security Council with Saeed`s findings last year and the information found its way into a White House report in December called, "Iraq: A Decade of Deception and Defiance."

But the information never held up and turned out to be another big intelligence failure for the Bush administration. Judith Miller first brought the existence of Saeed to light in a New York Times story in December 2001 and again in January. The White House, in September 2002, cited the information provided by Saeed in a fact sheet.

Whether a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen, but one thing is certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an enormous amount of power.

Larry C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the State Department, says he`s spoken to his colleagues working for both agencies and its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence process.

"What they`re experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the boat. OSP came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to believe," he said.

Vinnie Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the National Journal last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the intelligence community."

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California`s electricity crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He has written more than 2,000 news stories on the issue and was the first journalist to report that energy companies were engaged in manipulative practices in California`s newly deregulated electricity market. Mr. Leopold is also a regular contributor to CNBC and National Public Radio and has been the keynote speaker at more than two-dozen energy industry conferences around the country.



http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/072103Leopold/0…

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect3.html

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Bush Rating ist weiter gefallen auf 54%. Seine bisher tiefsten Werte hatte er eine Woche vor 9/11. Ein Schelm der böses dabei denkt. Er ist jetzt ein wenig über seinen niedrigsten Wert seit Amtsantritt.
40% wollen ihn definitiv wiederwählen, 35% nicht, 23% überlegen, ob sie jemand anderen wählen sollen.
48% der Dems würden H. Clinton wählen, wenn sie kandidieren würde.

Right Track/Wrong Track Polls listed chronologically.

Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll. July 22-24, 2003. N=1,000 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.1.

.

"Generally speaking, would you say things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?"

*********Right Direction ******Wrong****Track NotSure

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7/22-24/03****40****************54***********6 .

7/8-10/03*****46****************48***********6 .

6/17-19/03****46****************50***********4 .

6/3-5/03******50****************42***********8 .

5/20-22/03****50****************44***********6 .

5/6-8/03******51****************43***********6 .

4/15-17/03****60****************35***********5 .

4/1-3/03******55****************38***********7 .

3/18-20/03****53****************40***********7 .

3/4-6/03******34****************54**********12

http://www.pollingreport.com/

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Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 22 July 2003 (revised 7/25/03)

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

Fear and aggression

Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

Uncertainty avoidance

Need for cognitive closure

Terror management
"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association`s Psychological Bulletin.

Assistant Professor Jack Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley`s Goldman School of Public Policy and Visiting Professor Frank Sulloway of UC Berkeley joined lead author, Associate Professor John Jost of Stanford University`s Graduate School of Business, and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park, to analyze the literature on conservatism.

The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.

Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said.

The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.

The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.

Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, said Sulloway. That entails the tendency of people`s attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs.

The researchers` analytical methods allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed "more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of conservatism," Sulloway said.

While most people resist change, Glaser said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for change than conservatives do.

As for conservatives` penchant for accepting inequality, he said, one contemporary example is liberals` general endorsement of extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities such as gays and lesbians, compared to conservatives` opposing position.

The researchers said that conservative ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."

They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.

"In many cases, including mass politics, `liberal` traits may be liabilities, and being intolerant of ambiguity, high on the need for closure, or low in cognitive complexity might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty," the researchers wrote.

This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes, the researchers advised.

The latest debate about the possibility that the Bush administration ignored intelligence information that discounted reports of Iraq buying nuclear material from Africa may be linked to the conservative intolerance for ambiguity and or need for closure, said Glaser.

"For a variety of psychological reasons, then, right-wing populism may have more consistent appeal than left-wing populism, especially in times of potential crisis and instability," he said.

Glaser acknowledged that the team`s exclusive assessment of the psychological motivations of political conservatism might be viewed as a partisan exercise. However, he said, there is a host of information available about conservatism, but not about liberalism.

The researchers conceded cases of left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Castro, who, once in power, steadfastly resisted change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism.

Yet, they noted that some of these figures might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. The researchers noted that Stalin, for example, was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system.

Although they concluded that conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others are, Glaser said, "it doesn`t mean that they`re simple-minded."

Conservatives don`t feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm," Glaser said.

He pointed as an example to a 2001 trip to Italy, where President George W. Bush was asked to explain himself. The Republican president told assembled world leaders, "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right." And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, "Look, my job isn`t to nuance."
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_polit…

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Welcome to the Big Darkness
By Hunter S. Thompson
Page 2 columnist


Hi, folks, my name is still Thompson, and I still drink gin with ER Nurses at night -- but in one particular way, I am a New Man, a different man, a more dangerous man than I was the last time we talked. And that was a few weeks ago, eh?[.....]

Kobe cheating on his wife? Rape allegations? It`s only just begun, America.
When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year`s Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush`s job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton`s punching bag.

Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of `03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon`s "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.


The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

DR. THOMPSON IS BACK WITH US NOW, AND READY TO RUMBLE. HE IS FREE OF THE HIDEOUS PAIN THAT HAS PLAGUED HIM AND HIS LOVED ONES SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL. BUT IT IS GONE NOW. THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

To be continued very soon.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Ky. His books include "Hell`s Angels," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail `72," "The Great Shark Hunt," "The Curse of Lono," "Generation of Swine," "Songs of the Doomed," "Screwjack," "Better Than Sex," "The Proud Highway," "The Rum Diary," and "Fear and Loathing in America." His latest book, "Kingdom of Fear," has just been released. A regular contributor to various national and international publications, Thompson now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colo. His column, "Hey, Rube," appears regularly on Page 2.
http://espn.go.com/page2/s/thompson/030722.html

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Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Blair and Bush: When time-honored ties become a short leash
William Pfaff IHT
Thursday, July 24, 2003



PARIS Tony Blair`s current crisis, with a Law Lord inquiring into the death of David Kelly, the Defense Ministry advisor on biological weapons who committed suicide last week, surely derives in part from the prime minister`s intense but puzzling commitment to George W. Bush`s leadership in the Iraq war. If he or his entourage cut corners to justify Iraq`s invasion, it was to serve the common cause.

The Blair government has turned the 61-year-old Anglo-American security alliance into an unprecedented subordination of Britain`s security and foreign policy to the United States. This was the unspoken message of Tony Blair`s emotional address to a joint session of Congress last week.

Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon had already announced, in late June, that British military forces are to be reconfigured so as to function henceforth as Pentagon auxiliaries. This is because from now on, "it is highly unlikely that the U.K. would engage in large-scale combat operations without the United States."

By depriving itself of the ability to operate independently, Britain will abandon one of its most important assets, its possession of balanced and autonomous multi-arm military forces, capable of serving distinct British interests.

In Europe, only France now will have the capacity for sizable independent military operations. All other non-neutral western European forces have been turned into specialized units of an American-commanded NATO army.

As David Leich and Richard Norton-Taylor reported in The Guardian last week, Britain has begun re-equipping its nuclear missile submarines with U.S.-$ made and -maintained Tomahawk cruise missiles, usable only with U.S. acquiescence.

Britain, under Tony Blair, has sold its principal aerospace manufacturer, BAE Systems, to the United States. The Blair government has just agreed to extradite British subjects to the United States on demand, without need for prima facie evidence.

Tony Blair, after taking office in 1997, pledged his government to a "moral" foreign policy. The Bush government claims a moral result from its liberation of the Iraqis but also claims, when it wishes, a sovereign exemption from the constraints of international law and treaty obligation. It asserts a sovereign right to military domination of the planet.

Why does Tony Blair wish this slow suicide of one of Europe`s greatest nations, whose independent legacy to modern Western civilization, and certainly to the United States, is so immense? Where is his electoral mandate for so enormous a decision?

Britain gets nothing from the United States in return (other than Congressional cheers and a gold medal for the prime minister). If Bush remains in office beyond next year, Britain might find itself implicated in what could become an American national tragedy.

Neither does the United States gain anything valuable, merely the satisfactions of possessing a complaisant satellite.

Far better for it to have an independent friend, who speaks its language, has independent weight in world affairs, possesses a major voice in the European Union, is capable on occasion of telling Washington home truths and, by using its independent influence, to force Washington to pay attention.

A British tragedy is in the making. For many of us who grew up under the decisive influence of Britain`s history and literature, it implies an American tragedy as well.

Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/103854.html

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He Joerver ,

alter verschwörungstheoretiker




wie findest Du den ?

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Summary
*********US***UK***Total***Avg/Day

Total***242***44*****286****2.23

07/26/03 CENTCOM
3 US SOLDIERS KILLED, 4 WOUNDED, IN GRENADE ATTACK IN BAQUBAH
07/25/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES 4 ARMY CASUALTIES FROM JULY 23RD & JULY 24TH
07/25/03 Department of Defense
DOD IDENTIFIES 4TH DEATH ON JULY 24TH: VEHICLE MAINTENANCE ACCIDENT
07/24/03 CENTCOM
3 US SOLDIERS KILLED IN CONVOY AMBUSH NEAR MOSUL ON JULY 24TH
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 7 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE NEAR MOSUL
07/23/03 CENTCOM
ONE SOLDIER KILLED, 2 WOUNDED: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE AT AR RAMADI
http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

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One U.S. Marine Killed, One Wounded in Iraq Attack
Sun July 27, 2003 02:42 AM ET
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One U.S. Marine was killed and another wounded in a grenade attack in Iraq on Sunday, the U.S. military said, bringing to five the number of American soldiers killed in the last 24 hours.
A military spokesman said the attack happened in the early hours of Sunday, and involved troops from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. The spokesman had no details on the location of the attack.

On Saturday, three U.S. soldiers were killed when a grenade was thrown at them as they guarded a children`s hospital in Baquba, north of Baghdad, and one soldier was killed in an attack on a convoy in Abu Ghraib, on the capital`s outskirts.

Guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces have killed 49 U.S. soldiers since Washington declared major combat over on May 1.

Ten have died since U.S. forces killed Saddam`s sons Uday and Qusay on Tuesday in what American officials hoped would prove a devastating blow to the morale of Iraqi guerrillas prowling the "Sunni triangle" west and north of Baghdad.

But the feared brothers` bloody fate does not seem to have slowed the quickening rhythm of hit-and-run assaults, though it is not clear the hefty casualty toll of the past few days is related.

U.S. officials blame Saddam loyalists for the attacks on American troops, and masked men have appeared on Arab television networks vowing revenge for the deaths of Uday and Qusay.

But many Iraqis resent the U.S. occupation and link the violence to anger over the way U.S. troops behave.

Between 6000 and 7,800 Iraqi civilians are believed to have been killed since the war began on March 20, though no precise toll is available. There have been incidents of civilian deaths since the war too.

Local people in Kerbala, a Shi`ite Muslim holy city south of Baghdad, said two people were killed in an incident involving U.S. troops there on Saturday.

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Bully Ministers will wreck us - BBC chairman
Fierce attack by Gavyn Davies fuels dossier row, as it is revealed that Kelly named Campbell in taped interview

Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday July 27, 2003
The Observer

The fractured relationship between the BBC and the Government took another plunge last night when Gavyn Davies, the BBC chairman, said that the corporation`s independence was being threatened by political bullying.

Davies, using unusually strong language, said the BBC would not be cowed and that Government-backed attacks on the corporation amounted to an attempt to undermine the organisation`s integrity and the work of the BBC governors.

`Our integrity is under attack,` he said. `We are chastised for taking a different view on editorial matters from that of the Government and its supporters.

`Because we have the temerity to do this, it is hinted a system that has protected the BBC for 80 years should be swept away and replaced by an external regulator that will "bring the BBC to heel".`

In an interview last week, Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, said that she would see if the Hutton Inquiry into the death of the Government scientist, Dr David Kelly, had any impact on the BBC`s application for the renewal of its charter, which is being considered by the Government.

Davies`s words, in an article for the Sunday Telegraph , will add fresh fuel to the raging row between the BBC and the Government over who was to blame for Kelly`s death.

It also marks the end of a shaky and informal truce supposedly called between the two sides after Kelly`s body was found in a field near his Oxfordshire home. He had slit his left wrist.

Although Blair asked for a period of `respect and restraint`, the BBC was goaded into action after last week`s article in The Observer by Peter Mandelson. The key Blair ally and former Cabinet Minister said that the BBC`s journalism - accusing Downing Street of `sexing up` intelligence material against Saddam Hussein - was shoddy.

Davies said the BBC governors, the independent panel that oversees standards, were a `barrier between the BBC`s editorial processes and political bullying`.

The battle showed no signs of abating last night with Peter Hain, the Leader of the House of Commons, accusing the BBC of acting like a `tabloid newspaper` in its reporting of the intelligence claims.

Such is the importance of the issue that Greg Dyke, the director-general of the BBC, and Davies have both cancelled their summer holidays as they fight to save the corporation`s reputation.

Dyke was due to go on holiday to Peru with his family and Davies was due in the South of France. Richard Sambrook, the director of news, is also likely to cancel his holiday in August.

BBC sources said there was a `degree of concern` that the governors could face criticism from the inquiry over their decision to give a `clean bill of health` to reports by the BBC`s defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan.

It was the revelation that Kelly was the source of the original Gilligan story that led to what the Kelly family described as `intolerable pressure` being applied to him.

Sources have also told The Observer that the BBC is increasingly confident of its claims that Alastair Campbell, Number 10 director of communications and strategy, was behind efforts to strengthen intelligence.

In a taped conversation with Newsnight journalist and science editor Susan Watts, Kelly is believed to mention `Campbell` or Downing Street three times unprompted.

Downing Street made no complaint about the Watts broadcast, which went out on BBC2 less than a week after Gilligan`s original reports on Radio Four`s Today programme. She did not name Campbell in the report.

The tape, described as `a few minutes long`, will be sent to the inquiry this week. Broadcasting sources says that it backs up much of Gilligan`s original claims.

In further evidence to be sent to the inquiry, the BBC will also argue that there were a number of inconsistencies in Kelly`s evidence to the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

The BBC will say that Kelly`s description of how Campbell entered the conversation with Gilligan, who claims Kelly named him when questioned on who was behind the `sexing up`, does not square with the facts and that some of his testimony was evasive.

Some members of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee are believed to agree with the BBC view.

The committee will push this week to publish a transcript of evidence given to it in private sessions by Gilligan in which it is claimed the BBC reporter contradicts himself.

It was Gilligan`s evidence that led him to be described as an `unsatisfactory witness` by the committee. He has hit back saying that the committee was a `kangaroo court`.

MPs on the committee are angry at what they see as an attempt by Davies to bounce them into withdrawing plans to publish Gilligan`s evidence last Thursday.

In an emergency session on Tuesday, members of the committee will tell the chairman, the Labour MP Donald Anderson, that the committee should not have been forced into a corner by the BBC.

Anderson believed that Davies, who called him with a personal plea that Gilligan`s evidence be withheld, was suggesting that the BBC journalist was `under stress`.

Anderson has told colleagues he could not countenance the publication of Gilligan`s evidence following the suggestion it could tip Gilligan `over the edge`. The BBC says the wrong interpretation was placed on Davies`s words.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Face to face with death
The furore over the Hussein brothers has obscured the fact that we are no closer to rebuilding Iraq

Mary Riddell
Sunday July 27, 2003
The Observer

Like the last act of Hamlet, the gory corpses stack up. Top of the postwar heap are Uday and Qusay, sons of Saddam. In another drama, they might have revealed to an international tribunal their atrocities and the deepest secrets of their father`s regime. Instead, enough military hardware to reshoot Terminator 3 moved in. The rest is silence.

But first, there is the verbal post-mortem. Should the Pentagon have released pictures to reassure the doubting Thomases of Iraq, who, unless they can see Uzi holes in cadavers, will not believe? The risk is that the bodies of US soldiers, 11 of whom have been killed in the past week, may now be paraded as propaganda tools. The experiment could confer martyrdom on monsters. Mistrust of an occupying force might run too deep to be assuaged by human sacrifice.

Still, even the least bloodthirsty would acknowledge that apprehending the Hussein brothers could not be carried out along the lines of a Dixon of Dock Green caution. But nor should anyone be content that, in an age of DNA, a coalition boasting Olympian moral standards adopts a variant of the medieval identification technique of sticking heads on spikes.

A child of 14, albeit armed and dangerous, died in the raid. The force used against four people with small arms would have annihilated Coventry. The Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949 do not bless the treatment of the corpses, and barbarism, even the justifiable sort, is no substitute for justice. There is a case for the killings and their aftermath. But it leaves precious little room for hubris, especially when this dress rehearsal cast doubt on whether Saddam could be taken alive.

Quite a different dilemma confronted British editors. Some, mindful of gratuitous voyeurism, used the brothers` bloody pictures discreetly. Others flaunted them. The Times, quaintly, printed a health warning, advising readers that they might find the images displayed inside `disturbing`.

No doubt. But the Marsh Arabs may also have been disturbed at seeing their 250,000 population crushed to 40,000 by Qusay. So might the women raped by Uday and the families who wait for news that never comes of husbands or children consigned to mass graves by Saddam, or crammed into freezers filled with the body parts of those killed by coalition forces. At least 6,000 Iraqi civilians died in the conflict, and 1,000 children, on Unicef`s estimate, have been maimed or killed by ordnance in the weeks of peace.

The lost, the mutilated and the dead ruffle Western consciences too little, not too much. There is a lot to be said for some disturbing images. In one day in Liberia last week, 600 people were butchered in ways that made the Husseins` demise look merciful. The few pictures shown in the Western media served to shame America, with a clear moral and historical duty to intervene in this humanitarian catastrophe, into making a belated, limited gesture of salvation.

Away from the battlefield, hypocrisy underlies the notion that we are too frail to cope with violent death. About 1.4 million viewers watched Professor Gunther von Hagens`s televised autopsy, and hundreds turned out, some clutching infants, to bay for the blood of Ian Huntley, the man accused of the Soham murders. Britain`s Tyburn tastes go hand in hand, however, with a genuine terror of the dead.

Death, a rare sight for most people, must be sanitised and medicalised. Even for the very old, dying is seen as a failure, of medicine or the mortal spirit. There may be no faith in an afterlife, but neither is there any enthusiasm for the built-in obsolescence of the human package. Hence the fear of euthanasia and genetic advance, a revulsion inspired by religious scruples grafted on to a secular age.

It is unsurprising that societies schooled to see death as an aberration translate mortality into brutal fantasy. Where Victorian novels feature the statutory dead child, modern death is part of a morbid entertainment industry, in which computer games featuring mock massacres make virtual executioners of our children. I believe, with some reservations, that a normal child will not be much damaged by such unpleasant stuff. As for adult newspaper readers confronted by a dead Hussein, their squeamishness meshes with a different mindset.

In a vulpine culture, citizens prefer to believe in their limitless compassion. Such myths are vital. They validate those who wept for Princess Diana, who mourned Holly and Jessica as if they were their own children and who chanted `Viva Saint Linda` on the day of the previous Mrs McCartney`s funeral. These displays, bathing practitioners in the borrowed sanctity of the dead, were last deployed when the most mourned casualty of war was discovered, his wrist slit, in a lonely wood.

The effusions of media sorrow at the death of Dr David Kelly may have been heartfelt, but they were also trite. To portray him as an innocent hounded to his grave by the toxic forces of journalism and politics cannot have done full justice to an eminent Nobel nominee skilled in dealing with both sides.

If there is a less appealing sight than a politician cloaked in righteousness, it is that of the British media in a periodic fit of self-flagellation. Just as Diana`s death, to which it pleaded guilty, turned out to be the work of a drunken driver, so the pressures on Dr Kelly may be not what they seem. It is possible that the MoD, or Downing Street, or the BBC drove him to suicide, in which case Lord Hutton must uncover the evidence. But it is also feasible that the roots of his despair were more complex, private and unknowable.

Since we have no inkling, the best tribute to Dr Kelly is to emulate his long mission to create an Iraq safe for its citizens and the wider world. Rows about the semantics of the Today programme are a sideshow. The legal case for war has proved bogus, the weapons of mass destruction have not materialised and the Government`s case is in rags. I believe profoundly that the conflict was wrong, but blame is now useless to Iraq. So is the Government`s power struggle with the BBC.

Three prominent men are dead. They have been demonised or canonised accordingly. Beyond them are the ghosts of thousands more, some bad, some good. Whether a new Iraq can be built on their graves will depend less on what happened in Mosul, or Abingdon, than on whether humanity is at the heart of policy.

The pictures of the Saddam brothers do not augur well. Cadavers sewn up and plugged with mortician`s putty, like a macabre travesty of a Damien Hirst exhibit, may affront more Muslims than they console. Other images linger, such as the joy in Donald Rumsfeld`s eye.

There is a suspicion, too, that some atavistic impulse in Western spectators relishes the coalition`s mortuary peepshow. But let us see the remains of Saddam`s sons. Censorship is worse. Only remember that their bodies tell us less, not more, about the reality of suffering and death.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Milestones and millstones

The end of Alastair Campbell presents Tony Blair with the opportunity to make a fresh start with his party and the country

Andrew Rawnsley, political journalist of the year
Sunday July 27, 2003
The Observer

The judgment of history is the court of final appeal to which the Prime Minister is increasingly fond of referring his more unpopular and controversial decisions. Tony Blair may imagine a bewigged bench of Lord Hutton lookalikes handing down verdicts of absolution. During his summer sojourn at Sir Cliff Richard`s villa in Barbados, the Prime Minister might try to make the time to read some political biography. The judgments of historians are rarely that simple or unanimous.
When they consider his Government, the Law Lords of posterity will have to wrestle with the conflicting testimony from the diaries of Alastair Campbell, the recollections of Peter Mandelson and the memoirs of Gordon Brown. When even the architects of New Labour will not always agree, the court of history will be in disputation about the legacy of Tony Blair long after he has gone.

Still, at least he will shortly inscribe one hard fact into the history books. Assuming he survives in office until 2 August - and even his most feverish critics seem to accept that Mr Blair will probably just about manage to cling on until Saturday - he will set a new record. This will become the longest-ever period of continuous Labour government when he bests the six years and three months of Clement Attlee.

This is an important achievement, especially in terms of New Labour`s sense of itself. From the beginning, the essence of the Project was to turn Labour into a party that could win power and then sustain it. Grasp that about New Labour and you understand it all: from the great caution of the early years for fear of blowing the economy on to the rocks to the obsessive attempts, however often they have ultimately proved counterproductive, to manipulate public opinion. The single most important objective of the Blair version of Labour has been to break out of the pattern set by Attlee, and repeated by Wilson and Callaghan, of surrendering office back to the Conservatives after a term and a bit.

This significant moment is passing without any discernible celebration, even among New Labourites themselves. Do you hear the sound of champagne corks popping? You do not. It would, for starters, look incredibly tasteless for Tony Blair to be toasting his own longevity in office when Lord Hutton is just about to begin his judicial post-mortem into the death of Dr David Kelly.

Before that shocking development hit him as his plane flew across the Pacific, the Prime Minister had been hoping that August would act as a firebreak on his inferno of troubles. The media would become bored with those damned elusive weapons of mass destruction; the public appetite for reading yet more about African yellow cake and 45-minute launch times would become jaded. The autumn would provide a fresher canvas on which he could paint his big pictures about the public services and Europe. That hope is now shredded, as so many of his plans have been minced over the awful past few months.

The Hutton inquiry will run, and mainly in public, throughout August and maybe much longer. Mr Blair has felt obliged to say he is ready to return from his Bajan sun-lounger to Britain to give evidence. Everyone else will have to do the same. Downing Street is in a feverish state preparing its version of events for Hutton. The rebuttal units will be on the highest alert over the summer. There will be saturation coverage, all the more intense because August is normally a thin month for news, of a story that has been relentlessly damaging to the Government. Many more headlines will scream of spooks, spinners and dossiers.

`It will get worse before it gets better,` sighs a Cabinet Minister. If they are friendly towards the Defence Secretary, colleagues hope for the best for Geoff Hoon. But some senior members of the Government are already past caring about the verdict delivered by Hutton. They simply and desperately want it to be over and done with, and certainly before the party conference. That cannot be a potential springboard for relaunching the Government until a line is drawn under this affair. We will see whether Lord Hutton will oblige this desire for a rapid closure. These inquiries have a tendency to grow in both scope and timescale, whatever the Prime Minister would prefer to the contrary.

Another reason for New Labour not to boast about how long it has been in power is that this is an achievement which it is risky to flaunt in front of the voters. The milestone is also a millstone. Having noted that this government has more than six years on the clock, the public may be even more likely to ask themselves whether it has done enough with all that time. Moreover, it is never good for a government to look pleased with itself when the country isn`t. On all the key poll ratings - especially those for trust and competence - the Prime Minister is now scoring high negatives.

This is not surprising after all that has happened since January. Taxes have gone up, the economy has stuttered and the house-price balloon has deflated, a reshuffle has been botched, and Mr Blair has joined a widely suspected American President in a divisive and contentious war which provoked the resignation of two members of the Cabinet.

Here a bit of historical perspective is useful. The surprise is not that things are bad for Blair; the surprise is they are not vastly worse. Opinion polls still put Labour either just behind, just ahead or neck-and-neck with the Tories. Every government since 1945 has experienced much worse slides. If Tony Blair is in difficulties, his predecessors would have embraced his difficulties with joy.

Most postwar governments have bounced back from midterm declines. If the pendulum swings in the same way for Mr Blair, he is set to win the next election comfortably, even handsomely. The anxiety in the high commands of the Government is that this won`t happen for New Labour. In its first term, the Government never really suffered a serious slump. In its second term, it won`t enjoy a rebound. That is their fear.

When he won the last election, people asked of Tony Blair: how long will he go on? Now they ask: how long has he got left? The answer to that question is not one Mr Blair can leave to the court of historical judgment. He will have to master his own fate.

Everyone agrees that he needs some fresh ideas and a more compelling way of communicating his Government`s purpose. Even more urgently than that, it needs to try to re-establish a reputation for basic competence. Whether it be the school-funding fiasco or the tax-credits farrago, Labour is being seen as just not very adept at governing. As one senior member of the Cabinet put it to me the other day: `We`ve got to get our act together, quick.`

Next, Tony Blair is going to have to handle being deeply disliked by a great number of people for a long period of time. This is virgin territory for a man who enjoys the sound of applause. Sure, quite a lot of people have always despised him, but he could shrug off the slings of the Left and the arrows of the Right, reasonably safe in the knowledge that being vilified by them tended to make him more appealing to Middle Britain. What this Prime Minister has not had previous experience of dealing with is being deeply distrusted by mainstream opinion.

He will have to go through this unaided by Alastair Campbell, on whom he has been so heavily reliant since he was elected as Leader of the Opposition nearly 10 years ago. No one has spent more hours with Blair - no one in the Cabinet, no one else except perhaps his wife - than his director of communications and strategy. There are those who believe that the Prime Minister simply won`t be able to cope without the man who has been there for every triumph and every crisis from the Ecclestone affair to the war in Iraq. The end of Blair begins with the end of Campbell.

Well, I remember people saying much the same about Peter Mandelson: that Blair would collapse in a quivering heap the moment that he no longer had that consigliere by his side. The double-sacking of this close friend exhibited a ruthless streak of self-preservation in this Prime Minister which should not be underestimated.

You do not last at Number 10 for more than six years without having considerable reserves of resilience. You also need a capacity to know when allies, even the closest ones, have become more of a liability than an asset. It is accurate to say that Tony Blair has, on several occasions, urged Alastair Campbell not to quit. I also have good reason to believe that, in their more recent discussions about his future, Mr Blair has not fought quite so hard to keep him. He has come to the reluctant conclusion that it will probably be best for both of them and for the Government for Alastair Campbell to leave.

His departure from Downing Street will leave a huge hole. It will also create a big opportunity to try to kill spin as a constantly corrosive story about this Government. From burying bad news to hyping dodgy dossiers, Alastair Campbell would himself recognise that nothing has done the public character of the Government and its leader more harm. The collapse in public trust bleeds across to everything else, whether it is trying to convince people that public-service improvements are for real or persuading Britain to join the euro.

Alastair Campbell has at least sometimes been right when he has complained that this Government and he personally have been more spinned against than spinning. But a man with such a grasp of image will be able to recognise, even as he thinks it unfair, that he has become emblematic, for too many people for his own good or that of the Government, of why so much has gone so sour for New Labour. His departure creates a space for Tony Blair to try to establish a less hysterical relationship with the media; at any rate, with those parts of the media that might be interested in conducting political debate on a more mature level. It gives the Government the opportunity to think about how it might conduct its conversation with the electorate in a more candid and attractive tone.

The spinmeister who has been so integral to the making of Tony Blair can do his master a last and ironic service by giving Tony Blair the chance to remake himself anew.

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Ministers accused of threatening BBC chiefs
By James Morrison and Andy McSmith
27 July 2003


Ministers threatened revenge on the BBC in the feud that led to the death of the government scientist David Kelly, according to senior sources within the corporation. One said: "There have been phone calls from within government saying `we are going to get you`, talking about `vengeance`. There`s a war going on against the BBC of some kind."

The threats were seen by the BBC as part of an orchestrated campaign to intimidate the corporation over its coverage of Iraq`s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Another highly placed source alleged that the former cabinet minister Peter Mandelson had sought to negotiate a "deal" which it is believed would have involved the BBC publicly retracting allegations made by Andrew Gilligan, defence correspondent for the Today programme, who claimed in a broadcast on 29 May that Downing Street had altered intelligence reports on Iraq to make them "sexier", to buttress the case for going to war.

The BBC subsequently phoned Mr Mandelson back, rejecting the suggested deal. According to the source: "That`s when the not-so-veiled threat was made. Essentially, the meaning was `we`ll throw everything at you`. It was a clear attempt to threaten the BBC`s independence by getting us to pull a story we had publicly said we stood behind. The tone of the conversation seemed to be `retract or else`."

The row comes as the Prime Minister has appealed for restraint in the wake of the death of Dr Kelly. Today, Peter Hain, the Leader of the Commons, accuses politicians, broadcasters and journalists alike of being sucked into a "Westminster bubble" where political debate is driven out by spin and "on-message government boredom".

Writing in this newspaper, Mr Hain warns fellow members of what he calls "the political class" that unless they introduce more integrity into public life, "we will all go down together" if public disenchantment with politics worsens.

Yesterday Lord Hutton, who will head the official inquiry into Dr Kelly`s suspected suicide, paid a courtesy call on his widow at her Oxfordshire home. Tony Blair, who will hold a final press conference on Wednesday before his summer break, has called for "restraint" until after Lord Hutton`s inquiry.

The steady drip of information from inside the BBC as it prepares for the Hutton inquiry has infuriated government supporters. One former minister has accused BBC staff of being more guilty than the Government of "spinning".

Last week, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee "reluctantly" agreed not to publish a transcript of its final hearing in which Andrew Gilligan gave evidence, after receiving a personal request from the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies.

Gisela Stuart, a Labour member of the committee, said: "If we withheld the transcript, in the interest of stabilising the situation, I would have expected a similar attitude from the BBC. I would have expected them to give up spinning."

In his evidence, given in private at the very time when Dr Kelly was walking to his death in an Oxfordshire wood, Mr Gilligan is understood to have claimed that he was trying to persuade the source of his allegations to come forward, implying it was someone other than the scientist.

The BBC has since confirmed that this source was in fact Dr Kelly, who had appeared before the committee two days earlier. Mr Gilligan may have to explain to Lord Hutton why he appeared to give misleading information to a Commons committee.

Mr Hain, who had already complained of the deteriorating quality of political debate before the events that led to Dr Kelly`s death, has added a warning that: "Politicians, news broadcasters and journalists now form a `political class` which is in a frenzied world of its own, completely divorced from the people, and which is turning off viewers, listeners and readers from politics by the million.

"Government can do more to cut out the spin. But equally the media can do more to report substance. If we don`t burst this Westminster bubble, we will all go down together."
27 July 2003 09:38



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Trouble mounts for Bush as lethal Iraqi resistance claims more lives
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
27 July 2003


Just how organised is the resistance, and who is doing the organising, is not clear. But yesterday`s grenade attack which killed three US troops outside a children`s hospital north of Baghdad and injured four others has banished the hope that the death of Saddam Hussein`s two sons would halt the de facto guerrilla war against the American forces occupying Iraq.

Even more ominously for President Bush, it can only deliver another blow to the morale of soldiers deployed in an inhospitable and scorching hot country, and alarm a public opinion growing steadily more disenchanted with an operation whose costs are soaring and of which no end is in sight.

Since Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed in Mosul on Tuesday, the ambushes have, if anything, become deadlier. Eight US soldiers have died, They may also hasten yet another revamp of the reconstruction effort.

Last week Paul Bremer, the chief US civilian administrator in Iraq, was in Washington to give a progress report. Outwardly he was all optimism, claiming that rebuilding was running ahead of schedule. Privately however, the message was very different, as he pleaded for more money and more personnel.

And in a rare admission of human fallibility, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Secretary of Defense and a prime architect of the war, conceded last week that the Pentagon had been wrong in some of its post-war assumptions, and that "some conditions were worse than we anticipated."

The position of Mr Bremer is not in question. But the administration is urgently seeking to enlist one or more prominent figures to work alongside him, to try to revive public confidence in the overall project.

One person contacted is James Baker, the former Secretary of State and a trusted Bush family retainer who superintended the Republican team in Florida in the furiously contested aftermath of the presidential vote in Florida. Mr Baker, 73, who also served as Treasury Secretary, is seen as an ideal man to lead the search for foreign financial support for reconstruction.

For President Bush, the Iraqi war that had seemed to seal his popularity (and 2004 re-election) now threaten to become a liability. His approval ratings are back to the low 50s, where they were before the September 11 terrorist attacks, and a growing proportion of Americans tells pollsters the invasion was not worth it.

Mr Bush`s Democratic challengers are increasingly critical of the war, and of how the administration used intelligence about Saddam Hussein`s alleged illegal weapon programmes to justify it.
27 July 2003 09:39

|© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Peter Hain: The spin must stop. We must burst the Westminster bubble
Politicians and journalists are both guilty of making politics a turn-off for voters, argues Peter Hain
27 July 2003


Ten days ago a man took his own life amidst fever pitch intensity in the "Westminster bubble" - that politically incestuous world occupied by politicians, Government and Opposition, together with the media.

Well before this tragedy, I had become increasingly frustrated about the truly appalling quality of what passes for political debate in Britain today. And discussing this with some editors and lobby journalists, I found a common acknowledgement that we do have a genuine crisis. Politicians, news broadcasters and journalists now form a "political class" which is in a frenzied world of its own, completely divorced from the people, and which is turning off viewers, listeners and readers from politics by the million.

The media debate centres on soundbites interpreted by spin, instead of arguments underpinned by facts. The hunt for the new angle on a story leads to a self-indulgent obsession with process, not substance, and with personalities not policies. This is breeding a climate of cynicism which is corrosive of democracy, and which is contributing to voter disengagement and low turnout.

From Tony Blair and Gordon Brown through Alastair Campbell this government has been self-critical about our own tendency for "spin" in our early years. But then again if we hadn`t shown an iron grip on our communications, we could so easily have degenerated into the shambles of the John Major years - with the media being the first to attack us for it.

The media cannot have it both ways - we cannot be both "control freaks" and then, when we ease up on that control, be accused of having "lost control". When ministers all sing from the same hymn sheet we are accused of being controlled by our pagers - and women MPs demeaningly labelled "Blair babes". Yet when we go "off script", the Government is "adrift", the PM has "lost control". We are attacked as a government "without a grip", with our famed ability to communicate "ebbing away".

As a Cabinet minister, I`m a believer in plain speaking and answering the questions, not ducking them. It`s got me into the odd scrape. But then even the most cautious, on-message minister has been there too: it comes with the job these days. A different adjective on the euro feeds a restless rush for a new "Cabinet split" story and we`re off again - preoccupied with ourselves, not the public. The way the debate in the Westminster bubble is conducted is insulting to a public that wants intelligent debate, not journalistic spin or on-message government boredom.

The public don`t like the way every attempt at open debate is turned into a "split" or the way that every ministerial word that is microscopically different becomes a "gaffe". They want to see, hear and read the merits of interesting ideas by ministers or shadow ministers instead of all sorts of angles, spin and process minutiae - endlessly fascinating and exciting to the Westminster bubble but boring and self-obsessed to everyone else.

The Westminster bubble is obsessed with who`s up and who`s down. A grown-up policy debate within the Cabinet on a difficult issue becomes some huge personal rivalry by the time it is reported.

I was first in the media spotlight during anti-apartheid campaigns 33 years ago. But I have never before experienced so much made-up journalism - or, at best, journalism based on single anonymous sources - often from gossip over lunches, no doubt. I am invariably amazed at what I read about myself - and if that goes for me, imagine what the Prime Minister feels. Indeed, I know what he feels: that the Westminster bubble bears no resemblance to reality.

Most politicians of all parties are decent people, motivated by a desire to do good. We didn`t get involved in politics because of a fascination with process. We want to change society. Equally, most journalists went into their profession to report or uncover the truth. And the truth is that most voters - who are also readers, viewers and listeners - want to read or hear about how policies are likely to affect their lives, not about the self-obsessed little world of the political class.

The media is absolutely right to give the Government a hard time when we deserve it. But both government and media need to get a better balance between the reporting of politics in terms of the outcomes that affect the public and what goes on inside our own little bubble. Government can do more to cut out the spin and cut down on the packaging. But, equally, the media can do more to report substance and content. We need a new deal.

There is also a problem with the Opposition - or rather the lack of it. Politics abhors a vacuum. Sections of the media have rushed to fill it - not just traditionally partial newspapers, but independent broadcasters. Instead of being spectators, the media have become key players in politics. Instead of following the agenda, the media are increasingly setting it.

We have seen the absolute extreme of this in the recent row between the BBC and the Government. A story, based on one source, and "sexed up" to make it more interesting - with the seniority of that source also spun to give the report more credibility - to ensure the greatest embarrassment, in the best traditions of the tabloids, rather than a public service broadcaster.

There is a fine tradition of investigative journalism that must continue - including by broadcasters, and the BBC in particular considering its public service remit. Many genuine scandals have been exposed, and suffering and abuse ended, because of excellent journalism. There is a fine tradition of critical and campaigning journalism - and that must continue also. But when it becomes journalistic spin, it must not be dressed up as straightforward reporting - with lines blurred between fact and comment.

Instead of reporting, some journalists are increasingly spinning. Intense competition means even broadsheets hugely over-hype. I have consistently experienced sub-editors who often write headlines and introductions which bear little resemblance to quoted words - which broadcasters then transmit without correction.

This is a chicken and egg situation. The media becomes a 24-hour rolling, non-stop machine, with producers and editors crying out for a new angle to "take the story on". Politicians respond with media grids, pagers and pre-briefings of announcements - anything to wrest back control of the frenzied news agenda. The endless merry-go-round sucks in everybody, including public service broadcasters.

I would not claim that politicians are as pure as the driven snow. We make our fair share of mistakes but at least we are kept in check by the forces of democratic accountability. For journalists there is no electorate, there are no voters, there are no democratic checks and balances. In the market place of ideas the only thing that marks out a decent journalist from a scoundrel or a rogue is good old-fashioned integrity. It`s time for a little more integrity and a little less hypocrisy.

Although many indicators show that participation in traditional forms of politics is declining, I do not believe that people are uninterested in politics. It is the way that we in the Westminster bubble engage with people that is the problem - and by "we" I mean politicians and the media.

If we don`t crack this problem and burst this Westminster bubble, then we will all go down together, politicians and political journalists alike. Because the lower turnout falls, the less editors are going to feel they have to cover politics at all. And that spells redundancy for all of us - democratic politics included.

Peter Hain is Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Wales
27 July 2003 09:42



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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July 27, 2003

Minister`s denial puts aides in firing line
Nicholas Rufford



THE judge heading the inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly visited the scientist`s widow yesterday as pressure mounted on Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, over his handling of the affair.

Lord Hutton visited the Kelly family home in Southmoor, Oxfordshire, and spent about an hour talking to Kelly`s widow Janice. He is likely to have explained the remit of his forthcoming inquiry — expected to start this week — and that he might call her as a witness.

The judicial inquiry, ordered by Tony Blair after Kelly`s body was discovered on July 18, will aim to establish why the Ministry of Defence scientist apparently took his life, and who was responsible for leaking his name after he admitted to his bosses that he had spoken to BBC journalists.

Hoon yesterday insisted he was not responsible for naming Kelly and that he personally went to great lengths to protect the scientist`s anonymity. He said he would not quit. "I have no plans to resign and I don`t see any reason why I should," he said. "One day I will, but certainly not in the near future."

His defiant language points to a struggle between the Ministry of Defence and No 10 over who in government should take responsibility for giving clues to Kelly`s identity and confirming his name to journalists.

Hoon refused to comment on the details of an 80-minute meeting with Kelly`s widow last Wednesday. But he is understood to have told Janice Kelly that he was sorry her husband was cast into the centre of a public row between the government and the BBC through the leaking of his name.

Hoon said the Hutton inquiry would establish the truth of his role in the affair. "I am looking forward to giving evidence," he said.

However, Hoon — who was said to have called a press photographer "lowlife scum" during an altercation on Friday — reacted angrily when asked whether his insistence that he was not personally to blame for the leak effectively shifted responsibility to the senior officials at his department.

"I don`t think that is a fair question. You know as well as I do where the answer to that question leads."

But by declaring he was out of the decision-making loop, Hoon will start a battle at the top of his ministry.

The spotlight will now fall on Pam Teare, the MoD`s head of press, who confirmed Kelly`s name to journalists, and Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary, who discussed with other senior officials how press inquiries should be handled.

In briefings and statements issued the week before Kelly`s death, the MoD and No 10 said the BBC`s source had been a UN weapons inspector, an expert in arms control and a civil servant. Those and other clues pointed incontrovertibly to Kelly.

Alastair Campbell, the prime minister`s communications chief, who is expected to be called before Hutton to answer questions about his role in the leaking of Kelly`s name, was reported to have left yesterday for a holiday in France amid growing speculation about when he will leave his job.

Friends said that Fiona Millar, Campbell`s girlfriend, gave him a "Tony or me" ultimatum earlier this year. Millar, an adviser to Cherie Blair, will leave No 10 in the autumn. The couple have two sons and a daughter. A friend said: "Alastair has long been conscious that his boys are getting towards their mid-teens, which can be a very difficult time."

Campbell recently told one friend he had "one more big job" outside Westminster to do. Last night there was speculation he would join a new "kitchen cabinet", also including Peter Mandelson, the former cabinet minister, and Philip Gould, the government`s chief pollster, to formulate the party`s strategy in the run-up to the next election. Campbell has told friends he still expects to speak daily with Blair after leaving his current job.

The Kelly affair is now set to engulf the intelligence services. Some members of the intelligence and security committee believe MI6 was selective in its use of intelligence and gave an unbalanced impression of the Iraqi threat.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of MI6, was said to have been given a "rough ride" by MPs when he was questioned in private 10 days ago about claims in the government`s dossier that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium ore from Niger, and over the warning that Iraq could deploy chemical weapons in 45 minutes.

The committee praised Kelly, whose evidence they had heard the previous day, and said they were "impressed by his knowledge". Kelly had reservations about how intelligence material was presented in the dossier. The report is expected to be published after the recall of parliament in September.

Kelly expressed his fears over the dossier to fellow members of the eastern Baha`i faith last October. One said: "He felt frustrated by the way it had been interpreted. But he did not say who by."

In addition to Hutton`s inquiry, Kelly`s death and the handling of intelligence on Iraq are being investigated by two parliamentary committees, Thames Valley police and the Oxfordshire coroner.

Police last week interviewed Terry Taylor, head of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in Washington, who spoke to Kelly four days before his death.

Taylor, one of Kelly`s closest friends, said he was shocked by the scientist`s death because there was nothing in his behaviour to suggest he was suicidal. Taylor said Kelly was organising a 40-strong British team heading for Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction. He was to leave for Baghdad on July 18, the day after his death.

Last night, there was a further escalation in the row between the BBC and the government over the Iraq dossier sparked by a report from the defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan for which Kelly was the main source.

Gavyn Davies, the BBC chairman, made an uncompromising defence of the corporation`s editorial independence. He warned the BBC would not be intimidated by veiled threats that the Iraq row would affect renewal of its charter.

Davies wrote: "We are chastised for taking a different view on editorial matters from that of the government and its supporters. Because we have had the temerity to do this, it is hinted that a system that has protected the BBC for 80 years should be swept away and replaced by an external regulator that will `bring the BBC to heel`."

Davies` comments came amid reports that current and former ministers had threatened the corporation with "vengeance" if it did not yield in the dossier affair.

However, a spokesman for the culture department said last night: "The review of the BBC charter that will start at the end of this year will be radical and wide ranging . . . [but] there is no question of it being used to settle scores."

Davies and Greg Dyke, the BBC director-general, have cancelled their summer holidays to prepare for the Hutton inquiry. They stand behind reports from Gilligan and others that Campbell had a hand in overplaying intelligence reports. Dyke, however, is said to be "worried about discrepancies" between the story on the Iraq dossier run by Gilligan and those of other BBC reporters who also based their accounts on Kelly`s testimony.

Additional reporting: Dipesh Gadher

Saddam’s son fed his love rivals to the lions
Hala Jaber, Baghdad
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-758394,00.html
Blair guru sends son to private German school
Nicholas Hellen and Gareth Walsh
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-758324,00.html

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July 27, 2003

Comment: William Rees-Mogg: Only electoral defeat can revive Blair’s dream



The government could lose the next general election. That is not the same thing as saying that the Conservatives could win it. In order to gain an overall majority the Conservatives would need to win 164 seats, in addition to the 166 they hold.
We have no evidence that public opinion has swung so far in their favour. To lose the election, Labour would have to lose only 83 of the 412 seats it won in 2001.

There is no reliable way of using opinion polls to forecast the outcome of a general election in terms of seats. The next general election is probably two years away, give or take a few months; turnout is unpredictable; so is the tactical voting in marginal seats.

Nevertheless, the rule of thumb is that Labour would lose its overall majority on a swing of 7%; the latest opinion poll, by YouGov in The Daily Telegraph, shows a 6% swing to the Conservatives, but a 7.5% swing to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats combined. Losses of about or above 80 seats between elections are not uncommon: the Conservatives lost 219 seats in 1945 and 171 in 1997; Labour lost 236 in 1931, 78 in 1950 and 76 in 1970.

There is no law that says governments always recover popularity in the later stages of a parliament. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they do not. Of the 19 general elections since 1929, the government of the day has won 10 and lost nine.

Since 1945, of the five governments in Tony Blair’s position of enjoying — if that is the word — a second term, only two have won the subsequent election. There is nothing in psephology that makes it impossible, or even unlikely, that Labour will lose its overall majority.

Much could depend on the Liberal Democrats and their tactical voting. They are in an unusual position. Their only hope of power, or of achieving proportional representation for Westminster, is to gain the balance in a parliament in which Labour has no overall majority. Yet most of their seats are contested against the Conservatives rather than Labour, and tactical voting by Labour has helped the Liberal Democrats to win their marginals.

In 1997 and 2001 Liberal Democrat tactical voting undoubtedly helped Labour to win marginal seats against the Conservatives. Yet that is now directly contrary to the interests of the Liberal Democrats.

Unless the Conservatives do much better at the next election, there will be no hung parliament. What the Liberal Democrats need is Labour support in Conservative seats, while they support the Conservatives in Labour seats. That may be difficult to arrange.

The next general election will not, however, be decided by these psephological considerations. The real question is whether Tony Blair’s new Labour project has a future. One needs to look at the Labour party itself, and in particular at the history of the new Labour movement; it has been a strangely limited if strangely successful political group.

New Labour comes from an elitist culture outside the Labour mainstream. Its original progenitor, who resigned his Lincoln seat after pressure in late 1972 to contest it in a by-election early the following year as a Democratic Labour candidate, was Dick Taverne. He is now a Liberal Democrat peer. Then followed the gang of four who founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981. They consisted of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, William Rodgers and David Owen.

From the beginning, in all its phases, the new movement combined three elements: it was middle class and professional rather than working class and trade union; it was social democratic but not by any means socialist; it was strongly European. It belonged to the culture of the post-war progressive left.

In 1972 Taverne was seen as an alien body by the Labour party and was ousted with little difficulty. The gang of four, the second wave of infection, caused a big reaction, but they left the party and were eventually defeated. New Labour, the third wave, was able to seize control of a party which had lost three elections. It conquered a party in despair, but it is in despair no longer.

Blair became leader of the Labour party because he looked as though he could win elections; he has remained prime minister because he won two landslides. But he never represented the real culture of the party.

In this he is, for all his talents, at a disadvantage compared with many of his colleagues, such as David Blunkett or John Reid; he is certainly at a disadvantage relative to Gordon Brown. To be “one of us” in new Labour terms makes it harder to be “one of us” in old Labour terms.

Indeed “the most successful Labour leader in history”, as his friends call him, is not ideologically a Labour man at all; he does not share Labour’s instincts or values. The politicians one would compare him to are civilised and moderate Europhiles such as Jenkins. He would even fit in as a left-wing Tory, like Ken Clarke, except that Clarke opposed the war in Iraq.

The dissonance between the election-winning leader and his party has always been a strain. Blair, who is a genuinely charming man, has the ruthlessness but not the brutality of a leader; he has always been protected by men with thicker skins.

The conduct of his praetorian guard has alienated people both outside and inside the Labour party. Now some have gone and others are going; Peter Mandelson has resigned twice; Alastair Campbell remains in Downing Street as a loose tooth. The Blair machine may be beginning to break up.

The war in Iraq was a war too far for the Labour party. The alternative middle-class progressive group in the party, The Guardian and BBC intelligentsia, were shocked. Blair had largely lost his support in the trade unions.

Most unions in the past couple of years have been choosing people well to the left of Blair. Not only in British Airways is a 1970s-style militancy stirring. That is always a danger to the Labour party, which can neither control the unions nor dissociate itself from them. There is a strange paradox. Blair’s alienation from his party may lead to a hung parliament at the next general election. Yet that might be, for him, a new opportunity.

When he looks back at his period in office, he must regret missing the brief opening which existed in 1997 to unite the centre left, the people whose values he shares. He might have done the deal with which he was always tempting Paddy Ashdown and made a pact with the Liberal Democrats.

A hung parliament would give a new opportunity for “the project”, the idea with which the whole process started. Bring the centre-left together, introduce electoral reform, unite with the Liberal Democrats and dominate the new century.

Blair missed his opportunity in the victory year of 1997. He will have another chance only if Labour loses its majority in 2005 or 2006.




Ferdinand Mount is away

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-757932,00.html

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July 27, 2003
5 G.I.`s Killed in Iraq in 24 Hours
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.


AQUBA, Iraq, July 26 — Three American soldiers with the Fourth Infantry Division were killed and four were wounded here today after an assailant, who witnesses said was probably perched inside the children`s hospital the troops were guarding, threw a grenade into a group of soldiers who were playing a game of cards next to the building.

Another American soldier was killed today and two others were wounded in an attack on an Army convoy in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, military officials said. And early Sunday, a soldier from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in a grenade attack. A military spokesman had no details on the location of the attack.

The hospital here was sealed off shortly after the 11 a.m. attack, and at 8 p.m. military officials were still refusing to allow anyone, with a few exceptions, to enter or leave. Inside, employees and patients were searched, interrogated and fingerprinted, according to people who were allowed the leave the hospital.

Tonight, a military official at the scene, who asked that his name not be used, said the military was investigating whether the grenade had been thrown from the hospital. Otherwise, aside from confirming the number of dead and wounded, military officials offered few details about the attack in this town about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad.

"I saw for myself, three people died and one was critically injured," said Hussein Ali, a 30-year-old cafeteria worker at the hospital who was allowed to leave. The grenade "was thrown from inside," he said, adding: "I heard a voice and a loud sound, and then I saw three people dead."

Mr. Ali said the soldiers had been relaxing near their armored vehicle and close to a set of stairs on the exterior of the building. The grenade "was definitely thrown from one of the floors" of the hospital, he said, and the soldiers "were sitting playing cards a few feet away from the military vehicle."

The attack is a blow to hopes that the slaying in Mosul on Tuesday of Saddam Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusay, would weaken the resolve of Iraqi insurgents.

This has been one of the deadliest weeks for American troops since President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1. Of the 104 Americans who have died in Iraq since then, 14 have been killed in the last seven days.

Today`s attack occurred on the eastern fringe of the Sunni-dominated region where violence against American soldiers has been the worst. The strike today followed two deadly attacks in a 24-hour period this week in and around Mosul, a northern Iraqi city. In one attack, insurgents in the village of Qaiyara used rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov automatic rifles to ambush a convoy early Thursday morning, killing three. Another soldier was killed and six were wounded on Wednesday morning, after a remotely detonated explosive device struck a convoy traveling in Mosul.

Today in Mosul, American troops were busy preparing to demolish the luxury villa where troops killed the Hussein brothers. The demolition will follow an extensive search of the home for clues about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein.

The villa, in an upscale neighborhood in the northern part of Mosul, was extensively damaged by the fusillade of missiles, grenades and gunfire during a four-hour battle on Tuesday. It is owned by Nawaf al-Zidan, a businessman who liked to brag about a familial relationship to Mr. Hussein but who his neighbors suspect is the informant who claimed a $30 million bounty by tipping the military to the whereabouts of the two brothers.

"They`re putting charges in it and are going to blow it tomorrow," said Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a military spokesman in Baghdad. He said part of the rationale for quickly razing the villa was to avoid any injuries to squatters taking up residence in a building at risk of collapsing because of structural damage from 12 antitank missile strikes.

But Captain Fitzgibbons also said, "We want to try to make sure it doesn`t become some sort of shrine."

In Baquba tonight, one hospital employee who was allowed to leave the building said people inside had seen what appeared to be a safety ring pulled from a grenade lying on the fifth floor, which another employee identified as one of the children`s wards.

"Our office was near the explosion," said the first employee, who would identify herself only as a 32-year-old administrative clerk. "Within 10 minutes, the hospital was surrounded by soldiers and military vehicles." She said the soldiers "were playing cards, and the grenade was thrown in the middle."

Hamid Satar, 27, who left the hospital 10 minutes before the attack, said: "The Americans were sitting in the garden. There were about eight soldiers wearing T-shirts. Some of them were playing cards. Then the grenade came over them."

He said that many Iraqis, including children, had been in the same area during the morning, but that the attacker must have waited until they left. "They waited until the place was totally clear of Iraqis, and then they threw the grenade," he said.

After the attack, the wounded were quickly taken to the emergency room, said people who left the hospital, and American soldiers responded with an immediate search for the attacker. "They separated the women from the men and started taking fingerprints," said Munther Jaafer, a 22-year-old assistant pharmacist at the hospital.

A military translator emerged from the hospital at 6:30 p.m. and spoke to the Iraqis outside. "Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the hospital," he said. "You should go home."

The attacks continue to deeply frustrate soldiers. "What a lot of people don`t understand is that the war is far from over," said Pfc. Adam Gable, of suburban Washington, D.C., who stood guard outside the hospital tonight. Another private first class, Higinio Nunez, from Fresno, Calif., said, "All we want is for people to see that we are here to protect them." But he said Iraqis "call us Ali Babas," a common reference to thieves.

One patient allowed to leave the hospital this afternoon, who would say only that he was from the town of Khan Bani Saad, said that residents were tiring of the American presence, and that that frustration might have been behind the attack. "People don`t like to see Americans here," he said.

But the 32-year-old hospital clerk said she was very distressed that Iraqis would attack Americans guarding the hospital. "The people are here to provide security for us," she said. "They are doing their jobs."

In Baghdad overnight, blasts and gunfire rang out, but the United States military said there had been no reports of any deaths. In the Shoala neighborhood, the commander of Iraq`s national police academy, Brig. Ahmed Kadhim, was wounded while leading a raid on suspected carjackers about 1 a.m., The Associated Press reported.

Brigadier Kadhim`s assistant, Capt. Mushtak Fadhil, said five other officers were also wounded, one critically, when shots were fired as the police confronted five suspects. The suspected carjackers were arrested, he said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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July 27, 2003
The Country America Cannot See
By MUN YOL TI


ICHON, South Korea
Today is the 50th anniversary of the cease-fire that ended the Korean War. The division of the peninsula by two "liberation" armies — both of which seemed to hold it in no special favor — was an unwelcome gift thrust upon the Korean people, still dazed by the emotions of liberation from Japan in 1945. The intense nuclear anxieties on the Korean Peninsula now demonstrate the lingering effects of this gift.

The regimes imposed by the Soviet Union and the United States on North and South Korea at the end of the Second World War evolved quite differently — and not necessarily in the way Americans assume they did.

One side, thanks to a shrewd, quick-witted guardian, got what it was promised (the North). But the other side, owing to the obtuseness and confusion of its imperial benefactor, failed to develop into the strong democracy it was expected to become.

The Soviets, who had been thwarted by nationalistic sentiments while trying to export the socialist revolution to Eastern Europe in the 1920`s, immediately handed North Korea over to the group led by Kim Il Sung and withdrew, leaving no military administration behind. As a result, Kim seized power without serious damage being done to his nationalistic credentials. What`s more, the rapid creation of a system of one-party rule formed a good basis for the idolization of Kim Il Sung. For just as the Japanese had replaced Korea`s Yi dynasty with their emperor in 1910, Kim Il Sung took the throne left empty by the Japanese emperor, who had been banished by the Soviet troops.

In comparison with what happened in the North, South Korea`s search for its proper role was chaotic and drawn out. The American forces arrived as liberators — yet the military government they established in 1945 resembled the heavy-handed one the United States imposed on the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Without regard for the nationalistic feelings among Koreans, the military administration put people who had collaborated with the Japanese in official positions. Only after three years of questionable military rule did the United States approve the establishment of an independent government in South Korea.

Those three years — from 1945 to 1948 — did lasting damage (in the name of democracy), bringing about at least two changes in the consciousness of South Koreans.

First, the idea of a monarchy was completely demolished. While the other East Asian kingdoms saw a restoration of their monarchies after the Second World War, in South Korea the topic was never properly debated. Had a new monarchy been created — or had it even been discussed fully — South Koreans would have had an outlet for their nationalistic sentiments.

Second, there was among South Koreans an unrealistic level of belief in and hope for freedom of expression and thought. (Except, of course, when it came to discussing a monarchy.) As opposed to the North, the government in the South was obliged to permit every kind of political party in the name of democratic pluralism.

These two factors set the stage for the Korean War. In South Korea, the lack of a strong leader and the excessive openness of society enabled the country`s Communists to grow stronger and stronger. The chaos they created, the acts of terrorism they committed, made civil war inevitable.

And here we are, half a century later. What has changed? What has stayed the same? North Korea still maintains its hereditary system of rule without any dissent. It continues along its appointed path. South Korea, on the other hand, is struggling to find itself. I have the feeling, if I may exaggerate only slightly, that we are returning to the anxieties we felt before the Korean War.

These anxieties are particularly evident in the vicious battles between left and right in South Korea over reunification and political and economic reform. With greater and greater frequency, demagogues on both sides identify their opponents as evil.

These anxieties are apparent, too, in the widespread and intense anti-American feeling among Koreans. Anti-Americanism has always been around, but until recently it has usually been embraced by a minority only. When we see the lack of outrage among South Korean students at the fatal shooting of five of their number by the North Korean Navy — a contrast to the repeated calls for justice for the two girls killed by American soldiers driving a tank — we must assume there are changes in thinking among these students that go beyond simple nationalistic feelings.

We may never understand why America committed troops to the Korean Peninsula in September 1945. And we may never know, truly, why those troops have stayed here since. But I think we can say with some certainty that America never expected to find itself in its present situation in South Korea, and in particular to be treated as an enemy.

The problem of American policy toward Korea has been endlessly debated and analyzed. Still, if there is anything to add it is this: the American perspective on Korea has changed little since the end of the 19th century. As John King Fairbank, the historian, made clear in "East Asia: Tradition and Transformation," in the Pacific War America fought Japan for China; in the Korean War, it fought China for Japan.

When I first read these words roughly 20 years ago I failed to catch their full significance, but over time this sentence revealed to me the American perspective on Korea. Namely, even though America`s young people fought and shed blood on Korean soil, Korea was not a part of the American consciousness. For America, Korea has always been understood as a part of China or a part of Japan.

It was the same when it came to the armistice. There were more than 3.5 million victims of the Korean War. One in 10 Koreans was killed or wounded; one in three was forced to experience the agony of living separated from family, in North or South. Yet when the armistice was signed, although China was there with its North Korean ally (having replaced the Russians), there was no place for Korea. The South Korean representative was the American general acting as commander in chief of the United Nations forces; no South Korean representative was present.

It seems that still now, 50 years later, nothing much has changed. At the recent Beijing talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis, Korea, especially South Korea, was absent. China met North Korea, and America, to discuss nuclear disarmament on the Korean peninsula, but I wonder if even there America, while recognizing the existence of North Korea, did not consider it to be part of China.

There is no more effective way for foreigners to provoke Koreans than to view Korea as part of China or part of Japan. Naturally, from this standpoint it`s difficult for Americans to expect a positive response from Korea. Although it is late in the game, America must make space for Korea, and especially South Korea, in its consciousness. In East Asia there is in addition to China and Japan, Korea. A Korea distinct and separate.


Mun Yol Yi is author of ‘‘Our Twisted Hero,’’ a novel. This article was translated by Bruce Fulton, Ju-Chan Fulton and Brother Anthony from the Korean.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

July 27, 2003
California`s Comeback Kid
By JILL STEWART


SACRAMENTO
In California — even where politics are concerned — appearances can be deceiving. Opponents of Gov. Gray Davis most surely scored a historic victory last week when they succeeded in securing a special recall vote. Already, many are predicting the Democratic governor`s demise come the Oct. 7 special election. But even if Republicans are able to place a serious contender on the ballot, don`t count the governor out just yet. Mr. Davis may find himself on the political ropes, but that`s exactly where he does his best fighting.

The governor, let`s not forget, is above all a survivor — one with extraordinary gifts for doing whatever it takes. Consider, for example, one of his most recent bits of inspired strong-arming. His camp sued to try to delay certification of the recall petitions. The grounds for the suit: accusations that two felons were hired by Rescue California, the group that led the recall effort, to gather petition signatures. As reported up and down California, the lawsuit was intended to slow the recall, moving the vote from the fall to March, when Democrats would stream to polls for their presidential primary and possibly vote to save a governor toward whom few feel any pride.

We later learned from a San Francisco Chronicle article that the two felons the Davis camp cited in its effort to besmirch the group had left their jobs quickly, and then were promptly hired by the Davis team to gather signatures for a petition supporting the governor. The felon-recycling tale could have been deftly used to illustrate the intellectual dishonesty and political sleight-of-hand that has helped fuel Mr. Davis`s abysmal 22 percent approval rating. But Rescue California, run by people who have never managed a major statewide campaign, apparently lacks even a savvy press aide and the episode somehow faded away with little attention.

The truth is, the Davis camp has achieved much of what it had hoped for (while the often-snoozing California media missed it) and in the process revealed just how cunning it is. The lawsuits and accusations — and there is much more to come from Mr. Davis and company — are part of a Democratic strategy to convey to voters that really awful things happened to allow an unfair, expensive, chaos-creating recall. It`s a lot like tainting the jury pool before the trial.

Mr. Davis became the first governor to face a recall in the United States since 1921 in large part because of his shortcomings at policymaking. He let the state`s energy crisis spiral out of control while he failed for months to act; he passively allowed grave overspending by the liberal California legislature. Mr. Davis, however, displays nerves of steel when he is fighting for his political survival, and demonstrates his greatest decisiveness in one area: his contempt for voters as people who simply can`t be trusted with big electoral decisions.

In early 2002, for example, Mr. Davis broke one of the few remaining rules of political honor, pouring $10 million into TV ads focused on the Republican primary for governor. Mr. Davis`s efforts in the other party`s primary helped cripple his most threatening rival, Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles. (Pause for disclosure: I have been working with Mr. Riordan to start a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles.)

Coupled with Mr. Riordan`s numerous missteps, the ads — one depicted Mr. Riordan, a pro-choice Republican, as anti-abortion, another as a sneaky flip-flopper on gun control — turned off moderate and conservative Republicans. The former mayor`s big lead vanished, and the nomination went to Bill Simon, an inexperienced candidate whose conservatism put him well out of the California mainstream. Republican voters were in many cases unaware that Mr. Davis created the ads that defined Mr. Riordan for them.

No amount of old-fashioned political maneuvering, however, can erase the depths of doubt that many voters have over whether Mr. Davis is capable of handling the tough job confronting him. State Senate leaders finally announced on Thursday that they had reached an agreement on how to overcome California`s $38.2 billion budget deficit, but it forces the state to borrow billions and leaves it with an $8 billion deficit next year. There remain several other big fiscal worries, including the move that same day by Standard & Poor`s to downgrade California debt to the lowest rating of any state. The state treasurer`s office has already predicted that this move could cost California an additional $1 billion in borrowing costs over 30 years. And the badly botched energy crisis still threatens brownouts or worse.

Yet in almost every way, the governor`s campaign is more sly and sophisticated than the opposition`s. Mr. Davis quickly formed a new committee, Californians Against the Costly Recall — a somewhat humorous name, since his protracted failure to lead the legislature to a budget deal cost California $20 million per day, according to independent state finance officials.

The governor has now brought in a team of hardball consultants, including Chris Lehane and David Doak, who helped him vanquish Mr. Riordan. They are already using scare tactics to stop further defections of Democratic voters into the arms of recall advocates (polls show one-third of Democrats, including a majority of Latinos, want the governor removed). Mr. Davis is already claiming that change at the top will somehow threaten a woman`s right to choose, and that the environment will come under assault if he is ousted — hollow charges in a state with a very liberal legislature.

Mr. Davis is also a prodigious fund-raiser who is likely to amass money quickly; his camp said it intends to raise $15 million to $20 million to keep him in office.

All this means that Mr. Davis, despite his Nixonian approval ratings, could well survive this recall unless a major challenger with equally high-powered consultants jumps in. As far as the state Democrats go, they have vowed to stay out of the race in a show of unified support for the governor. If Senator Dianne Feinstein and other major Democrats don`t change their minds, it`s likely that the only way to unseat the most unpopular governor in California`s history will be with a heavy-hitter Republican.

As of now, though, the Republican Party has done little to position itself for the gubernatorial seat, and hopefuls have only until Aug. 9 to file their candidacy. Rescue California received only spotty help from top Republican contributors other than the conservative Representative Darrell Issa, who led the recall effort. Mr. Issa declared his candidacy early on, and he has the deep pockets to bankroll it. But he is also dogged by continuing stories about his checkered youth (he got probation for a weapons charge and was indicted on auto theft but the charges were dropped), and his campaign staff can`t seem to get the California news media refocused, even a little bit. And given their past records against Mr. Davis, neither Mr. Simon nor Mr. Riordan seems to be causing much fear in the governor`s camp.

Then there is Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican who could pose the most serious challenge. The actor has been active as a moderate Republican in California politics, is a warm and self-deprecating public orator and comes with a built-in fan club. But he has yet to decide, and his top political adviser acknowledges that his wife, Maria Shriver, is opposed to her husband`s candidacy.

Even if a strong rival decided to run, though, he would have only a couple of months to mount a campaign. Given Governor Davis`s past behavior, look for him to unleash unprecedented character assassinations intended to make voters personally dislike Mr. Schwarzenegger or other challengers.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has already had a tiny taste of this. In 2001, mere rumors that the movie star was thinking of running for governor produced an onslaught of faxes from the Davis campaign to political reporters. Each of the messages began by making fun of Mr. Schwarzenegger`s Austrian accent, and went on to take personal jabs at him. Clearly, Mr. Davis saw the actor as a threat even then.

Now that the clock is officially ticking, we can expect the Republican Party to go into overdrive to help its candidate — or candidates — in the effort to unseat the governor. David Gilliard, a spokesman for Rescue California, has vowed that the party won`t "blow it" as it has in the past. Whether it will be able to live up to those words remains to be seen. But one thing is sure: Mr. Davis will do everything it takes to avoid the humiliation of being recalled as a gubernatorial lemon.


Jill Stewart writes a syndicated column about California politics.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

July 27, 2003
Out of Their Cages
By MAUREEN DOWD


LOS ANGELES

The hot new toy here among agents and producers is the $5,000 clicker. The AMX ViewPoint remote commands the plasma TV, TiVo, stereo, radio, pool heater, security cameras, flattering lighting, videoconferencing and air-conditioning. It makes coffee and soon it will make popcorn.

New Age Buddhists here talk about the inner life with a talisman of outer life: the clicker. If you are sad, simply change channels and look at the same events with a new perspective.

Variety reports that Sony has spent $1.75 million for "Click," a script, perhaps for Adam Sandler, about an ad exec who rewinds his life through his TV remote control.

Californians are trying to go Gatsby one better. He thought he could redo the past. They think they can redo the present; simply point the clicker and change governors.

It was probably inevitable that California money guys would try to recast the state`s unimpressive top executive while his show was running.

On the surface, the recall is so complicated that even those who are in charge seem bumfuzzled. John Burton, the State Senate president pro tem, said he had never even heard of the Commission on the Governorship until he learned he might have to convene it this week. But like all California epics, this one revolves around two things: cars and money.

Years ago, Darrell Issa, the right-wing millionaire congressman from San Diego who bankrolled the recall drive, was arrested twice on car theft charges. He ended up making his $100 million fortune developing the Viper alarm system, in which his own voice warns thieves to "please step away from the car." Now he is trying to hot-wire the political system and speed away with the governorship.

"The recall provision was created to get rid of governors guilty of malfeasance — not so malfeasers could put themselves into office," sniffs Chris Lehane, a Gray Davis recall adviser.

But the effort could not have succeeded, even in a state festooned with do-it-yourself democracy, if someone besides Sharon Davis liked Gray. Even before he mismanaged the energy crisis and the budget mudslide, he irritated his fraternity brothers at Stanford by calling the police to report them for car theft when they borrowed his red Chevy to go surfing.

It`s a bad sign when even an ascetic like Jerry Brown, who used to sleep on a mattress on his floor, makes you sound like an abstemious drip. Asked about Mr. Davis, Governor Brown`s chief of staff for six years, Mr. Brown offered a listless list: "He doesn`t drink. He eats broccoli. He gets on an exercise bike. He`s very focused."

The former Governor Moonbeam, now mayor of Oakland, said the stars had aligned to create the "kaleidoscope" of the chaotic rerun, described by a Davis aide as akin to unlocking "all the cages in the zoo." Any celebrity or citizen (except the governor himself) who has 65 signatures of voters and $3,500 can run.

"There have been a lot of governors who were unpopular — Wilson, myself, my father, even Reagan for a time — but we never got anywhere near a recall," Mr. Brown said. "You had to have a guy willing to plop down a million, a bad economy and a really unpopular governor."

Part of the antipathy toward Mr. Davis was that, with his cycle of fund-raising and favor, he was the personification of money distorting the system. But the recall provision, which was created in 1911 to thwart the corruption of East Coast-style machine politics and domination by plutocrats, has become another way big money can warp the system.

"Instead of spending $50 million to be governor," Mayor Brown says, "a wealthy person can throw in $2 million for a recall and only need 20 percent of the vote to win."

The two parlor games this weekend are: Will Arnold run? (The truncated race works well for pols with racy pasts they`d just as soon race past.) And will any Democrats defy the weak Mr. Davis and get in?

Democrats and Republicans are wary about fixing the awful budget mess and facing a cornered Mr. Davis, who is brutally talented at saving his own skin. (His aides are pointing out that the G.O.P. budget cuts off funding for food for Seeing Eye dogs.)

Mr. Brown and Leon Panetta are leery of jumping into what Mr. Panetta calls "the Looney Tunes." "California is still on the cutting edge," says Mr. Panetta wryly, "but now we`re on the cutting edge of showing other states how not to govern."




Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[stockmarketbull]

@Joerver,du ungläubiger Christ,um diese Uhrzeit solltest du eigentlich in der Kirche sein und Gott huldigen!
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[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Iraq Flap Shakes Rice`s Image
Controversy Stirs Questions of Reports Unread, Statements Contradicted

By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page A01


Just weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush`s national security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East that was widely seen as advancing the peace process. There was speculation that she would be a likely choice for secretary of state, and hopes among Republicans that she could become governor of California and even, someday, president.

But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration`s use of intelligence about Iraq`s weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues` claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.

The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq`s nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.

Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa before the charge landed in Bush`s State of the Union address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other of Rice`s public characterizations of intelligence documents and agencies` positions have been similarly cast into doubt.

"If Condi didn`t know the exact state of intel on Saddam`s nuclear programs . . . she wasn`t doing her job," said Brookings Institution foreign policy specialist Michael E. O`Hanlon. "This was foreign policy priority number one for the administration last summer, so the claim that someone else should have done her homework for her is unconvincing."

Rice declined to be interviewed for this article. NSC officials said each of Rice`s public statements is accurate. "It was and is the judgment of the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program," said Michael Anton, an NSC spokesman.

Still, a person close to Rice said that she has been dismayed by the effect on Bush. "She knows she did badly by him, and he knows that she knows it," this person said.

In the White House briefing room on July 18, a senior administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said Rice did not read October`s National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the definitive prewar assessment of Iraq`s weapons programs by U.S. intelligence agencies. "We have experts who work for the national security adviser who would know this information," the official said when asked if Rice had read the NIE. Referring to an annex raising doubts about Iraq`s nuclear program, the official said Bush and Rice "did not read footnotes in a 90-page document. . . . The national security adviser has people that do that." The annex was boxed and in regular type.

Four days later, Rice`s deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, said in a second White House briefing that he did not mention doubts raised by the CIA about an African uranium claim Bush planned to make in an October speech (the accusation, cut from that speech, reemerged in Bush`s State of the Union address). Hadley said he did not mention the objections to Rice because "there was no need." Hadley said he does not recall ever discussing the matter with Rice, suggesting she was not aware that the sentence had been removed.

Hadley said he could not recall discussing the CIA`s concerns about the uranium claim, which was based largely on British intelligence. He said a second memo from the CIA protesting the claim was sent to Rice, but "I can`t tell you she read it. I can`t tell you she received it." Rice herself used the allegation in a January op-ed article.

One person who has worked with Rice describes as "inconceivable" the claims that she was not more actively involved. Indeed, subsequent to the July 18 briefing, another senior administration official said Rice had been briefed immediately on the NIE -- including the doubts about Iraq`s nuclear program -- and had "skimmed" the document. The official said that within a couple of weeks, Rice "read it all."

Bush aides have made clear that Rice`s stature is undiminished in the president`s eyes. The fault is one of a process in which speech vetting was not systematic enough, they said. "You cannot have a clearance process that depends on the memory of people who are bombarded with as much information, as much paperwork, as many meetings, as many phone calls," one official said. "You have to make sure everybody, each time, actually reads the documents. And if it`s a presidential speech, it has to be done at the highest levels."

Democrats, however, see a larger problem with Rice and her operation. "If the national security adviser didn`t understand the repeated State Department and CIA warnings about the uranium allegation, that`s a frightening level of incompetence," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), who as the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee has led the charge on the intelligence issue. "It`s even more serious if she knew and ignored the intelligence warnings and has deliberately misled our nation. . . . In any case it`s hard to see why the president or the public will have confidence in her office."

Rice, a former Stanford University provost who developed a close bond with Bush during the campaign, was one of the most outspoken administration voices arguing that Saddam Hussein posed a nuclear danger to the world. As administration hard-liners worked to build support for war throughout the fall and winter, Rice often mentioned the fear that Hussein would develop a nuclear weapon, saying on CNN on Sept. 8: "We don`t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Now that U.S. forces have not turned up evidence of an active nuclear program in Iraq, the White House is being barraged with allegations from abroad, and from Democrats on Capitol Hill and on the presidential trail, that Bush and his aides exaggerated their evidence. Rice, who is responsible for the White House`s foreign policy apparatus, is the official responsible for how the president and his aides present intelligence to the public.

When the controversy intensified earlier this month with a White House admission of error, Rice was the first administration official to place responsibility on CIA Director Tenet for the inclusion in Bush`s State of the Union address of the Africa uranium charge. The White House now concedes that pinning responsibility on Tenet was a costly mistake. CIA officials have since made clear to the White House and to Congress that intelligence agencies had repeatedly tried to wave the White House off the allegation.

The main issue is whether Rice knew that U.S. intelligence agencies had significant doubts about a claim made by British intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. "The intelligence community did not know at that time or at levels that got to us that this, that there was serious questions about this report," she said on ABC`s "This Week" on June 8. A month later, on CBS`s "Face the Nation," she stood by the claim. "What I knew at the time is that no one had told us that there were concerns about the British reporting. Apparently, there were. They were apparently communicated to the British."

As it turns out, the CIA did warn the British, but it also raised objections in the two memos sent to the White House and a phone call to Hadley. Hadley last Monday blamed himself for failing to remember these warnings and allowing the claim to be revived in the State of the Union address in January. Hadley said Rice, who was traveling, "wants it clearly understood that she feels a personal responsibility for not recognizing the potential problem presented by those 16 words."

In a broader matter, Rice claimed publicly that the State Department`s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, did not take issue with other intelligence agencies` view that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear program. "[W]hat INR did not take a footnote to is the consensus view that the Iraqis were actively trying to pursue a nuclear weapons program, reconstituting and so forth," she said on July 11, referring to the National Intelligence Estimate. Speaking broadly about the nuclear allegations in the NIE, she said: "Now, if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to me."

In fact, the INR objected strongly. In a section referred to in the first paragraph of the NIE`s key judgments, the INR said there was not "a compelling case" and said the government was "lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program."

Some who have worked in top national security jobs in Republican and Democratic administrations support Rice aides` contention that the workload is overwhelming. "The amount of information that`s trying to force itself in front of your attention is almost inhuman," one former official said. Another former NSC official said national security advisers often do not read all of the dozens of NIEs they get each year.

Still, these former officials said they would expect a national security adviser to give top priority to major presidential foreign policy speeches and an NIE about an enemy on the eve of a war. "It`s implausible that the national security adviser would be too busy to pay attention to something that`s going to come out of the president`s mouth," said one. Another official called it highly unlikely that Rice did not read a memo addressed to her from the CIA. "I don`t buy the bit that she didn`t see it," said this person, who is generally sympathetic to Rice.

In Rice`s July 11 briefing, on Air Force One between South Africa and Uganda, she said the CIA and the White House had "some discussion" on the Africa uranium sentence in Bush`s State of the Union address. "Some specifics about amount and place were taken out," she said. Asked about how the language was changed, she replied: "I`m going to be very clear, all right? The president`s speech -- that sentence was changed, right? And with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have gone. And the agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the speech. They cleared the speech. Now, the State of the Union is a big speech, a lot of things happen. I`m really not blaming anybody for what happened."

Three days later, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Rice told him she was not referring to the State of the Union address, as she had indicated, but to Bush`s October speech. That explanation, however, had a flaw: The sentence was removed from the October speech, not cleared.

In addition, testimony by a CIA official before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence two days after Fleischer`s clarification was consistent with the first account Rice had given. The CIA official, Alan Foley, said he told a member of Rice`s staff, Robert Joseph, that the CIA objected to mentioning a specific African country -- Niger -- and a specific amount of uranium in Bush`s State of the Union address. Foley testified that he told Joseph of the CIA`s problems with the British report and that Joseph proposed changing the claim to refer generally to uranium in Africa.

White House communications director Dan Bartlett last Monday called that a "conspiracy theory" and said Joseph did not recall being told of any concerns.

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

@Stockmarketbull
Ich gehe immer in die Frühmesse und bete um die Rettung der verstockten Sünder vor Habgier (Greed), falschen Göttern (GOD) und Einsatz von todbringenden Waffen (Guns).

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
U.S. to Seek New Afghan Aid Package Of $1 Billion
Planned Boost Comes Amid Criticism of Reconstruction

By Vernon Loeb and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page A01


The Bush administration will soon propose a $1 billion aid package for Afghanistan aimed at bolstering the government of President Hamid Karzai and countering criticism that U.S. officials have lost interest in rebuilding the country as their focus has shifted to postwar Iraq, senior administration officials said yesterday.

The $1 billion package, which more than triples the $300 million Afghanistan receives, represents new spending on Afghanistan and is designed to fund projects that can be completed within a year to have maximum impact on the lives of the Afghan people before scheduled elections in October 2004, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Among other things, the funds -- to be shifted from existing foreign and military aid accounts so as not to increase the deficit -- would go toward highway and school construction, other infrastructure initiatives, police training, beefed-up development of the Afghan national army, education projects and programs to help women enter the workforce, the officials said.

Defense policy officials, who developed the aid proposal, reasoned that accelerating ongoing initiatives and packaging them with new development programs are justified, in light of annual U.S. expenditures in Afghanistan of about $10 billion, most of which supports a military presence of 9,000 troops.

The proposed $1 billion in aid resulted from "a comprehensive, strategic update on Afghanistan," said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, who confirmed accounts of the program provided by other officials but declined to provide further details.

"We noted that there`s a lot that we`re spending in Afghanistan and there`s a lot at stake strategically," Feith said. "And we asked ourselves are we investing enough, given the expense of everything that we`re doing, the importance of success and the benefits, strategic and financial, of completing our mission there sooner rather than later."

In a speech in October, President Bush noted that the United States and 60 other countries had pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over five years at a donorsconference in Tokyo and said "America is delivering on our pledge; we`re writing our checks. We`re currently implementing more than $300 million worth of reconstruction and recovery projects."

The administration hopes to hold another donors conference as part of the September meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico, with the expectation that the new $1 billion aid package will inspire other countries to increase their contributions as well, one senior administration official said.

As recently as May, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage visited Kabul, the Afghan capital, and pledged that the United States remains committed to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, even as it pursues far larger postwar stability operations and reconstruction programs in Iraq.

Despite such promised support, the security situation in Afghanistan remains fragile, and the reconstruction of the country, devastated by decades of war, remains agonizingly slow. Numerous aid organizations, policy analysts and lawmakers have faulted the administration for its limited reconstruction efforts.

The administration, they argue, cannot adequately support Karzai`s central government while maintaining de facto security agreements with a half-dozen or more regional military commanders who maintain their own forces and often work to undermine Karzai`s central authority.

Remnants of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan until the United States and its allies toppled it in late 2001, continue to harass U.S. bases and patrols in Afghanistan, often from across the border in Pakistan.

Afghanistan also remains the world`s largest opium producer, with a growing drug trade and associated corruption threatening the country`s reconstruction and clouding its ongoing debate over such basic issues as law and governance. The country is to hold a constitutional convention this fall, with elections planned for next year.

Although Congress authorized $3.3 billion in financial and military assistance to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, a relatively small part of that amount has been spent. Testifying in June before the House International Relations Committee, Barnett R. Rubin, former special adviser to the United Nations on Afghanistan, said that $200 million in construction projects have been completed.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), the committee`s chairman, commented a month earlier, during a hearing on postwar Iraq policy, that it "would be a horrendous mistake for us to invest the blood and treasure we have in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and then making the same mistake we made in Afghanistan, leaving the scene."

At the same hearing, Rep. William D. Delahunt (D-Mass.), said that "it`s been about a year and a half [since the war] in Afghanistan and President Karzai only has control, maybe, of Kabul, and we still have warlords all over that particular country. And I dare say that reconstruction in Afghanistan is a mess at this point."

One senior defense official, who recently returned from Afghanistan, conceded that serious problems remain but said far greater progress has been made than most critics and many commentators acknowledge.

"There`s been tremendous progress in every field," the official said. "The doom and gloom in the media, both on Iraq and Afghanistan, is talked about by everyone who comes back. They say the coverage is incredibly negative. People in Afghanistan making bricks and repairing their houses is not news anymore."

Training of the first 4,500 soldiers of the new Afghan army by U.S. military personnel has been "an incredible success story," the official said, explaining that Afghans who see the well-disciplined troops in action think they are Western peacekeepers and are elated to learn that they are native Afghan forces.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Where From Here?




Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page B06


THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION responded to last week`s release of the joint congressional inquiry`s report on 9/11 intelligence failures with confident assertions that any problems have been taken care of. President Bush stated that "my administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks." And FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that while the bureau was still implementing changes recommended by the report, the commission`s findings were already out of date: "While the report provides a snapshot of the FBI at September 11, 2001, the picture of the FBI today shows a changed organization."

The choice of tense in these statements is significant: The government has already been "transformed," the FBI already "changed." It is true that the past two years have seen the biggest reorganization of American government in decades, and Mr. Mueller has made significant changes at the bureau. Yet the show of confidence that deficiencies identified in this report are already a thing of the past seems premature. While America is unquestionably better positioned today than before the attacks to confront terrorism, it is far from clear that American counterterrorism is today functioning optimally.

In fact, the joint inquiry report only begs the question of what a serious appraisal of the intelligence community`s progress would show. The congressional investigation focused chiefly on what happened before the attacks, far less on what has been done since. There is no doubt that 9/11 prompted legal changes, resource commitments, bureaucratic shifts and -- perhaps most important -- a universal realization that fighting terrorism had to be the central priority of those responsible for American security. Yet many things did not change. Most fundamentally, the structure of the American intelligence community remains very much the motley group of agencies -- collectively lacking strong centralized authority -- that it ever was. And many observers remain skeptical that the FBI has been reborn from its law enforcement past as a first-rate intelligence and counterterrorism organization. It`s easy for the administration to declare that the information-sharing problems that have long plagued the intelligence world have been fixed and that, as Mr. Mueller put it, "the FBI and the CIA have become integrated at virtually every level of our operations." But Congress needs to satisfy itself that the current arrangements really are the best they can be.

Nobody designing an intelligence structure from scratch to deal with America`s contemporary problems would conceive of the one this country now has. Nobody thinking rationally, for example, would have placed fighting global terrorism alongside arresting pornographers among the responsibilities of a federal law enforcement agency, nor would anyone have given the head of the CIA oversight of an intelligence operation whose agencies were spread out over several different Cabinet departments. The intelligence world is a patchwork that developed over decades in response to changing needs, geopolitical shifts, civil liberties concerns, bureaucratic turf warfare and simple happenstance. It may be that the costs associated with changing its fundamental design -- costs in effectiveness, in civil liberties and in money -- exceed the benefits. But after 9/11, these are not determinations that should be made through inertia or bureaucratic commitment to maintaining a comfortable status quo. The costs of mediocrity are far too high.

The next major study of 9/11 will come from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, headed by former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. The bipartisan commission would do a great service if it addressed not merely the factors that led to the attacks but the adequacy of the intelligence reform that has followed them.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company