Monday Catblogging

It looks like Eddie is going to be fine: dental issues again. So, we're going through the antibiotic course here, probably in preparation for more dental work. I'll get the blood work back tomorrow. Hint: for pilling cats that hate pilling, grind it up with the back of a spoon and mix with a little baby food. Works great.

I'm going to be spending the evening reconstructing the desktop: no, I didn't have a back up. Do you? What are you going to do about it?

Contact Info

Note the new email, effective today

[email protected]

Ooops

Hi, all

Sorry for the long absense. In order to complete the last six weeks of computer hassles, my hardrive crashed yesterday morning. Speedy repairs were completed yesterday afternoon by my heroic brother. But since I didn't have a paper copy of all the current numbers of my dial-up service, I was unable to get back on-line until the friendly service technician from Cox Cable plugged me in a few minutes ago. Blogging will be light this afternoon as I have (to top it all off) a very sick kittie who needs to go to the vet. Stay tuned, we'll return to our regularly schedule program as soon as possible.

Military Malfeasance

Who's Dying in Our War?
# The answer is Army Reservists and National Guardsmen such as Californian Patrick McCaffrey.

By Rone Tempest, Times Staff Writer

As the military occupation of Iraq approaches its third year, morale and recruitment issues have begun to surface. A 2004 battlefield survey conducted in Iraq for the Secretary of the Army showed that morale among the National Guard soldiers was "markedly lower" than that of active-duty soldiers. At the heart of the complaints, the survey results said, is the feeling among guardsmen that they are "treated like second-class citizens in the Army." More recently in New Mexico, where the California National Guard's 184th Infantry Regiment was preparing to be deployed to Iraq, soldiers complained to a Los Angeles Times reporter about poor training and inadequate equipment. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one said.

In a celebrated incident on Dec. 8 in Kuwait, Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson surprised Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld during an impromptu press conference, asking why Guard units were being sent into Iraq with inadequate armor on their vehicles. Cheered by his fellow soldiers, Wilson claimed that his unit was forced to rummage through local landfills for "rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass . . . to put on our vehicles to take into combat."

"I call it the 'question heard 'round the world,' " says military historian Col. Mike Doubler, a Tennessee native who served 14 years in the Army and nine years in the Guard. "There is a growing perception—among guardsmen and reservists—that there are two armies in Iraq."

It's likely no coincidence that on Dec. 17, National Guard Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum announced that, because of declining recruitment during the Iraq war, the service now will offer inducements to make reenlistment more attractive. Among the incentives: tripling retention bonuses from $5,000 to $15,000. Blum also announced that the number of Guard recruiters would be increased nationally from 2,700 to 4,100.

Experts predict that the first real test of the war's impact on the National Guard will come this spring, when soldiers returning from Iraq have their first opportunity to quit. "The fact is," says Kohn, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill professor, "we have worn these people out [and] taken advantage of their patriotism and service. Many of them are going to quit as soon as they get a chance."

This long article is worth the time. This is as fine an exposition of all of the issues around the use (and mis-use) of the Guard and Reserve as I've read in the secular press.

Some units have lost 20% of their active strength to fatalities and injury. At that level, unit cohesion and functionality breaks down completely.

Behind the Mask

'What a bloody charade'

By Robert Fisk

But there will be democracy in Iraq.

The media boys and girls will be expected to play along with this. "Transition of power", says the hourly logo on CNN's live coverage of the election, though the poll is for a parliament to write a constitution, and the men who will form a majority within it will have no power.

They have no control over their own oil, no authority over the streets of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, no workable army or loyal police force. Their only power is that of the American military and its 150 000 soldiers whom we could all see on the main intersections of Baghdad yesterday.

The big television networks have been given a list of five polling stations where they will be "allowed" to film. Close inspection of the list shows that four of the five are in Shi'ite Muslim areas - where the polling will probably be high - and one in an upmarket Sunni area, where it will be moderate.

The majority Shi'as, oppressed under Hussein, are expected to take a majority in the polling at the expense of the formerly dominant Sunnis.

The reality is that much of Iraq has become a free-fire zone
Every working-class Sunni polling station will be out of bounds to the press. I wonder if the television lads will tell us that today when they show voters "flocking" to the polls.

In the Karada district, we found three truckloads of youths on Saturday, all brandishing Iraqi flags, all - like the unemployed who have been sticking posters to Baghdad's walls - paid by the government to "advertise" the election. And there was a cameraman from Iraqi state television, of course, which is controlled by Iyad Allawi's "interim" government.

The "real" story is outside Baghdad, in the tens of thousands of square kilometres outside the government's control and beyond the sight of independent journalists, especially in the four Sunni Muslim provinces which are at the heart of Iraq's insurrection.

Right up to the election hour, US jets were continuing to bomb "terrorist targets", the latest in the city of Ramadi, which - although US President George Bush and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair do not say so - is now in the hands of the insurgents as surely as Fallujah was before the Americans destroyed it.

Every month since Allawi, the former CIA agent, was appointed premier, American air strikes on Iraq have been increasing exponentially.

There are no "embedded" reporters on the giant American air base at Qatar or aboard the US carriers in the Gulf from which these ever increasing and ever more lethal sorties are being flown. They go unrecorded, unreported, part of the "fantasy" war which is all too real to the victims but hidden from us journalists.

The reality is that much of Iraq has become a free-fire zone (for reference, see under "Vietnam") and the Americans are conducting this secret war as efficiently and as ruthlessly as they conducted their earlier bombing campaign against Iraq between 1991 and 2003, an air raid a day, or two raids, or three. Then they were attacking Hussein's "military targets" in Iraq.

Now they are attacking "foreign terrorist targets" or "anti-Iraqi forces": I especially like this one, since the foreigners involved in this violence happen in reality to be Americans who are mostly attacking Iraqis.

Christopher Allbritton live blogged the election from Baghdad and reports:

12:29:48 PM Interesting. I'm watching CNN International, and the shots of long lines and happy voters are almost all coming from Iraqi Kurdistan where the voters are motivated and the environment is (relatively) safe. The rub is that CNNi is not identifying the images as coming from Kurdistan; the only way I knew it was from up north was the single shot of someone waving a Kurdish flag. But if you don't know what the flag looks like (red, white and green bars with a yellow starburst in the center), as I suspect most Americans don't, you wouldn't know the context of these images. Shi'ites are also coming out in droves in the south. But Sunnis are staying home. I will be surprised if the Sunni vote hits double digits at this point.

It's pretty clear that everything we are going to see on television today is heavily stage managed and will be heavily propagandized. Chris is reporting a basically optimistic view of the elections, but I think Fisk's point of view needs to be taken very seriously. If the Iraqis think that things should change because they've held an election and things don't change, the anger at the occupation will only increase.

A River in Egypt

U.S. Is Close to Eliminating AIDS in Infants, Officials Say
By MARC SANTORA

Published: January 30, 2005

AIDS among infants, which only a decade ago took the lives of hundreds of babies a year and left doctors in despair, may be on the verge of being eliminated in the United States, public health officials say.

In 1990, as many as 2,000 babies were born infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS; now, that number has been reduced to a bit more than 200 a year, according to health officials. In New York City, the center of the epidemic, there were 321 newborns infected with H.I.V. in 1990, the year the virus peaked among newborns in the city. In 2003, five babies were born with the virus.

Across the country, mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. has dropped so sharply that public health officials now talk about wiping it out.

"This is a dramatic and wonderful success story," said Dr. Vicki Peters, the head of pediatric surveillance for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. This winter, Dr. Peters presented a report in Bangkok for World AIDS Day documenting the improvement in New York.

The success in fighting mother-to-child transmission, a sweeping victory for public health officials, was made possible largely because of better drugs, but aggressive public education and testing, as well as cooperation at the federal and local levels, also played a significant role.

While this is undeniably good news, there is other news which isn't so good, but you have to dig in order to find it. This comes courtesy of Revere at Effect Measure:

"We're Number One! We're Number One!"

Yes, we're Number One. In sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), anyway.

Or maybe it's just a "family values" example of justifiable homicide for disobedience?

Facts on the Ground

Deadline for Troop Withdrawal Ruled Out

By Bradley Graham and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 30, 2005; Page A01

The Bush administration has for now ruled out creating a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq after today's elections, but military commanders have charted a plan to have Iraqi security forces begin taking the lead in combat operations in certain parts of the country as early as spring.

U.S. officials have identified areas in southern and northern Iraq that have remained relatively free of violence as the best candidates for a piecemeal shift in military responsibilities over the months ahead. Under this approach, as Iraqi forces take on more of the counterinsurgency mission, some U.S. troops would assume an emergency backup role or shift to training Iraqi units, and others might leave the country, according to administration officials and others familiar with the plan.

Under optimal conditions, commanders anticipate possibly being able to withdraw, sometime this spring or summer, three of 20 brigades in Iraq, or about 15,000 troops. That would lower the level of U.S. forces in Iraq to where it was before it was raised to 150,000 troops last month.

More reductions, however, are considered unlikely until the end of 2005 or early 2006. Officials said they will look at establishing a phased pullout predicated on achieving certain benchmarks, basing it on conditions on the ground rather than dates on a calendar.

The question of U.S. withdrawal has become especially acute in Washington in the days leading up to today's elections, which will open a new phase in the U.S. involvement in Iraq. White House officials worry that Americans will see the vote as a natural turning point and expect quick reductions in U.S. forces afterward. In the face of growing pressure in Congress to begin bringing troops home, President Bush has tried to prepare the public for a long-term deployment.

"As democracy takes hold in Iraq, America's mission there will continue," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. "Our military forces, diplomats and civilian personnel will help the newly elected government of Iraq establish security and train Iraqi military police and other forces. Terrorist violence will not end with the election. Yet the terrorists will fail, because the Iraqi people reject their ideology of murder."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) last week called on Bush to begin withdrawing U.S. troops "immediately," with a complete pullout by early next year. Other Democrats have begun voicing similar proposals. So far, congressional Republicans remain solidly behind the president but privately fret that the administration has no exit strategy and that the political heat for a timetable will reach a boiling point.

First of all, "murder" isn't an ideology. This isn't even good rhetoric. A majority of Iraqis may reject murder as a tactic, but that doesn't really change anything, does it?

Next, how is this not an occupation when we have a 1.5 billion dollar embassy in Baghdad staffed by 3,700? That's not an embassy, that's a proto-government. With 150,000 troops in country, Iraq isn't a sovereign nation, it is at best a protectorate.

I can see Bush's lips moving, but the sounds he is making don't make any sense.

Bloodbath

Two Americans Dead in U.S. Embassy Bombing
Suicide Bomber Also Kills Eight in a Kurdish Town

By BASSEM MROUE
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, January 29, 2005; 2:33 PM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents hit the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad with a rocket, killing two Americans, set off explosions that killed eight Iraqis and a U.S. soldier and blasted polling places across the country Saturday as Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's government urged Iraqis to overcome their fear of violence and vote in landmark elections.

The strike in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone was a dramatic sign of guerrillas' ability to hit at the heart of power in Iraq even as the U.S. and Iraqi militaries took some of their strictest security measures ever for the election, imposing a strict lockdown in the capital and large parts of the country.

The rocket hit the embassy's compound after nightfall, near the building itself, an embassy official said. A civilian and a Navy sailor, both assigned to the embassy, died and four Americans were injured.

During the day, bursts of heavy machine gun fire rattled through central Baghdad at midday, and several heavy explosions shook the downtown area in the afternoon. A U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in a western district of the capital, the military said.

Iraqi police and soldiers set up checkpoints through streets largely devoid of traffic, with a nighttime curfew imposed across the country and the borders sealed. Seven American soldiers were killed Friday in the Baghdad area, including two pilots who died in the crash of their OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter.

West of the capital, in the insurgent bastion of Ramadi, five Iraqis with hands tied behind their backs were found slain Saturday on a city street. One of the bodies was decapitated. Militants accused them of working for the Americans.

Iraqi forces expected to do little to stop election day violence

By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers

But the security scene across Iraq is a stark reminder of how unprepared the Iraqis are as Sunday's vote approaches:

-In Mosul, violence remains uncontrolled, despite the presence of thousands of American troops and more than 4,000 Iraqi police and army reinforcements sent to supplement the 8,000 Iraqis already on duty there. Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, who's in charge of American forces there, says that the challenge in Mosul is the lack of a "credible and capable police force."

-There are 11 Iraqi army battalions in the areas controlled by the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division south of Mosul, each with about 900 men and based in key cities such as Samarra, Tikrit, Baqouba, Balad and Kirkuk. Only two or three are capable of conducting operations much beyond roadblocks, U.S. officers say. Infiltration remains a major problem. Soldiers from the 1st Infantry arrested one battalion commander for allegedly collaborating with the insurgents.

-More than four months after U.S. and Iraqi forces retook Samarra from insurgents, U.S. and Iraqi units are still waiting for the arrival of new police recruits being trained in Jordan or Baghdad. Insurgents carry out an average of five attacks a day there, according to Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division.

-In Baghdad, where there are seven Iraqi army battalions, many of the soldiers wear ski masks and street clothes to hide their identities out of fear that insurgents will kill their families.

U.S. troops have been told to let Iraqi soldiers and policemen guard the country's 5,500 polling places, to avoid images of Iraqis voting under the shadow of American guns.

But U.S. troops also have been told that they'll have to respond quickly to major attacks and that they'll need to enforce a ban on nearly all vehicle traffic across the country beginning Friday.

Iraqi soldiers and policemen have been tasked with searching everyone who comes to vote and with securing the immediate areas around the polling places, U.S. officers say. Soldiers with the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad are planning to search houses around voting places.

U.S. soldiers openly consider Iraqi troops either dangerously inept or agents of the insurgency.

"The Iraqi army guys go out with us, but all they do is pull security," said Sgt. William Amundson, 27, of Middletown, N.Y., who's serving with the 25th Infantry Division in Mosul. Even when they're only standing guard, the Iraqis are to be avoided, soldiers say.

"Whenever something happens, they start shooting at everything. They shoot at us," Amundson said.

Capt. John Bohnen, who as a 1st Cavalry Division company commander often patrols with Iraqi troops in Baghdad, said he knows that some of the Iraqis are working for the insurgency.

"There's definitely rats inside," he said. "It's like pulling teeth to get U.S. soldiers to go out with me" on joint patrols with Iraqi troops.

A Betting Man

Bumper wayne49 pointed this out via Bad Attitudes:

Bill Gates, World's Richest Man, Bets Against Dollar (Update2)

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gates, the world's richest person with a net worth of $46.6 billion, is betting against the U.S. dollar.

A week before Group of Seven officials meet to discuss currency policy, Trichet repeated the ECB's concern over the dollar's drop to record lows against the 12-nation euro currency.

What have I been telling you for over a year?

WHA'?

Slight Turnout Is Expected as Iraqis Abroad Begin to Vote
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 28, 2005

Filed at 10:49 p.m. ET

SOUTHGATE, Mich. (AP) -- Hundreds of Iraqis streamed into polling places in five U.S. cities Friday, the first day they could vote in their homeland's election. Nearly 26,000 people have registered to vote in five U.S. metropolitan areas with heavy Iraqi populations: Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Tenn., Los Angeles and Washington.

Tens of thousands more are expected to vote in 13 other countries during balloting that runs through Sunday.

In Iraq and around the globe, the voting has been a cause for jubilation among Iraqis who have long been tormented by Saddam, but the threat of violence is still present. Insurgents bent on disrupting the election process have killed U.S. soldiers -- two more died Friday in Baghdad -- set off suicide car bombs, assassinated officials and bombed polling places.

Adim Altalibi struggled to hold back tears Friday after voting in an Iraqi election for the first time. All he could think about were his five nephews, all killed under Saddam Hussein's regime.

``We lost a lot of our young men and women struggling against Saddam Hussein. It's paid off now,'' said Altalibi, 55, an engineer who left Iraq in 1987 and cast his ballot Friday at a suburban Detroit voting site that was once a home-improvement store.

Isho Mishail, 40, a driving instructor who was voting at the Chicago polling place, said it is important for him to vote because he does not know if his relatives in Iraq will have the same luxury.

Insurgents ``went to the houses and threatened them, `If you go to the polls, we'll kill everyone in the house,''' Mishail said.

In the United States, organizers said lack of documentation, large travel distances, bad weather and concern about retribution could be keeping some Iraqis away from the polls. The number of people voting in the United States is expected to make up about 10 percent of the 240,000 Iraqi expatriates expected to cast ballots around the world.

To be eligible to participate, voters had to be born in Iraq or have an Iraqi father. They also had to have turned 18 by Dec. 31.

Am I the only one who thinks this is weird? Who decreed patrilinial citizenship?

The Standard

This guy is a real prize.

Security Nominee Gave Advice to the C.I.A. on Torture Laws
By DAVID JOHNSTON, NEIL A. LEWIS and DOUGLAS JEHL

This article is by David Johnston, Neil A. Lewis and Douglas Jehl.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 - Michael Chertoff, who has been picked by President Bush to be the homeland security secretary, advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the legality of coercive interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture statute, current and former administration officials said this week.

Depending on the circumstances, he told the intelligence agency, some coercive methods could be legal, but he advised against others, the officials said.

Mr. Chertoff's previously undisclosed involvement in evaluating how far interrogators could go took place in 2002-3 when he headed the Justice Department's criminal division. The advice came in the form of responses to agency inquiries asking whether C.I.A. employees risked being charged with crimes if particular interrogation techniques were used on specific detainees.

Asked about the interaction between the C.I.A. and Mr. Chertoff, now a federal appeals court judge in Newark, Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman, said, "Judge Chertoff did not approve interrogation techniques as head of the criminal division."

Ms. Healy added, "We're not aware that anyone in the criminal division was involved in approving techniques because that responsibility would have belonged in the Office of Legal Counsel," another Justice Department unit.

One current and two former senior officials with firsthand knowledge of the interaction between the C.I.A. and the Justice Department said that while the criminal division did not explicitly approve any requests by the agency, it did discuss what conditions could protect agency personnel from prosecution.

Johnston and Co. dance around, but the article says that Chertoff didn't have any problems with the status quo ante. We'd better hope that the bad guys don't capture any of our troops. If rape and "waterboarding" is okay with us, I don't want to think about what will be dreamed up for our people.

Manifest Destiny

While you weren't looking:

It's Not All Blue Skies for Drilling Project
# Expansion of gas wells in Rocky Mountain states will degrade the air at several national parks.

By Miguel Bustillo, Times Staff Writer

GILLETTE, Wyo. — When he turned Mt. Rushmore into his granite canvas, sculptor Gutzon Borglum wrote that the faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln would remain visible, Lord willing, "until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away."

Borglum's vision endures in the Black Hills of South Dakota about 130 miles from here, but for nearly a month every year, it may soon become harder to see the famous faces through the man-made haze generated by the addition of 50,000 gas wells in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana.

It is just one of several ways in which the largest expansion of natural gas drilling approved by the federal government is expected to degrade air quality in the region that today has the clearest skies in the lower 48 states.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, under pressure from the White House to fast-track energy production, approved the drilling plan two years ago without incorporating any requirements to reduce the resulting air pollution.

Government scientists expect that the drilling expansion, combined with a planned increase in coal mining and oil drilling in the northern Great Plains, will nearly double smog-forming emissions and greatly increase particulate matter pollution in a thinly populated region that has produced less than 3% of the amount of unhealthful air found in Los Angeles.

The BLM moved forward with the project despite its own air quality analysis, which concluded that the pollution would cloud views at more than a dozen national parks and monuments, exceed federal air quality standards in several communities and cause acid rain to fall on mountain lakes, where it could harm fish and wildlife.

The Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service expressed similar concerns to the BLM.

The agency was told to expect particle-laden dust clouds and smog-forming exhaust from what amounted to a new industrial zone of gas wells, compressor stations and service roads spanning more than 30 million acres.

"From our review, it appears this project may be inconsistent with the Clean Air Act," Forest Service officials wrote in a 2002 letter to the BLM. The letter stated that the Forest Service was particularly concerned about the effects of pollution and acid rain on several popular wilderness recreation areas.

EPA officials wrote in a similar 2002 letter to the land management agency: "Monitoring and mitigation are given short shrift." They added that the agency's environmental review did not "adequately link the modeled impacts, which are clearly above regulatory criteria, with what BLM proposes that it would do or it would recommend others do to mitigate impacts."

BLM officials acknowledged they were under orders from Washington to quickly approve the projects, which the Bush administration considered vital to meeting the nation's energy needs.

The U.S. Energy Department predicted last year that natural gas demand would grow 38% by 2025.

The Powder River Basin, the energy-rich region of Wyoming and Montana where the drilling plan was authorized, is believed to contain enough natural gas to power the country for a year.

The administration has also accelerated drilling in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, raising concerns about environmental effects. But the increase in drilling activity has been greatest in Wyoming.

There, BLM officials said they were collaborating with state officials and industry groups to see that steps were taken to prevent serious problems.

"Even though we approved these wells, we were careful to disclose all impacts, and we have been working to mitigate them," said Richard Zander, assistant field manager for minerals and lands at the BLM field office in Buffalo, Wyo.

Wyoming officials, now flooded with permit applications to run heavy equipment at the gas fields, are planning a massive network of monitoring sensors to measure how much air pollution the fields are generating. Officials, however, concede that they are not sure how the state will pay for all of it. Gas companies are helping purchase some of the monitors.

"We definitely want to make sure we don't violate the Clean Air Act," said John Corra, director of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.

Critics say it will be difficult for government regulators to control the pollution after failing to address it upfront.

"It was one of the worst pieces of work I have seen in a long time, and it made me mad," said John Molenar, an air pollution consultant who has worked for the National Park Service. He was hired by a Wyoming environmental group, the Powder River Basin Resource Council, to review the gas project.

"Let's be honest about the consequences," Molenar said. "There will be an observable brown cloud at some times of the year that people will get mad about."

Now underway, the drilling boom, which will take two decades to complete, has already added more than 3,000 natural gas wells to the Powder River Basin, a picturesque landscape of meandering streams, rolling hills and expansive ranches where Crazy Horse once fought U.S. soldiers and Butch Cassidy hid from lawmen.

The air pollution from the gas project, when combined with existing emissions from cars, coal mines and power plants, is expected to diminish visibility at Mt. Rushmore National Memorial 26 days a year, according to the BLM's air quality analysis.

You didn't actually expect to USE our National Parks, did you? Silly, silly you. They're just unexploited resources for US energy companies. Didn't you know that?

The Iceman Cometh

Economic Growth Slowed in 4th Quarter

By Joel Havemann, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — U.S. economic growth, hobbled by a reduction in demand for American goods and services overseas, sagged to an annual rate of 3.1% after inflation in the final three months of last year, the government reported today.

It was the lowest growth rate since the first three months of 2003, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis said.

For all of 2004, the bureau found that the gross domestic product — total economic output — grew by 4.4%. That was its highest rate since the 4.5% registered in 1999, shortly before the most recent recession. And that in turn was last exceeded in the 1980s.

Economists attributed the tail-off in the final three months of 2004 to a 3.9% decline in exports, the sharpest drop in two years. Imports grew by 9.1% as the United States continued to suck in goods from around the world — particularly China and Japan.

"We're back in a situation where everybody but the U.S. is enjoying export-led growth," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist with Global Insight, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm.

If exports had merely held at their previous level, GDP would have grown a vigorous 4.8% in the last three months of last year, said Bill Dudley, chief domestic economist with Goldman Sachs.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a Pennsylvania consulting firm, said the decline in the dollar — about 15% against the euro in the last three years — would ultimately help the U.S. trade picture by making American goods and services cheaper on world markets.

But there is a lag, he said, while contracts at higher dollar values run their course. And China, the source of much of the U.S. trade deficit, pegs the value of its currency to the dollar.

"The dollar doesn't matter that much anyway," said Maury Harris, chief U.S. economist at the investment house UBS.

Countries, particularly in Asia, have been willing to invest in the U.S. many of the dollars they earn by selling goods and services here, he said.

"The Asian nations would prefer to lend us money than to buy our goods," Harris said. "We're still a pretty good credit risk."

Consumers continued to do their share of contributing to economic growth in the final three months of last year. Overall, sales in the U.S. grew 4.7%.

But so much of what they bought came from abroad that U.S. economic output grew by only 3.1%, short of the 3.5% that had been the consensus forecast of Wall Street economists.

So much for the Bush predictions of growth getting us out of his fiscal mess.

No More War

5 U.S. Soldiers and 5 Iraqis Killed in Attacks in Baghdad
By EDWARD WONG
and TERENCE NEILAN

Published: January 28, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 28 - Five American soldiers were killed in Baghdad in three separate incidents today, the military said, as pre-election violence also took the lives of four Iraqi policemen and a minibus driver.

American officials also reported that an Army OH-58 Kiowa helicopter crashed in southwest Baghdad today, but they had no immediate information on the cause or the fate of the crew, which typically consists of two members, although the aircraft can carry additional crew members or passengers.

"At this time, we have no evidence of hostile fire playing a role in the helicopter going down," said Col. Keith Walker, chief of staff of Task Force Baghdad and the First Cavalry Division.

In the other incidents, four soldiers were the victims of roadside bombs, one at 2 p.m. in the south of the city, and three at about 4:30 p.m. in western Baghdad. Another soldier died in small-arms fire in the northern part of the capital at about 2:15 p.m., the military said.

The Iraqi government, which has been seeking to reassure potential voters that it is addressing the security problems, announced today that two more close associates of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have been arrested, news agencies said.

Right. Pin at all on the Bad Guy so that we can pretend that this is a cartoon war. That makes it simpler for fuzzy American heads.

Just Say "NO"

I join a growing consensusof blogs and bloggers who oppose the nomination of Alfredo Gonzales for Attorney General. Torturers ought to have no place in our government. The Bush administration, which has no shame, should be ashamed of this.

I've written my congresscritters. Have you?

Waiting it Out

Iraqis Get Ready for the Worst
People stock up on food and gasoline before an election-related national lockdown takes effect.
By Edmund Sanders
Times Staff Writer

January 28, 2005

BAGHDAD — As fast as butcher Shakir Salman can hang the skinned, headless sheep from hooks in his shop, customers scurry away with armloads of fresh meat.

Homemaker Manar Shumari is frantically stocking up on diapers for her 2-year-old. "I bought some yesterday, but I came again today, just to be sure," she said.

At Medical City in Baghdad, doctors are dragging mattresses into their offices and bunking in vacant nursing-home beds, preparing for the possibility of widespread bloodshed.

Amid excitement and fear over Sunday's election, Iraqis are in a mad rush to prepare for an unprecedented three-day national lockdown. With insurgents vowing to disrupt the balloting and kill voters, U.S. and Iraqi security forces have imposed a lengthy set of emergency security measures.

Starting Saturday, borders will be sealed and the airport will be shut down. Government offices and most companies will take a three-day holiday. Nightly curfews begin at 7 p.m. and last until 6 a.m.

In addition, cars will be banned from roads unless occupants have special election badges, except in cases of medical emergency.

Traffic in Baghdad, a city that loves cars as much as Los Angeles does, appeared Thursday to be down by about half. Road closures and police checkpoints made navigating the capital difficult. Many drivers said they wouldn't risk taking to the roads, noting that insurgents had threatened to attack anyone attempting to vote or assisting in the election.

"I'm staying home," said Ali Mohammed, 40, a government employee who was filling plastic jerrycans with black-market gas. "We don't know what's going to happen."

Though he won't be driving, but Mohammed said he needed the fuel to run a generator to compensate for chronic electricity failures.

Demand for gas, food and emergency supplies has spurred a price surge. Black-market prices for gasoline doubled from $1.30 a gallon last week to $2.70 a gallon Thursday. Potatoes that sold for 22 cents for a little more than two pounds on Monday sold for 55 cents Thursday.

Long lines snaked out of bakeries selling samoun, a popular bread. Grocery stores were selling out of water, eggs, canned food and rice.

Iraqis, who over the last two decades have grown accustomed to hunkering down, are preparing for the worst.

"Many people are scared," said Ahmed Abdullah, 36, a taxi driver who charged double his usual fare this week. "But so what? For one reason or another, we've been scared all our lives."

Similar stockpiling occurred shortly before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. But widespread road closures are rare in Iraq, the last one occurring in 1997 during a one-day national census.

Anticipating a rush this week, Salman, who has owned his Baghdad butcher shop since 1962, packed his freezer with lamb chops, steaks and whole chickens. For those customers seeking fresh meat over the weekend, there's a fluffy, white specimen tethered to a post outside his shop, ready for slaughter.

"I'm going to try to open, but I don't know if many people will be out shopping," Salman said.

Preparing Iraq's hospitals and healthcare facilities poses a unique challenge. If violence is stepped up during the election, the need for doctors and nurses will soar. But the logistics of transporting staff to work amid the security lockdown will be difficult, officials said.

Health Ministry officials ordered the nation's hospitals on emergency alert beginning Saturday and told them to prepare by stockpiling oxygen, blood, water, gasoline and cash.

"We're prepared for all eventualities," said Dr. Amer Mukh- tar, general director of Medical City, a giant complex of teaching hospitals and medical facilities in Baghdad. "God knows what will happen."

More than 500 elective surgeries were postponed to keep hospital beds free. Nearly 1,000 employees, from surgeons to blood bank workers, will camp out at the facility rather than commute each day. As medical personnel, they are exempted from the travel ban, but most prefer to sleep at work for the three-day lockdown.

This is the face of democracy and freedom. Don't we just love democracy and freedom? It's sorta like an icestorm. Just stock up and you'll be fine.

Unbalanced Risks

American consumers are weakest link
From Gary Duncan, Economics Editor, in Davos
Experts say that unrealistic spending is creating a dollar crisis
AMERICA needs to act to put its economy in order and rein in "self-indulgent consumers" before its vast government borrowing triggers a global economic crisis, experts claimed in Davos yesterday.

The day after the White House forecast a deficit of $427 billion this year, some of America's most prominent economists sounded warnings of a dollar crisis.

Fred Bergsten, the director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington, told delegates at the World Economic Forum that he feared that the beginning of such a crisis could come within days or weeks if President Bush's budget proposals did not convince financial markets that the deficit would start coming down over the next few years.

"The dollar would come down sharply, US inflation and interest rates would be pushed up sharply and the world would follow a much slower growth pattern. Trade would be a big casualty it would be poison for US trade policy," he said.

His warnings were echoed by Stephen Roach, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street investment bank, who said that the US Federal Reserve was "in denial" over the threat posed by America's balance of payments and budget deficits. He pinned much of the blame for the economy's vulnerability on "self.indulgent" US consumers, who, he said, were the "weakest link" in a global economy that could be derailed at any time. "For me, something just doesn't add up. The American consumer is an accident waiting to happen."

Mr Roach said that American consumers were relying on a "bubble" in US property prices to sustain unrealistic spending and "turning their homes into a massive ATM machine".

Americans relying on borrowing against their homes are snapping up imports from Asia, made cheap by those countries' currency pegs to the dollar. To sustain the pegs, Asian nations are forced to keep buying dollars, artificially driving down US interest rates so Americans borrow even more.

"This is an insane way to run the world economy. You know that, we know that, but the Federal Reserve is in denial," Mr Roach said. He added that with US interest rates now climbing, a sharp retrenchment by American consumers could jeopardise economic recovery there and worldwide.

The comments came after a steep and steady slide in the dollar over the past three years that accelerated after Mr Bush's re-election in November - although the currency has steadied recently.

Financial markets and Wall Street economists see the deficits on the US Government's budget and balance of payments as unsustainable and as symptoms of fundamental imbalances in the world economy.

Amid doubts that the US can continue to draw in the $5 billion a day required to finance its current account deficit, now standing at 7 per cent of the national income, foreign exchanges have driven the dollar sharply downwards. Mr Bergsten said he believed "a very large correction" in the dollar's exchange rate, particularly against the currencies of China and other Asian nations, is needed to eliminate global imbalances.

I know from the stories you've all told me that most of you are in no position to be materialists. And that many of you, like me, are in straightened financial situations. I spent the day following up on some good financial advice I got from my brother a couple of weeks ago, and I'm in the middle of a cash out re-fi in order to get out of debt. The amount of equity I have in this place means that there is no good reason to be in consumer debt and debt to friends and family. The last job covered my expenses but nothing more. As my brother pointed out, a re-fi would also give me some breathing room to find the right job, rather than taking the first thing that comes along. Knowing that there is a financial crisis out there means that I'm leery of taking out an ARM, but my credit is so bad I can't qualify for a fixed. Those are the kinds of things that happen when you are unemployed or under employed for a long time. In my case, it's been nearly 5 years. The new mortgage will probably not be larger than the value of the place after the housing market crashes, pretty close to what I paid for it ten years ago, but it's still a risk. But one I can't afford not to take.

The Unserious Administration

A Deficit You Can't Refuse
# Fuggetaboutit: The White House isn't planning to get the budget in order.

JONATHAN CHAIT


Kay: It made me think of what you once told me — "In five years, the Corleone family will be completely legitimate." That was seven years ago.

Michael: I know — I'm trying, darling.

— The Godfather, Part II

I don't mean to sound cynical, but it's starting to look as though the Bush administration does not seriously intend to get the federal budget in order. At least that's the impression I got from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's attempt this week to explain the unfortunate fact that the administration projects that the deficit will climb this year.

To grasp the full vacuity of the administration's rationalization, you need to consider it piece by piece. Here's how McClellan began his response to a reporter's question about the growing deficit: "And in terms of the deficit, the president has a deficit reduction plan. It's based on strong economic growth and spending restraint."

So the two elements of this plan are strong economic growth and spending restraint. Let's begin with the growth.

"Strong economic growth" means an expanding economy that produces large gains in tax revenues. The trouble is that the economy, as the administration has been reminding us for a long time, is already growing, yet tax revenues are not rising anywhere fast enough to meet the level of spending. Tax revenue accounted for 20.9% of the economy in 2000 and is projected to account for just 16.8% this year. A really hot business cycle can usually push tax revenues up a couple percentage points in a great year. Even if that were to happen in 2005, calling this a deficit reduction plan is like assuring your teenager that you have a plan to pay for her education, and it involves her growing 10 inches and winning a basketball scholarship. And no, dear, this growth plan has nothing to do with that new luxury yacht I just bought myself.

Phase 2 of the "plan" is spending restraint. President Bush is confining his spending restraint to domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for about $500 billion, less than a quarter of the budget. So, as I noted on this page a few weeks ago, programs like the National Science Foundation will suffer a budget freeze.

If he can get Congress to accept his spending limits — something he's tried and failed to do in every year of his presidency — we would chop a whopping $9 billion from the deficit. The deficit, let me remind you, will exceed $400 billion.

McClellan, perhaps trying to make the plan sound more extensive than it is, proceeded to repeat points one and two before concluding: "We've got a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. And we are on track to meet that goal." On track, huh? Last year, the deficit was $412 billion. This year, it's expected to hit $427 billion. At this pace, we'll cut it in half by — hmm, let me pull out my calculator here — approximately never.

Nor is this the first of the broken promises. Bush first said he would cut the deficit by half in five years in July of 2003. Now, 18 months later, his press secretary is still promising to cut the deficit by half "over the next five years." It seems that at any given point in time, the date of this promised halving is always five years away.

I don't get the impression that this administration is actually interested in, you know, "governing." It's all about power and never about responsibility.

Myopia

Rumsfeld's Attendance at Security Conference Uncertain

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 28, 2005; Page A04

Will Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld skip a major security affairs conference in Germany next month or won't he?

Two weeks ago, he sent word to organizers of the annual event not to expect him, saying he would be traveling elsewhere in mid-February. The news, reported in Germany but not announced here, prompted complaints that Rumsfeld was snubbing Europe and speculation that his move was in reaction to a legal complaint filed against him in Germany.

By late yesterday, however, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence T. Di Rita, was waffling on the secretary's plans. He said Rumsfeld is weighing a number of "competing scheduling priorities," including other possible travel and preparation for congressional testimony on the defense budget. Di Rita left open the possibility Rumsfeld will attend the conference.

"I just don't know who will end up representing the Department of Defense," Di Rita said in a phone interview.

The event, known formally as the Munich Conference on Security Policy, marked its 40th anniversary last year. It draws hundreds of cabinet ministers, lawmakers and other prominent figures from many parts of Europe. Washington tends to be represented not only by the defense secretary but also by a large congressional delegation. This year, about a dozen U.S. lawmakers plan to attend, led by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.).

Word that Rumsfeld was not coming had surprised the conference's chief organizer, Horst Teltschik, who had assumed the decision was final.

"I'm really disappointed," he said earlier yesterday. By not attending, he added, Rumsfeld would be missing an important opportunity to explain the goals and initiatives of the Bush administration at the start of its second term.

"The defense secretary's speech has traditionally been a highlight of the conference," said Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany's ambassador to the United States. "I assume there'll be quite a bit of disappointment if this year he's not going to show up."

Bush administration officials have signaled that one of their second-term priorities will be to mend transatlantic ties that were badly frayed by disagreement over the war in Iraq. Between them, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Robert B. Zoellick, plan to visit every NATO ally this spring. President Bush expects to meet with NATO leaders in Brussels on Feb. 22, then stop in Germany.

There is a weird, US-centric quality to this article which simply doesn't comport with reality. Donald Rumsfeld is the second most hated man in Europe, after W himself. He will have no credibility with his European counterparts and there is no way on earth that those governments are going to be able to show their voters that they are giving Washington anything other than the cold shoulder, or they'll get pummelled at the polls.

Whatever inclination the Europeans might have had to "mend fences" has pretty much disappeared with the confirmation of Gonzales as AG. The Europeans are outraged that such a person could assume the highest law enforcement position in the land.

Worm_Bagle.AZ spreading rapidly in the wild

I don't usually post "worm warnings" to message boards. But this puppy is a special case. Really.

I strongly suspect my ISP uses some sort of filtering software, as it is most unusual for malware to land in my Inbox. But I received two probables in the last 12 hours.

Previous variants of Bagle have been roaring successes .. for the sick sniggering little sociopaths who wrote them. Not for anybody else.

If you have not updated your A/V signatures in the last 12 hours, you should do so NOW.

Here is the Trend Micro page concerning this infector. Here is the Symantec page.

Be wary of any new email with the following "Subject" lines:

Delivery service mail
Delivery by mail
Registration is accepted
Is delivered mail
You are made active

Be wary of any email with the following message bodies:

Thanks for use of our software.
Before use read the help

Be wary of any email with the following attachment names:

guupd02
Jol03
siupd02
upd02
viupd02
wsd01
zupd02

DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. If you take that precaution, you should be OK.

If you do get hit, there is a removal tool here.

Best of luck, and heads to the storm.

Bird Flu Update

Forbes gets it.

The Next Big Killer
Robert Langreth and Tomas Kellner, 02.07.05

When a giant wave kills 200,000, the world is stunned and wonders what could have been done. But it is less galvanized to deal with a global catastrophe that could be much worse.

It is likely to kill many millions of people, sicken a quarter of the world's population and send the global economy into a tailspin. There is little we can do to stop this disaster from happening, and it could already be imminent.

The threat, obscured by the all-too-with-us aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, is a global influenza pandemic, the rapid spread of a deadly new strain of the influenza virus to which no one in the world is immune. Such a virulent strain unpredictably leaps from farm animals to humans every few decades, with devastating consequences. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the worst on record, felled 50 million people; it was particularly effective at targeting adults in the prime of life. Milder pandemics occurred in 1957 and 1968. Thanks to modern jet travel and densely packed Asian countries where millions live in close proximity to farm animals, the threat of a new pandemic is greater than ever.

"The influenza tsunami is coming. It is hard to say that the probability of its occurring is anything other than 100%," says Martin Meltzer, health economist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. The only real questions, he says, are how soon and how bad. A potential pandemic may already be brewing. The so-called bird flu, identified by virologists as H5N1 (a reference to the viral surface proteins hemagglutinin and neuraminidase; there are 15 types of ‘H' and 9 subtypes of ‘N' proteins), first emerged in Hong Kong in 1997 and has spread among poultry populations in Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere in Asia. So far it has infected 47 people who had come in contact with sick animals, and killed 34 of them--a chilling 72% mortality rate. (By comparison, the SARS virus killed 10% of the 8,000 people it hit.) Unlike ordinary flu strains, which mostly vanquish elderly or other vulnerable populations through secondary bacterial infections or by exacerbating preexisting conditions, the bird flu appears to have a more direct killing effect on cells in the lungs and other organs; many of the fatalities were among previously healthy young people.

It may just be a matter of time before a new strain combines the high lethality of avian flu with garden-variety influenza's ability to spread through coughing and sneezing. (Recently a strain in Holland infected a thousand people, killing one.) Meltzer says it is virtually certain there will eventually be another lethal pandemic. What is the probability that H5N1 is going to be it? That's hard to judge. Still, says University of Minnesota infectious-disease epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, "this looks like the first chapter in the new flu pandemic. Even with moderate transmission and fatality rates, this could do in less than a year what HIV took 30 years to do."

Since no one would be immune, all 6.4 billion people on the planet would need a shot. But only 300 million flu shot doses are produced each year, a capacity that could stretch to 500 million or so doses in the case of a single-strain pandemic. In any case the shots may come too late: A special vaccine would have to be made, a months-long process that involves incubating influenza virus in millions of chicken eggs. "It will go around the globe, and nothing will stop it," says Klaus Stöhr, head of the World Health Organization's Global Influenza Program. "At best we can slow down the spread to give us a little more time to produce more vaccines."

The U.S. vaccine supply is particularly vulnerable, now down to a single main flu shot manufacturer, Sanofi-Aventis, after factory snafus this fall contaminated the entire supply at Chiron Corp., the other big producer. After giving lip service to the influenza threat for years, the U.S. government is finally getting serious. Federal spending on flu research, surveillance and vaccine procurement zoomed to $283 million this year from $39 million in 2001. But 20 state health departments still don't have pandemic response plans, and half don't have an online reporting system compatible with theCDC's national database, says Trust for America's Health, an advocacy group. Assuming that a pandemic hits once every 30 years, economist Meltzer calculates that $700 million to $2 billion in annual spending for vaccine development and response is justified.

GOVERNMENTS ACT AGAINST LOOMING DISASTER

The WHO warned last week that the bird flu virus was now endemic in Asia and it appeared to be evolving in ways that increasingly favoured the start of a deadly human outbreak.

Experts still believe most nations would be helpless if the H5N1 virus becomes as easily transmittable as human flu. That could happen if the bug got into an animal, most probably a pig, and mingled with the type of influenza virus that affects people.

UPDATE: Vietnam deploys bird flu riot police, another dies
28 Jan 2005 18:09:38 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Adds WHO, paragraphs 10-12, China's Wen, paragraphs 16-18)

HANOI, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Vietnam has deployed riot police at bird flu checkpoints around sprawling Ho Chi Minh City, officials said on Friday, as the killer virus claimed another victim, raising the country's recent death toll to 10.

Following an order from the city's People's Committee, the armed riot officers are backing up traffic police and market monitors manning 24-hour checkpoints to stop infected or uncertified birds entering the southern city, officials said.

As Vietnam's third wave of the killer H5N1 virus spreads unchecked, city authorities have started destroying any chickens and ducks whose origins cannot be pinned down, a policy that has raised the rare threat of civil unrest.
....
The Saigon Giai Phong daily said travel agents in Vietnam's southern commercial hub had also been told not to take tourists to areas with a high risk of the H5N1 virus, which has killed at least 42 people since first erupting in Asia at the end of 2003.

Expect civil unrest all over the place if this bug breaks out.

Hard Truths

Seymour Hersh in Democracy Now:

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

"He" is W, the "cult" is the neocons.

Hersh is one of the few who can tie all the pieces together, the war, the economy, everything. The only piece he is missing is avian influenza. Even without that, this is going to be a very, very difficult year.

Damage

Returning veterans paint grim picture of war's toll

January 27, 2005

BY CHERYL L. REED Staff Reporter

Soldiers recently returned from Iraq gave an unfiltered and unflattering assessment of the war's human toll as they detailed their war experiences to a crowd of Oakton Community College students and faculty Wednesday in Des Plaines.

One officer lost more than 38 pounds in the Iraqi desert when his unit ran low on food and water. Another was sent to the front lines without body armor. They witnessed soldiers blown to bits and mourned the loss of others who killed themselves when they returned home -- often excluded from the government's official body count.

And they've been frustrated with buddies who have had to wait months for medical services or for their claims to be decided by the Veterans Affairs Department.

'People are unaware'

"There's a tremendous human cost of this war, and America isn't prepared for it," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former Army infantry platoon leader from New York and founder of Operation Truth, a national soldier organization that is touring college campuses to present an alternative view of the war.

Rieckhoff criticized the military for not releasing the entire number of those killed or injured in Iraq, a figure he said is far greater than the 1,416 listed as killed and 10,622 listed as wounded by the Defense Department.

"It takes guys like us to embarrass [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld before things get changed," he said. "The military is being run into the ground, and the American people are unaware of what's really going on."

The group showed a documentary in which former soldiers from Iraq -- many of them amputees -- were angry about how the government treated them once they returned, complaining they were met with a "nightmare of paperwork" to get medical and disability benefits.

"Once you've served your purpose," one young soldier told the camera, "you're no longer of use to the U.S. government."

The soldiers' group is advocating legislation that would provide the VA with more funding and stop a proposed budget cut, give better counseling and treatment for the estimated thousands of troops returning with psychological problems and train and equip National Guard and reservists on par with their active duty counterparts. It also wants the military to end its stop-loss policy, which prevents many soldiers from leaving the military when their term ends.

While Americans are plastering their vehicles with "support the troops" ribbons, here is what is really going on, and it is hurting recruitment and retention very badly.

I am not a pacifist, but it is a principled moral stand I admire. I believe that we do need a competant military and we had one until relatively recently.

Profit Motive

Secrets and Epidemics

The avian flu is known to have killed 32 humans last year — hardly enough to trigger global concern, it seems. But viruses have a habit of mutating in ever more harmful ways, and there are signs that avian flu could be on the verge of turning into a much greater threat, capable of killing millions of people around the world.

That was the conclusion of top World Health Organization officials in the wake of a study published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The only thing stopping avian flu from raging through human populations, epidemiologists believe, is that it hasn't mutated in ways that allow efficient human-to-human transmission. The new study, however, suggests that this may be changing.

The first strategy that was tried — stopping the virus in its tracks — has failed. Despite the slaughter of more than 100 million birds, the virus is thriving in poultry farms throughout Asia.

Earlier this week, the WHO was forced to halt a meeting of its 32-member executive board because delegates couldn't agree on whether to let poor countries ignore drug patents, should massive infections of avian influenza break out in humans. The opposition to granting such exceptions, led by French and U.S. officials, is shortsighted. These nations have already agreed to grant patent exceptions to poor countries for drugs to treat AIDS and HIV, which can fell people over months or years; it's illogical for them to forbid such exceptions for drugs to treat avian influenza, which can be fatal in a few days.

But the most effective strategy for tackling avian influenza shouldn't cost any money at all, unless you count political currency. The leaders of wealthy nations, particularly President Bush, must push Asian nations to cooperate rather than resist efforts to investigate and quell the disease.

What's needed is a commitment from China's leaders — who lied for months last year about the number of their citizens infected with another virus, SARS — that they will not conceal what they know about any human avian flu outbreaks. There are signs that China may be encouraging dangerously irresponsible policies. In recent months, poultry farmers have been buying vaccines on the black market that keep their chickens alive without killing avian influenza, thus doing nothing to stop its spread. Thailand recently banned the use of such vaccines, but China has been promoting it.

Without information on outbreaks, epidemiologists can't track the progress of the disease and organizations such as the WHO can't develop effective ways to fight it. When it comes to potential scourges like avian flu, secrecy can be deadly.

The LAT still doesn't get the seriousness of the situation, but at least Big Media are starting to pay attention.

I caught this brouhaha at WHO earlier this week at CIDRAP. We're facing a disease with a frightening mortality rate and the public health authorities are arguing about patent rights? My God.

Cold Wind

Oh, pogge? Something tells me you are going to have to say hello to a bunch of my countrymen very soon.

The Return of the Draft

With the army desperate for recruits, should college students be packing their bags for Canada?

By TIM DICKINSON

Uncle Sam wants you. He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan to draft you.

In the three decades since the Vietnam War, the "all-volunteer Army" has become a bedrock principle of the American military. "It's a magnificent force," Vice President Dick Cheney declared during the election campaign last fall, "because those serving are ones who signed up to serve." But with the Army and Marines perilously overextended by the war in Iraq, that volunteer foundation is starting to crack. The "weekend warriors" of the Army Reserve and the National Guard now make up almost half the fighting force on the front lines, and young officers in the Reserve are retiring in droves. The Pentagon, which can barely attract enough recruits to maintain current troop levels, has involuntarily extended the enlistments of as many as 100,000 soldiers. Desperate for troops, the Army has lowered its standards to let in twenty-five percent more high school dropouts, and the Marines are now offering as much as $30,000 to anyone who re-enlists. To understand the scope of the crisis, consider this: The United States is pouring nearly as much money into incentives for new recruits -- almost $300 million -- as it is into international tsunami relief.

"The Army's maxed out here," says retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who served as Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush. "The Defense Department and the president seem to be still operating off the rosy scenario that this will be over soon, that this pain is temporary and therefore we'll just grit our teeth, hunker down and get out on the other side of this. That's a bad assumption." The Bush administration has sworn up and down that it will never reinstate a draft. During the campaign last year, the president dismissed the idea as nothing more than "rumors on the Internets" and declared, "We're not going to have a draft -- period." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in an Op-Ed blaming "conspiracy mongers" for "attempting to scare and mislead young Americans," insisted that "the idea of reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration."

That assertion is demonstrably false. According to an internal Selective Service memo made public under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency's acting director met with two of Rumsfeld's undersecretaries in February 2003 precisely to debate, discuss and ponder a return to the draft. The memo duly notes the administration's aversion to a draft but adds, "Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc." The potentially prohibitive cost of "attracting and retaining such personnel for military service," the memo adds, has led "some officials to conclude that, while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis." This new draft, it suggests, could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

The memo then proposes, in detail, that the Selective Service be "re-engineered" to cover all Americans -- "men and (for the first time) women" -- ages eighteen to thirty-four. In addition to name, date of birth and Social Security number, young adults would have to provide the agency with details of their specialized skills on an ongoing basis until they passed out of draft jeopardy at age thirty-five. Testifying before Congress two weeks after the meeting, acting director of Selective Service Lewis Brodsky acknowledged that "consultations with senior Defense manpower officials" have spurred the agency to shift its preparations away from a full-scale, Vietnam-style draft of untrained men "to a draft of smaller numbers of critical-skills personnel."

Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that preparing for a skills-based draft is "in fact what we have been doing." For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But that's not all. "Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the future," Flahavan says, "then with some very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short." In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you -- and quick.

But experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. "What you've got now is a real shortage of grunts -- guys who can actually carry bayonets," says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, "to deal with the situation we've got ourselves into. We've got to have a bigger Army."

Michael O'Hanlon, a military-manpower scholar at the Brookings Institute, believes a return to a full-blown draft will become "unavoidable" if the United States is forced into another war. "Let's say North Korea strikes a deal with Al Qaeda to sell them a nuclear weapon or something," he says. "I frankly don't see how you could fight two wars at the same time with the all-volunteer approach." If a second Korean War should break out, the United States has reportedly committed to deploying a force of nearly 700,000 to defend South Korea -- almost half of America's entire military.

O'Hanlon, as always, is being very conservative. If we are going to continue the Madness in Mesopotamia, the Army, active, Reserve and National Guard, will be demonstrably broken by the time of the next troop rotation. This is planned for this summer. A draft instituted right now isn't going to help that.

If we are going to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future, however, a draft becomes inevitable.

Gunpoint Democracy

In Violence-Prone Mosul, Voters Will Need a Shield of Snipers
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and THOM SHANKER

Published: January 28, 2005

Once considered a model city of the occupation, Mosul has descended into a hellish sectarian stew, 65 percent Sunni Arab and 30 percent Kurdish, with a sprinkling of Turkmens, Assyrians and other ethnic groups. Making matters worse, in November thousands of police and security officers abandoned their posts under an insurgent assault that coincided with the American attack on Falluja.

Since then, scores of civilians have died in attacks. Kurds, government officials and Iraqi security officers have been massacred.

Thousands of American troops poured into the region after the uprising in November, anchoring security, arresting suspects, uncovering caches of weapons and carrying out raids in some of the most extensive military operations in the country. Hundreds of Kurdish fighters have been sent here to enforce security.

But much damage had been done, and election officials were left scrambling to catch up. Mosul's 700 election workers, threatened by insurgents, walked off the job. A warehouse full of ballot papers was attacked and burned in December.

"It has not gone to plan," said Maj. Anthony Cruz, the liaison officer between the elections commission in Mosul and the American military. "They had to reconstitute a large portion of staff."

To recruit more election workers, Mr. Kazar promised prospects a secure place to stay, food provisions and a bonus of $500 - a major sum in Iraq right now. The drive apparently paid off to some extent.

On Thursday, Mr. Kazar was busy leading a group of new recruits in the basics of balloting. At a guarded building in Mosul, he demonstrated how to mark voters' fingers so they could not vote twice, how to use the voting booths and how to check identities.

One election worker said he joined the commission because he was convinced it was the only way to get the country out from under military occupation.

"We need an election to get a real government going and to get real police and security forces," said the man, a 25-year-old Arab from Mosul, who declined to be named because, he said, he would be "slaughtered" if he were identified.

American officials have been trying to convince Iraqi voters that they can vote safely. "American and Iraqi operations conducted over the last several weeks have set the conditions for the vast majority of Iraqis to vote safely," Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, said in a brief interview here. But even so, he warned, "there will be violence."

Talk about democracy at the end of a gun. How real is an election by gun?

Duck and Cover

Hoon and Rumsfeld agree Iraq exit strategy

Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill
Friday January 28, 2005
The Guardian

The US and Britain have privately agreed an exit strategy from Iraq based on doubling the number of local police trainees and setting up Iraqi units that would act as a halfway house between the police and the army.

The agreement was reached on Monday between the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon.

It was based on recommendations from retired US general Gary Luck, sent to Iraq by the Pentagon last month to look at the failings of Iraq's security force.

The more aggressive police force is designed gradually to replace the 150,000 coalition troops and will form the centrepiece of plans for Britain and the US to quit Iraq.

Although no deadline has been set for withdrawal - partly, British sources say, because it may encourage the insurgents - Britain has made a phased pull-out its top priority.

"Everything the defence secretary is working towards now is an exit strategy, but without a public timetable," said a British military source.

Spanish and Italian forces could be asked to help train the Iraqis, a British defence source said. Thousands of troops from the multinational force would back up the Iraqi police which, at present, has a reputation for desertion in the face of the insurgency.

Although the US and Britain would like to pull out as soon as Iraq is stable, Gen Luck said it could be years before the Iraqi police was ready.

The Pentagon this week said it expected to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq for at least the next two years.

Britain said yesterday it would send 220 more soldiers to Iraq to help fill a gap left by the Netherlands which is pulling out in March.

If the build-up of reliable Iraqi security forces could be speeded up, Britain can see various staging posts for a phased withdrawal. Dates include August 15, when a constitution is to be agreed by the assembly. By 15 December, there is due to be a new national election.

Charles Kennedy demanded a clear statement yesterday on the future status of British troops. He called on Tony Blair to set out "a proper exit strategy, including the phased withdrawal of British troops, as the security situation allows."

This is blowing smoke. There is no schedule, this is make work to give Hoon some political cover.

Scumbags

As Texas judge, Gonzales heard donors' cases
Practice legal, but still faces criticism

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 27, 2005

WASHINGTON -- When White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was a Texas Supreme Court justice running to stay in office in 2000, he took thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from companies that had business before him and he did not recuse himself from voting on their cases.

The practice is legal in Texas, and Gonzales was not the only judge to benefit from it. But his record in 2000 -- when he raised $539,000 for the Republican primary, outraising his opponent by a 1,047-to-1 ratio -- drew special criticism from an Austin-based group that tracks the influence of money on government.

Gonzales's nomination to be US attorney general was approved yesterday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which voted 10-8 on party lines to send his confirmation to the Senate floor. Criticism of his nomination has focused on his role in formulating the Bush administration's policies on torture and interrogations.

But to government watchdog groups, his record of declining to recuse himself from cases involving campaign contributors is also worthy of scrutiny.

''It raises questions about the integrity of his decision-making process," said Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause, a public corruption watchdog group. ''When you have people come before the bench from whom you have accepted campaign contributions, and you don't recuse yourself, that raises questions."

Gonzales had been appointed to the bench in 1999 by then-Governor George W. Bush, but had to run in 2000 to keep his seat. That year, he accepted $2,000 from an insurance company after the court heard arguments -- but before it issued a decision -- as to how much the company should pay a man injured in a car accident. In a similar case, he voted in favor of another insurance company whose law firm gave his campaign $2,500 just before the court heard arguments.

Both cases involved whether insurance companies had to pay interest to plaintiffs whose final awards were delayed because the case went to court. The watchdog group said the decisions were ''a costly slap in the face to Texas consumers."

The group sarcastically called the donations ''prejudgment premiums" collected by Gonzales and another justice who voted in favor of the insurance industry.

While the group singled out those two donations as particularly egregious, it also criticized Gonzales for taking tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from law firms with clients before the Texas Supreme Court and business interests who wanted to clamp down on large personal injury awards.

After Gonzales's confirmation hearing two weeks ago was dominated by questions about the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies in the war on terrorism, Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, sent a written follow-up question to Gonzales about his judicial campaign finance record.

Feingold asked him whether the reports were accurate and asked, ''[Did he think] it is ethical or appropriate for a judge to accept campaign donations from parties appearing before him?"

Gonzales sent back three sentences in reply: ''In Texas, the voters elect the justices of the Supreme Court. My contributors, as well as those of every other justice, are a matter of public record. I am confident that during my service as a justice on the Supreme Court of Texas, I complied with all legal and ethical requirements regarding acceptance of campaign contributions."

The White House press office declined to make Gonzales available for further comment yesterday. But he was more forthcoming in a response attributed to him by Texans for Public Justice in their 2000 report: ''In the whole scheme of things, $2,000 isn't going to have any kind of influence on me."

Most.Unethical,Administration.Ever.

Solidarity Forever

The WaPo's Dan Froomkin rarely reports news, that's not his beat at the Post. However, his column today has an interview from American Journalism Review with Clinton's press chief Mike McCurry, who makes a point often made on this site.

The Sad Lot of the Press Corps

Lori Robertson has a big piece in the American Journalism Review on the White House and its tight control over the press corps.

"The lack of solidarity in the press corps is another thing that amazes McCurry. If a reporter is thrown off the vice president's plane, he asks, why doesn't the entire press corps say, fine, then none of us travels with you. 'You don't ever see any kind of collective action like that.' "

News from Davos

China has lost faith in stability of U.S. dollar, top Chinese economist says

Edith Lederer
Canadian Press

January 26, 2005

At a standing-room only session focusing on the world's fastest-growing economy, Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation, said the issue for China isn't whether to devalue the yuan but "to limit it from the U.S. dollar."

But he stressed that the Chinese government is under no pressure to revalue its currency.

China's exchange rate policies restrict the value of the yuan to a narrow band around 8.28 yuan, pegged to $1. Critics argue that the yuan is undervalued, making China's exports cheaper overseas and giving its manufacturers an unfair advantage. Beijing has been under pressure from its trading partners, especially the United States, to relax controls on its currency.

"The U.S. dollar is no longer - in our opinion is no longer - (seen) as a stable currency, and is devaluating all the time, and that's putting troubles all the time," Fan said, speaking in English.

"So the real issue is how to change the regime from a U.S. dollar pegging ... to a more manageable ... reference ... say Euros, yen, dollars - those kind of more diversified systems," he said.

"If you do this, in the beginning you have some kind of initial shock," Fan said. "You have to deal with some devaluation pressures."

The dollar hit a new low in December against the euro and has been falling against other major currencies on concerns about the ever-growing U.S. trade and budget deficits.

Sinking Dollar Dominates Davos Debate
By MARK LANDLER

Published: January 27, 2005

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 26 - Two things were as clear as the Alpine air on the opening day of the World Economic Forum on Wednesday: The relentlessly sinking dollar is Topic A, and anyone hoping for an answer to when it will stop dropping is likely to come away disappointed.

Economists, politicians and business executives voiced deep unease about the imbalances in the global financial system, which are reflected in the dollar's steep fall against the euro and other currencies.

But most expressed skepticism that the Bush administration would reduce the trade and budget deficits, which have fed those imbalances. The White House has said that it does not view these issues as a major problem because foreigners still view the American economy as an attractive investment.

Some at the forum said they doubted that China, which is financing much of the American debt, would bow to pressure to allow its currency to rise against the dollar this year.

"The U.S. current-account deficit is a problem for the whole world," said Jacob A. Frenkel, a former governor of the Bank of Israel. But, he said, "I don't see the budget deficit being taken seriously."

The Bush administration, which dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to past Davos meetings to defend the Iraq war and other foreign policy actions, has not sent a similarly prominent economic policy maker to this gathering. That absence has lent the proceedings an imbalanced tone.

"In fairness, it's a transition period in Washington," said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who supplied the American voice on a panel about American leadership. He added, however, "The administration doesn't really have anyone they trust enough to send here."

Mr. Frank, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said that he worried that the United States was not paying enough attention to the risks of its growing indebtedness. The repercussions of a weak dollar, he said, had barely registered with the White House.

Other critics were blunter.

"There's nobody home on economic policy in America right now," said Stephen S. Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley. The twin burdens of household and public debt in the United States, he said, are unsustainable. Describing American consumers as "an accident waiting to happen," he asked, "When does the music stop?"

With the dollar already trading at $1.30 to the euro - near the level of economic unacceptability for Europe - Mr. Roach said the United States could not rely on currency markets to right the imbalance between it and the Asian countries that finance American deficits by buying Treasury bills.

The answer, he said, lies with the Federal Reserve, which he said would have to raise rates aggressively to curb the spending binge. Whether it could do that without triggering a recession is an open question.

Few here held out hope for international coordination of the kind that stabilized the dollar in the 1980's.

"The Bush administration doesn't listen to people," said Laura D. Tyson, who served as an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton. "There's no hope of changing U.S. fiscal policy."

Hot Air and Hot Lead

Dahr Jamail's Here Comes "The Freedom"

Let me describe the scene on the ground here in “liberated” Iraq.

“Now I’m afraid mortars will hit my home if the polling station is attacked,” he adds. He’ll be moving across town to stay at a relative’s house, which is not near one of the dreaded polling stations.

The facts on the ground seem to have very little to do with Bushian rhetoric.

Communicator in Chief Keeps the Focus on Iraq Positive
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: January 27, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 - President Bush's opening statement at his news conference on Wednesday was striking for what it left out: any mention of the 31 Americans who died overnight in the crash of a Marine helicopter in Iraq, the largest number of American deaths in a single incident since the war began.

Mr. Bush instead focused on his long-term goal of "ending tyranny in our world," and then cast the Iraqi election coming Sunday as part of a march of freedom around the globe. He said that if he had told the reporters in the room a few years before that the Iraqi people would be voting, "you would look at me like some of you still look at me, with a kind of blank expression."

The president's words were part of an aggressive White House communications strategy this week and next to frame the risky Iraqi election - a critical test of his assertion that the country is on the path to stability - in the best possible light. The goal, a Bush adviser said, was not only to lower expectations but to avoid any definition of success.

Guns 'n' Butter

I gotta start spending more time with the regional papers....

Forcing democracy on Iraq is getting really expensive

Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Dick Feagler
Plain Dealer Columnist

By now, we know the following things: Iraq had nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center. Iraq had no plans to invade us. Iraq had no stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. After 9/11, we could have let Iraq go its own way and not have been damaged.

But now we're in a war. The meter is running, and soon 1,500 of our kids will have been killed in this war. And that doesn't count the thousands who have come back without limbs. For them, the war will never be over.

America basically shrugs at this. All the blood-letting under America's flag has not yet fully captured America's attention.

And neither will that $80 billion bill. Because it's borrowed money and Americans are used to credit cards and borrowing money. They think, somehow, this is tomorrow's debt and not today's problem.

I would love to see a draft come back for this war. But that ain't going to happen. Failing that, I'd love to see a draft lottery - a universal lottery - that cuts across all class lines.

We like to say we have no classes in America. We like to say it, but it certainly isn't true. The kids who are fighting this war are not the same kids who are out after their MBA degrees. Anybody who denies that is a liar. And too many people on the top are liars. Or, if that's too strong, delusionaries.

These delusionaries are talking about an election in Iraq this weekend. At gunpoint. Why do they think they can buy democracy on credit?

They're nuts.

But they can afford to be nuts because they rule over a complacent society that rarely calls them to question.

If the billions weren't on the Visa bill, maybe America would pay attention. If the cost of this war, which most Americans blandly oppose, were added to the property tax or the sales tax, maybe we'd pay more attention to what we're doing.

That's why it's off budget.

Except it's not off budget for the kids who come home in caskets.

It's not off budget for the kids in Walter Reed, learning to walk with metal legs.

This war is not off budget for any of us. Think what we could do with these billions. How many schools built? Which diseases hurried to a cure?

I figure the best rules to attract democracy are the same that apply to a singles bar. It's all a question of allure. You'd better not force it, and if you have to buy it you're buying emptiness. On your card, brother.

Neocon Out

Key Player In Postwar Strategy in Iraq to Quit

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2005; Page A03

A principal architect of the Defense Department's postwar strategy in Iraq announced yesterday that he will leave his post this summer.

Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, said he is leaving for personal reasons, citing the desire to spend more time with his four children. "For the last four years, they haven't seen me a lot," Feith said yesterday.

Feith is a longtime Washington lawyer and part of a group of neoconservative foreign policy experts known for strong support of Israel and who had long-held aspirations of unseating Saddam Hussein.

Supporters have praised Feith and the group, which includes former Reagan defense aide Richard N. Perle, for their willingness to take risks to confront autocracy in the Middle East and for their hard-line position against giving up Israeli-held land to the Palestinians.

Detractors have criticized Feith for being unrealistic about the cost and outcome of invading Iraq and have asserted that he played a critical, behind-the-scenes role in exaggerating the prewar threat from Hussein through a secretive office he set up, the Office of Special Plans.

Retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, once commander of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, called him "the stupidest guy on the face of the Earth" in his recent book. Feith and Franks tangled often, including over a proposal to train 5,000 Iraqi soldiers to be interpreters and guides during the war.

I think the facts can pass their judgement on Doug Feith, who will probably go on to a thinktank job at AEI or a board position with Carlyle. He is totemic of the idea that smarts do not equal wisdom.

Is an indictment pending? I don't know.

Peace and Freedom v. 5.0

Prof. Cole remarks, "You know, if all you have to boast about is that you are better than Saddam Hussein, it isn't actually a good sign. Can you imagine what would have happened to the Republican Party if its reply to Kerry's criticisms of last summer had been, "Well, the American Republican Party is a damn sight more progressive than Hitler was.""

Iraqi Insurgency Proves Tough to Crack
# U.S. officials no longer believe this weekend's election will finish off the rebellion, whose disparate factions unite in hating the Americans.

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — Four days before the landmark Iraqi national election, U.S. officials and their allies are bracing for fresh insurgent attacks with far less of the optimism that marked previous milestones.

The capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 was greeted as a likely death blow for the guerrillas, then regarded as an incipient array of ill-organized holdovers from the ousted dictator's Baath Party. When sovereignty was returned to Iraq six months later, the insurgents were seen as a more substantial threat, but it was widely anticipated that their strength would wither under an Iraqi government.

Today, after more than 18 months of often-fierce confrontations, tens of thousands of hard-core fighters are said to be operating in and around Baghdad and the Sunni Muslim heartland of central Iraq. The insurgents have plenty of firepower and mobility, employ strategic military thinking and operate openly in some areas, defying Iraqi government control.

On Tuesday, insurgents assassinated an Iraqi judge, killed at least five members of Iraqi security forces and made public a videotape of an American hostage begging for his life at gunpoint.

Recently the insurgents have carried out about 50 attacks daily, including a spate of killings and the bombing of a water main that disrupted the supply for hundreds of thousands of Baghdad residents. After a round of killings in Ramadi, the capital of Al Anbar province in the Sunni heartland, word came Tuesday that the 1,000-member police force had abandoned its posts, the latest flop of the U.S.-sponsored security services.

Regardless of the turnout for Sunday's election, U.S. officials are no longer predicting the swift vanquishing of the insurgents, who have stymied the world's most potent military machine with bombings, assassinations, abductions and infrastructure attacks.

"I think during election day they're going to start to attack early, create as big of a media event as they can, to try and intimidate people," a senior U.S. commander said Tuesday.

Other assessments are even more bleak.

"I think it is unlikely that these elections will do much to bring violence down; let's be honest about it," said one Western official here, who, like several others interviewed, declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. "I think the elections are a huge step for the credibility of the government, the legitimacy of the government, and will contribute to a solution over the medium and long term. But there's not going to be a short-term answer in March or April…. Ending the violence is going to take a long time."

The shift in attitude reflects a view that the insurgents have successfully adapted to changed circumstances.

The water main bombing, for example, appeared to be part of a well-planned campaign of sabotage that has left much of the nation's infrastructure in tatters. Rebels have mounted hundreds of attacks on oil, gas and electricity lines, and most major highways are hijack-prone shooting galleries. The international airport is now little used; two commercial flights returned to Jordan this week because of intense battles on the ground near the airfield.

Blogkeeping

We'll be off-line for a bit this afternoon as we negotiate the change from dial up to cable broadband. During the intermission, the email address will be
[email protected], and I'll default the Bump software to send "comments" there. Once I get a permanent address it will be front page and put up on the right sidebar. Today is going to be a little messy.

Do-Over

Criminals the lot of us

The invasion of Iraq was a crime of gigantic proportions, for which politicians, the media and the public share responsibility
Scott Ritter
Thursday January 27, 2005

Guardian

The White House's acknowledgement last month that the United States has formally ended its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq brought to a close the most calamitous international deception of modern times.

This decision was taken a month after a contentious presidential election in which the issue of WMD and the war in Iraq played a central role. In the lead-up to the invasion, and throughout its aftermath, President Bush was unwavering in his conviction that Iraq had WMD, and that this posed a threat to the US and the world. The failure to find WMD should have been his Achilles heel, but the Democratic contender, John Kerry, floundered, changing his position on WMD and Iraq many times.

Ironically, it was Kerry who forced the Bush administration to acknowledge that it was WMD that solely justified any military action against Iraq. Before the US Senate in 2002, secretary of state Colin Powell responded to a question posed by Kerry about what would happen if Iraq allowed UN weapons inspectors to return and they found the country had in fact disarmed.

"If Iraq was disarmed as a result of an inspection regime that gave us and the security council confidence that it had been disarmed, I think it unlikely that we would find a casus belli."

When one looks at the situation in Iraq today, the only way that it would be possible to justify the current state of affairs - a once secular society now the centre of a global anti-American Islamist jihad, tens of thousands of civilians killed, an unending war that costs almost £3.2bn a month, and the basic principles of democracy mocked through an election process that has generated extensive violence - is if the invasion of Iraq was for a cause worthy of the price.

The threat to international peace and security represented by Iraqi WMD seemed to be such a cause. We now know there were no WMD, and thus no justification for the war. And yet there are no repercussions.

The culpability for the war can be traced to those same Senate hearings in 2002, when Colin Powell said:"We can have debates about the size of the stockpile ... but no one can doubt two things. One, they [Iraq] are in violation of these resolutions ... And second, they have not lost the intent to develop these weapons of mass destruction."

Politicians, the mainstream media and the public alike accepted this line of argument, without debate, thus setting the stage for an illegal war.

UN weapons inspections were never given a chance. Ever since the Clinton administration ordered them out of Iraq in 1998, the US has denigrated the efficacy of the inspection process. This was a policy begun by Clinton, but perfected by Bush in the build-up to war. In October 2002, a month after Saddam Hussein agreed to the unfettered return of weapons inspectors, the US defence department postulated the existence of secret production facilities, protected by a "concealment mechanism" designed to defeat inspectors. Thus, even if they returned, a finding of no WMD was meaningless.

Inspectors did return, and they found nothing. Iraq submitted a complete declaration of its WMD holdings, which was dismissed as lies by the Bush administration. Everyone seemed to accept this rejection of fact. "Intelligence information" wasassumed to be infallible. And yet it was all just hype.

There was never any serious effort undertaken by the Bush administration to find Iraqi WMD. Prior to the invasion, the US military re-designated an artillery brigade as an "exploitation task force" designed to search for WMD as the coalition advanced into Iraq.

It did little more than serve as a vehicle for its embedded reporter, Judith Miller of the New York Times, to recycle fabricated information provided by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, creating dramatic headlines that had no substance. Once Iraq was occupied, Miller was sent home, and the taskforce disbanded.

Well, Scott, not all of us bought Miller's line nor endorsed the war. Some of us had seen the "swinging dick" strategy in human behavior enough before to notice when we were seeing it again.

I don't ask to be excused, just to be noticed, that when the rest of my co-workers were anticipating sarin attacks in the DC Metro system, I was buying fare cards. That when pre-emptive war was being pardoned among my co-workers, I was quoting Stanley Hauerwas. Now that we are mired in the sands of Mesopotamia, I don't know how they feel.

Terra, Terra, Terra

Bush Describes 'Ending Tyranny' As Ideal, Not Shift

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2005; Page A01

President Bush yesterday characterized his Inauguration Day goal of "ending tyranny in our world" as a long-term ideal rather than a new policy redefining U.S. relations with repressive governments, as he ratcheted back expectations of a more muscular approach to spreading freedom abroad.

While saying he had "firmly planted the flag of liberty" in Iraq, Bush offered no tangible plans for how he would plant it in other countries, suggesting instead that the stirring words of last week's inaugural address were meant as a statement of principles recapitulating his first-term practices.

"My inaugural address reflected the policies of the last four years," Bush told reporters at the first news conference of his second term. Asked if the speech that termed advancing democracy "the calling of our time" reflected a policy shift, he said: "No. As I said, it reflects the policy of the past, but it sets a bold new goal for the future. And I believe this country is best when it heads toward an ideal world."

The president's hastily called appearance in the White House briefing room came on the deadliest day yet for U.S. troops in the war in Iraq and just four days before Iraqis are scheduled to go to the polls to elect a new National Assembly. With Iraq serving as a volatile test case for his vision of embedding democracy in historically hostile parts of the world, Bush urged Iraqis to go to the polls Sunday and "defy these terrorists" who are "afraid of a free society."

Looking ahead to his State of the Union address next Wednesday, Bush said he will present specific ideas for restructuring Social Security and then barnstorm through four or five states to sell his plan, but he also signaled openness to negotiating with key congressional Republicans who have been skeptical. Bush repeated his vow to cut the federal deficit in half in five years despite heavy new spending on Iraq and said he has ordered Cabinet departments not to pay media commentators to promote administration policies.

But it was Iraq and the president's vision to promote democracy that dominated the 47-minute session. Bush appeared in a confident, relaxed mood, notably more upbeat on Iraq than he seemed at his news conference in December, when he acknowledged that anti-American insurgents were "having an effect" and complained that U.S.-trained Iraqi troops had sometimes "left the battlefield" rather than fight. By contrast, yesterday he praised "some really fine units" among the Iraqis and called the election "a grand moment in Iraqi history."

I watched it and think it represented a low point in the presidency of a low rent president.

There was a time, not that long ago, when presidents used the pronoun "we" when referring to their administration. This was not the royal "we" but rather the democratic "we," the recognition that governing is a business that requires the work of many. Bush, however, prefers the royal "I", he is the Sun King, and uniquely available, when he isn't in Crawford, for the "hard work" of governance. This presser was emblematic of everything which is wrong with Bushco.

GS-0

Civil Service System on Way Out at DHS
Department Will Deviate From Federal Personnel Rules; Others May Follow Suit

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2005; Page A01

The Bush administration unveiled a new personnel system for the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that will dramatically change the way workers are paid, promoted, deployed and disciplined -- and soon the White House will ask Congress to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees.

The new system will replace the half-century-old General Schedule, with its familiar 15 pay grades and raises based on time in a job, and install a system that more directly bases pay on occupation and annual performance evaluations, officials said. The new system has taken two years to develop and will require at least four more to implement, they said.

Wednesday's Question:
The Senate is scheduled this week to confirm several of President Bush's Cabinet nominees. Which of the following positions was NOT within former president Under the new plan, employees will be grouped into eight to 12 clusters based on occupation. Salary ranges will be based, in part, on geographic location and annual market surveys by a new compensation committee of what similar employees earn in the private sector and other government entities. Within each occupational cluster, workers will be assigned to one of four salary ranges, or "pay bands," based on their skill level and experience.

A raise or promotion -- moving up in a pay range or rising to the next one -- will depend on receiving a satisfactory performance rating from a supervisor, said officials with homeland security and the Office of Personnel Management.

"We really have created a system that rewards performance, not longevity," OPM Director Kay Coles James said in a briefing for reporters. "It can truly serve as a model for the rest of the federal government."

The Civil Service system was erected to move political abuses out of of the personnel system. Do you really think that this crew is going to keep politics out of the hiring and firing process?

Home: Where the Heart is

The Best Coverage Money Can Buy

Published: January 27, 2005

Mr. Bush was plainly irritated by having to field questions about administration officials who tapped taxpayers to finance spin-for-money deals. The most prominent sellout was Armstrong Williams, the conservative television commentator who took $240,000 to do administration bidding on behalf of the No Child Left Behind Act while making a show of tough-minded candor.

The latest is the syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher, who did not disclose a $21,500 government writing contract for her promotion of Bush policy on strengthening marriage. Last year, there was the propaganda video on behalf of the Medicare drug program offered to budget-pressed TV stations. Full disclosure at signoff might have said, "Reporting live and in the tank!"

Loss of credibility works both ways. The exposed spinners deservedly suffer shame. But the administration's believability comes into question when officials like Rod Paige, the outgoing education secretary, defend buying faked coverage.

Family Dynamics

Pick your poison: which one gets us first? A dirty bomb in Washington, bird flu or a global recession? I'm betting on the second, CIDRAP doesn't think there is a decent defensive strategy in here anywhere, but Bob Kuttner is looking at global economic collapse today and I hardly blame him. It's all in the timing, Bob. You are damned right, unless the virus hits first. Combine the two and I don't want to think about it.

Oh yes, it can happen here

By Robert Kuttner | January 26, 2005

''How did you go bankrupt?"
''Two Ways. Gradually, and then suddenly."
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

COUNTRIES GO broke gradually, by borrowing so much money that creditors lose confidence in their ability to pay the debt back. Then, they go broke suddenly as creditors stop lending.

This has happened to more than a dozen Third World nations, who had the additional misfortune of having to borrow in dollars. As their own currency lost the confidence of world markets, they lost value against the dollar. This only increased their real debt burden. The optimists say, ''It can't happen here."

First, we're the people who print dollars. So if the dollar is losing value, it just means the money that we owe the rest of the world is getting cheaper. Lucky us.

Second, we enjoy a codependency with our creditors. For instance, China, which keeps lending us money to finance our deficits, may be accumulating dollar credits that are losing their real worth. But China needs us to keep absorbing their products, so China will go right on lending.

And third, the United States remains the anchor of the world economy. So even though other nations may not like America's immense trade and budget deficits, nobody is going to risk pushing the world into depression by crashing the dollar.

That, as I say, is the optimistic view. Well, dream on.

Yesterday, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, possibly the last intellectually honest government agency in George Bush's Washington, reported that our fiscal situation is even worse than expected.

According to the CBO's latest ''Budget and Economic Outlook," the projected deficit for 2005 will be about $400 billion. The CBO declares, politely but unmistakably, that it doesn't buy the Bush administration's budgetary gimmickry of trying to keep anticipated military outlays out of the official budget.

''The absence of further appropriations for activities in Iraq and Afghanistan," CBO states, ''masks a further deterioration in budget projections over the [next] ten years."

Specifically, the deficit for the next decade is $504 billion worse than anticipated in CBO's previous estimate last September.

The agency goes on to warn that other challenges not currently itemized in official administration projections, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, will only increase future deficits. And, of course, if the Bush administration succeeds either in making permanent his major tax reductions (most of which sunset after 10 years), or in adding $2 trillion of borrowing to privatize Social Security, the fiscal situation would go from merely disastrous to catastrophic.

But back to our story, ''It Can't Happen Here." America's deteriorating fiscal situation, unfortunately, is not lost either on world money markets or on the Federal Reserve. Although no world leader would willfully plunge the world into depression, that's not how markets work. Markets are purely self-interested.

Lately, markets, with good reason, have been betting against the dollar. As the US trade deficit approaches a staggering 7 percent, it's not clear how much longer foreign investors will keep investing in dollars and dollar-securities, such as corporate stocks and government bonds.

As for the Chinese, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute, formerly a senior trade negotiator in the Reagan administration, offers the following scenario: In a future crisis involving the tense China-Taiwan relationship, the Chinese ambassador suggests to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that maybe the United States would like to move its warships 500 miles away from Taiwan. Rice demurs. The next day, the Bank of China sells a few --just a very few to get our attention -- US Treasury securities. Money markets reel.

Countries go broke the same way the rest of us go broke. And we're doing it right now in a way that is going to take our equity markets down and out. And I don't notice anyone waiting around to bail us out.

Welcome to Bushism 2.0. Making the world safer for terrorism and economic collapse since 2000. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world looks on with horror and alarm? We're like that drunken poor relation who embarrasses everybody at weddings and funerals. You have to go to the event, but you're going to get cornered by the sot at some point.

I imagine that world leaders just love getting lectured by W the same way the press corps does. Not.

Frustration Watch

This comes from a very surprising source, paleocon Paul Craig Roberts, (fixed) and it is right on:

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country.

I think that about sums it up.

Failed Policies

Rehearsal for Democracy

American officials have set the bar about as low as it can go for expectations about Sunday's election in Iraq. Is it a success if only 20% of the voters turn out? If the outcome is decided more by voters outside the country than in it? Nobody wants to say, and for good reason. As low as the bar is, the election could still prove to be a disappointing farce.

Days before the balloting, most Iraqis have no idea where their polling places will be — unless they are voting outside the country. In Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi and other cities, officials have kept the location of polls secret as long as possible for fear that insurgents will destroy the sites.

Many Iraqis have refused to announce their candidacies for one of the 275 seats in the interim national assembly or for offices in the provinces. Suicide car bombers and terrorist executioners have tried to scare voters away from the polls, especially in cities with a majority of Sunni Arabs.

Yet with sufficient luck, the balloting could mark the start of independent rule for the country and an eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops. Without luck or good follow-up, the election could fuel a civil war.

The expectation is for parties led by Shiites, who account for about 60% of the population, to win most of the seats in the assembly. Kurds, who are Sunni but not Arab, make up about 20% of the population and may take about that percentage of the seats. Arab Sunnis, who account for about 20% of the population but were favored by fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein, are boycotting. That will increase the pressure on the winners to determine how to bring the Sunnis into the political process after the election.

One possibility would be increasing the number of assembly seats and earmarking some of them for Sunnis. Whatever happens, Sunni involvement in the assembly's drafting of a new constitution is to be encouraged. Voters will get the chance to pick a full-term assembly later this year, and also will decide whether to approve the constitution. Sunnis have majorities in three provinces, and the transitional law passed last spring allows rejection of the constitution if two-thirds majorities in three of the country's 18 provinces turn thumbs down. That gives Sunnis leverage, which they should use to push for a constitution that provides for protection of minority communities.

The election is on Sunday, the Iraqis don't know who's running or where to vote (if they dare leave their homes) and we're still talking about what the process should be? LAT, this is purest bullshit. The process for the election was set by the interim constitution, like it or not.

Re-arranging the deck chair on the Titanic is what this is.

Not the Whole Story

The US is behaving as if every Sunni is a terrorist'

For centuries they have comprised the ruling class, but since the fall of Saddam everything has changed for Iraq's Sunni Arabs. This weekend's elections are likely only to reinforce their disaffection, reports Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Wednesday January 26, 2005

Guardian

'Two weeks ago, Adnan al-Janabi, the then minister of state in the Iraqi interim government of premier Ayad Allawi, and a tribal leader of one of Iraq's largest predominantly Sunni tribes, was arrested, handcuffed and insulted by US soldiers manning a checkpoint leading into the Green Zone where he worked. Only when a senior bodyguard of the prime minister intervened was he released. That same day he resigned from government.

"You know, and other brother ministers know," he wrote, "how many insults we suffer on the hands of the occupation forces, and the Iraqi people suffer from far more. We have been patient telling ourselves maybe we can do something ourselves to reduce the effect of the occupation. But arresting one of the ministers in such a humiliating way can mean only one thing: that the sovereignty the security council talked about means nothing to the occupation force."

Janabi, apart from being one of Iraq's most revered tribal sheikhs, is also a highly educated man who found himself in an awkward position after the war.

He leads one of the largest tribes in what is known now as the triangle of death south of Baghdad. He is also a western-educated former Opec official who knows how to talk to the Americans as well as the UN. Finally, when he puts on his traditional Arab dress, he becomes the charming sheikh who can reason with everyone including Ayatollah Sistani. For almost two years now he has been trying very hard to bridge the ever growing gap between his community and the Americans; as fruitless a task as one might imagine.

Janabi is one of the few Sunni leaders still involved in this weekend's elections. Most others have announced their decision to boycott them. Nevertheless, when one junior American officer was fed up with this bald, thin man who insisted on knowing why he couldn't get to his office - despite his US-approved ministerial ID card - he was arrested on the spot.

Janabi's ordeal has been experienced by most of his community, a community trying to come to terms with the realities of the post-Saddam era; a change not helped by being the target of a near-daily American campaign of intimidation.

What happened to him might be a coincidence, but what is happening to his Sunni community has proven to be far more complicated than that. In Iraq - as is the case in most of the Muslim world - the Sunnis were always the natural-born leaders of the community. In Iraq's case this meant that they tended to look with a mixture of anxiety and scorn at the poor Shia in the south and the Kurds in the north; these fears and prejudices were exploited by those who came to control Iraq, from the Ottomans to Saddam via the British.
....
Having a tribal name that associated you with a Sunni-dominated area or tribe was for centuries a guarantee of access to the government and a good job, but these same names now land you in American custody if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A widespread loathing of the Americans combined with a fear of Shia revenge is likely to lead to a very low turnout among Sunnis this weekend. For most, a Shia government is inevitable - and so, in turn, is the likelihood of further disturbance. A senior moderate Sunni official who is running in next week's elections was asked what would happen if the Shia won a landslide victory. He replied: "We will all join the armed resistance."

There is something important missing from this story: US soldiers and marines can't tell a Sunni from a Shia on sight. They are going to treat every "rag head" like shit, they don't know or understand the political, historical or religious differences between them, nor do they care. This particular Sunni found a sympathetic reporter and got a megaphone.

Neocon Dreams

Wake Up! Bush Is Serious

by Paul Craig Roberts

If Bush were in control or had a brain, he would have shut Cheney up and fired all the neocons who produced the Iraqi disaster. Instead, despite the Iraqi mess, the Bush administration is publicly threatening to attack Iran, a country that has committed no terrorist or aggressive act toward the U.S. The Pentagon has been ordered to prepare plans. Apparently, the U.S. has already inserted special forces into Iran to gather intelligence.

The neoconservatives are Jacobins. The neocons are the greatest threat America has ever faced, and they have the reins of power. Americans need to wake up to this fact and stop indulging their macho "kick their Muslim butts" fantasies and their "end times" Rapture fantasies.

The Bush administration is not establishing any democracies. It is starting a war that will last a generation. That is the neocon plan. They have put their intentions in writing just as Hitler did. It is no protection that their plan is detached from reality. Robespierre was detached from reality, and that did not stop him. So were Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. People with power in their hands who are detached from reality are the most dangerous people of all. The delusional quality of their rantings disarms people from taking them seriously: "Oh, they couldn't mean that." But they do.

I watched some think tank panel program on C-Span this morning which featured Weekly Standard editor Bill Krystol, spewing the party line on all this wonderful peace and freedom we're going to spread to Iran. The fact that we don't have the horses doesn't seem to bother any of these fantasists.

New Crew

What-If A-Bomb Postulator Ascends

By Al Kamen
Wednesday, January 26, 2005; Page A19

The diplo crowd had raised its hopes of late that Condoleezza Rice would return to her realist roots once confirmed as secretary of state and then restrain ideological activists at the Pentagon.

The diplos watched approvingly as Rice tapped a number of career officers and former secretary of state James A. Baker III hands to senior-most jobs: Robert B. Zoellick as No. 2 and career officer R. Nicholas Burns as No. 3, along with highly regarded career officers to key posts at the undersecretary and assistant secretary levels.

But word last week, according to the San Jose Mercury News, was that Rice had tapped Stanford University professor Stephen D. Krasner, a close pal and mentor from university days, to the key job of director of policy planning.

This is raising some eyebrows.

From its iconic first director, George F. Kennan, the policy planning chief, gatekeeper for all paper that heads to the secretary's desk, usually is a veteran Washington hand: Think of Winston Lord for Henry A. Kissinger, Peter W. Rodman and Richard H. Solomon for George P. Shultz, Dennis B. Ross for Baker, Morton H. Halperin for Madeleine K. Albright, or Richard N. Haass for Colin L. Powell.

In contrast, Krasner spent about a year here in the early days of this administration, first at policy planning and then working for Rice on the National Security Council staff.

In addition, though he has long been respected as a premier thinker firmly in the realist camp, his latest views on preventive war seem to be more in sync with the Pentagon's, judging from his article in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy. In that piece, Krasner speculates on what would happen if terrorists set off nuclear explosions here and in New Delhi, Berlin and Los Angeles.

"Full-scale preventive wars would be accepted in principle," he says, "and the major powers would no longer" bother trying to get United Nations approval. "A consortium of major powers would assume executive authority and declare the international legal sovereignty of the occupied territory null and void.

"A state's right to control the exploitation of its natural resources (most notably oil) within its territory will be an added casualty," Krasner writes, adding that there is a "growing tension" between states that cannot manage their internal affairs and "the handful of states that possess the means and wherewithal to set matters right."

Meanwhile, U.N. membership "would be contingent upon a state's ability to effectively control it's own territory," he predicts. Presumably he is exempting America's inability to control immigration across its borders. Well, no confirmation required for this gig.

While not a full-on PNACer, Krasner doesn't seem to be all that reality based but appears to have a rich fantasy life. This doesn't bode well for that trip to Europe coming up next week.

New News II

Bumpers,

Courtesy of the assistence of a loyal reader, I'm moving to cable broadband tomorrow. This means my email will change, but I won't know until the service tech arrives what the new address will be. When I get the new address, I'll post it here and put it in the sidebar at the right.

I am literally unable to conceive of what this change in speed will mean for me.

To Tell the Truth

Winning Cases, Losing Voters
By PAUL STARR

Published: January 26, 2005

Princeton, N.J.

To be sure, Democrats were right to challenge segregation and racism, support the revolution in women's roles in society, to protect rights to abortion and to back the civil rights of gays. But a party can make only so many enemies before it loses the ability to do anything for the people who depend on it. For decades, many liberals thought they could ignore the elementary demand of politics - winning elections - because they could go to court to achieve these goals on constitutional grounds. The great thing about legal victories like Roe v. Wade is that you don't have to compromise with your opponents, or even win over majority opinion. But that is also the trouble. An unreconciled losing side and unconvinced public may eventually change the judges.

And now we have reached that point. The Republicans, with their party in control of both elected branches - and looking to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that will stand for a generation - see the opportunity to overthrow policies and constitutional precedents reaching back to the New Deal.

That prospect ought to concentrate the liberal mind. Social Security, progressive taxation, affordable health care, the constitutional basis for environmental and labor regulation, separation of church and state - these issues and more hang in the balance.

Under these circumstances, liberal Democrats ought to ask themselves a big question: are they better off as the dominant force in an ideologically pure minority party, or as one of several influences in an ideologically varied party that can win at the polls? The latter, it seems clear, is the better choice.

Rebuilding a national political majority will mean distinguishing between positions that contribute to a majority and those that detract from it. As last year's disastrous crusade for gay marriage illustrated, Democrats cannot allow their constituencies to draw them into political terrain that can't be defended at election time. Dissatisfied with compromise legislation on civil unions and partner benefits, gay organizations thought they could get from judges, beginning with those on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, what the electorate was not yet ready to give. The result: bans on same-sex marriage passing in 11 states and an energized conservative voting base.

Public support for abortion rights is far greater than for gay marriage, but compromise may be equally imperative - especially if a reshaped Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade by finding that there is no constitutional right to abortion and throws the issue back to the states. Some savvy Democrats are already thinking along these lines, as Hillary Clinton showed this week when she urged liberals to find "common ground" with those who have misgivings about abortion.

And if a new Supreme Court overturns affirmative-action laws, Democrats will need to pursue equality in ways that avoid treating whites and blacks differently. Some liberals have long been calling for an emphasis on "race neutral" economic policies to recover support among working-class and middle-income white voters. Legal and political necessity may now drive all Democrats in that direction.

Republicans are leaving themselves open to this kind of strategy. Their party is far more ideologically driven and more beholden to the Christian right than it was even during the Ronald Reagan era. This is the source of the party's energy, but also its vulnerability. The Democrats' opportunity lies in becoming a broader, more open and flexible coalition that can occupy the center.

In the long run, Democrats will benefit from their strength among younger voters and the growing Hispanic population. But the last thing the Democrats need is a revived interest group or identity politics. As the response to Senator Barack Obama's convention speech showed, the party's own members are looking for an expansive statement of American character and national purpose.

Secure in their own lives at home, Americans can be a great force for good in the world. That is the liberalism this country once heard from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy - and it is the only form of liberalism that will give the Democratic Party back its majority.

No, no and no. What cost the election for the Democrats was the Wurlitzer and the fact that the entire MSM is taking its marching orders directly from the office of Karl Rove. Remeber what Greg Palast told us?

In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship -- and self-censorship -- which had seized US newsrooms. After September 11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

"Bush Family Fortunes," the one-hour documentary taken from Greg Palast's BBC investigative reports, including the story of George Bush and Texas Air Guard, can be viewed, in part, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

If the g-damn Washington press corps would all hang together and refuse to accept Bush bull**shit, they couldn't be picked off individually like this. They should be boycotting little Scotty's bearcrap "briefings" and Bush "press conferences." Starve them of attention. Make 'em beg for it.

Up comes the Bush presser this morning. This is a presidency in deep trouble. Will the sharks smell the blood in the water?

Mass Casualty Situation

Marine copter crash kills 31

January 26, 2005

BY SAMEER N. YACOUB ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD, Iraq-- A U.S. Marine helicopter transporting troops crashed Wednesday in the desert of western Iraq, killing 31 people, American military officials said. It was the deadliest crash of a U.S. military helicopter in Iraq.

A Pentagon source said the helicopter was a CH-53 Sea Stallion, which is normally configured to carry 37 passengers, but can take up to 55. There was no immediate word on how many people were on board or what caused the crash.

The military officials did not specify the nationalities of those on board or say how many were soldiers.

It was the biggest loss of life in a helicopter crash in Iraq-- and could be the deadliest single incident for American forces since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The helicopter went down about 1:20 a.m. near the town of Rutbah, about 220 miles west of Baghdad, while conducting security operations, the military said in a statement. The aircraft was transporting personnel from the 1st Marine Division.

A search and rescue team has reached the site and an investigation into what caused the crash is underway, the military said.

"We can confirm casualties, but not what type or numbers yet," a U.S. spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, said.

Previously, the deadliest incident involving U.S. troops was a Nov. 15, 2003, crash of two Black Hawk helicopters that collided while trying to avoid ground fire in Mosul, killing 17 U.S. soldiers and wounding five.

Earlier that month, a Chinook transport helicopter was shot down by shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile near Fallujah, killing 16 American soldiers and wounding 26.

The U.S. military has lost at least 33 helicopters since the start of the war, including at least 20 brought down by hostile fire, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.

I wonder if this will get the war back on the national radar screen.

Staying Away in Droves

Voter Registration of Iraqi Expatriates Falls Short

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Efforts to register Iraqi expatriates to vote in Sunday's Iraq elections have fallen far short of expectations, drawing in fewer than 10% of the eligible voters in the United States and fewer than 25% worldwide, according to officials.

The program was launched two months ago by the exile-dominated Iraqi Election Commission to empower Iraqis driven abroad by Saddam Hussein, and in hopes of beefing up vote totals for the moderate parties that are led by exiles. But as registration closed today, it was clear that the $92-million effort had been hampered by a late start, the long distances between registration sites, and many expatriates' mixed feelings about the election.

A tally that includes all but the last day of registration shows that about 24,000 of an estimated 240,000 eligible Iraqi Americans have signed up over the nine-day registration period. About 256,000 out of 1.2 million eligible Iraqi expatriates worldwide have signed up. The figures suggested that expatriate voters will be less influential than some analysts have forecast in the election, in which 13 million Iraqis are eligible to vote.

"It was a long distance to travel and the elections had lost credibility with some people," said Sam Kubba, an Iraqi American businessman in northern Virginia who had lobbied hard for the out of country voting program.

A senior U.S. official said the low turnout meant expatriate voters would not be a major factor in the election, adding that the relatively low turnout in the United States was "not all that surprising." "People have a way of settling in in the United States and forgetting about the old country," he said.

More Iraqi expatriates made it to the registration sites in other countries.

Iran, a refuge for Shi'iah Iraqis for decades, led in turnout, with 53,145, or 65%, of 81,000 Iraqis registered. Election officials said the Shi'iah government of Iran was highly cooperative in registering those expatriates, who are expected to vote heavily for Shi'iah slates.

Sweden was No. 2, with more than 29,000, or 51%, of its 57,000 eligible voters.

In Jordan, where many Sunni Iraqis now live, only about 14,000 of 180,000, or about 8%, of expatriates registered. In Syria, the figure was 14,000 of 250,000, or 6%.

If most people think the election is a sham, and it appears that the ex-pats do, it hardly makes sense to tie yourself into knots to go through this tortured registration process.

Street Justice

Insurgents Vowing to Kill Iraqis Who Brave the Polls on Sunday
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: January 26, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 25 - The black sedan made its way down Madaris Street, the young men inside tossing leaflets out the window.

"This is a final warning to all of those who plan to participate in the election," the leaflets said. "We vow to wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters' blood."

Thus was the war over Sunday's nationwide elections crystallized in a single incident on Tuesday in Mashtal, an ethnically mixed neighborhood on the eastern edge of Baghdad, where many Iraqis say they would like to vote, and where a small, determined group of people are doing everything they can to stop them.

The leaflets, like many turning up on sidewalks and doorsteps across the capital, were chilling in their detail: they warned Iraqis to stay at least 500 yards away from voting booths, for each would be the potential target of a rocket, mortar shell or car bomb. The leaflet suggested that Iraqis stay away from their windows, too, in case of blasts.

"To those of you who think you can vote and then run away," the leaflet warned, "we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children."

The effect of such intimidation across the country will not be known until Sunday. Estimates vary, but Iraqi officials say they will be pleased if the nationwide turnout reaches 50 percent of the 14 million eligible voters. In some areas, like the Sunni-dominant cities of Ramadi and Falluja, even a meager turnout would be welcomed.

In Madaris Street, the men in the black sedan got a hostile reception: Iraqi police officers spotted the car and opened fire, killing two of the men, residents said. The rest got away, after killing three officers.

Guerrilla groups have vowed to step up attacks to disrupt the voting.

I note that Filkins finds neither interest nor irony in the fact that Iraqi police can offer summary justice on the street to the propagandists in the face of so-called "democratic" elections.

The US media have fallen to a truly lowly state.

Bringing Freedom

Sunnis Weigh the Risks of Running
One Tribal Leader Defies Threats, but Another Sits It Out

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 26, 2005; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- Mishaan Jubouri does not dare set foot in his home district in Mosul to campaign for a seat in Iraq's National Assembly. His posters are torn down -- if anyone was emboldened to put them up in the first place. Stores do not sell the newspaper he runs, and some post large signs on their windows saying so. Even in Baghdad, where Jubouri lives now, his wife and family are afraid to leave their home, which is guarded by 54 armed security men.

Still, Jubouri, a Sunni Muslim and Mosul's first mayor after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, defies those trying to stop the Iraqi elections. He has to run, he says, "to give the people some hope."

In another northern city, Kirkuk, things are almost as bad. Ethnic strife looms over the coming vote, politicians have been kidnapped, mortar fire punctuates campaign debate, candidates are scared and their staff members are hunkered down in their homes. A Sunni leader there, Abdul Rahman Asi, took stock of the situation and chose to do the opposite of what Jubouri is doing.

"Under normal circumstances, I would be a candidate. But the people are too afraid to come. There will be no voters. I will only lose," Asi said. "It is dangerous, and my reputation will go down."

The two men -- both leaders of large Sunni Arab tribes -- represent the dilemma for Iraq's once-dominant branch of Islam. The Sunnis are the targets of an intimidation campaign by insurgents using violence to disrupt the elections. Under threat of death, they have been warned not to run, not to vote, not to participate. If they stay away from the polls, the attackers' logic goes, the elections will be seen as invalid, the fragile sectarian balance in Iraq will be upset, and Iraq might sink into a civil war among Sunni Arabs, the majority Shiite Muslims and the Kurds, who are Sunnis but are ethnically distinct from Iraq's more numerous Arabs.

Coaching Iraq's New Candidates, Discreetly
U.S.-Funded Programs Nurture Voting Process

By Karl Vick and Robin Wright
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 26, 2005; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The midwives of democracy toil behind the towering gray blast walls that encase every Western enterprise in the new Iraq. This one, in an anonymous cluster of buildings, houses the country's first school for political candidates.

There is a miniature television studio, where novice office-seekers learn the fine art of the sound bite and the value of "earned media." There are conference rooms, where instructors from countries that have already left war behind conduct seminars on "Six Steps to Planning and Winning a Campaign." (Step 3: Targeting the Voters).

A graphic artist stands by with advice on getting a party's poster noticed on the cluttered streets of Baghdad. A former congressional staffer stands by to emphasize the vital difference between an army of volunteers and an armed militia.

And on the rooftops of nearby buildings, snipers simply stand by, their vigil as discreet as the low-profile democracy-building effort underway below.

Funded by U.S. taxpayers, the Baghdad office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs stands at the ambitious heart of the American effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world. In the 13 months it has operated in the country, the institute has tutored political aspirants from all of Iraq's major parties, trained about 10,000 domestic election observers and nurtured thousands of ordinary citizens seeking to build the institutions that form the backbone of free societies.

The work is in many ways entirely routine for the institute -- as it is for the two other Washington-based organizations that are here advising on the architecture of democracy: the International Republican Institute (IRI), which declined requests for an interview, and the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), which along with the United Nations is providing crucial technical assistance to Iraq's electoral commission. The groups work in scores of countries, from those in Eastern Europe to Yemen and Indonesia, and arrived in Baghdad with solid reputations for encouraging democratic norms. Together, the three have been allotted as much as $90 million for their work in Iraq.

But such is the state of Iraq less than a week before elections for the National Assembly that the Democratic Institute's instructors dare not see their names in print. "You can say, 'an official with an international organization that operates in Iraq,' " said the institute's country director, a former political operative and public relations executive who, like his boss, happens to be Canadian. He later agreed to allow the use of the organization's name.

The overriding concern is security. In Iraq, schools are being bombed simply because they might be pressed into service as polling stations Sunday. No sane group intimately involved in mounting the vote dares wave from atop its blast walls.

But there are other good reasons for a certain discretion in Iraq.

"If you walk into a coffee shop and say, 'Hi, I'm from an American organization and I'm here to help you,' that's not going to help," said one instructor, who was born in Iraq and is well versed in the region's widely held perception of U.S. hegemony. "If you say you're here to encourage democracy, they say you're here to control the Middle East."

Let's just say that your ordinary Iraqi has a higher level of sophistication about this "democracy" than the entire US Washington press corps.

Their Voices

Iraq election log: 25 January 2005

As Iraqis prepare to hold a landmark election the BBC News website resumes its daily Iraq log. For two weeks, we will be publishing a range of accounts from people inside Iraq about their day-to-day lives.

You can bookmark this page and come back to read the latest posts each day.

Flu Update

CIDRAP is the website of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. They have some of the most through information on avian influenza and the public health implications of H5N1. The page was just updated today. It is chilling reading:

# If an influenza pandemic were to occur in the near future, vaccine for the pandemic strain would not be readily available for a number of months, as noted in the previous section. Even though some developed countries have stockpiles of antiviral agents effective against influenza, supplies of these agents would be extremely limited (see References: Hayden 2004). It is unlikely that they would have a significant effect on curtailing spread of the pandemic unless a mobile stockpile with adequate supplies was created for use in the area where the virus emerges (see References: Monto 2005; WHO: Influenza pandemic preparedness and response 2005). Therefore, prevention and treatment options would essentially not be available during the initial wave of the pandemic.

# If the next pandemic strain is highly virulent (such as the 1918 strain) the global death toll could be dramatic. The current plans generally do not address the social, political, or economic issues that would likely be associated with an ongoing influenza pandemic. It is very possible that substantial disruption of basic services (such as health care, food, clothing, provision of utilities [eg, water, electricity], and transportation will occur. Furthermore, international trade will likely be impacted, which could have serious global economical and societal consequences.

Look at that third bullet.

Rising Powers

The Washington Note pulls an excellent op-ed by Michael Lind from behind the subscription wall at the Financial Times:

How the U.S. Became the World's Dispensable Nation
by Michael Lind

In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world." The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging - but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited.

Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations with China, Japan and South Korea. This group has the potential to be the world's largest trade bloc, dwarfing the European Union and North American Free Trade Association. The deepening ties of the APT member states represent a major diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to limit the growth of Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free trade zone.

Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress toward military independence. American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of Washington). Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And despite US resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite network, which will break the monopoly of the US global positioning satellite system.

The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering Brazil to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.

The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in last week's address as America's mission: the promotion of democracy and human rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to consolidating democracy in post-communist Europe than has the US. By contrast, under Mr Bush, the US hypocritically uses the promotion of democracy as the rationale for campaigns against states it opposes for strategic reasons. Washington denounces tyranny in Iran but tolerates it in Pakistan. In Iraq, the goal of democratisation was invoked only after the invasion, which was justified earlier by claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was collaborating with al-Qaeda.

Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind. The present one-party rule in the US has been produced in part by the artificial redrawing of political districts to favour Republicans, reinforcing the domination of money in American politics. America's judges -- many of whom will be appointed by Mr Bush -- increasingly behave as partisan political activists in black robes. America's antiquated winner-take-all electoral system has been abandoned by most other democracies for more inclusive versions of proportional representation.

In other areas of global moral and institutional reform, the US today is a follower rather than a leader. Human rights? Europe has banned the death penalty and torture, while the US is a leading practitioner of execution. Under Mr Bush, the US has constructed an international military gulag in which the torture of suspects has frequently occurred. The international rule of law? For generations, promoting international law in collaboration with other nations was a US goal. But the neoconservatives who dominate Washington today mock the very idea of international law. The next US attorney general will be the White House counsel who scorned the Geneva Conventions as obsolete.

A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence.

Most internationalists expect the Eurozone to be a counterbalancing power rather than a hyperpower. As we look down the road, India and then China will become the next hyperpowers, should they decide to use their economic assets to create a military which can project itself around the world. They certainly have the population base to do so.

All of this, of course, is off the radar of those who get a steady diet of American media, all of whom subscribe to the theory of American exceptionalism.

Propaganda

CNN hammered the hell out of the "significance" of this story yesterday. In the cold, clear light of morning, it looks a little different:

Iraq Announces Capture Of Aide to Wanted Militant

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 25, 2005; Page A12

BAGHDAD, Jan. 24 -- Iraqi officials announced Monday that they had captured a top lieutenant of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi who admitted involvement in a substantial share of the car bombings carried out in Iraq since August 2003.

Sami Muhammad Ali Said Jaaf, who was taken into custody nine days ago, claimed to have supervised construction of 32 car bombs, according to Thaer Naqib, a spokesman for the interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Naqib said Jaaf, who used the nom de guerre Abu Umar Kurdi, was captured in a raid in Baghdad Jan. 15. There was no way to immediately verify Jaaf's admissions or the government's claim that he had been involved in 75 percent of the car bombings in Baghdad since 2003.

"I think they do have somebody fairly important," said a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad, adding that he was not familiar with details of the arrest.

Juan Cole says:

The announcement of the arrest of a key associate of the shadowy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was accompanied by hype that he was behind most of the spectacular car bombings in Iraq for the past 18 months. That seems silly to me, almost an insult to our intelligence. How could one man be behind so many attacks? Isn't it much more likely that they were the work of numerous Baath military and Salafi cells? My guess is that the interim government in Iraq is attempting to convince voters that it will be safe to come out on Sunday. This arrest will make virtually no impact on the guerrilla war, which is likely to go on for at least a decade.

Betrayal of Trust

Army Plans To Keep Iraq Troop Level Through '06
Year-Long Active-Duty Stints Likely to Continue

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 25, 2005; Page A01

In a related development, Senate and House aides said yesterday that the White House will announce today plans to request an additional $80 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would come on top of $25 billion already appropriated for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. White House budget spokesman Chad Kolton declined to comment.

White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten is to describe the package to lawmakers today, but the budget request will come later, the aides said. Administration officials have said privately for several weeks that they will seek the additional funding, the result of continuing high costs incurred battling an unexpectedly strong insurgency in Iraq.

Budget Director Josh Bolten:

“We don't anticipate requesting anything additional for the balance of this year.” (7/28/03)

Go Ask Alice

Fear of civil war as Sunnis turn away from polls

Leaders tell of sense of exclusion after US refuses to let violence delay vote
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Monday January 24, 2005

Guardian

Just two months ago Ayad al-Samarrai's offices were crowded with staff drawing up plans for their election campaign. Today the offices are deserted.

Iraq's elections are less than a week away but in the compound of the country's largest Sunni Muslim party the corridors are empty and there is not one campaign poster on the wall.

The Iraqi Islamic party, which Mr Samarrai, an engineer from Baghdad, joined as a young man, withdrew from the elections last month saying the violence raging through so much of Iraq, and Sunni frustration with the occupation, meant the vote on January 30 could never be legitimate.

It was a decisive moment that underlined the sense of bitterness and exclusion many in Iraq's Sunni community feel about the unfolding political process.

The Islamic party, founded secretly in Iraq in 1960 and loosely sharing the ideals of the influential Muslim Brotherhood, counts its supporters in the provinces north and north-west of Baghdad that have been ravaged by the insurgency since the war.

The prospect of many Sunni voters going to the polls in towns such as Falluja, Ramadi or even Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, is slim.

"If these people are not able to join in the elections, how can it be fair?" said Mr Samarrai, the editor of the party's newsletter and a former exile who spent many years in the Emirates and later in Leeds. "We asked the Americans how they are going to solve these problems. We gave proposals but we got nothing."

The Red Queen shook her head, `You may call it "nonsense" if you like,' she said, ` but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'

Same as the Old Boss

A.C.L.U. Presents Accusations of Serious Abuse of Iraqi Civilians
By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: January 25, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - The American Civil Liberties Union released documents on Monday describing complaints of serious abuse of Iraqi civilians, including reports of electric shocks and forced sodomy, and accused the military of not thoroughly investigating the cases.

The documents list dozens of allegations of abuse at American detention centers - the use of cigarettes to burn prisoners, aggressive dogs, electric shocks, sexual humiliation and beatings - that began at about the same time such acts were occurring at Abu Ghraib prison.

But it is not always clear whether every case described is a new incident; many details, including the names of victims and of the accused, were blacked out before the documents were provided to the A.C.L.U. as part of its litigation.

Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the organization, said gaps in the files made it difficult to draw any definite conclusions about a particular case. "But overall there does seem to be a clear pattern here, and that is that it is difficult to say the government was aggressive in investigating these allegations of abuse," he said.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman, declined to discuss any particular case mentioned in the documents. But she said, "The Army has aggressively investigated all credible allegations of detainee abuse and we've held soldiers accountable for their actions."

The documents list several sites where abuses are reported to have taken place, many of them at the detention center at Adhamiya Palace, one of Saddam Hussein's villas in Baghdad. The documents contain allegations from detainees about being abused and statements from American contractors who said they saw the effects of beatings.

In one case, a detainee said that while at Adhamiya Palace, his nose was pinched while water was poured down his throat, a wooden stick was inserted forcefully into his anus and electric shock was applied to his genitals. Some of the allegations were directed against Iraqi policemen. One contractor who said he was assigned to screen detainees brought to Abu Ghraib said that many who had come from Adhamiya arrived with serious injuries, including one boy with a bleeding rectum. He said the boy had told him that an Iraqi policeman had sodomized him with a soda bottle and that American soldiers were present.

I notice that we're not hearing much about Saddam's "rape rooms" these days

The Wisdom of the Markets

Listen to the Central Bankers and the entrepreneurs. We be in a heap 'o trouble, but this isn't new to you.

Dollar's Steep Slide Adding to Tensions U.S. Faces Abroad
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: January 25, 2005

This article was reported by David E. Sanger, Mark Landler and Keith Bradsher and written by Mr. Sanger.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - After a first term in which terrorism and war dominated President Bush's foreign policy agenda, his allies in Europe and Asia suspect that his next confrontation with the world could take on a very different cast: a potential currency crisis, in which a steep plunge in the value of the dollar touches off economic waves around the world.

Already, the tensions over the dollar are becoming a recurring source of friction, a conflict that does not reverberate as loudly as the differences over Iraq but may be as deeply felt. At a meeting in Paris on Monday, the finance ministers of Germany and France complained that Europe had unjustly borne the brunt of the dollar's decline, and called for coordinated action to stop it.

"Europe has until now paid too big a share in this readjustment," Hervé Gaymard, the French finance minister, said. His German counterpart, Hans Eichel, said the United States needed to reduce its deficits, adding "each one has to play its role."

Two months ago, similar sentiments came from China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, whose nation is at the center of a struggle with Washington over currency policy. He complained about the fall of the dollar, asking, "Shouldn't the relevant authorities be doing something about this?"

In an interview just before President Bush's inauguration, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow played down the tensions. "We understand that deficits matter," he said, insisting that the tight budget Mr. Bush is expected to send to Congress next month should give foreigners and the financial markets the solace they seek.

But should the dollar continue to fall - if, for example, global investors determined that Mr. Bush did not have the will to hold spending down - it would not only add to tensions, analysts said. It might also force up interest rates at home to keep foreigners interested in financing America's need to borrow more than $600 billion a year to cover its gap in the current account. The current account is the broadest measure of the trade and financial flows into and out of the country.

To be sure, the dollar's fall may never reach crisis levels, and in the last few weeks, after a more or less steady fall of almost 35 percent against the euro and 24 percent against the Japanese yen over the last three years, the dollar has stabilized a bit. Many experts argue that a further decline, if relatively modest and gradual, is entirely manageable.

Administration officials, along with a number of like-minded economists, contend that the nation's record trade and current account deficits are not particularly worrisome, a reflection more of strong foreign interest in investing in the American economy than any sign of global weakness.

But across Asia and Europe, a wide range of officials and analysts worry that Mr. Bush's economic team may not be up to the challenge of grappling with the issue. They contend that Washington has retreated from efforts to marshal the biggest economies of the world into a mutual effort at more robust and balanced growth.

Many European politicians and exporters cannot shake the suspicion that the Bush administration, despite its statements supporting a strong currency, has been perfectly happy to watch from the sidelines while the dollar heads down.

At a moment of surging American trade deficits that have reached a record share of economic output, a falling dollar makes American exports more competitive and puts imports from Europe at a particular disadvantage.

"It's hard to tell an entrepreneur to wait two years for a policy to change when he says, 'I've got to deliver my goods tomorrow,' " said Anton Boerner, the president of BGA, the Berlin-based association of wholesalers and exporters.

That "strong dollar" thing is working out so well, while the economy deteriorates at home and the rest of the world is noticing. Hmm, we might have a problem here.

What Liberal Media?

Dr. Alterman is in the house:

Have death squad, will travel

• January 24, 2005 | 11:31 AM ET

One weakness of liberals is our inability to credit right-wingers with a sufficient degree of malevolence. During the Reagan administration, for instance, no liberal would ever have gone so far as accuse the president of selling arms to terrorists and using the profits to fund an illegal war. You would have been called crazy. Similarly, no one ever accused the Reagan administration of actually setting up and funding the murderous death squads that killed innocent civilians by the tens of thousands in El Salvador at the time. The farthest anyone would go would be to accuse them of failing to rein them in. Well, check out this quote in Sy Hersh’s latest New Yorker piece, here, attributed to a former high level intelligence officer:

P.P.P.S. I see the guest list for “Meet the Press” represented the following SCLM bias. Republican conservative John Negroponte; Republican conservative Bill Thomas; Republican conservative Stephen Hayes (peddling a discredited theory about the phony Saddam-Al Qaida connection) and honest, centrist journalist Robin Wright. Repeat after me: What liberal media?

Bump Goes Wonkette

The Washingtonian's Harry Jaffe makes some predictions

Fearless Predictions: Bushies Vs. the Press, Round Two

The inaugural balls are so yesterday—so let the second round of warfare between the White House press corps and the Bush team begin.

Final prediction: President Bush will point to Jim VandeHei at a press conference and call him by his nickname, “Vandy.” One can only hope VandeHei isn’t so flattered that he takes the edge off his coverage.

Spy vs. Spy

Gentlemen, choose your weapons.

Social Security Changes, Tax Cuts Among GOP Senators' 10 Priorities
Gay-Marriage Ban Does Not Make List

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 25, 2005; Page A13

Senate Republican leaders outlined their 10 top legislative priorities yesterday, focusing mainly on cutting taxes and restructuring Social Security. But two notable omissions -- changes to immigration laws and a ban on same-sex marriage -- underscored tensions with their conservative wing.

Senate Democrats announced their own priorities, including increases in military personnel, the minimum wage and education spending. But with Democrats having lost seats in both chambers last fall, the GOP is better positioned to move its agenda aggressively in the newly formed 109th Congress.

The Senate Republicans' top 10 list calls for adding private accounts to Social Security, extending President Bush's tax cuts, limiting personal-injury lawsuits and expanding domestic oil exploration. But GOP Senate leaders moved cautiously on more contentious issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration.

Although their House counterparts are preparing to offer anti-terrorism legislation that includes broad crackdowns on illegal immigration, Senate Republicans did not mention immigration in the legislative agenda they outlined for reporters yesterday. With several Republican senators supporting expanded guest-worker programs, "we don't have a consensus" in the Senate GOP caucus, said its third-ranking leader, Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.).

A proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage -- a priority to many conservative activists -- also was omitted from the list of bills that will be numbered S1 through S10, signifying their importance to Republicans. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said the marriage provision will be designated Senate Joint Resolution 1, "because it's not a legislative bill, it's a joint resolution."

Senate Democrats Speak of Slowing Confirmation Votes
By CARL HULSE

Published: January 25, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - Trying to show that they remain a force despite their reduced numbers, Senate Democrats on Monday threatened new hurdles for President Bush's cabinet choices and expressed deep misgivings about the planned Social Security changes at the heart of this year's Republican agenda.

Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said he was mulling whether to try to stall consideration of Michael O. Leavitt, Mr. Bush's choice for health secretary, unless Mr. Dorgan was guaranteed a vote on allowing importation of cheaper prescription drugs.

In addition, a growing number of Democrats are raising issues about the selection of Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general, a nomination initially headed for quick approval.

The political problems for the nominees arose after Democrats last week blocked a quick vote on the approval of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. As many as a dozen Democrats intend to use the Senate floor on Tuesday as a platform to lay out their objections to Ms. Rice, tying her to what they see as the administration's mistakes in Iraq.

"The honeymoon is over and we are now in the full throes of our new marital arrangement here," said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, after he and other Democratic leaders introduced a priority list on Monday sharply at odds with that put forward by Republicans.

While Republicans listed changes in Social Security as their No. 1 objective, Democrats made enlarging the armed forces and providing new military benefits as their top goal, rejecting the idea that the retirement program needed urgent repair. A poll of all Democratic senators by the Democratic staff of the Senate Finance Committee found none who supported diverting Social Security tax revenue into personal investment accounts, the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's initiative.

"This isn't a crisis, so why should we be lurching forward?" asked Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the new Democratic leader.

Walk twenty paces, turn and fire. Good luck.

All of Life

Abortion Foes Stage Protest of Roe vs. Wade
Bush Tells Protesters He Supports 'Culture of Life'

By Laurie Kellman
The Associated Press
Monday, January 24, 2005; 12:47 PM

President Bush told abortion foes on Monday he shared their support for "a culture of life" and claimed progress in passing legislation to protect the vulnerable.

"We need most of all to change hearts and that is what we're doing," Bush said as anti-abortion activists marked the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion with a day of rallies, protests and other activities.

The issue took on new urgency with the likelihood of a high court vacancy.

Bush addressed marchers by phone from the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., where he had spent the weekend.

Every anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision, prompts demonstrations by opponents and proponents of abortion rights. Activists on both sides of the abortion issue marched in demonstrations across the country Saturday, the actual anniversary of the Jan. 23 decision.

This year there is increasing speculation about Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's health. Three other justices have had cancer.

One or more court vacancies would give President Bush the chance to install another justice or justices who oppose the Roe decision, increasing the likelihood that at some point, the ruling could be overturned.

Bush conceded that a society "where every child is welcome...may still be some way away."

Still, he said, he was working with Congress to pass "good, solid legislation to protect the vulnerable." He cited his signing of legislation last year to outlaw certain late-term abortions.

"You know, we come from many, different backgrounds, but what unites us is our understanding that the essence of civilization is this: The strong have a duty to protect the weak," Bush said. He has said he supports a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, but has not actively pushed for it.

Bush also said that he would continue "seeking common ground where possible and persuading increasing numbers of our fellow citizens of the rightness of our cause. This is the path of the culture of life that we seek for our country."

On Monday, abortion opponents staged a rally before a march from the Ellipse to the Supreme Court. Other groups opposed to abortion rights were holding events on Capitol Hill.

Culture of life, my ass. This is the same guy who enjoyed mocking the people the state of Texas is so efficient at executing (state sponsored murder is still murder.)

But I read this article and it made me sad more than anything else. Sad that none of these people can get exercised enough about the way this country treats its children to get up a march over it. Sad that prenatal care isn't available to millions of mothers. Sad that the children who go to bed hungry every night will never have a group of angry adults marching for them. Sad that "prolife" is only "prolife" for fetuses and not for the young lives of children.

Breakout

Forbes has a frightening article today. The World Health Organization has documented the first human to human transmission of H5N1 avian flu in Thailand. The WHO scientist they spoke with said that there have probably been other cases, but this is the first documented case.

What the epidemiologists will be looking for next is how quickly the virus mutates to increase the efficiency of its capability to spread through human populations. Since the virus is only a plane ride away from the rest of us, this bears careful watching.

Hook 'em

Phishers Drop Hooks Into Smaller Streams
Online Scam Artists Now Targeting Regional-Bank Customers

By Brian Krebs
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, January 24, 2005; 9:48 AM

As the nation's largest financial institutions deploy increasingly sophisticated measures to prevent Internet scams, online fraudsters are targeting smaller, regional U.S. banks whose customers may be less attuned to the threat.

Experts say the shift is the latest trend in a technological arms race between Internet con artists dubbed "phishers" and the e-commerce and banking companies they target. Phishers use fake Web sites and e-mail messages in an attempt to trick customers into disclosing valuable personal financial information.

"We have found that financial institutions and other targets are starting to purchase and deploy solutions to help battle phishing," said David Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), a coalition of banks and technology companies. "As they do this, phishers are starting to move on to softer targets."

The majority of attacks still involve a handful of global financial institutions with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. These banks are attractive targets because they often boast large numbers of customers who opt for online banking services.

The new targets, by comparison, often operate in only a handful of U.S. states and serve fewer customers. In October, phishers first targeted customers of Madison, Wisc.-based First Federal Capital Bank, which has 90 branches in three states and about $3.3 billion in assets.

In November, scams struck Wayzata, Minn.-based TCF Bank and Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bancshares Inc., each a regional institution covering six states. That same month, attackers hit People's Bank, which has branches only in Connecticut.

The new attacks varied in complexity, but all shared a common technique. Bank customers received an e-mail message urging them to update or verify their account data. A link in the message took them to a genuine-looking bank Web site -- actually a fake created by the attacker -- where any information entered would fall into the hands of the e-mail sender.

This new tactic is aimed at older, more rural and less sophisticated users, who are the typical customers of the smaller, regional outfits. If you have family who fall into that category, send them a link to this story.

I get phished AT LEAST once a day. I had two of them waiting in my inbox when I hit the computer this morning.

Singing the Blues

Perhaps this is the cause of my malaise?

And now for something completely dreary

David Ward
Monday January 24, 2005
The Guardian

If you stumbled out of bed in the dark this morning, fell over the cat, found no milk in the fridge for your porridge, had a row with your partner, received a rude letter from the bank, got covered in snow at the bus stop and finally arrived at work in time to be made redundant, you will already know that today is the most depressing day of the year.

And if you want scientific proof, then Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University has it.

He settled on January 24 after using an elaborate formula expressing the delicate interplay of lousy weather, post-Christmas debt, time elapsed since yuletide indulgence, failed new year resolutions, motivation levels, and the desperate need to have something to look forward to.

In short, all that's left of Christmas today is credit card bills and a pervading sense that the next holiday is months away.

An insurance company added to the gloom by saying that drivers are more than usually miserable in January, losing their tempers with those other road users who have no right to be driving in the outside lane at 48mph and impeding progress to a vital meeting in Birmingham at noon.

This syndrome, dubbed winter driver's disorder, could be the cause of two million accidents (but not all happening today, which happens also to be the 40th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill).

Yesterday the recruitment firm totaljobs.com stirred the gloomy pot by saying that 24/1 despair is likely to overwhelm employees. Michael Robinson, the company's marketing director, suggested that bosses could be extra nice to their staff today.

He suggested they should offer encouragements ranging from free tea (big deal) to an office party.

"Many workers are feeling the winter blues and it is up to employers to motivate their staff and keep them happy," he said.

"[Today] provides an ideal opportunity for employers to acknowledge the hard work that employees put into a company throughout the year."

Funny, it's always the month of February that gets to me, the longest 28 days of the year. I've always said that asparagus was God's way of apologizing for February.

More Disaster

Countdown to global catastrophe

Climate change: report warns point of no return may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

24 January 2005

The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.

The report, Meeting The Climate Challenge, is aimed at policymakers in every country, from national leaders down. It has been timed to coincide with Tony Blair's promised efforts to advance climate change policy in 2005 as chairman of both the G8 group of rich countries and the European Union.

And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming, that is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream.

The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate. But it points out that global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then, with more rises already in the pipeline - so the world has little more than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is reached.

More ominously still, it assesses the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere after which the two-degree rise will become inevitable, and says it will be 400 parts per million by volume (ppm) of CO2.

The current level is 379ppm, and rising by more than 2ppm annually - so it is likely that the vital 400ppm threshold will be crossed in just 10 years' time, or even less (although the two-degree temperature rise might take longer to come into effect).

"There is an ecological timebomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe. It was assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Centre for American Progress in the US, and The Australia Institute.The group's chief scientific adviser is Dr Rakendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So much to look forward to this year. If it isn't avian influenza coming to get us, it's global climate change, impending economic collapse and the Bush Justice Department. Lord, I think I need a vacation.

Down, Down, Down

Central banks 'shunning dollar'

Is the dollar's global hegemony waning?

Many of the world's central banks are starting to look to the euro to fill their currency reserves instead of the dollar, a survey suggests.

Some economists have suggested that the two could ease their purchases, making it more difficult for the US to support its borrowing.

Dollar slides as short positions crumble

By Steve Johnson in London
Published: January 24 2005 11:51 | Last updated: January 24 2005 17:28

The currency market performed a passable impression of a rabbit caught in the headlights on Monday, seemingly paralysed by fear ahead of a barrage of set-piece events.

For weeks the market has been hanging on every word for hints as to whether China will come under renewed pressure to revalue the renminbi at the G7 meeting of central bankers and finance ministers on February 4-5.

The smart money is that G7 will change nothing. But regular comments, such as those by Herve Gaymard, the French finanace minister, that Europe has borne too much of the burden of dollar weakness and the issue should be addressed at the G7, have been enough to keep the issue bubbling.

Even outside the G7, event risk is rising. This weekend’s Iraqi elections, President Bush’s State of the Union address and the first Federal Reserve meeting of the year have all been cited as reasons not to trade.

Data released late on Friday suggested that traders had taken some of their chips off the table. Net short-dollar positions against six major currencies fell to $7.2bn as of January 18, from $10.9bn the week before, the smallest position since September 2004.

This was potentially dollar-bearish news, and indeed it contributed to a modest early sell-off. “This could signal a downturn in the dollar’s fortunes as traders are now clear to initiate new short positions,” said Chris Gothard, currencies strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman.

Bad News

Study Says All Stem Cell Lines Tainted

By Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer

All human embryonic stem cell lines approved for use in federally funded research are contaminated with a foreign molecule from mice that may make them risky for use in medical therapies, according to a study released Sunday.

Researchers at UC San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla report that if the stem cells are transplanted into people, the cells could provoke an immune system attack that would wipe out their ability to deliver cures for diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes.

The finding is a setback to the Bush administration's controversial policy that provides federal funding only for research using embryonic stem cell lines that were created before August 2001. Evidence that all such lines are contaminated supports long-standing concerns among researchers that the lines eligible for federal money are insufficient to propel research forward.

The scientists who wrote the study say it could take at least a year or two — if it is possible at all — to find a way to salvage the stem cells by wiping them clean of the mouse molecules.

"We don't know, but I'm trying to be optimistic," said Fred H. Gage, a professor of genetics at the Salk Institute who co-wrote the paper in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

The researchers said the safest course was to create fresh batches of stem cells that were free of contamination from animal molecules — a process that could also take years.

The need to develop new, uncontaminated embryonic stem cell lines would bolster the influence of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a $3-billion funding agency established by state voters in November to circumvent President Bush's restrictions.

"This is why Prop. 71 is so important," Susan Fisher, a UC San Francisco professor of cell and tissue biology, said of California's stem cell research measure. "We will be able to do this basic research to be able to really produce a strong foundation on which this work can continue."

The thing that I don't get is that stem cell research holds out the most promise for new therapies of any research approach kicking around right now. You'd think that Bush buddy Big Pharma would be all over this.

The First Victim is Truth

The Invasion of Falluja: A Study in the Subversion of Truth
by Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell

Falluja should go down in history as a case study on how truth is subverted, co-opted, buried, and ignored. The first US-led siege of Falluja, a city of 300,000 people, resulted in a defeat for Coalition forces. Prior to the second siege in November, its citizens were given two choices: leave the city or risk dying as enemy insurgents. The people of Falluja remembered the siege of April all too well. They remembered being trapped when Coalition forces surrounded and blockaded the city and seized the main hospital, leaving the population cut off from food, water, and medical supplies. Families remembered the fighting in the streets and the snipers on the rooftops, which prevented movement by civilians. They remembered burying more than 600 neighbors - women, children, and men - in makeshift graves in schoolyards and soccer fields.

Under threat of a new siege, an estimated 50,000 families or 250,000 people fled Falluja. They fled with the knowledge that they would live as refugees with few or no resources. They left behind fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, as males between the ages of 15 and 45 were denied safe passage out of the city by US-led forces. If the displaced families of Falluja were fortunate, they fled to the homes of relatives in the surrounding towns and villages or to the city of Baghdad - homes that were already overcrowded and overburdened after 20 months of war and occupation. Many families are forced to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care and alongside tens of thousands of displaced and homeless people already living in the rubble of Baghdad.

What of the estimated 50,000 residents who did not leave Falluja? The US military suggested there were a couple of thousand insurgents in the city before the siege, but in the end chose to treat all the remaining inhabitants as enemy combatants.

Preceding the siege, journalists were prevented from entering the city, the main hospital was seized by US forces and access denied to the wounded. The population was subjected to daily aerial bombardments. The use of cluster bombs in urban areas was recorded. Doctors reported seeing patients whose skin was melted from exposure to phosphorous bombs. Water and electricity were cut off and people quickly ran out of food as they were trapped in their homes by sniper fire. Families trying to flee the devastated city were executed, including a family of five, shot down trying to cross the river to safety; their murder was witnessed by an AP photographer. With few independent journalists reporting on the carnage, the international humanitarian community in exile and the Red Cross and Red Crescent prevented from entering the besieged city, the world was forced to rely on reporting from journalists embedded with US forces. In the US press, we saw casualties reported for Falluja as follows: number of US soldiers dead; number of Iraqi soldiers dead; number of "guerillas" or "insurgents" dead. Nowhere were the civilian casualties reported in those first weeks.

Although there has been resounding silence about the humanitarian disaster in Falluja, the true cost to the civilian population is emerging. Preliminary estimates are as high as 6,000 Iraqis killed, a third of the city destroyed, and over 200,000 civilians living as refugees. It is estimated that it could be months before people are allowed to return to what is left of their homes. According to a UN emergency working group on this humanitarian crisis, there are shortages of food items and cooking fuel. The temperatures have dropped, underscoring an urgent need for winterization items and appropriate shelter. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported on December 23 that three of the city's water purification plants had been destroyed and the fourth badly damaged.

Aid organizations have repeatedly been denied access to the city, hospitals, and refugee populations in the surrounding areas. Sporadic fighting continues as some insurgent forces return. Iraqi National Security Advisor Qassem Daoud has warned of explosive ordnance still hidden in debris and on the streets. Residents seeking to return are required to go through intense security checks before being allowed to re-enter Falluja.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights voiced deep concern for the civilians caught up in the fighting. She said all those guilty of violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws - including the targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, killing of injured persons, and the use of human shields - must be brought to justice.

The Orwellian double-talk of the Administration and Pentagon officials belies the reality "on the ground." US actions in Falluja precipitated a tersely worded proclamation from the Muslim Scholars Association denouncing the violence and calling for a boycott of upcoming elections, claiming that "elections are being held over the corpses of those killed in Falluja and the blood of the wounded."

A fantasy of freedom

If Bush wanted to tackle tyranny, he could start with regimes under US control. But liberty clearly has limits, says Gary Younge.

Monday January 24, 2005
The Guardian

Bush's inauguration speech was packed with truisms, axioms, platitudes and principles that appear reasonable at first glance. The trouble is they are contradicted by the reality he has created and continues to support.

As he delivered his address, you could almost whisper the caveats. "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains [apart from in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay], or that women welcome humiliation and servitude [apart from in Saudi Arabia] or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies [apart from Uzbekistan and Israel]."

Such hypocrisy is not new. When Mr Bush said "Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom and make their own way", nobody imagined he was referring to the Bolivian peasants fighting oil price hikes and globalisation or the landless Venezuelans taking over farms.

The agenda for a second Bush term represents not a change in direction but an acceleration of the colossal and murderous folly that he, and most of his predecessors, have pursued.

The damage that this selective notion of liberty inflicts on the rest of the world should by now be pretty clear. According to the independent website Iraqbodycount.net, reported civilian deaths in Iraq have already reached between 15,365 and 17,582 since the war started, while the recent study for the Lancet estimated the death toll at 100,000 at least, and probably higher; meanwhile, the number is growing remorselessly. Next weekend's elections in Iraq - which take place in the midst of a war against foreign occupiers with most candidates too scared to campaign, the location of polling sites kept secret until the last minute and key areas unable to participate - have become not an example of democracy but an embarrassment to the very idea of democracy.

Meanwhile, a global poll for the BBC last week showed the US more isolated than ever, with people in 18 out of 21 countries saying that they expect a second Bush term to have a negative impact on peace and security.

What is less clear is whether most Americans understand that this isolation leaves them more vulnerable to attack. Ms Rice last week promised "a conversation, not a monologue" with the rest of the world. But as the situation in Iraq shows, conversations that start with "D'you want a piece of this?" rarely end well for anybody.

Both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have shown that the tyrants the US supports today can easily turn against it tomorrow while fostering resentment among their victims. Yet the idea that the US is a civilising force endowed with benevolent intentions is still as prevalent within the US as it is rejected outside it.

Indeed, Tony Blair seems to be the only foreign leader who still holds to the mixture of wishful thinking, wilful ignorance and warped logic behind the idea that Bush is leading humanitarian interventions at the barrel of a gun.

The American Way

Dream On America
The U.S. Model: For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards.

By Andrew Moravcsik
Newsweek International

The gulf between how Americans view themselves and how the world views them was summed up in a poll last week by the BBC. Fully 71 percent of Americans see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view Bush's election as positive for global security. Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe "American ideas and customs" should spread globally.

Foreigners take an entirely different view: 58 percent in the BBC poll see Bush's re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America's traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India viewed Bush's second Inaugural positively.

Tellingly, the anti-Bushism of the president's first term is giving way to a more general anti-Americanism. A plurality of voters (the average is 70 percent) in each of the 21 countries surveyed by the BBC oppose sending any troops to Iraq, including those in most of the countries that have done so. Only one third, disproportionately in the poorest and most dictatorial countries, would like to see American values spread in their country. Says Doug Miller of GlobeScan, which conducted the BBC report: "President Bush has further isolated America from the world. Unless the administration changes its approach, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs." Former Brazilian president Jose Sarney expressed the sentiments of the 78 percent of his countrymen who see America as a threat: "Now that Bush has been re-elected, all I can say is, God bless the rest of the world."

The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international institutions—globalization, in a word.

Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive ways—none made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that's caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate culture. "First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S. multinational, "then we overtake."
....
Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism. They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections. Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard, has become "provincial." The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are out of step with the rest of the world.
....
This is much of the secret of Britain's economic performance as well. Lorenzo Codogno, co-head of European economics at the Bank of America, believes the British, like Europeans elsewhere, "will try their own way to achieve a proper balance." Certainly they would never put up with the lack of social protections afforded in the American system. Europeans are aware that their systems provide better primary education, more job security and a more generous social net. They are willing to pay higher taxes and submit to regulation in order to bolster their quality of life. Americans work far longer hours than Europeans do, for instance. But they are not necessarily more productive—nor happier, buried as they are in household debt, without the time (or money) available to Europeans for vacation and international travel. George Monbiot, a British public intellectual, speaks for many when he says, "The American model has become an American nightmare rather than an American dream."

Just look at booming bri-tain. Instead of cutting social welfare, Tony Blair's Labour government has expanded it. According to London's Centre for Policy Studies, public spending in Britain represented 43 percent of GDP in 2003, a figure closer to the Eurozone average than to the American share of 35 percent. It's still on the rise—some 10 percent annually over the past three years—at the same time that social welfare is being reformed to deliver services more efficiently. The inspiration, says Giddens, comes not from America, but from social-democratic Sweden, where universal child care, education and health care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately, economic productivity. In the United States, inequality once seemed tolerable because America was the land of equal opportunity. But this is no longer so. Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today he pulls in 1,000 times as much. Cross-national studies show that America has recently become a relatively difficult country for poorer people to get ahead. Monbiot summarizes the scientific data: "In Sweden, you are three times more likely to rise out of the economic class into which you were born than you are in the U.S."

This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan: a poorer, sicker and less economically vigorous America which is safe for CEOs and hazardous for the rest of us.

The Price

Some See Risks as Republicans Revel in Power
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: January 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 - President Bush begins his second term with the Republican Party in its strongest position in over 50 years, but his clout is already being tested by Republican doubts about his domestic agenda, rising national unease about Iraq and the threat of second-term overreaching, officials in both parties say.

With this election producing a second-term Republican president and solid majorities in both the Senate and the House, Mr. Bush's party is more dominant than at any time since Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928. As Mr. Bush embarks on an explicit effort to put an imprint on politics and policy that will long outlast his presidency, his advisers are heady over what several described as an opportunity to make a long-lasting realignment in the nation's political balance of power.

But even those advisers said Mr. Bush had at most two years before he faced the ebb that historically saps the authority of a second-term incumbent, a relatively short time to sell his far-reaching agenda. And Republicans say his situation could be complicated by the absence of an obvious heir, opening the way for competing wings of the party to battle over details and tactics on the very issues Mr. Bush is embracing.

Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar who is director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said the Republican Party had "come closer now than they've been at any time in my lifetime" to being the nation's majority party. But Mr. Smith said historical cycles over the past century suggested that its dominance might be coming to a close.

"The calendar alone tells you this conservative cycle is long in the tooth," he said. "Add to that the divisions, or latent divisions, that exist with your own coalition. Once Bush is removed from the scene, and once he becomes in effect a lame duck, all those tensions are there."

The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his Inaugural Address on Thursday, Mr. Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.

But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who invoked his experience serving alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans captured the House in 1994. "Hubris is deadly," Mr. Sanford said.

With W in control, hubris is also inevitable. The Republicans have chosen as their standard bearer a very small and mean (in every sense of the word) figure who stands for nothing other than political expediency. The phrase "hoist on their own petard" was crafted for situations such as this. Those 34 scandals (so far) will come home to roost. Hubris always brings nemesis.

The Monkey Problem

God and Darwin

Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A14

WITH THEIR SLICK Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of "intelligent design" -- a "theory" that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution -- are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. Rather than attempt to prove that the world was created in six days, they operate simply by casting doubt on evolution, largely using the time-honored argument that intelligent life could not have come about by a random natural process and must have been the work of a single creator. They do no experiments and do not publish in recognized scientific journals. Nevertheless, this new generation of anti-evolutionists, arguing that children have a "right to question" scientific truths, has had widespread success in undermining evolutionary theory.

Perhaps partly as a result, a startling 55 percent of Americans -- and 67 percent of those who voted for President Bush -- do not, according to a recent CBS poll, believe in evolution at all. According to a recent Gallup poll, about a third of Americans believe that the Bible is literally true. Some of these believers have persuaded politicians, school boards and parents across the country to question their children's textbooks. In states as diverse as Wisconsin, South Carolina, Kansas, Montana, Arkansas and Mississippi, school boards are arguing over whether to include "intelligent design" in their curriculums. Last week, in Pennsylvania's Dover School District, an administrator read a statement to ninth-grade biology students saying that evolution is not fact. Over the objections of ninth-grade science teachers and of parents who have filed suit, he offered "intelligent design" as an alternative. Also last week, a Georgia county school board voted to appeal a judge's decision to remove stickers describing evolution as a "theory, not a fact" from school textbooks. In both cases, the anti-evolutionists have been very careful in their choice of language, eschewing mentions of God or the Bible. Nevertheless, their intent was clear. As the lawsuit filed by Dover parents states, "intelligent design is neither scientific nor a theory in the scientific sense; it is an inherently religious argument or assertion that falls outside the realm of science." Discussion of religion in a history or philosophy class is legitimate and appropriate. To teach intelligent design as science in public schools is a clear violation of the principle of separation of church and state.

It also violates principles of common sense. In fact, the breadth and extent of the anti-evolutionary movement that has spread almost unnoticed across the country should force American politicians to think twice about how their public expressions of religious belief are beginning to affect education and science. The deeply religious nature of the United States should not be allowed to stand in the way of the thirst for knowledge or the pursuit of science. Once it does, it won't be long before the American scientific community -- which already has trouble finding enough young Americans to fill its graduate schools -- ceases to lead the world.

This won't buy much with the Christian evangelicals, but the Catholic church has never had a problem with evolution, and these are the folks that had trouble with Copernicus.

The WaPo editorial misses the point: the reason why things like these text-book wars are happening is because a concerted campaign by far right-wing Christian evangelicals began 30 years ago at the school board level. They figured out how to game the system by standing up candidates for local elections and worked their way up to the national level. The reason why the US appears to have swung to the right is because that's the only organized political movement in the country.

If the Left wants to start winning elections, it needs to organize a coherent political movement that knows how to use religious language.

In Brooklyn

A Bridge to Sell

Published: January 24, 2005

The president promises that under a private retirement scheme, anyone age 55 or older would continue to receive full Social Security benefits. What he repeatedly fails to mention is that privatization would require some $2 trillion in new borrowing over the next 10 years and an additional $4.5 trillion in the decade thereafter. That's on top of the trillions that need to be found to cover the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and - if the president gets his way - to make this decade's tax cuts permanent. It's foolhardy to assume that the government could continue to meet all of its obligations, including the payment of Social Security benefits, under such a mountain of debt.

All told, by 2030, when today's 55-year-olds turn 80, the national debt would be as big as the economy itself, according to a calculation by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that uses data from Social Security and the Congressional Budget Office. To compare, consider that in the last 50 years, national debt has equaled only 38 percent of the economy on average, and that percentage includes the tremendous overhang of debt from World War II.

Large and virtually permanent fiscal imbalances could create severe hardship. At the least, big and ongoing deficits erode living standards because they reduce the money available for investment in the economy. At worst, enormous and endless deficits could provoke a loss of investor confidence, leading to higher interest rates and inflation, lower stock and bond prices, less household wealth, less government spending and slower economic growth.

If Congress faced that kind of crisis, it's safe to assume that everything would be on the table, including Social Security retirement benefits. This would be especially true if the crisis was provoked by privatization. The reason: diverting a portion of payroll taxes into private accounts - the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's privatization scheme - would greatly accelerate the exhaustion of the Social Security trust fund, unless the government made huge transfusions of other tax revenue into the fund. It could be difficult to justify such transfers with an economy in dire straits. A dwindling trust fund, in turn, could create a political dynamic for benefit cuts that would be hard to resist.

Even if Congress managed to keep the commitment to continued funding of full Social Security benefits for today's retirement-age population, senior citizens could find that their other sources of retirement income, especially stocks and bonds, had taken a hit. Their adult children would probably not be able to provide a safety net. Indeed, a country in fiscal crisis is one in which adults are more likely to turn to their elderly parents for help.

Despite the risks to their own economic well-being in retirement, some older Americans might be willing to support Social Security privatization if it would ensure a stable retirement for their children and grandchildren. But it wouldn't. Privatization would require potentially debilitating borrowing up front, in exchange for a drastically reduced benefit later on, no matter how well, or poorly, private accounts performed. So there's no reason for senior citizens to support it and plenty of reasons to oppose it. Mr. Bush is wily, and wrong, when he tries to dismiss older Americans from the debate.

The Times can't quite bring itself to say that Bush is lying, that, with small tweaks, SS will be fine in perpetuity and that the whole "personal accounts" idea is both wicked and expensive.

But, since Congress isn't going to go along with this terrible idea, I guess The Times isn't afraid of retribution from the White House. You wonder why our press coverage is so bad? It's because bucking Karl Rove can cost a career and everybody in town knows it.

New Tech

Scrambling For a Slice Of Internet Phone Pie
Small Firms in Area Search for a Niche

By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 24, 2005; Page E01

nvestors showed little interest when Richard M. Tworek started setting up Internet-based phone systems for businesses two years ago.

Now the company that Tworek founded, Qovia Inc., has $16.1 million in venture capital and 120 businesses use its software to make sure their Internet connections stay robust enough for calls to go through glitch-free. But last week the Frederick company laid off 16 of its 59 employees and retooled its business plan.

BroadSoft sells voice over Internet protocol providers desktop software that helps users program phone systems.

Like Qovia, most Washington area companies in the Internet phone business are relatively small and still searching for a secure and profitable niche in a fast-changing sector. They range from start-ups that provide behind-the-scenes support for the technology to alternative phone providers, such as Primus Telecommunications Group, that sell Internet calling plans directly to consumers.

Most are counting on predictions that the technology known as VoIP, or voice over Internet protocol, will take off this year. But a boom could cut both ways. The local companies could benefit from increased demand, but analysts say they also will face heightened competition from communications industry giants.

"Once the big guys come into the market, it's game over for the small guys," said Jon Arnold, a Toronto-based analyst with Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm. He predicted that a handful of carriers will dominate the consumer market. The situation may be less dire for software companies providing the technological underpinnings of VoIP systems, he said. But they will have to compete against big equipment-makers such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.as well as international rivals.

"There's only room for two or three vendors in each niche," Arnold said.

The number of consumers using VoIP is expected to grow to about 4 million by year-end from about 800,000 today, according to Frost & Sullivan. The growth may be driven by major communications companies such as cable giant Comcast Corp., which this month announced plans to offer Internet calling to as many as 20 million homes this year and another 20 million by the middle of 2006.

I'm looking for both a broadband provider and a new phone company. Anybody have experience to share?

Ask the Huns

McCain Expects Hearings On Defense Intelligence Unit
Pentagon Disputes Some of Post Report

Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A02

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings on a Washington Post report that the Defense Department is reinterpreting U.S. law to give the secretary broad authority over clandestine operations abroad.

"I'm always sorry to read about things in The Washington Post when they affect a committee that I am a member of," McCain said.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. DiRita issued a carefully worded statement yesterday that appears to dispute parts of the Post article.

"There is no unit that is directly reportable to the secretary of defense for clandestine operations as is described in the Washington Post," he said. In addition, DiRita said, "the Department is not attempting to 'bend' statutes to fit desired activities, as is suggested in this article."

At the same time, DiRita said: "It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its long-standing human intelligence capability."

DiRita said the war on terror necessitates "a framework by which military forces and traditional human intelligence work more closely together and in greater numbers than they have in the past. These actions are being taken within existing statutory authorities to support traditional military operations and any assertion to the contrary is wrong."

The Strategic Support Branch, according to The Post, was designed to expand the Pentagon's use of "humint" or human intelligence operations, including the recruitment of spies and interrogation of prisoners. The recruited agents could include "notorious figures" whose ties to the United States would be embarrassing if revealed, according to a Pentagon memo.

I covered the initial WaPo story here yesterday. McCain may speculate that Rummy's broken no laws, but who can tell? Under this scheme, he's not accountable to anybody.

Every administration stretches the "separation of powers, checks and balances" part of the Constitution as far as they can, but I have to admit that the Bushies make Nixon look like an amateur. Someone should give them the words of advice offered by Attilla the Hun, "Pillage, then burn."

Wake Up Call

The US press finally wakes up.

Wary health officials plan for next flu pandemic
Avian strain has potential to mutate into killer of people

By Anne C. Mulkern
Denver Post Staff Writer

Atlanta - Fearing an outbreak of a new flu strain capable of killing millions, the nation's public health agency is quietly preparing a plan that proposes quarantines, school closures and rationing vaccine to counteract an epidemic.

Colorado health leaders are developing a similar strategy. Gov. Bill Owens has a draft quarantine order ready.

Even as they plan, health officials worry those steps won't halt a deadly bird flu if it mutates and starts spreading among people. An outbreak of avian flu in humans - if it happens - would kill millions worldwide.

Scientists say it's not a question of if but rather when a flu that people lack immunity to emerges, triggering a pandemic. A mild form of avian flu has already spread among a small group of people in Europe.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have asked states to formulate plans to deal with a pandemic and will meet in Denver next month to discuss vaccine development. Representatives from Western states are expected to attend. It is one of several regional meetings being held throughout the country.

"The situation is different than it's ever been before" with the avian flu, said Dr. Ken Gersham, chief of the communicable-disease program at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. "I think it is scary to people who know a lot about flu and what could happen."

It sounds like the plot of a disaster movie or hype about another impending catastrophe that never arrives. In fact, lethal avian flu may never infect people in the United States. But fears about an avian flu pandemic have experts worldwide issuing warnings and preparing for the worst.

Mutation a concern

Avian flu, which plagues birds in Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, lacks the ability to spread from person to person. Of the 37 deaths that have occurred worldwide, most of those who died had direct contact with infected birds.
.

But influenza viruses mutate constantly, which is why people need vaccines each year to fend off the latest strain. The longer that avian flu persists in birds, the greater the likelihood it will mutate into a form that is contagious among people.

If that happens, "then you have a virus that essentially the vast majority of people have no protection against, but it transmits well in humans," said Lynette Brammer, an epidemiologist at the CDC in Atlanta. "That's when you get a pandemic."

The avian virus is particularly virulent, killing 73 percent of the people infected with it in the last year.

The World Health Organization estimates that in a "best- case scenario," avian flu spreading person to person would kill 2 million to 7 million worldwide and sicken tens of millions. Some experts put the potential death toll as high as 50 million, a number the WHO said is scientifically based but with different assumptions about infectivity and vaccine availability. That compares with the more typical flu strains, which in the United States kill an average of 36,000 people annually, most of them elderly.

Flu pandemics on average have occurred three to four times a century. The last one hit 35 years ago. The last severe one was in 1918.

"When you look at health threats, here is one that we essentially know is going to happen," Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' vaccine program, said of a flu pandemic. "We don't know when it's going to happen. We don't know how severe it's going to happen."

Planning for such a pandemic began about two years ago.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told Gellin, a specialist in infectious disease, that a national pandemic plan was his "No. 1, 2 and 3 priorities." A draft was issued in August and is posted online. No date has been set for a finalized report.

Here are some things to think about: because of protective quarantines and actual cases of illness, essential services that we take for granted may not be available. Plan in advance to be inconvenienced, possibly for several weeks. Your bank may not be open and there may be no one to service the ATM, so get used to keeping a supply of cash at home. The networks that service credit cards may be down due to lack of staffing. Grocery stores may be closed.

You should plan for this the way you'd prepare for a major winter storm, extensive power outage or natural disaster, like a hurricane. It's hard to know how essential services might be affected, so plan as if you need to be completely self-sufficient for several weeks.

There may be civil unrest. If you own a business, plan for that. If you have access to a line of credit, make sure that it is open.

Order your nanomasks, and try to have a supply of oseltamavire on hand. Tamiflu will not help, so save your money.

The Denver Post story is a sign that the CDC's level of concern is beginning to ramp up. Your level of concern should ramp up, too.

Tell your friends and relatives about this story, because they sure aren't going to hear about it until we have case 0 in the US, at which time it is too late. Way, way too late.

Load of Whoosh

How can you tell when John Negroponte is lying? His lips are moving.

.S. Envoy Tries to Assure Iraqis of Security at Polls
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune

Published: January 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 -- A leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq threatened today that a '''bitter war''' would be waged against anyone taking part in the upcoming election, but the United States ambassador, John Negroponte, promised ''elaborate security'' for voters and predicted ''strong participation.''

While the warning from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an ally of Al Qaeda, underscored the risks of the coming week, Mr. Negroponte said that coalition and Iraqi forces had elaborate plans to protect election sites next Sunday so that in ``the preponderance of the country it will be safe for people to go and vote.''

Mr. Zarqawi and his allies are blamed for much of the violence ravaging parts of Iraq; today the group claimed the unconfirmed killing of Salem Jaafar al-Kanani, a leading member of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s party.

Bombings north of Baghdad killed 10 Iraqis, and insurgents elsewhere dynamited a voting center, a government building and a police station. An American soldier was fatally shot while patrolling in the northern city of Mosul, the United States military said.

There are fears that violence will only intensify in the final days before the elections next Sunday.

In an audio tape on the Internet, a man believed to be Mr. Zarqawi derided members of the Shiite majority for embracing the elections. Minority Sunnis, once a power base for Saddam Hussein, are expected largely to shun the vote, either through fear or from a sense that the outcome can only overwhelm their interests. Mr. Zarqawi said Sunnis should seek violently to derail the vote.

"We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it," he said.

But United States and Iraqi officials pledged their determination today to what they said would be a historic step in propelling the Iraqi people toward full autonomy, a constitutional democracy and an end to occupation.

Mr. Allawi said that his government would do all in its power to protect the more than 5,000 polling sites against "evil forces determined to hurt Iraq." Authorities plan to seal borders, close airports, limit traffic and impose curfews to reduce the chances of election-day attacks like those that have killed hundreds of politicians and security workers and thousands of others.

Mr. Allawi said that if his party emerges triumphant, it will be in no hurry to set a timetable for an American withdrawal. And Mr. Negroponte said that he did not expect any new governing party to ask for such an immediate pullout.

This is all bullshit. We don't have the horses, the ING doesn't have the horses. If any significant number of Iraqis show up to vote there will be desperate bloodshed, and for that reason I don't anticipate much turnout.

Defining Ignorance Down II

Greg Palast watched the oaf of office and says what everybody is thinking hasn't had the nerve to say:

But, dear Reader, there's one cold statistic Kerry voters must face. The fact that Republicans monkeyed with the votes in swing states doesn't wash away that big red stain: 59 million Americans marched to the polls and voted for George W. Bush.

When I looked today at the oaf of office, I could not shake the feeling that this election was an intelligence test that America flunked.

Defining Ignorance Down

Survey Finds Church-Going Americans Less Tolerant
Sat Jan 22, 2005 6:38 PM ET

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Church-going Americans have grown increasingly intolerant in the past four years of politicians making compromises on such hot issues as abortion and gay rights, according to a survey released on Saturday.

At the same time, those polled said they were growing bolder about pushing their beliefs on others -- even at the risk of offending someone.

The trends could indicate that religion has become "more prominent in American discourse ... more salient," according to Ruth Wooden, president of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research organization which released the survey.

It could also indicate "more polarized political thinking. There do not seem to be very many voices arguing for compromise today," she said in an interview. "It could be that more religious voices feel under siege, pinned against the wall by cultural developments. They may feel more emboldened as a result."

The November U.S. election saw voters in a number of states back gay marriage bans, and President Bush won re-election with heavy support from fellow religious conservatives.

The findings came from a telephone survey of 1,507 adults made in 2000 and a second similar survey of 1,004 adults done during the summer of 2004 that tracked the same issues. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Those surveyed were nearly all Christians, not by design but because the sample reflected the makeup of the population, the group said. A 2002 Pew Research Council survey found that 82 percent of the U.S. populace considered itself to be Christian, while 10 percent identified with no religious group.

On the question of whether elected officials should set their convictions aside to get results in government, 84 percent agreed in 2000. However, four years later that had dropped to 74 percent. There was a sharper decline on the same question among weekly church-goers from 82 percent in the first survey to 63 percent in the second.

Fascinating, isn't it, that religious attitudes are hardening even as church attendence drops. Wouldn't want to be held accountable for those beliefs, would we?

And then there was Stephen Prothero's article in the LAT a couple of weeks ago:

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can't be bothered to read what he has to say.

U.S. Catholics, evangelicals and Jews have been lamenting for some time a crisis of religious literacy in their ranks. But the dangers of religious ignorance are by no means confined to those worried about catechizing their children or cultivating the next generation of clergy.

When Americans debated slavery, almost exclusively on the basis of the Bible, people of all races and classes could follow the debate. They could make sense of its references to the runaway slave in the New Testament book of Philemon and to the year of jubilee, when slaves could be freed, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Today it is a rare American who can engage with any sophistication in biblically inflected arguments about gay marriage, abortion or stem cell research.

Since 9/11, President Bush has been telling us that "Islam is a religion of peace," while evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy's son) has insisted otherwise. Who is right? Americans have no way to tell because they know virtually nothing about Islam. Such ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads.

How did this happen? How did one of the most religious countries in the world become a nation of religious illiterates? Religious congregations are surely at fault. Churches and synagogues that once inculcated the "fourth R" are now telling the faithful stories "ripped from the headlines" rather than teaching them the Ten Commandments or parsing the Sermon on the Mount (which was delivered, as only one in three Americans can tell you, by Jesus). But most of the fault lies in our elementary and secondary schools.

In a majority opinion in a 1963 church-state case (Abington vs. Schempp), Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark wrote, "It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion … and its relationship to the advance of civilization." If so, the education of nearly every public school student in the nation is woefully inadequate.

Because of misunderstandings about the 1st Amendment, religious studies are seldom taught in public schools. When they are, instruction typically begins only in high school and with teachers not trained in the subtle distinction between teaching religion (unconstitutional) and teaching about religion (essential).

Though state educational standards no longer ignore religion as they did a decade or so ago, coverage of religion in history and social science textbooks is spotty at best. According to Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., "It is as if we got freedom of religion in 1791 and then we were free from religion after that."

Now that the religious right has triumphed over the secular left, every politician seems determined to get religion. They're all asking "What Would Jesus Do?" — about the war in Iraq, gay marriage, poverty and Social Security. And though the ACLU may rage, it is not un-American to bring religious reasoning into our public debates. In fact, that has been happening ever since George Washington put his hand on a Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. What is un-American is to give those debates over to televangelists of either the secular or the religious variety, to absent ourselves from the discussion by ignorance.

This is one of the things which has made me nuts in trying to talk with religious liberals about beliefs: they have a range of opinions which are founded on nothing at all but their own good opinions of themselves, rather than in any kind of actual knowledge about the subject under discussion.

Ya Gotta Read the Foreign Press

Cheney firm's £40m MoD deal

BRIAN BRADY WESTMINSTER EDITOR

THE MULTIBILLION-pound project to build Britain’s biggest ever warships will be placed under the control of controversial American military firm Halliburton, under an extraordinary deal to be announced this week.

The Ministry of Defence is expected to confirm that the controversial firm, closely linked to US vice-president Dick Cheney, will be installed to manage the construction of the two "super-carriers", in a move that will have far-reaching implications for Scottish shipbuilding.

But Scotland on Sunday understands that, in an unprecedented move, ministers will retain a "veto" over major decisions relating to the £4bn construction contract - in particular where the massive vessels will be assembled.

The unique demand effectively guarantees the future of up to 1,000 jobs at the Rosyth yard, which had been hoping to clinch the lucrative work of fitting the component parts of the ships together, after the modules have been produced at yards across the UK.

Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, had been planning to assemble the 60,000-tonne ships at Nigg, on the north-east coast of Scotland, where it has an offshore oil platform yard.

But after a huge lobbying campaign from unions and MPs, and representations from Chancellor Gordon Brown - whose Dunfermline East constituency is next door to the Rosyth yard - Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has ordered that the government must have the final say on where the finishing touches are made to the vessels, due to enter service in 2012 and 2015.

Spreading graft and corruption around the world since 1995.

Human Rights Watch

"The United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors."

G. W. Bush, 20 January, 2005

On One Night, Iraqi Turns From Friend to Foe

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A20

BAGHDAD -- The day after the soldiers came, Imaad ordered his mother to go through her refrigerator and pantry and throw out all the cheese that had been made outside of Iraq. He went around and collected any images of Westerners in the house, threw them in a pile and burned them until they were floating bits of ash. He struck his mother repeatedly and forbade her to watch foreign news or movie channels on their new television.

The Americans were "the devil," Imaad ranted.
....
On the night of Jan. 5, Imaad and his mother, Um Imaad -- both of whom declined to give their full names for fear of retribution -- were watching a movie in the living room. As in most other parts of the capital for the past two months, their Adhimiya neighborhood has electricity about two hours a day. So the generators outside were humming at about 9 that night, and the television was turned up so they could hear.

Imaad said they were startled by a loud banging at the door. He went quickly to open it. When he did, Imaad said, there were about a dozen U.S. soldiers standing with their guns pointed at his head.

Imaad and his mother said the soldiers rushed in, ordering them to sit together while they searched the house. "You look poor," Imaad recalled one of the soldiers saying. "Why?"

Imaad answered in English: "I have not been able to find a job, although I'm a graduate of the College of Arts." His heart was pounding, Imaad said. His mother, a chatty widow who adores her son, sat next to him, shaking.

The soldiers went to search his bedroom. He heard laughing, and then they called for him, he said. Imaad went to his room and saw that the soldiers had found several magazines he kept hidden from his mother. They had pictures of girls in swimsuits and erotic poses. Imaad said the soldiers spread the magazines on his bed and put his Koran in the middle.

"This is a good match," Imaad said one of the soldiers told him.

"It was a nightmare," he said. "I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines."

Within 20 minutes, the soldiers left without arresting him or his mother. While the soldiers went next door to search his neighbor's house, Imaad began to slap his mother, he said. "The American people are devils," Um Imaad recalled her son repeating.

Whatever happened to that "hearts and minds" strategy?

The Blessings of Liberty

WHAT'S WORRYING IRAQI VOTERS

Despite the ever-present threat of a suicide bombing or US troops opening fire at random, security is not the main issue for Iraqi voters. They can avoid those dangers if they keep clear of military or police checkpoints, but everyone is affected by the endless shortages of everything from petrol to electricity.

Fuel: In the Jadriyah district of Baghdad, drivers sometimes sleep two nights running in their cars as they wait in a two-mile queue for petrol. Black market fuel is available, but it is often 30 times the normal price, heightening the anger of a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves.

Power: Electricity supply is worse than ever. At the end of last year, the last time for which there are official figures, only 845MW of electricity was available in Baghdad, compared with 2,500MW under Saddam Hussein.Iraqis largely blame the US for the collapse of infrastructure.

Water: Although water supplies remain erratic, this is less of a problem in winter than it is in summer. However, if water shortages this year are as bad as they were last year in the heat of summer, public fury is likely to erupt.

Communications: Mobile phones, banned by Saddam, were welcomed in Baghdad after the invasion. But by the end of last year they were often failing to work for days at a time because the company in charge had sold too many, and the equipment it installed was overburdened.

Heating and cooking: It is surprisingly cold at night during winter, and Iraqis try to keep warm by huddling next to paraffin heaters. But paraffin is in short supply, and has risen in price from 1,500 Iraqi dinars to 7,500 dinars a litre. The price of domestic gas for cooking has shot up even more steeply.

Reconstruction: In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, a decade ago, Iraq rapidly rebuilt its bridges and patched up power stations and refineries. Iraqis often contrast this with the dismal failure of the US and its Iraqi allies since 2003. Construction materials like cement are expensive. Cement plants can only operate part time because they lack electricity.

Riverbend wrote last night:

Bleak Eid...
It's the third day of Eid. Eid is the Islamic holiday and usually it’s a time for families to get together, eat, drink and celebrate. Not this Eid. This Eid is unbearable. We managed a feeble gathering on the first day and no one was in a celebratory mood. There have been several explosions- some far and some near but even those aren't as worrisome as the tension that seems to be growing on a daily basis.

It's amazing how as things get worse, you begin to require less and less. We have a saying for that in Iraq, "Ili yishoof il mawt, yirdha bil iskhooneh." Which means, "If you see death, you settle for a fever." We've given up on democracy, security and even electricity. Just bring back the water.

The USA: bringing freedom to the world since 2002.

His Dark Domain

Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain
New Espionage Branch Delving Into CIA Territory

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A01

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.

Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.

The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.

Perhaps the most significant shift is the Defense Department's bid to conduct surreptitious missions, in friendly and unfriendly states, when conventional war is a distant or unlikely prospect -- activities that have traditionally been the province of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Senior Rumsfeld advisers said those missions are central to what they called the department's predominant role in combating terrorist threats.

The Pentagon has a vast bureaucracy devoted to gathering and analyzing intelligence, often in concert with the CIA, and news reports over more than a year have described Rumsfeld's drive for more and better human intelligence. But the creation of the espionage branch, the scope of its clandestine operations and the breadth of Rumsfeld's asserted legal authority have not been detailed publicly before. Two longtime members of the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, said they knew no details before being interviewed for this article.

The CIA has congressional oversight for its black ops, the DoD does not. If that thought doesn't raise the hairs on the back of your neck....

What's going on here is that Rummy is running his own private army and private intel service. And we've been covering it for more than a year already without so much as a shred of interest by Congress or the MSM.

Posted by Melanie at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

War Crimes

Army faces new claims over Iraq brutality

Lawyers weigh charges over nine fresh allegations as government faces demands for full public inquiry

Jamie Doward and Mark Townsend in Osnabrück
Sunday January 23, 2005
The Observer

The army faces a fresh series of serious allegations of abuse against its forces in Iraq, The Observer has learnt. The Ministry of Defence confirmed last night that army prosecution lawyers have completed investigations into nine separate incidents involving British soldiers serving in Iraq and are now actively considering bringing charges on the back of their inquiries.

Three of the cases concern incidents in which Iraqis were detained by British forces. Four involve the fatal shooting of Iraqis during military operations and two involve non-fatal injuries. A further 48 cases are still being investigated, while 77 cases have been examined and closed by army lawyers.

An MoD spokesman declined to give further details, but confirmed: 'Nine cases are now complete and the army prosecution authorities are examining them.'

The nine cases are in addition to the current court mar tial in Osnabrück, Germany, where three members of the Royal Fusiliers have been accused of abusing Iraqi civilians.

The revelation that more of the 9,200 soldiers serving in Iraq could face courts martial has prompted calls from human rights groups for a full public inquiry into the army's activities. They also want to know when - and to what extent - the government was aware of concerns about the abuse of Iraqis.

Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, which last year raised concerns about the conduct of British troops with defence ministers, said only an independent investigation could reveal the true picture.

Referring to the court martial in Osnabrück, Allen said: 'What's really staggering is that these allegations would probably never have come to light had a soldier not taken some pictures into a high street developers' and the staff not called the police. Is that really the full extent of public scrutiny over the behaviour of our armed forces?

On Television, Torture Takes a Holiday

Frank Rich

ON the day that the defense rested in the military trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, American television news had a much better story to tell: "The Trouble With Harry," as Brian Williams called it on NBC. The British prince had attended a fancy dress costume party in Wiltshire (theme: "native and colonial") wearing a uniform from Rommel's Afrika Korps complete with swastika armband. Even by the standards of this particular royal family, here was idiocy above and beyond the call of duty.

For those of us across the pond, it was heartening to feel morally superior to a world-class twit. But if you stood back for just a second and thought about what was happening in that courtroom in Fort Hood, Tex. - a task that could be accomplished only by reading newspapers, which provided the detailed coverage network TV didn't even attempt - you had to wonder if we had any more moral sense than Britain's widely reviled "clown prince." The lad had apparently managed to reach the age of 20 in blissful ignorance about World War II. Yet here we were in America, in the midst of a war that is going on right now, choosing to look the other way rather than confront the evil committed in our name in a prison we "liberated" from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What happened in the Fort Hood courtroom this month was surely worthy of as much attention as Harry's re-enactment of "Springtime for Hitler": it was the latest installment in our government's cover up of war crimes.

But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.

The latest chapter unfolding in Texas during that pre-inaugural week in January was broadcast on the evening news almost exclusively in brief, mechanical summary, when it was broadcast at all. But it's not as if it lacked drama; it was "Judgment at Nuremberg" turned upside down. Specialist Graner's defense lawyer, Guy Womack, explained it this way in his closing courtroom statement: "In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here the government is going after the order-takers." As T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post, the trial's judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, "refused to allow witnesses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One-Alpha, or what orders they had given." While Mr. Womack's client, the ringleader of the abuses seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs, deserved everything that was coming to him and then some, there have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison's officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command.

Nor are there likely to be any, given how little information about this story makes it to the truly mass commercial media and therefore to a public that, according to polls, disapproves of the prison abuses by a majority that hovers around 80 percent. What information does surface is usually so incomplete or perfunctorily presented that it leaves unchallenged the administration's line that, in President Bush's words, the story involves just "a few American troops" on the night shift.

The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out.

In a just world, Rummy would be in shackles in the dock at The Hague. In a just world, my senator, John Warner, would be taking a star turn in the press.

The Man of La Mancha

Bush Doctrine Is Expected to Get Chilly Reception

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A01

When President Bush flew to Canada in his first international trip following his reelection, the White House portrayed it as the beginning of a fence-mending tour to bring allies back into the fold after a tense first term. But after Bush left, the Canadians were more furious than before.

They were stunned when Bush leaned across a table in a private meeting and lectured Prime Minister Paul Martin about opposing the U.S. missile defense system. And they were later taken aback by a speech filled with what they considered the same "old Bush" foreign policy pronouncements that opened the divide with the allies in the first place.

"If he's going to take that speech to Europe," said a top Canadian official who attended the meeting between Bush and Martin, "he's not going to get a good reception."

For all the talk of fresh diplomacy and rebuilding frayed alliances, Bush heads into his second term still demanding that the rest of the world meet him on his terms -- and now he has redefined those terms to an even more provocative degree with an inaugural address articulating a grand vision for spreading democracy and "ending tyranny" in "every nation." With his eye on history, Bush wants to change the world. The rest of the world is not necessarily so eager to be changed.

While administration officials have since tried to tamp down expectations of a radical shift in policy, the inaugural speech reflected a worldview dramatically at odds with that in many parts of Europe and the Middle East, where it has only confirmed the image of Bush as an American unilateralist pursuing his own agenda with messianic fervor.

To the neoconservative thinkers who have long sought a leader in the White House willing to champion American ideals abroad, Bush has the chance to be a transformative figure. The first-term efforts to build democratic institutions in Afghanistan and Iraq, they hope, will expand in the second term, though not necessarily through armed force.

"His importance as a world leader will turn out to be far larger than the sort of tactical issues that are widely debated and for which he is sometimes reviled," said Richard Perle, an influential former adviser to the Pentagon. "Put this in a historic perspective: He's already created profound change. All around the Middle East, they're talking about the issue of democracy. They're talking about his agenda. It's an extraordinary thing."

Yet many Democrats, as well as Republicans from the traditional school of U.S. foreign policy, see Bush heading down a treacherous road that will further unravel a half-century of international relationships. The rupture over Iraq, they fear, may presage a widening divide with the rest of the world over the next four years.

I have many years in the 12-step program. Doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is considered, um, "madness." Add lies to madness and you've got yourself a front-row seat at an AA meeting.
==========
I am I, Don Quixote, the lord of La Mancha
My destiny calls and I go

Onward to glory I go.

Sweet Dreams are Made of This, Who am I to Disagree?

U.S. Attempts To Build Trust, Leaders in Iraq

By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A01

MOSUL, Iraq -- A dozen U.S. and Iraqi military officers dropped in on the Mosul police chief last week. After arriving at his headquarters in their armored Humvees, the men crowded into the chief's office to discuss security for the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections.

An Iraqi special forces officer, Lt. Col. Adell Abbas, quickly took over. "I have everything I need to protect you," he assured the police chief.

[Somehow, this fails to make me think I'll be taking my next vacation in Iraq ed.

The police chief appeared doubtful. He looked pleadingly around the room at the Americans, the real power in Mosul. What would they do to protect him?

A Marine seated next to Abbas intervened. "Sir, Col. Adell and I are brothers," said Maj. Frank Shelton. "He has a picture of my daughter. I have a picture of his son. Anything we can do to assist you, that is our mission together."

Abbas, 39, is commander of the 23rd Battalion, 6th Brigade, Iraqi Intervention Force. Shelton, 35, is his senior American adviser. In addition to keeping a photo of Abbas's 4-year-old son, Mustafa, strapped to his left arm, Shelton sleeps five feet from Abbas, eats meals off the same plate and seldom leaves his side. With limited success, he has grown a mustache to resemble the facial hair worn by Abbas and his men. Both men were trained as military divers.

Their intense relationship is part of a changing U.S. strategy to find a way out of Iraq. After a string of battlefield failures by the nascent Iraqi security forces, the U.S. military has committed as many as 10,000 advisers to work directly with Iraqi units in the coming months. The goal is to develop quality leaders who can prevent the units from falling apart under attack and ultimately assume responsibility for Iraq's security.