Spring Showers Bring May Flowers

The wheels are starting to come off. These are the first three stories at the top of Sean-Paul Kelly's excellent blog The Agonist tonight:

New Details Emerging From Early in the White House About Plans to Attack Iraq

Aired March 31, 2004 - 11:30 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Frustrated that Iraqi gunners were shooting at American planes, within weeks of coming into office, President Bush approved war plans for a massive retaliatory attack on Iraq if a U.S. pilot had been shot down.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says the new options were justified by the threat.

White House won't let adviser testify on Medicare drug costs

By TONY PUGH

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to allow President Bush's chief health-policy adviser, Douglas Badger, to testify Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee about early administration estimates that the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit would be far more costly than many lawmakers believed when they voted for it.

And this one is really off the effing wall. Phillip Zelikow is the Executive Director, the principal administrator of the 9/11 commission:

RAQ:
War Launched to Protect Israel - Bush Adviser

Emad Mekay

Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.

WASHINGTON, Mar 29 (IPS) - IPS uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 -- the 9/11 commission -- in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East.
....
Zelikow made his statements about ”the unstated threat” during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president.

He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.

”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.

It sounds like the White House is living on speed and Ambien. Let's see what they sound like after a couple more months of investigation reports and hits of their own devising.

There is a school of psychology, to which I do not subscribe, which says that those in real trouble scream for help. I don't buy it, I've watched too many a**holes bury those around them and get off scott-free. But I note that all these stories broke in the last 24 hours, and they got reported, Air America launched today (no, I didn't listen, I've launched radio programs before myself and it is a kindness to give the first week a pass, just like I don't go to new restaurants in the first month) and I hear Atrios got great reviews, and Kos will be on in future segments. The stars are beginning to align.

Spanked to Baghdad?

No Clear Favorite for Top U.S. Job in Iraq
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: March 31, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 30 — It is described as the most challenging diplomatic assignment in the world, and the toughest to fill. Three months before sovereignty is restored in Iraq, the Bush administration is still looking for an ambassador to replace L. Paul Bremer III as the chief American political presence in Baghdad.

With at least 3,000 employees, the new ambassador will run the United States' largest and most complex embassy. President Bush is said not to have settled on a choice, but diplomats agree that whoever it is will need excellent rapport with Mr. Bush, American military commanders and top State and Defense Department officials who have feuded over Iraq for a year.

Not least, the new ambassador will have to keep uppermost Mr. Bush's political needs in an election year in which anything that goes wrong in Iraq could ignite a political furor.

"The first thing you'd have to ask about this job is, who would want it?" said an administration official. "I can't imagine a more impossible job, in a more nasty place. But you could make an awfully big difference."

Among the names being discussed within the administration are Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; retired Gen. George A. Joulwan, a former NATO commander; Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who now directs Iraq policy at the White House; and two veteran diplomats, Thomas R. Pickering and Frank G. Wisner.

The selection process has been complicated by squabbling between Mr. Bremer, who reports to the president through the Pentagon, and the State Department, to which the ambassador will report July 1.

Mr. Bremer, administration officials said, has been resisting a transfer of power to the new embassy in stages leading up to the June 30 deadline, not wanting any perception of diminished power for himself. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, some officials said, had to insist on Mr. Bremer's cooperation when he was in Baghdad this month.

One senior official said, with admiration, that Mr. Bremer was "a little bit of a control freak" who feared a diminution of his stature at a time when he is trying to broker an accord among Iraqis on what sort of government will take power on June 30.

This is all about the B/C re-elect, it's a political move, not one that has anything to do with actually assisting the transition to the UN, the only thing which has the ghost of a chance of keeing Iraq from erupting.

What LUNATIC put Paul Wolfowitz on this list? The man is a monomaniac so sure of his own brilliance, with no diplomatic credentials--he's a technocrat--that his choice would guarantee the disaster we seem to be headed for, anyway. Juan Colehas a post up tonight saying that this is the name being heard around Washington. I'm not hearing it. The man has been so spectacularly wrong about everything that even the Bushies must have noticed. A Baghdad posting could be seen as punishment.

The Sink Hole

I.R.S. Request for More Terrorism Investigators Is Denied
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Published: March 31, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 30 - The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday.

The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.

The disclosure, to a House Ways and Means subcommittee, came near the end of a routine hearing into the I.R.S. budget after most of the audience, including reporters, had left the hearing room.

It comes as the White House is fighting to maintain its image as a vigorous and uncompromising foe of global terrorism in the face of questions about its commitment and competence raised by the administration's former terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and its first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill.

Representative Earl Pomeroy, a North Dakota Democrat whose question to a witness about one line on the last page of a routine report to Congress prompted the disclosure, said he was dumbfounded at the budget decision.

"The zeroing out of resources here made my jaw drop open," Mr. Pomeroy said. "It just leaps out at you."

In other budget news:

House Republicans Stop Effort to Limit Tax Cuts

By Alan Fram
Associated Press
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A04

The Republican-led House defeated a fresh Democratic effort yesterday to limit Congress's ability to approve new tax cuts, averting an embarrassing setback to President Bush's agenda of continued tax reductions.

By a near party-line 209 to 209 vote -- one vote short of the majority Democrats needed to prevail -- the House turned down the Democratic provision urging budget bargainers to reimpose rules requiring that tax cuts or benefit increases be paid for with other budget savings.

Republican leaders held the voting period open an extra 23 minutes to persuade a handful of Republicans who initially supported the Democratic move to instead vote with their party.

Talk about your party of fiscal responsibility.

Guess What? We're "Elites!"

Emotional Elder Bush Attacks Son's Critics
Tue Mar 30, 2004 06:20 PM ET

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - An emotional former President George H.W. Bush on Tuesday defended his son's Iraq war and lashed out at White House critics.

It is "deeply offensive and contemptible" to hear "elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail" dismiss progress in Iraq since last year's overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the elder Bush said in a speech to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual convention.

"There is something ignorant in the way they dismiss the overthrow of a brutal dictator and the sowing of the seeds of basic human freedom in that troubled part of the world," he said.
....
The former president, who waged the first Gulf War against Saddam in 1991, described progress in Iraq as "a miracle."

"Iraq is moving forward in hope and not sliding back into despair and terrorism," he said.

9 Killed in Separate Attacks in Iraq
Bodies of 4 Contractors Brutalized; Five U.S. Soldiers Killed by Roadside Bomb

By Sewell Chan and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; 2:41 PM

FALLUJAH, March 31 -- Four civilian contractors were killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah Wednesday in an attack that left their vehicles in flames, and afterward at least three of the burned bodies were mutilated, dragged through the streets and suspended from a bridge while a group of Iraqis danced in the streets. Separately, in nearby Ramadi, five U.S. soldiers died after their armored vehicle hit a roadside bomb.

Fallujah residents interviewed said the incident involving the contractors was the most savage behavior they had seen in the city since the U.S. occupation began.

From comments to a post by frequent Bump commentor paradox atThe Left Coaster:
We are waiting to see if my family member is one of the fallen. It's been a tough day so far.
Posted by Ga6thDem at March 31, 2004 09:57 AM

They Don't Even Try to Hide It

Pentagon report indicates Boeing investigations have widened

By Joseph L. Galloway and Alan Bjerga

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A Defense Department inspector general's audit report on the negotiations between the Air Force and the Boeing Co. on a new aerial tanker indicates that investigations into possible criminal conduct have widened, according to officials who are knowledgeable about the report.

The audit report finds that the Air Force tailored the Operational Requirements Document to the Boeing 767, and the Air Force and Boeing failed to meet important requirements that would make the aircraft fit for war, the officials told Knight Ridder, speaking on condition of anonymity because the report isn't expected to be released until next week.

The inspector general's office is examining whether Boeing and the Air Force improperly negotiated a $23.5 billion deal to supply the military with 100 tankers. Congressional investigators told Knight Ridder it was increasingly clear that the contract was based on an invalid specifications document and didn't meet the needs of the military services.
,,,,
The audit report suggests that at least one Air Force official, who hasn't been identified, may be subject to a criminal investigation into whether he was truthful with officers who work for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The allegations involve an Air Force briefing to Joint Chiefs of Staff officers on the revised tanker specifications.

The audit report says the first 100 versions of the Boeing 767 tanker wouldn't meet the Air Force's key requirements. For example, they wouldn't be able to refuel multiple aircraft simultaneously and wouldn't be able to be used for other missions, such as medical evaluations. The Air Force plans to buy more tankers in the future.
....
During a June 7, 2002, briefing of the Joint Requirements Board, officials on the board asked the Air Force official who was giving the briefing a direct question: Has this document been tailored to fit the 767? The briefer replied, "No." The IG report indicates that that wasn't the truth.

The officials said investigators also were focusing on whether Boeing's alleged participation in modifying the Air Force specifications involved misconduct and conflict of interest.
....
Fallout from Air Force tanker negotiator Darleen Druyun's later employment at Boeing continues to make the program a political hot potato. Druyun worked closely with Boeing and congressional supporters to pass the 2001 appropriations bill that steered the contract to Boeing, the documents indicate.

Air Force Secretary James Roche told a House of Representatives defense subcommittee Tuesday that while he thinks the deal the Air Force and Boeing negotiated is a good one, he's open to whatever the government tells the Air Force to do, including reopening negotiations with Airbus.

Knight Ridder obtained some of the emails between Boeing and DoD discussing this transaction. They are quite revealing:

There is this, from Boeing tanker boss Bob Gower to half a dozen Boeing executives, titled "Darleen/tankers":

"Meeting today on price was very good. Darleen (Druyun, then still an Air Force official) spent most of the time bringing the USAF (U.S. Air Force) pricer up to our number. ... It was a good day. She may be running her own covert operation on this one, so we probably don't want to discuss openly."

And this one from Walter Skowronski, the vice president for finance and treasurer:

"Briefly, the OMB A-94 Business Case Analysis will most likely pass the test. But this test measures the illogical conclusion that it is better to lease now than to buy now. This won't make sense in the newspapers. Further, neither Boeing nor SSMB (Salomon Smith Barney) would ever put its hand on a Bible and say that makes economic sense."

Your tax dollars at work.

Media Notes

Al Gets Gore-TV

by Joe Hagan

The Observer has learned that former Vice President Al Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt, an entrepreneur and Democratic fund-raiser, will close the deal to pay around $70 million to French-owned Vivendi Universal this week, making them the owners of the tiny digital-cable channel Newsworld International (NWI), moving Mr. Gore from politics to mini-media-moguldom.

As far as the dovetailing between Air America Radio and Mr. Gore’s project, Mr. Franken said, "It’s all part of the same thing. It’s fighting back …. I think that the country—there’s an odd idea that the mainstream media is liberal, and it just isn’t. And I think the mainstream media has become scared of its own shadow. Basically, their testicles have been sucked up into their body cavity with a slurping sound."

Quite frankly, "fair and balanced" would be kind of a novelty at this point in time. Those of you who are younger than I probably will never have seen or heard it.

Here is a link to Air America Radio, which went live with Al Franken about 40 minutes ago. They are using a syndication strategy which is a mistake, I think, when the war is one of ideas. The first five markets they are airing in are already Democratic ones, preaching to the choir.

As Mel Goux says:

Instead of following Clear Channel’s lead and gobbling up lots of tiny radio stations in rural areas for peanuts, Central Air Media went for the high dollar stations in all the major markets. And instead of focusing on creating nationally syndicated content, while keeping overhead low, they’ve now got the world’s biggest nut. Basically, they couldn’t have gotten less bang for their buck if they’d done what Greg Proops jokingly suggested and hired carrier pigeons to deliver their message.

You'll need Windows Media Player or Real to use the link.

Pentagon Papers Redux

Holy Shft! Is today the Whitehouse Tapes Day? Just got this email from the Center for American Progress:

FOUND AT STARBUCKS
The Pentagon's Papers

Well, others in the Bush administration did, apparently, make an appearance at the local Starbucks. And as the Washington Post reports today, one of them -- obviously readying himself to prep Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- left his notes on the table. Talking points, hand-written notes on spin tactics, and a hand-drawn map to the Secretary's house were found by a resident of DuPont Circle, who made them available to the Center for American Progress. The name of said resident is being withheld at his request, as he fears that he may be accused on national television of being "disgruntled." We've published the documents -- which we've dubbed The Pentagon's Papers -- on
our Web site.
Download The Pentagon's Papers as PDF,

Oh, my. We are going to be busy little readers today. Most of the guts are on the Post link, above, if you don't want to PDF.

Cancer of the Presidency

Salon is doing the same deal with their John Dean interview that they did with their Richard Clarke interview a week ago: no ad. Go read. Impoverish yourself further by ordering the book from your favorite merchant.

Creepier than Nixon
The man who brought down Richard Nixon says Bush and "co-president" Cheney are an even greater threat to the country.

Colson was brutal, cruel and vicious before he found God (during Watergate). While he once famously said he would run over his grandmother to get Nixon reelected, today I suspect he'd run over his grandmother to convert a few heathens to Christ. Segretti did not engage in the kind of dirty politics that Colson liked to play. Segretti was a political prankster, who only by accident got associated with Watergate. Nothing that Segretti did, that I know of, could be called sinister. Colson, on the other hand, was as nasty a political operative as could be found. Indeed, to this day we don't know the full extent of Colson's activities. He even refused to tell Nixon some of the things he had done (while boasting to Nixon he had done things he didn't want to tell the president). Colson walked out of the White House with any of his papers and records that might cause him a problem. Karl Rove, from what I've seen, makes Colson look like a novice.

I have nothing to say. This leaves me with my jaw on the floor.

UPDATE: Credit to Suzie Madrak for the catch. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush is ready to ship.

The Amazon Bill is Getting Ridiculous

The briefing

Fit of conniption: I hear that "Plan of Attack," supersleuth Bob Woodward's still-secret study of President Bush's war on terrorism, will be very bad for the Bush reelection campaign - which is still reeling from gun-toting former terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's critique of Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration figures in "Against All Enemies."

Woodward's book, to be released next month, will receive not only a multipart series in The Washington Post, but also the Mike Wallace treatment on "60 Minutes" April 18 - when I am absolutely confident that the common corporate ownership of CBS and Woodward's publisher, Simon & Schuster, will be mentioned.

And John Dean's book comes out next month, and Joe Wilson's book comes out next month...,

At the Center of the Storm Over Bush And Science
By JAMES GLANZ

Published: March 30, 2004

But to a degree not seen in previous administrations, a wide range of influential scientists — even many who say they like Dr. Marburger personally and respect him professionally — express dismay at White House science policy.

"I think this is as bad as it's ever been," said Wolfgang H. K. Panofsky, a retired Stanford physicist who has advised the government on science and national security since the Eisenhower administration. "This is an extremely serious issue. I believe it is true that there is such a thing as objective scientific reality, and if you ignore that or try to misrepresent it in formulating policy, you do so at peril to the country."

Other experts have been blunter. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Dr. Howard Gardner, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, said, "I actually feel very sorry for Marburger, because I think he probably is enough of a scientist to realize that he basically has become a prostitute."

Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Gardner said he had made the reference but added, "I wish I'd used it as a verb rather than as a noun."

Chris C. Mooney has devoted his blog to exposing Bush's bad science and comments on the NYT piece:

Interestingly, lots of high level members of the administration talked to by Glanz are singing Marburger's praises and saying the president likes him a lot--which may or may not be true. These are the same people who told the press repeatedly--and in retrospect unbelievably--that the President was "agonizing" over his stem cell decision.

Why would Glanz downplay Marburger's promise to issue a refutation, especially in such a lengthy profile as this? It's quite clear, after all, that such a refutation, if it ever comes, may be the key standard by which Marburger will be judged. And if it doesn't come...well, Marburger will be judged on that basis instead.

Today, Bump received its 2,500th comment, on a total of 665 posts. Thank you!

A Passion for Books

Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars': Connecting the Dots
By JAMES RISEN

Published: April 11, 2004

Discounting the possibility that the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't simply trying to help him sell more books. But if President Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too good to be ignored.

The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. It is a rarity among Washington-insider memoirs - it's a thumping good read.

The first - and by far the best - chapter is a heart-stopping account of the turmoil inside the White House on the morning of Sept. 11, when Washington suddenly came blinking into a bloody new world. I hope Clarke has sold the rights to Hollywood, at least for his opening chapter, because I would pay to see this movie. You can guess who gets to play Jack Ryan in his retelling of that historic morning.

By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden. By the morning of Sept. 11, he was still handling counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.

In the first minutes after the attacks, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Clarke to act as crisis manager in the White House Situation Room, and he seized the moment. In his account, it was he who recommended to Vice President Dick Cheney that President Bush should not come back to the White House from Florida, and he who gave the order triggering the Continuity of Government procedures, the doomsday rules under which cabinet members and Congressional leaders were whisked to undisclosed locations.

With Clarke at the helm of a secure videoconference network linking the White House with other key agencies, in quick succession thousands of commercial aircraft were grounded; the country's land and sea borders were closed; the military went to Defcon 3, its highest alert level in nearly 30 years; and the Russians were notified. ''Damn good thing I did that,'' Clarke quotes Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as telling him. ''Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?''
....
''Ghost Wars,'' Steve Coll's objective - and terrific - account of the long and tragic history leading up to Sept. 11, is a welcome antidote to the fevered partisan bickering that accompanied the release of Clarke's book.

Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, has given us what is certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of Al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan. He has followed up that feat by threading together the complex roles played by diplomats and spies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States into a coherent story explaining how Afghanistan became such a welcoming haven for Al Qaeda.

In particular, Coll has done a great service by revealing how Saudi Arabia and its intelligence operations aided the rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in terrorism has been the subject of wild conspiracy theories since Sept. 11; Coll gives us a clear and balanced view of Saudi Arabia's real ties to bin Laden. The links he reveals are serious enough to prompt an important debate about the nature of the Saudi-American partnership in the fight against terrorism. ''Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent,'' he writes, referring to Saudi support for foreign Arab fighters against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Still, ''it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.''

Coll overlaps with Clarke in his detailed recounting of the mush that was the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy. Unlike Clarke, however, Coll doesn't have an ax to grind, and so offers a more evenhanded view of the internal battles between the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies at a time when terrorism was not Washington's top priority. As a reporter who struggled to cover many of the twists and turns in counterterrorism policy that Coll describes, I find ''Ghost Wars'' provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions.

As Coll seeks to explain why the Clinton team never mounted a serious effort to go after Al Qaeda, even after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, he finds plenty of blame to go around: ''Clinton's National Security Council aides firmly believed that they were the aggressive ones on the Al Qaeda case, pursuing every possible avenue to get at bin Laden over calcified resistance or incompetence within the C.I.A. and Pentagon bureaucracies. From the other side of the Potomac, Clinton's White House often looked undisciplined, unfocused and uncertain.'' ''Ghost Wars'' also corroborates many of Clarke's assertions that counterterrorism policy was largely ignored by the new Bush administration before Sept. 11. Coll notes, as does Clarke, that the Bush team didn't hold its first cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan until Sept. 4, one week before the twin towers fell.

Coll closes with the Sept. 9, 2001, murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan rebel leader who had been cooperating with the C.I.A. in its vain efforts to track bin Laden around Afghanistan. As with so many other warnings before it, the full significance of Massoud's murder was missed until it was too late. Here and elsewhere in ''Ghost Wars,'' Coll's riveting narrative makes the reader want to rip the page and yell at the American counterterrorism officials he describes - including Clarke - and tell them to watch out.

That oughta whet your appetite. Both of these guys have penned not just history but page turners. I'm looking forward to reading them.

Critical Mass

Rice to Testify Under Oath

Reuters
Tuesday, March 30, 2004; 10:30 AM

The White House offered to have national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testify publicly under oath about the Sept. 11 attacks before the 9-11 commission, Tuesday.

The White House released a letter to the independent commission from legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez outlining the offer. It also said it would make President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney available to speak before a joint private session of the full panel.

Both offers were on condition that they would not set a precedent under the constitutional separation of executive and legislative powers, an administration official said.

The offers follow bombshell allegations from former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke that Bush and his top aides ignored an urgent threat from al Qaeda in the months before the attacks on New York and Washington.

The 10-member bipartisan commission investigating the hijacked airliner attacks had unanimously requested that Rice testify publicly and under oath. Bush had previously insisted on meeting privately with only the chairman and vice chairman of the panel.

Up to now, White House lawyers have claimed executive privilege and refused to let Rice testify publicly based on a long-standing position that presidential advisers who have not been confirmed by the Senate cannot give public testimony.

Translation: Karen Hughes is back. I'm going to engage in some rank speculation. I've read various accounts about the complex relationship between Bush's two principal advisors, Rove and Hughes, which seem to function like the two hemispheres of his brain.

Josh Marshall observed last night:

It's been clear for some time that one of the key shortcomings of this administration is the presence of so many loyalists and ideologues who can usually be counted on to shout "Onward! Onward! Onward!" as the ship of state sails off the edge of the world.

More prosaically one might start with this Knight Ridder article from Sunday, the first sentence of which reads: "Accounts from insiders in the Bush White House describe a tightly controlled, top-down organization that pushes a predetermined agenda, shuns dissenting views and discourages open debate."

As Josh says elsewhere, the risk of this kind of operation is getting cut off from reality, and that is clearly what happened with the Condi testimony, a political miscalculation of truly amateur proportions.

The WaPo's Dan Froomkin reported yesterday that Hughes's new book has an index for Rove, Karl, disagreements with...Karen and Karl have been able to work together successfully in the past, but she has been the one with the message discipline. I'm going to be watching to see what happens when this fractious pair has to function under the kind of pressure that comes in a presidential campaign being waged under no fewer than ten investigations (and maybe a couple more coming.) Tightly wrapped, top-down operations which are isolated from reality have a nasty way of blowing up.

Grocery Settlement

The grocery workers are voting as I type. The WaPo article is oblique, but it looks like the Union will advise its members to ratify. The proposed agreement contains some serious hits for the workers, but is not so draconian as the contract agreed to by the Southern California local. Two-tier agreements are always unwelcome because they split the economic interests of the bargaining unit. The rest of the article is not very good: quoting a worker who wishes that they had received the contract earlier flies in the face of the way negotiations are conducted.

NPR is reporting that the Safeway workers have already ratified. Giant workers will be meeting at noon, and I'll update as soon as the vote is announced.

Grocers, Union Agree on Pact
Giant, Safeway Workers Vote Today On Contract With Reduced Benefits

By Michael Barbaro and Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 30, 2004; Page A01

Negotiators for Giant Food LLC, Safeway Inc. and the union representing their 18,000 Washington area workers have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract that, if accepted by the rank and file, would avert a strike at the region's two largest grocery chains, people familiar with the talks said yesterday.

Health care costs were some of the most contentious issues in the negotiations. Under the proposal, current workers will pay more for prescriptions and their annual deductible will increase from $100 to $200. New employees will pay a larger share of their health care costs. They will also receive less generous pay on Sundays and holidays, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by The Washington Post.

Union and company officials declined to comment publicly, saying the proposal will be explained to workers at a meeting this morning at the D.C. Armory, when workers will vote on the contract. A majority is needed to accept the contract. If it is rejected, the workers could vote to strike. Giant and Safeway stores will be closed today from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. while workers vote.

"This is a contract the leadership does not expect the workers to turn down," said Joslyn N. Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, which includes the grocery workers union as a member. Williams, who is not involved in the negotiations, called the tentative agreement "a positive indication that there will not be a strike."

The battle now moves on to the Northern California and Pacific Northwest locals.

UPDATE: Both the Safeway and Giant workers approved the draft settlement by acclimation. I sense huge amounts of relief.

Exodus

Big Pay Luring Military's Elite to Private Jobs
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

Published: March 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 29 — Senior American commanders and Pentagon officials are warning of an exodus of the military's most seasoned members of Special Operations to higher-paying civilian security jobs in places like Baghdad and Kabul, just as they are playing an increasingly pivotal role in combating terror and helping conduct nation-building operations worldwide.

Senior enlisted members of the Army Green Berets or Navy Seals with 20 years or more experience now earn about $50,000 in base pay, and can retire with a $23,000 pension. But private security companies, whose services are in growing demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, are offering salaries of $100,000 to nearly $200,000 a year to the most experienced of them.

The Central Intelligence Agency is also dangling such enticing offers before experienced Special Operations personnel that the Pentagon's top official for special operations policy, Thomas W. O'Connell, told a House panel this month that intergovernmental poaching "is starting to become a significant problem."

Evidence of a drain of seasoned Special Operations members, including elite Delta Force soldiers, is largely anecdotal right now, but the head of the military's Special Operations Command, Gen. Bryan D. Brown of the Army, is so concerned about what he is hearing from troops in the field that he convened an unusual meeting of his top commanders in Washington last week to discuss the matter. "The retention of our special operating forces is a big issue," General Brown said.

Last December, he gathered 20 senior members of the Navy Seals and Army Green Berets and Air Force commandos and their spouses, at his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., for a weeklong session to discuss career-extending sweeteners, like special pay bonuses and educational benefits. A special panel is now reviewing those recommendations.

"The kind of people we're training today, that are culturally aware, able to work overseas, experts with handguns and rifles, physically fit, hand-selected guys that also speak a foreign language," General Brown told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday, "these kind of people are very attractive to those kind of civilian private industries that provide security services both at home and abroad."

General Brown and other senior officials acknowledged that the lucrative offers by outsiders presented a rare opportunity for career soldiers to gain financial security.

"They're not leaving out of disloyalty," said Gen. Wayne Downing, a retired head of the Special Operations Command who recently returned from Iraq. "The money is just so good, if they're going to be away from home that much, they may as well make top dollar."

As we've discussed at length earlier, Rummy has broken the Army in its current formation for years to come. Discovering that our most elite forces are about to be decimated by private recruiters--these are the forces who are hunting OBL--means that we are simply going to be much less safe in a world which is increasingly dangerous.

Bush's "more free, more peaceful" rhetoric is contradicted by the facts on all sides.

Take and Read

This may be the most important column Paul Krugman has ever written, and it is also some of the most cogent political writing I've ever seen in the 700-word format that The Bigs give their regular columnists.

In his autobiography, Confession, St. Augustine of Hippo tells the story of his spiritual life and conversion. It began, he said, when he heard a voice tell him, "tolle...lege..", take and read. Take this up and read it, print it and pass it to friends and family.

This Isn't America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 30, 2004

And new evidence keeps emerging for Mr. Clarke's main charge, that the Iraq obsession undermined the pursuit of Al Qaeda. From yesterday's USA Today: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures."

That's why the administration responded to Mr. Clarke the way it responds to anyone who reveals inconvenient facts: with a campaign of character assassination.

Some journalists seem, finally, to have caught on. Last week an Associated Press news analysis noted that such personal attacks were "standard operating procedure" for this administration and cited "a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster," the Medicare actuary who revealed how the administration had deceived Congress about the cost of its prescription drug bill.

But other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics — even compared with Nixon's. Even more disturbing is its readiness to abuse power — to use its control of the government to intimidate potential critics.

To be fair, Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

And there are many other cases of apparent abuse of power by the administration and its Congressional allies. A few examples: according to The Hill, Republican lawmakers threatened to cut off funds for the General Accounting Office unless it dropped its lawsuit against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post says Representative Michael Oxley told lobbyists that "a Congressional probe might ease if it replaced its Democratic lobbyist with a Republican." Tom DeLay used the Homeland Security Department to track down Democrats trying to prevent redistricting in Texas. And Medicare is spending millions of dollars on misleading ads for the new drug benefit — ads that look like news reports and also serve as commercials for the Bush campaign.

On the terrorism front, here's one story that deserves special mention. One of the few successful post-9/11 terror prosecutions — a case in Detroit — seems to be unraveling. The government withheld information from the defense, and witnesses unfavorable to the prosecution were deported (by accident, the government says). After the former lead prosecutor complained about the Justice Department's handling of the case, he suddenly found himself facing an internal investigation — and someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation to the press.

Where will it end? In his new book, "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy."

A Picture is Worth...

If you haven't seen the cover of the new The American Prospect, you haven't seen the face of politics this week. Go look. It is a revelation. I'll be blogging a couple of the articles during the week, because it is just good stuff, but you have to see the cover. You have to. Go.

Stranger than Fiction

The site was down for a while. Sorry. We now return to our regularly scheduled program:

Inside of most writers is the delusion that there is a fiction writer waiting to be published. Most of us have the good sense to stifle this demon, but sometimes it gets out of the careful box most of us have constructed around our fantasy of the great American novel. I hope to write a decent book or two, history, spirituality and non-fiction, in the next couple of years and I'll let the market determine if they are any good. I have no delusion that I've got any gift for fiction. All writers are story tellers, but fiction writers have to spin a world and I know that's beyond me. But it ain't out of the mind of Lynn Cheney. This is a parody site, but... Some people shouldn't investigate the world of fiction. Kos excerpts:

Waiting for Sophie was a world where women were treated as decorative figurines or as abject sexual vassals ... where wives were led to despise the marriage act and prostitutes pandered to husband's hunger ... where the relationship betwen women and men became a kind of guerilla warfare in which women were forced to band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted. In her effort to grasp the meaning of her sister's life and death, Sophie discovers the secret that tainted her life and begins to understand the experience of the vast majority of silent, trapped women...

I once tried to write this stuff for a buck and it is harder than it looks.

Go Say Hello

Jordan Barab's excellent blog Confined Spaces is celebrating one year of providing the best and most complete news on workplace health and safety in the blogosphere. Congratulations and good job, Jordan! I'm looking forward to launching the labor blog with you on Wednesday.

Maybe one of these days I'll actually meet some of these DC area bloggers instead of just blogging with them.

Impressment

An Insulting Waste

Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A22

"I WANT you discharged from the military -- but not just yet." That's the message Uncle Sam has these days for gay men and lesbians who serve in the military. Under the decade-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the number of patriotic Americans kicked out of the military for their sexual orientations rose steadily from 1994 through 2001.

But when America went to war after Sept. 11, 2001, all of a sudden the military found that those gay men and lesbians had useful skills -- and discharges dropped precipitously. In 2002, some 906 people were kicked out of the military and the Coast Guard -- down from 1,273 the previous year. Last year, according to a new report from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, the number fell again, to 787. (The Pentagon's official numbers differ only slightly.)

How badly, we wonder, has unit cohesion -- in whose name the gay ban is perpetuated -- suffered for all those gay men and lesbians whose service has been prolonged by military necessity? And if gay men and lesbians serve their country honorably and effectively during wars, where is the decency in drumming them out as soon as peace permits? The policy is insulting when enforced, insulting when not enforced -- and all the more so because the military continues to tolerate harassment of those who "don't tell" and are, therefore, still in the service. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network complains that the Bush administration and the military brass "continue to ignore a growing epidemic of anti-gay harassment within the armed forces," while the official anti-harassment plan "continues to collect dust on Pentagon shelves."

This is, of course, outrageous, and I'm glad the WaPo didn't pull one of its famous editorial waffles.

Louder, Louder

Mark Danner, writing in The New Yorker sums up with a "what do we do now?" piece.

In the United States, the debate over Iraq has encouraged a kind of corrosive, brutal politics that has at its center an appeal to personal fear. That leaves a powerful weapon in the hands of the terrorists, who gained enormously after the attacks in Madrid by appearing to swing Spain’s election against a major ally of President Bush. No one can say what effect a terrorist attack would have on the American election. But the tone and the terms of the evolving struggle for political dominance here present the possibility that such an attack could similarly strengthen those whom both candidates have pledged to destroy.

This is the atmosphere into which all of the other stories of this weekend submerge, and it explains the venomous way that John Kerry's scripture quoting and Richard Clarke's professional reputation have been savaged. Bush has used the nation's ultimate weapon, the one with the highest price, and he is left without justification for the lives, coalition and Iraqi, that this misadventure has cost. That this recklessness has left us manifestly less safe is now beyond question. Bush and his supporters have nothing left but volume to fall back on.

A Liberal Credo

Kevin Raybould of Lean Left has a particularly eloquent rejoinder to the back and forth between John Kerry and George Bush on the topic of faith. Remember, this is the president who told you that his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ, so judging him by Christian standards is fair game.

Campaigning yesterday in Missouri, Kerry said, "The scriptures say, what does it profit, my brother, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?" Kerry told the congregation at New North Side Baptist Church. "When we look at what is happening in America today, where are the works of compassion?"

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Kerry's comment "was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of Scripture for a political attack."

Kevin's commentary:

As usual, when faced with a criticism, the Bush Administration runs from the substance and attempts to smear the critic. Anyone who says their favorite political philosopher is Jesus Christ had best be prepared to defend his actions in the light of Jesus' teachings.

The language of religion has always been spoken comfortably on the left, even if the principle of tolerance has caused it to occasionally be spoken too quietly. John Kerry is not speaking quietly now. Whatever George W. Bush may desire, whatever the editors of the Washington Post and New York Times may decree, Christianity and faith are not the property of the right wing. I have a faith, too, as does John Kerry and millions of others. It is strong, and sincere, and, as Kerry has reminded us, powerful. And in the face of provocation and distortion, it has no reason to be silent.

As a liberal and a Catholic, I can only say "Amen."

Out-Foxed

G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: March 29, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 28 — American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the doors after the occupation authorities accused it of printing lies that incited violence.

Thousands of outraged Iraqis protested the closing as an act of American hypocrisy, laying bare the hostility many feel toward the United States a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"No, no, America!" and "Where is democracy now?" screamed protesters who hoisted banners and shook clenched fists in a hastily organized rally against the closing of the newspaper, Al Hawza, a radical Shiite weekly.

The rally drew hundreds and then thousands by nightfall in central Baghdad, where masses of angry Shiite men squared off against a line of American soldiers who rushed to seal off the area.

The closing of the newspaper illustrated the quandary Americans faced in trying to strike a balance between their two main goals — encouraging democracy while maintaining stability. But as the days wind down to the June 30 target date for handing sovereignty back to the Iraqi people, security seems increasingly elusive.

On Sunday, the Iraqi public works minister narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the northern city of Mosul, and two foreign workers were shot to death nearby in front of a power plant.

Many Iraqis said closing down a popular newspaper at such a crucial time would not curtail anti-occupation feelings but only inflame them.

"When you repress the repressed, they only get stronger," said Hamid al-Bayati, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a prominent Shiite political party. "Punishing this newspaper will only increase the passion for those who speak out against the Americans."

The American authorities said Al Hawza could reopen in 60 days. The paper's editors, however, said they had been put out of business.

"We have been evicted from our offices, and we have no jobs," Saadoon Mohsen Thamad, a news editor, said as he stared at a large padlock hanging from the front gate. "How are we going to continue?"

Among Iraqi journalists, Al Hawza was known for printing wild rumors, especially anti-American ones. A broadsheet of about eight pages, the paper is considered a mouthpiece for Moktada al-Sadr, a fiery young Shiite cleric and one of the most outspoken critics of the Americans.

The letter ordering the paper closed, signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator in Iraq, cited what the American authorities called several examples of false reports in Al Hawza, including a February dispatch that said the cause of an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile.

Nathan Newman responds:

Can We Padlock FoxNews?

UPDATE: Constitutional Scholar Jack Balkin explains it all for you:

From the Interim Iraqi Constitution:

Isn't constitutional law fun?

Even the Water Doesn't Work

D.C. Knew Of Lead Problems In 2002
Timing of E-Mails Contradicts Claims

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

Senior D.C. government officials knew that the city's water contained unsafe levels of lead 15 months before the public learned of the problem but failed to flag the issue as a major concern, according to internal documents that contradict the account provided recently by top managers.

Officials at the D.C. Department of Health, who have publicly maintained that they did not know of the lead problem until this year, first discussed the contamination in October 2002 with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, according to e-mails between the two agencies.

But after assisting WASA in drafting a 2002 educational brochure that has since been criticized for glossing over the high lead levels, Health Department officials largely ignored the mounting health threat last year and failed to issue clear instructions to residents about how to reduce their risk of lead poisoning.

Not until last month -- three weeks after a Washington Post article revealed the lead problem to most residents -- did the Health Department issue a health advisory urging at-risk people to drink filtered water and get blood tests.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said he was "deeply disturbed" that his administration had not shared information earlier about the lead threat with him and city residents.

"I always suspected this . . . that somebody in District government knew about this," said Williams, who added that he has ordered a complete review of the Health Department's actions. "People keeping crucial information from the higher-level management and the mayor is completely unacceptable."

Last week, City Administrator Robert C. Bobb notified Health Department Director James A. Buford that he was being removed from his job, in part because Buford failed to respond to letters, sent in December and January, in which WASA asked for help with the lead contamination issue. But interviews and internal documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the communication problems go beyond Buford.

WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson declined to comment about the Health Department for this article. Buford could not be reached. But other D.C. leaders joined the mayor's call for an internal review.

Since the lead problems were disclosed publicly, city and federal leaders have criticized WASA, the Washington Aqueduct and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to ensure a safe drinking-water supply and for failing to warn the public about health risks when the problem first arose. Now, the health agency's lack of engagement and pattern of playing down bad news have drawn new ire.

The lack of coordination between WASA and the Health Department has worried many city leaders. WASA, a quasi-independent agency, manages the city's drinking water and sewer systems but has no senior staff members who are experts in public health.

That, Johnson said, is the domain of the Health Department. "I think that in most municipalities you rely on the public health agency of that community to provide that information and react to those kinds of issues," Johnson said.

Johnson contacted the Health Department in fall 2002. Oct. 22 of that year, Robert B. Vowels, an Environmental Health Administration physician in the Health Department, sent an e-mail to several staff members.

WTF? It is beyond me why nothing works in The City Over The River, but this level of incompetence boggles my mind.

A Smile on Your Face

Wish Fulfillment for Woody
By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 29, 2004

Last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the New York City Police Department "is doing a great job," and added, "I wish I had the money to pay 'em more."

Two days later he was at a press conference giddily explaining how anxious he was to fork over $300 million in city funds to help the New York Jets build a glittering new playground for the rich on the banks of the Hudson River in Manhattan.

I guess it's a matter of priorities. The mayor can't find the money to pay the city's cops or teachers what they deserve, but he can sure come up with the cash for a stadium.

"If you don't have a smile on your face today," said the mayor, with the Jets' billionaire owner Woody Johnson looking on, "you're never going to have one."

He then proceeded to outline a West Side development plan that would include a 75,000-seat stadium for the Jets, complete with a retractable roof and a halo of full-service cocoons (known as luxury boxes) for the very rich and famous.

One of the things that didn't come up during the announcement was the fact that the city can't afford to fund some of its most basic services.

For example, the bathrooms in many of the public schools are a scandal. Toilets are broken and filthy. Ceilings leak. Toilet paper is often nonexistent. The Times's Elissa Gootman wrote in January that youngsters at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn use the toilets down the road at Coney Island Hospital.

A student at a high school in Manhattan, Diola Castillo, said, "I just try to wait till I get home."

You can bet that Woody Johnson's bathrooms will be pristine.

There is an entire range of important city services that, in the mayor's view, New York cannot afford. In his operating expense budget for fiscal 2005, which was sent to the City Council in January, the mayor proposed cuts that would eliminate 2,500 day care slots, take weekend meals away from senior citizens, and reduce funding for infant mortality programs and foster care services by $3 million and $15 million, respectively.

And then there are the libraries, which I think of as a crucial municipal service. Since fiscal 2003, funding cuts for the New York Public Library are closing in on $21.7 million, nearly 20 percent. If the proposed cuts for fiscal 2005 take effect, library services will be curtailed across the board, with some branches remaining dark up to three days a week. That would be the lowest level of library service since the worst days of the fiscal crisis in the 1970's.

Given these conditions, the idea that the city would put any of the public's cash at Woody Johnson's disposal strikes me as beyond crazy. And I'm a Jets fan. When the city's kids are hurting for bathrooms and libraries, welfare for Woody and his green-clad lineup of muscular millionaires should be out of the question.

This wouldn't be good for Mr. Johnson, either. He's already in danger of drowning in money. It would be cruel to pour more money on him. He paid $635 million for the Jets in 2000. No one forced him to do that. He did it because he wanted to and because he could. Now he says he's ready to put up another $800 million for the West Side stadium. But $800 million is not enough. The stadium will cost — hold your breath — $1.4 billion. So he wants the city and the state to make up the difference.

That's the way it works in Bushworld. Basic services get left behind while the government helps the already wealthy.

The Bottom Line

Rice Defends Refusal To Testify
Compromise Sought With 9/11 Commission

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, at the center of a controversy over her refusal to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, yesterday renewed her determination not to give public testimony and said she could not list anything she wished she had done differently in the months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Administration officials were searching for a compromise last night with the commission that would limit the political damage from her refusal to testify. But a defiant Rice gave no hint of that as she defended the Bush administration's counterterrorism performance on CBS's "60 Minutes" -- the same venue used a week earlier by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke to launch his criticism that the Bush administration did too little on terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001, and wound up strengthening al Qaeda by pursuing war in Iraq.

Rice's appearance, and that of three other top Bush officials on the airwaves yesterday, came at the end of a week in which the Bush administration labored to discredit Clarke, who challenged the White House yesterday to release more classified counterterrorism documents.

Rice, the top foreign-policy official in President Bush's White House, brushed aside the notion that the U.S. government should apologize to Sept. 11 victims' families for not stopping the attacks, saying, "It's important that we keep focused on who did this to us." Rice asserted that "we are safer today than we were on September 10," and, asked whether there were any mistakes or misjudgments before the attacks, replied: "I think we did what we knew how to do."

But Rice gave no ground on the administration's decision that she will not appear in public before the panel or testify under oath because Bush officials believe doing so would compromise the constitutional powers of the executive branch. The renewed refusal came despite the panel's unanimous plea for her testimony.

Republican commissioner John F. Lehman, who has written extensively on separation-of-power issues, said that "the White House is making a huge mistake" by blocking Rice's testimony and decried it as "a legalistic approach."

"The White House is being run by a kind of strict construction of interpretation of the powers of the president," he said on ABC's "This Week." "There are plenty of precedents that the White House could use if they wanted to do this."

Two Republican officials, who declined to be identified because they are not supposed to talk to reporters, said White House aides are discussing ways they could compromise with the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, perhaps by agreeing to the declassification of Rice's private testimony. "That would show people that she is cooperating, and make it clear that her testimony is consistent with her public pronouncements," one official said. "That would help our credibility."

.....

Clarke said he voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election but declined to say whether he would support Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumed Democratic nominee, this year. On the Iraq war, Clarke said: Bush's "political advisers sought to capitalize on it, just as his political advisers are seeking to capitalize on 9/11 by the ads that they're running."

Clarke said that by invading Iraq, the Bush administration built support for al Qaeda by inflaming Islamic opinion, diverted resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and spent money that could have been better used to fortify domestic security. While saying he thinks bin Laden will be killed or captured this year, he warned: "We're going to face a second generation of al Qaeda."

In their bid to counter Clarke's allegations, three administration officials gave televised interviews yesterday to argue that they did more on counterterrorism before Sept. 11 than Clinton had done. Powell pointed to Bush taking direct briefings almost every morning from CIA Director George J. Tenet as "something President Clinton had not been doing." Rice said Tenet briefed Bush 46 times on al Qaeda.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on ABC's "This Week," disagreed with Clarke that going to war in Iraq hurt the overall war on terrorism. Asked about charges by Clarke and others that CIA and Army Special Forces units, with key personnel who spoke Arabic, were moved from Afghanistan in early 2002 and sent to help prepare the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "I don't think that is accurate."

The same Special Forces unit, Task Force 21, that was used to search for Saddam Hussein was redeployed a month ago to Afghanistan to support the search for bin Laden.

Rice said that when Bush met with his top advisers on Sept. 15, 2001, "not a single one of the president's principal advisers suggested that he do anything more than go after Afghanistan, and that's what we did." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was at that meeting and did suggest that Iraq should be attacked, as described in detail in Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War."

Rice said the Bush administration's development of a counterterrorism plan before Sept. 11 was brisk.

The Bush administration has been sharply critical of Clinton and his antiterrorism policy for depending on diplomacy and law enforcement and not having military intervention as part of his plan to attack al Qaeda.

But Rice said yesterday that the United States is safer today because "we have an umbrella of intelligence and law enforcement worldwide."

Rice argued that "al Qaeda is not more dangerous today than it was on September 11" but said it is still dangerous. She also said, "The world is a lot safer and the war on terrorism is well-served by the victory in Iraq." When it was noted that there have been more terrorist attacks in the 30 months since Sept. 11 than in the 30 months prior, she replied: "That's the wrong way to look at it."

Are you feeling safer? I'm not.

The Good Life

From the WaPo, this counts as sympathetic coverage. I'll deconstruct it in the morning. If you think you can live the good life around here on the UFCW average wage, you're smoking something other than cigarettes. G'night.

Grocery Workers Hope to Keep the Good Life
Middle Class Could Be Out of Reach Under New Safeway, Giant Contract

By Michael Barbaro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

Six months after graduating from the District's Mackin High School in 1969, Glennis T. Mitchiner took a part-time job at a Safeway store in Northwest, bagging groceries to help pay his college bills.

Mitchiner realized that his full-time colleagues at Safeway were earning as much as many of the graduates at his college. So he quit school to work full-time at Safeway, a job that provided the middle-class life a college degree had promised. He and his wife, who works at a Virginia software company, each earn about $45,000 a year, own a two-bedroom house, two Toyota sedans and send their daughter to a $3,000-a-year parochial school.

"I realized it from the get-go," Mitchiner said of his job. "This was a good deal."

But what Mitchiner, now 53 and a cashier, views as a good deal, Safeway and unionized grocery stores across the country regard as a financial burden. Tomorrow, 18,000 Washington area workers at Safeway and Giant Food are to vote on a new jointly negotiated four-year contract that is expected to call for lower wages for new workers and reductions in health benefits, which the companies say they need to remain competitive with nonunion retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. If it is rejected, employees may vote to strike, disrupting business at 350 Giant and Safeway stores in the Washington area.

Both Safeway Inc. and the Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold NV, which owns Giant Food LLC, have been struggling financially. Safeway lost $170 million in 2003 and $828 million in 2002. Ahold lost $807 million in 2002, the last full year it reported earnings. The company declined to say if Giant was profitable.

In less than a decade, the U.S. grocery industry has undergone wrenching changes. Independent regional chains in Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago have been gobbled up by big national and international companies, such as Safeway and Royal Ahold, which bought Giant Food in 1998. Today, grocery chains face a host of competitors, including Wal-Mart, bulk warehouse stores and gourmet food stores.

Consumers themselves, once loyal to their neighborhood supermarket, now shop around more in search of bargain prices and top quality. Even Mitchiner's wife, Michelle, shops at Wal-Mart. "I can get more for our money," she says, as her husband buries his face in his hands. Although the companies are proposing that new hires take the biggest hit, they are also asking employees like Mitchiner to accept some benefit cuts. "I resent it," he said. "I feel I earned these wages and benefits and I started to live accordingly."

That's the crux of the matter. What does it mean to "live accordingly?" What does it mean to have some stability of wages and benefits in one's life? What does it mean when benefit cuts become a salary cut? What does it mean to "the American way of life" when we can no longer pass on to our children a higher standard of life? I've got two master's degrees and I never made as much as my undegreed mom's retirement benefit.

I did a rather long piece about work and worth earlier. It is time to replay some of it:

I want to address something I read in a long comment thread on [the grocery] strike over at Calpundit a couple of days ago. I suspect that very few readers here would hold ideas similar to this particular commentor, but a question was implied which is worth a further thought over here. One of Kevin's commentors was simply offended by the whole strike, taking the position that these are no skill jobs and that if people were simply willing to improve themselves and work harder, get an education and dig a little deeper, they wouldn't be working in a grocery store. Therefore there is no reason that grocery workers with decades on the job should be making $17 an hour. If they had any gumption, they'd go out and do what it takes to, you know, get a good job.

One of my canniest theology teachers likes to say that theology is "unvoiced operating assumptions," the things we believe about how life works which we rarely interrogate to see if it is borne out in fact. There is a theology behind this labor action, and it provides us a window into the collective subconscious about God, human worth and the relationship of money to both.

The grocery worker average wage here in DC is closer to $11/hr. I'll be happy to supply you with the average apartment rents in this area. You can do the math. Who is entitled to a middle class life? That's the question this strike is asking. Do you really think you don't have a stake in that? Who decides?

That IS the point.

Detante?

via Josh Marshal:

Nader, Kerry to Discuss Defeating Bush

By HARRY R. WEBER

ATLANTA (AP) - Ralph Nader said Sunday he will meet with John Kerry next month to discuss the effort to defeat President Bush in the November election.

While stressing that he is still a competitor in the race, the independent presidential hopeful said he views his candidacy as a "second front against Bush, however small."

Following a speech on the environment at Georgia State University, Nader stepped up his attacks on Bush, describing the Republican incumbent as "a giant corporation residing in the White House camouflaging as a human being."

"George W. Bush's values are corporate values," Nader told reporters. And he said the administration "should spend more time waging peace ... than waging a military conflict."

At the same time, Nader prodded Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to push traditional Democratic values of helping working families. He said the Democrats in general need to be reminded of that.

He did not elaborate on the meeting he plans with the Massachusetts senator and there was no immediate response from the Kerry campaign.

Well, well. It looks like it is going to be another busy week for us liberal newsbloggers.

Finding the Middle Way

Here's a story that pulls all the pieces together. It has religion, politics, sex and money all mixed together:

A Matter Of Church, Conscience And Cash
Episcopal Diocese Pays for Backing First Gay Bishop

By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page C01

Russell Randle and the Rev. John A.M. Guernsey are both Episcopalians who love their church. And both were deeply disturbed when church leaders, including their own bishop, selected the denomination's first openly gay bishop at its general convention last summer.

But the two Northern Virginia residents strongly disagree about what several parishes in their diocese have done in response to that vote. To demonstrate their displeasure at the elevation of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, the parishes have reduced or eliminated their annual financial contribution to the diocese.

The result has been a 19 percent drop in the diocese's income for 2004, causing a severe financial crunch -- and a heated debate among church members over whether it is right to withhold pledge money from the diocese as a protest.

"Just as our bishop and deputies voted their conscience at [last summer's] general convention, our parishioners are following their conscience in their giving," said Guernsey, whose All Saints' Episcopal Church in Woodbridge is sending only $26,432 to the diocese this year, compared with last year's contribution of $117,635.

"If our people were forced to underwrite and support the actions of the general convention by their giving, they would feel forced to leave the church," the rector added. His parish is affiliated with the American Anglican Council, a conservative Episcopal network that believes the Robinson decision violated Scripture.

Randle, a lawyer and active member of Christ Church in Alexandria, sees things differently.

"The bottom line is, if we're a community working together, one has to provide the basic support to keep working together," said the Arlington resident, who was a lay delegate to the general convention and voted against Robinson's elevation. "The things that unite us are a lot more important than the things that divide."

Randle lamented that the drop in diocesan revenue, which funds everything from salaries to youth ministry to overseas missions, is "limiting our ability to plant new churches." This is especially important in Northern Virginia, he said, where some Hispanic immigrant communities include many Episcopalians.
....
Unlike many other Episcopal dioceses, which impose quotas on individual parishes, Virginia has a voluntary system in which each parish decides what percentage of its income to give the diocese.

In 2002, the average contribution was 6.65 percent of parish income, compared with about 15 percent 40 years ago, Kerr said.

The Washington diocese, which covers the District and the Maryland suburbs, is a bit more assertive. "We ask for 10 percent of what's basically normal operating revenue," said spokesman Jim Naughton, who added, "There is no penalty for giving less or giving nothing at all."

Christ Church in Accokeek is the only parish that gives no money to the Washington diocese, a decision that predated the Robinson vote, Naughton said.

Washington Bishop John Bryson Chane also voted to affirm Robinson as bishop. But that has not affected the diocese's finances, Naughton noted. "Many parishes increased their giving to the diocese this year," he said, adding that the entire amount is "up a couple of percentage points."

The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia is the largest in the Episcopal Church. Like the rest of the state, it is somewhat more conservative than the church in general. Just across the river, the Diocese of DC and Maryland is one of the most liberal. On a parish-by-parish basis, a number of churches offer gay marriage ceremonies. My colleague Le Pretre Noir, one of the great religious liberals in the blogworld, pastors a couple of congregations in the most conservative part of a liberal diocese and comments frequently on the cognitive dissonance he has to work with.

This story plays out the tensions present in Catholicism and the mainline Protestant denominations today, both in the US and around the world. As church membership falls in the US, it is growing in the third world, but all of the missionary faiths rely on first world money to support their growing but impoverished congregations in the southern hemisphere. Those mission churches are more conservative and traditional and oppose heatedly the mainstreaming of GLBT people into the life of their faiths.

The Anglican communion has always had a genius for finding the middle way to maintain its unity. Ordination of gay and lesbian ministers and consecration of homosexual bishops is going to test this faith's ability to play to its center.

Among the Home Crowd

via Democratic Veteran:

Rockefeller sounds off on Iraq

By Paul J. Nyden
STAFF WRITER

"If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. “I have admitted that my vote was wrong.”

The key Senate vote authorizing a war against Iraq came Oct. 11, 2003. It passed 77 to 23. The opponents included Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., an outspoken opponent of President Bush’s war plans. (The House of Representatives voted to pass a similar resolution, 296 to 133.)

“The decision got made before there was a whole bunch of intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped.

“You had a president who we now know was determined to go to war. He was going to be a war president,” Rockefeller said during an interview with editors at The Charleston Gazette on Friday.

“We had this feeling we could be welcomed as liberators. Americans don’t know history, geography, ethnicity,” Rockefeller said. “The administration had no idea of what they were getting into in Iraq. We are not internationalists. We border on being isolationists. We don’t know anything about the Middle East.”

Rockefeller also said he is disturbed at the failure to involve the United Nations in creating a new government and finding peace in Iraq.

“He [Bush] has been stiffing the United Nations,” the senator said. “He doesn’t believe in the United Nations. He doesn’t understand the United Nations.”

The political atmosphere in Washington, D.C., changed dramatically after Bush took office, said Rockefeller, who has served in the Senate since 1985. “Republicans fell totally in line since Bush came into office. They have a loyalty I have never seen before.

“They are true believers. It started with [Rep.] Newt Gingrich [R-Ga.] in 1994. Nothing gets in their way. Facts don’t get in their way.

“And three chairmen of major [Senate] committees were told by Dick Cheney not to investigate anything in the administration.”

Many of the senator’s feelings were strengthened during his five-day trip with four other senators to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations last week.

In Iraq, the senators visited a team of researchers investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction. “They have three million pieces of paper,” Rockefeller said. “But it is a sham. There is nothing to point to any weapons of any kind.”

Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the influence of terrorist groups, such as al-Qaida, is growing. “But only about five percent of the insurgents in Iraq are coming across the borders into the country. Most of them are homegrown.”

Domestic problems will continue to grow, Rockefeller believes, since Bush administration tax cuts could put the nation in a deficit for the next 50 years.

Tax cuts are hurting all federal social, educational and medical programs. The only agencies currently getting significantly increased funding today are military, homeland security and intelligence operations.

Rockefeller said he was particularly outraged by recent revelations that Bush administration leaders failed to provide Congress and the public with honest estimates of the costs of prescription drug benefits in the Medicare program.

When Bush signed the new bill late last year, he said costs for prescription drugs would be $400 billion over the next 10 years. Then, in late January, Bush admitted those costs actually would be $534 billion.

“Bush withheld the real costs of Medicare. That is absolutely unheard of,” Rockefeller said. “There will be an investigation of that.”

Rockefeller had high praise for Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief who served for 30 years under three Republican presidents and one Democratic president.

So, this is the way the story is playing beyond the Beltway. That's good to know.

Labor News

I listened to W's Saturday radio address yesterday with growing outrage. The economy is in trouble and all he can do is talk about home ownership rates, which are something that the presidency has little to do with. Widespread unemployment, the rate of which is masked by BLS statistics, artificially low interest rates and easy credit, combined with a bubble in both real estate and equity markets, have handed us a dangerous economy.

Kevin Drum has a lengthy discussion about the housing bubble today. What he doesn't talk about is that, with average wages actually falling, these prices are unsustainable. The foreclosure rate, nationally, is the highest it has been since the Reagan recession.

Feeling the SQUEEZE?

If money's tight, don't wait until a foreclosure posting to tell your lender you're in trouble

By Teresa McUsic

Special to the Star-Telegram

A record 1,610 houses in Tarrant, Denton and Collin counties are scheduled to be sold next month in foreclosure -- a number unseen since the 1980s

"It's a devastating problem; since 1997, foreclosures in the city have doubled. In February alone, more than 1,000 properties were listed for sale." Philly Daily News

I'll be paying special attention to the economy this week, because I'm hoping Bush gets hung out to dry on it very soon. But there is another reason that I'm focusing on money matters this week: on Tuesday, Local 400 of the United Food and Commercial workers will be voting to either ratify a new contract or to go on strike. The Local represents 40,000 workers in a huge geographical area from Eastern Tennessee to the Maryland shore. The contracts with the two largest grocery employers in the area, Safeway and Giant, expire at midnight Tuesday. The Union is prepared for and expecting a strike.

On Wednesday, I will begin participating in a group blog dedicated to job actions, labor and organizing. Marc Brazeau, Nathan Newman, Max Sawicky, Jordan Barab and Carter Wright will be my partners in this endeavor. As we get closer to the launch, I'll post a permanent link over on the sidebar. I'm looking forward to bringing you stories from the picket lines, information on how to decode what you hear and see in the press and some of the history of the labor movement in this country.

Bump will continue to bring you the mega-narratives in politics, culture and religion in our times. I look forward to this new venture with such well-informed and credentialed partners.

Wave of the Future

A Town's Future Is Leaving the Country
The 1,500 residents of Clintwood learn the meaning of outsourcing the hard way.

By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer

The disappearance of Travelocity will send more young people like Rose to such cities as Knoxville, Tenn., and Roanoke, Va., further eroding the fabric of the community. "We're becoming more and more Third World here," said Bill Deel, a retired English teacher. "The best and the brightest leave."

The joke among the town's citizens is that the only secure jobs are at the new state prison, because they're not going to be shipping the convicts to India anytime soon. There are several new lockups around the county, which a lot of people have mixed feelings about.

"It's not quite as bad as being a nuclear waste dump site," said John Clay Stanley, director of the Dickenson County Chamber of Commerce. "But we're the dumpsite for human misery."

Even with the Travelocity jobs, Dickenson County was in a precarious position. With a population of 16,000 and falling, the county leads Virginia in the wrong statistics. Per-capita income here is half the state average, but the suicide rate is 66% higher. Unemployment is in the double digits.

Like most community officials, Stanley refuses to be pessimistic. But the abruptness of the Travelocity announcement was unnerving.

"A few weeks ago, I was watching a TV program showing how customer-service people in India were being trained to speak with a Southern accent," Stanley said. "I didn't realize I was seeing our annihilation."

Travelocity says it is only doing what its competitors have already done. Sykes Enterprises, which runs centers for Fortune 500 clients, is also cutting back sharply in the region. It shut one center in eastern Kentucky in January and has slated the second for extinction next month. Those jobs are going overseas too.

At the heart of offshoring is the question of what a company owes its workers and its community. It's a topic with particular resonance in Appalachia, where the coal companies once owned everything and the miners had to fight for basic human rights.

Fifteen years ago, the primary employer in Dickenson County was Pittston Coal. Like Travelocity, it was losing money. So Pittston cut benefits for retired miners and their widows. The miners responded by walking out. Hundreds were arrested for civil disobedience. Violence flared as the strikers punctured tires on coal trucks. The strike lasted nearly a year, the bitterness far longer.

Two years ago, Pittston sold its holdings. Mining is still a big business here, but ownership is fragmented.
....
Local development officials were so happy to land Travelocity that they loaned the company $250,000 for employee training. They also rounded up $1.6 million in government funding to build a day-care center. The goal: keeping the employees — and therefore Travelocity — happy.

A few years later, the company's promises are remembered with weariness and the money with regret. Travelocity didn't turn out to be so different after all. But the techniques used by workers against the mining companies no longer apply.

"The situation with Pittston was physical," said Will Mullins, 22, a Travelocity operations manager. "We could block the roads and block the trucks, and there was no way they could get the coal out. But there's no way to block the Internet. If we tried to do a strike, they'd just ignore us."

Travelocity, like other companies, is doing what it takes to survive, he added. "They'd cut our throats if it meant the stock price would go up a quarter." The company, a division of Sabre Holdings in Southlake, Texas, was an early leader in the Web travel business, but in the last two years its market share has been falling against No. 1-ranked Expedia and the up-and-coming Orbitz. Trying to remedy that situation, Travelocity has launched an $80-million ad campaign featuring a gnome that roams the world.

Wal-Mart World

A Lesson From Wal-Mart

By Peter J. Solomon

To meet the Wal-Mart challenge, consolidation is an imperative for both competitors and suppliers. Size can provide retailers with the product offerings and price flexibility to help keep customers from migrating to Wal-Mart. It can also allow suppliers to drive their manufacturing and logistics costs down and give them more countervailing negotiating power.

The size of Wal-Mart relative to its competitors and suppliers is so vast that the principal strategic question for every American retailer and consumer goods manufacturer is: "What's my relationship to Wal-Mart?" After a firm's management answers this question, it can decide how to answer other strategic questions. For many companies, that will mean getting to a size not attainable by internal growth, which will inevitably lead them to consolidation.

There is no reason to believe that the Wal-Mart economic juggernaut -- with $250 billion of sales (larger than the next five retailers combined) and $240 billion of market equity -- will slow down. The FTC needs to update its historical, now largely anachronistic definition of "markets" to reflect more accurately Wal-Mart's dominant position and allow others to join forces to compete.

If the FTC acts too aggressively against future mergers, there ultimately will be fewer competitors, not more, and weaker competition, not stronger. Eventually, Wal-Mart's everyday low prices may not need to be so low.

The need to change its definition of "markets" to account for Wal-Mart should have been apparent to the FTC in 1997, when it blocked the proposed merger between Staples and Office Depot (on whose board of directors I have served for 14 years). The FTC ruled that the two "category killer" superstores made up their own "relative market" despite the fact that at the time Wal-Mart alone probably sold more disposable paper office products than Staples, Office Depot and Office Max combined. Seven years later, the FTC still has not broadened its criteria in the face of the radically altered marketplace.

The last dominant retailer to have such influence was Sears, Roebuck and Co. in the late 1920s, when its explosive growth ignited a wave of consolidation in the retail business. Locally based department stores merged to create Federated Department Stores, Allied Stores and Associated Dry Goods and emerged as powerful competitors.

Wal-Mart's success is stimulating countervailing forces. In evaluating the inevitable flood of mergers to come, regulators should avoid unwittingly handicapping the emerging competition.

I think this is about 180 degrees wrong. Solomon is an investment banker and fails to see markets as individual choices. If we had half-way decent labor laws in place and a health care system that actually worked, most of these abuses would be illegal. The idea that creating ever more Wal-Marts will somehow solve the problem of crummy workplaces is fantastic. I guess he thinks ever more of us should be living in boxes and courting a case of TB.

They're Ba-ack

About 3,000 kinds of cicadas populate the globe, and most live conventional lives of a few years' duration. The eastern half of the United States is home to a unique set of species, called periodical cicadas, whose members spend 13 or 17 years underground before suddenly emerging into a frenzied and noisy adulthood.

Periodicals are the glamour girls and boys of the cicada world. And we are about to greet them again.

A few inches below the surface of the soil, in about 15 states and the District, billions of cicadas that were spawned in the spring of 1987 are ready to leave their subterranean homes and taste life in the open air.

In a few weeks, probably in early to mid-May, the cicada nymphs will crawl out of the ground, shed their skins and unfurl their wings. The males will out-roar lawn mowers in their search for a mate. The females will lay their eggs in the branches of trees. Then, beginning in mid-June, the adults will all die.

Prepare to welcome Brood X (that's 10), as a federal bureaucrat named this batch of 17-year cicadas. Periodical cicadas last appeared in the Washington area in 1996, when Brood II came topside. That emergence, while sparser overall, affected Virginia more heavily than will X, which will largely sidestep the Old Dominion.

The good news is that these insects are almost entirely harmless -- they don't bite or sting, although they can startle. They may make a few outdoor weddings even more unforgettable than brides and grooms might hope.

The rest of the news is that they are pretty hard to miss. There is of course the noise. But there is also their charm.

Elizabeth Kraft discovered that after a few days, she was enchanted with the bugs. "It was really creepy, but it's also amazing. It's an amazing encounter with nature."

"You're only going to see them three or four times in your life," says John Zyla, an amateur naturalist in Ridge, in southern St. Mary's County, who plans to track this year's appearance of Brood X. "I feel fortunate to drive to a place where they're calling."

I'm less enthusiastic. The noise is intense. During the last "emergence" it kept me awake at night, it sounds like the sound track to a science fiction movie blasting outside your windows.

They do enormous damage to tree limbs as they lay their eggs in the bark of the smallest branches. And they are everywhere. This is an encounter with nature you don't get to skip.

Wierd Weather

Rare hurricane stirs South Atlantic
Storm could make landfall in Brazil late Saturday or early Sunday

Saturday, March 27, 2004 Posted: 3:59 PM EST (2059 GMT)

The storm swirls off the coast of Brazil in this satellite image taken Saturday at 10 a.m. ET.

(CNN) -- A rare South Atlantic hurricane about 110 miles off the coast of southeastern Brazil on Saturday afternoon was expected to make landfall Saturday night or Sunday, a U.S. government meteorologist said.

The report marked the first time since 1966, when satellite tracking began, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded a hurricane-strength storm in the South Atlantic Ocean, said Jack Beven, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.

"Some of the outer cloud bands are just reaching the coast," Beven said.

He described the Category 1 storm, which was packing 85 mph winds, as moving southwesterly toward the coast at about 9 mph and predicted it would not gain strength.

Tropical storm-strength winds extended less than 100 miles from the eye.

"The whole thing is only about 200 miles across, at best," Beven said. "Size-wise, it's a very small system."

No one on shore was reporting significant storms, he said.

Remember that story a couple of weeks back about the effects of Global warming, a scary Pentagon study?

Faithful Liberal

For those liberals who complain that the religious left isn't heard in politics and public policy:

BISHOP MAKES A FAITH-BASED CHALLENGE TO GEORGE W BUSH

(New York, March 19 2004) - President George W. Bush has made his Christian faith and "compassionate conservatism" central to his presidency and campaign for re-election. But just how "Christian" are the assumptions underlying current US domestic and foreign policy?

In a book to be published in June by Continuum, retired Atlanta Bishop Bennett Sims provides a penetrating critique of the religious and political assumptions of the Bush presidency. He sets out contrasting versions of Christianity, both of which may be drawn from the Hebrew-Christian scriptures.

"Why Bush Must Go - a Bishop's Faith-based Challenge" gives a succinct and compelling alternative to the Bush vision of Christian leadership.

Bishop Sims juxtaposes the violent, confrontational concept of power presented by George W. Bush with the enduring power of compassion, justice, and nonviolence exemplified by the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth. He rejects the fierce Fundamentalism that expects an imminent and violent end to history and celebrates the movement of prophetic power from the shadows of history to the foreground of political action.

As the presidential campaign gathers momentum this summer, Bishop Sims is the ideal source for answers to questions that will be debated across the nation.

About the author
The Right Rev. Bennett J. Sims is retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta (1972-83), and Founding President of the Institute for Servant Leadership at Emory University (1988-99). A seminary professor before becoming a bishop, he returned to teaching, at Candler School of Theology, after his retirement. He is the author of three books: "Invitation to Hope," "Purple Ink: Theology and Social Ethics," and "Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium." >From 1943 to 1946 Sims served in the U.S. Navy as a line officer on destroyers.

Praise for "Why Bush Must Go":

"This is a timely and courageous book. It should provoke much thought, prayer and discussion. Read it." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Bishop Sims believes in a politically committed spirituality. His message should be read and discussed in every church in the land at this critical time in the nation's history." - The Rev. William Sloan Coffin

"This is a passionate and persuasive book. Bennett Sims has woven together his career as an Episcopal theologian and bishop with his ethical and political concerns as an informed citizen of the United States. He examines issues underneath the political propaganda of the spin-doctors and presents a vision of what the country can be which judges what it is becoming. This book will not be popular in the present White House, but it will ring true with millions of Americans and people around the world will cheer that someone inside the USA sees what they see so clearly." - Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of A New Christianity for a Better World

"Like the minor prophets before him, Bennett Sims has written a small book that packs a major wallop. His mix of religion and politics is as fresh as it is bold, but his critique of power goes well beyond reproof. Having witnessed the worst that people can do, Sims remains an apostle of hope. His practical vision of a peaceable planet is so compelling that only the terminally hard of heart can fail to respond." - Barbara Brown Taylor, author of When God Is Silent

Waste, Fraud and, Especially, Abuse

Federal auditors on the trail of wasteful spending in Iraq

By Seth Borenstein

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Uncle Sam's "cost detectives" are following the billions of taxpayers' dollars the Bush administration is spending to rebuild Iraq, and that makes some people nervous.

Federal auditors are on the trail of wasteful spending and padded bills. They work in the offices of the politically connected defense contractors they're investigating. What they've dug up so far is big news. Who they are remains mostly a secret.

They've found that Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm, has charged $67.3 million for soldiers' meals that were never served, billed Uncle Sam $2.64 per gallon for gas in oil-rich Iraq and had cost estimates that were inflated by $700 million at one point. They faulted contractor Science Applications International Corp. for billing the government for flying a Hummer and a pickup into Iraq on a chartered jet.

And the Defense Contract Audit Agency is just getting started.

"You just gotta understand auditors. Once we get a taste of something, we start digging," said Rich Buhre, a recently retired regional agency director. "You peel the onion (of finances) enough ... it's very difficult to try to hide that stuff" from the auditors.

What makes a good auditor is "the junkyard dog mentality," Buhre said. "It's like, you ever get an itch and something just doesn't feel right?"

The agency's job is to be a consultant to the Pentagon and more than two dozen other federal agencies on the arcane language of contracts, to see whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth.

It's the most un-Washington of the federal agencies. It shuns attention, gets bipartisan praise in Congress and adheres to strict ethics rules that rotate auditors every five years so they don't get close to the companies they investigate.

What really separates it from the rest of the feds is that it saves taxpayers money instead of just spending it.

Last year, it spent $406 million, but helped the government save $2.2 billion. In the past three years, it found that contractors had inflated the prices they charged the government by more than $88 million.

"They're the last line of defense for taxpayers," said Keith Ashdown, the vice president of the liberal fiscal watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The key to the agency is that it's independent from the rest of the Defense Department bureaucracy and from political and business pressure, said former acting agency director Fred Newton. He added: "You got to be independent about pursuing it and not having a contractor make you back off."

That's what the agency is doing with Iraqi spending. Its work triggered a Pentagon inspector general's report March 18 that found serious problems with 24 early contracts in Iraq. The agency has issued 187 reports on Iraqi contracts in all.

All of which has something to do with this:

U.S. contract goofs rob Iraqi forces of vital gear

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Senior American commanders in Iraq are publicly complaining that delays in delivering radios, body armor and other equipment have hobbled their ability to build the Iraqi security force that eventually is supposed to replace U.S. troops here.

New members of the Iraqi security force celebrate their graduation Thursday in Baghdad.

The lag in supplying the equipment, because of a contract dispute, perhaps even contributed to deaths among Iraqi recruits, say U.S. commanders, whose private complaints through the chain of command have broken into public debate in recent days.

A spokesman for the company that was awarded the original contract said much of the equipment was "sitting on the docks" waiting to be shipped to Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, praised the Iraqi forces helping his troops in western Iraq, which includes the dangerous regions around Fallujah and the Syrian border. But he said the work had faltered for lack of combat gear for the Iraqis.

"Not only are the security forces bravely leading the fight against terrorists, they are, in some cases, insisting on doing it alone," Swannack said. "They want to defeat these enemies of a new and free Iraq. If we had the equipment for these brave young men, we would be much farther along."

The U.S. military, too, has suffered shortages of some equipment, such as newer bulletproof vests and armored Humvees. But the equipment for America's troops and for the Iraqis comes through different contract processes.

The first batch of equipment for the Iraqis - rifles, uniforms, body armor, radios and other gear - had been paid for and was to have been delivered under a $327 million contract to Nour USA Ltd. of Vienna, Va. But the Pentagon canceled that deal this month after competing firms protested that Army procurement officers had botched the contract with sloppy language and incomplete paperwork.

"We messed up," said an Army official with 28 years of experience in contracting.

The Army is rushing to seek new bids but that could take two to three months.

"Part of it is just the magnitude of how much was needed - thousands of police cars, hundreds of thousands of uniforms," said Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, the Army's deputy director of operations. "It was just a lot harder to get stuff in than we anticipated."

A spokesman for Nour USA said that the company had protested the Army's cancellation of the contract and that much of the equipment to have been supplied was ready to ship, sitting in warehouses in the United States and eastern Europe.

The list of reconstruction contracts either delayed or being investigated is growing because of what watchdog agencies say is an ad hoc and underregulated selection process. Analysts caution that it will invite more abuse if the United States transfers power to an Iraqi government without a strong oversight agency.

Not About AIDS Patients

Plan to Fight AIDS Overseas Is Foundering
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: March 28, 2004

Three years after the United Nations declared a worldwide offensive against AIDS and 14 months after President Bush promised $15 billion for AIDS treatment in poor countries, shortages of money and battles over patents have kept antiretroviral drugs from reaching more than 90 percent of the poor people who need them.

Progress in distributing the drugs, which have sharply cut the death rate in the United States and other Western countries, has been excruciatingly slow despite steep drops in their prices.

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As a result, only about 300,000 people in the world's poorest nations are getting the drugs, out of six million who need them, according to the World Health Organization.

Experts, advocacy groups and health officials agree that the delays, compounded by inadequate medical facilities and training in very poor countries, are likely to persist unless spending is stepped up sharply.

Early this month, Stephen Lewis, the special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, conceded that the W.H.O.'s ambitious plan to have three million people in treatment by 2005 — announced on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day — was already collapsing from a lack of money. Donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are now about $1.6 billion a year, barely 20 percent of what Secretary General Kofi Annan said was needed when he created the fund in 2001.

Saying that global contributions come to a tiny fraction of what is being spent on military operations and building civilian institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Lewis added that if the W.H.O. program failed, "there are no excuses left, no rationalizations to hide behind, no murky slanders to justify indifference — there will only be the mass graves of the betrayed."

While Mr. Bush promised in his 2003 State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over five years on AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, his budget requests have fallen far short of that goal. For the most recent donation to the Global Fund, he requested only $200 million, although Congress authorized $550 million.

Nor have Europe and Asia been as generous as the fund had hoped.

Dr. Richard G. A. Feachem, a Briton who is the fund's executive director, put a brave face on the situation, describing current donations as "a steep upward flight path to our cruising altitude, which we anticipate to be $8 billion." To get there in the fund's first two years would be "inconceivable," he added. He is lobbying Congress for $1.2 billion for 2005.

At the same time, few people in poor countries have been able to get lower-priced generic antiretroviral drugs. While the generic drugs have been approved by the W.H.O., endorsed by the World Bank and used in several African countries, the Bush administration has so far paid only for medicines that are still under patent and cost much more.

Yet another give-away program for Big Pharma.

While the Bushies play politics with AIDS, here are the latest statistics from UNAIDS:

"The global HIV/AIDS epidemic killed more than 3 million people in 2003, and an estimated 5 million acquired the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) bringing to 40 million the number of people living with the virus around the world."

- AIDS Epidemic Update 2003

The public health community is tearing its hair out trying to get the press's attention about this global epidemic, which will devastate entire societies and economies in addition to the plain human suffering it will cause.

Rummy Broke It

Personnel Crisis Looming, Army Spouses Say
As Soldiers and Their Families Tire of Extended Deployments, Reenlistment May Fall, Survey Shows

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A01

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. -- Patty B. Morgan's husband was fighting in Iraq with the 101st Airborne and she was caring for two children by herself. Their lease was expiring and they had committed to buying a house across town, so she was going through with the move anyway.

One hot morning last July, as she was about to drive boxes to the new place, she walked outside, infant car seat in hand, and opened the garage door -- to find that her green Jeep had been stolen.

A few days later, she was told that her husband wouldn't be home by Labor Day, as she had expected, but would serve in Iraq six months more, for a total of a year.

"It was a hell of a week," Morgan said in her throaty voice.

Morgan's experience is part of a significant change in Army life brought about by the war on terrorism: The extended, or repeated, deployments that characterize the post-9/11 Army have intensified the burdens traditionally borne by military families. And most of the spouses who have remained behind are wondering how long the Army can keep it up.

This change is reflected in a recent poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, and in dozens of supplemental interviews. The poll, the first nongovernmental survey of military spouses conducted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, included more than 1,000 spouses living on or near the 10 heaviest-deploying Army bases.

While most of them said they have coped well, three-quarters said they believed that the Army may hit a personnel crisis as soldiers and their families tire of the pace and leave for civilian lives.

Lt. Gen. Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief, said in an interview that overall, The Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll results seemed to reflect those of the service's internal surveys.

The findings come at a time when the Army is providing soldiers' families with unprecedented levels of support. Over the past 30 years, beginning with the end of conscription after the Vietnam War, the service became smaller, more professional -- and more married. By the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the military was caught flat-footed by the growing need to support soldiers' families during a major deployment.

Well, we've been predicting this since day one of Bump. Here's a link to the poll results. Younger spouses married to more recent enlistees are having the hardest time, which is not much of a surprise.

Tech Trouble

My email has been down since about 10 EST last night. Of course tech support at the ISP doesn't keep weekend hours, so I don't know what the problem is or how long it will take to fix. Leave email for me in the comments below.

See No Evil

How Good Intelligence Falls on Deaf Ears
By DAVID KAHN

Published: March 27, 2004

Two centuries ago, Carl von Clausewitz concluded that "most intelligence is false." A century later, the chief of the German general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, added a psychological explanation for this: "The higher commander generally makes himself a picture of friend and foe, in the painting of which personal wishes provide the main elements. If incoming reports appear to correspond with this picture, they are laid by with satisfaction. If they contradict it, they are discarded as entirely false."

Of course, the response is not limited to the realm of politics and statecraft. People believe what they want to believe. Edna St. Vincent Millay asked her reader to "Pity me that the heart is slow to learn/What the swift mind beholds at every turn." A little boy begged of Shoeless Joe Jackson, on hearing that he had betrayed a World Series for money, "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Intelligence cannot discover everything or foresee all. Such expectations exceed human capacity. People ask, "Why didn't we intercept their communications?" Perhaps we did. But even if we had, they would probably not have revealed anything like, "Tomorrow we fly into the World Trade Center" but only something like "Tomorrow is the day!" The best we can do is prepare as much as possible. After Pearl Harbor, the commanders there, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Gen. Walter C. Short, complained that they did not have all the intelligence needed to alert them to the attack. Regardless of whether this was true, there was no excuse for them not to be ready.

Intelligence will always be incomplete; it will often run counter to what people want it to say. Leaders, however, are paid to overcome these obstacles. They can only lead when they deal with reality — and then take steps to help us plan for the worst.

As we now know, they did have the intelligence. They just didn't listen to it.

Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming
By PETER R. NEUMAN

The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was relatively little interest in Al Qaeda when the Bush team took over. For most of 2001, the national security agenda really consisted of only two items, neither of which had anything to do with the terrorist threat of radical Islam. First, the administration increased its efforts to bring about regime change in Iraq, which was believed to be the prime source of instability in a region of great strategic importance.

The second goal was a more competitive stance toward China. Missile defense — this time against attack by China and North Korea — was put back on the table. Even the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter in 2001 is an indication of the administration's mindset — intelligence resources were deployed not to find Osama bin Laden, but to monitor what many White House hawks considered the most likely future challenger of American power.

Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.

Table Pounding

Trust Clarke: He's right about Bush
More than two years after the worst terrorist attack in history, the President still does not understand the threat we confront, say security experts IVO DAALDER and JAMES LINDSAY

Why are administration officials pounding the table so hard? Because confirmation of Mr. Clarke's basic accusations comes from none other than George W. Bush himself.

Take the charge that the Mr. Bush did not make fighting al-Qaeda a priority before Sept. 11. In late 2001, Mr. Bush told the journalist Bob Woodward that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after Sept. 11. I was not on point." Mr. Bush knew Osama bin Laden was a menace. "But I didn't feel the sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Or take Mr. Clarke's charge that Mr. Bush immediately sought to link the attacks in New York and Washington to Iraq. According to the notes of national-security meetings that the White House gave Mr. Woodward so he could write his book, Bush at War, the President ended an early debate over how to respond to Sept. 11 by saying, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now." At a later meeting, he linked Saddam Hussein to the attacks: "He was probably behind this in the end."

Those admissions highlight a broader, more troubling point that Mr. Clarke's accusations raise, which is that Mr. Bush does not understand the threat we confront. For Mr. Bush and his advisers it is not al-Qaeda that is the real danger so much as the states that supposedly support it. Thus, a Defence Department spokesman, responding to Mr. Clarke's claim that Mr. Wolfowitz did not take the al-Qaeda terrorist threat seriously, said Mr. Wolfowitz did see al-Qaeda "as a major threat to U.S. security, the more so because of the state support it received from the Taliban and because of its possible links to Iraq."

The assumption driving Mr. Bush's war on terrorism is that the United States can win by targeting rogue states and the tyrants who rule them. The war in Afghanistan was about ousting the Taliban and denying al-Qaeda a sanctuary; the Iraq war was about ousting Saddam.

That view of the terrorist threat is deeply flawed, quite apart from the dubious claims about ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Al-Qaeda is a transnational network of terrorists, less like a state than like a non-governmental organization or multinational corporation with multiple independent franchises. It thrives on an Islamist ideology, and extends its presence to the far reaches of the globe -- not just in rogue and failed states, but within the West as well. Its terrorists can strike -- whether in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid or New York and Washington -- without the direct support of states. That is what makes it so frightening.

Mr. Clarke's charges have stung the Bush administration not just because of the stature of the accuser, but because at their core, they say that more than two years after the worst terrorist attack in history, the President and his advisers still don't get what happened.

That is the true, and alarming, message of this week's debate.

Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay are co-authors of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, which won the 2003 Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations.

Think about this. At issue is not just 9/11, at issue is NOW. Very little, beyond airline safety, has been done to change the threat profile of this country. The ports are not safer. The railways are not safer. The power plants are not safer, nor are the chemical plants. The bridges and highways are not safer, and a tanker truck fire in Connecticut yesterday took out a hunk of the major east coast throughway. The money that it would take to fix this now is in Mesopotamia.

This is the message of Richard Clarke's book. We are in greater danger NOW because Bush took us into Iraq. NOW.

Unpacified Iraq

Iraqi cleric: 9/11 was a 'miracle from God'
Five Iraqis killed in Fallujah

Friday, March 26, 2004 Posted: 4:22 PM EST (2122 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- An influential Shiite cleric in Iraq called Israel's assassination of the spiritual leader of Hamas a "dirty crime against Islam" and the September 11, 2001, terror attacks "a miracle from God."

Moqtada al-Sadr delivered a charged sermon at Friday prayers at a mosque near the holy city of Najaf, blasting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas.

On Monday, Israeli helicopters fired rockets at the wheelchair-bound Yassin as he left a Gaza City mosque. Yassin and seven others were killed in the attack on the leader of what Israel, the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist group.

Al-Sadr Friday called Sharon the "biggest terrorist of all.

" ... He has committed this dirty crime and killed one of the greatest of Islamic mujahedeen," al-Sadr told hundreds of worshippers at the Kufa mosque. "This was once again a dirty crime against Islam."

He accused the United States of complicity in Yassin's killing and said Iraqis should react to the assassination "in the way that satisfies God."

Al-Sadr led the worshippers in chants: "No, no Israel! No, no to the Jews! No, no America! No, no to terrorism!"

Al-Sadr, who also has a powerful base in a poor Baghdad neighborhood, railed against the United States' occupation of Iraq.

"I seek the spread of freedom and democracy in the way that satisfies God," he said. "They have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner -- and the proof of this is the fall of the American Twin Towers."

He then referred to the September 11 attacks as "a miracle from God.

This is real bad news, Al-Sadr is enormously influential among the Shi'a, particularly the poor ones whose lives have been made enormously worse by our mishandled occupation. He has a private militia and the will to use it.

Marine and 11 Iraqis Die During Fighting in Sunni Triangle
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: March 26, 2004

FALLUJA, Iraq, March 26 - At least 12 people, including one American marine, were killed in a series of gunbattles today, as guerrilla violence swept the Sunni-dominated area north and west of the Iraqi capital.

Among the Iraqis killed was a cameraman for ABC News, who was shot by American soldiers, an eyewitness said, when he stepped into the middle of a skirmish with Iraqi guerrillas.

American military officials provided no information on the ABC camerman or any other Iraqi casualties. They said that in addition to the one marine killed in the fighting here today, ``several'' others had been wounded. The death of the marine comes a day after Iraqi guerrillas attacked an American convoy here with homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, leaving one marine dead and two wounded.

Seven other Iraqis - three suspected insurgents and four Iraqi paramilitary troops - were killed during a large-scale attack on a suspected guerrilla hideout in Tikrit. American military officials said they took 21 prisoners in that raid.

The combat today was the most dramatic measure of the violence that has continued unabated throughout the Sunni heartland in recent months. In both the level of sophistication and ease of maneuver displayed by the insurgents, the fighting has appeared to raise new doubts about the claims of American military officers that that they were close to defeating the insurgency led by members of Saddam Hussein's fallen regime and were dealing with a smaller number of foreign-led Islamic terrorists.

The fierce street fighting in Fallujah demonstrated anew that this city, 35 miles west of Baghdad and in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, the epicenter of anti-American resistance, was far from pacified and that there were large areas of the city where the Americans could enter only at their peril.
....
The atmosphere was very tense in the city, and hospital officials at the city's main hospital waved away journalists, warning this reporter that there was a very good chance that he would be shot and killed if he went inside.

After the firefights, which were said to have taken place in the Askari neighborhood of the city, the Marines sealed off the main highway to Baghdad and moved in tanks and armored cars.

This evening dozens of marines could still be seen fanning out on foot through the neighborhood. They were walking house to house but they were not searching any houses.

Last month, more than 30 insurgents shot their way into a Falluja police station,
freed dozens of prisoners and killed 15 police officers.

Foreign Press Review

Running scared

The Bush administration fears voters will believe Richard Clarke's allegations, writes Philip James

Friday March 26, 2004

The swiftness and ferocity of the Bush White House's attack on Richard Clarke tells you two things: his story may be largely true, and the Bush administration is terrified that the American people will believe it.

The central allegation - that Mr Bush was so obsessed with going after Saddam Hussein that he openly challenged his counter-terrorism adviser to find a link between September 11 and Iraq the day after the attacks took place - is serious.

It threatens the fundamental platform of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign: that you are safer with them than you are with the Democrats.

The White House did not let a single news cycle go by before questioning that the alleged encounter between the president and Clarke had ever taken place, assigning dark motives to a man who has served four presidents, three of them Republicans.

But you don't have to be Bob Woodward to check Clarke's story out. There were other witnesses to this meeting, one of whom spoke to me.

"The conversation absolutely took place. I was there, but you can't name me," the witness said. "I was one of several people present. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the president had Iraq on his mind, first and foremost."

This former national security council official was too terrified to go on the record - he knows how vengeful this administration can be.

He remembers the late night phone call former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill received just before he published The Price of Loyalty, his account of how the Bush White House set its sights on Iraq from day one. He was about to discover the price of disloyalty to this administration.

It was Donald Rumsfeld on the line, a man more used to authorising deadly force on the grandest scale, gently advising him that it might not be in his best interests to go public.

When O'Neill ignored him, he instantly became the target of an investigation by his former department, which claimed that he had revealed state secrets.

Damning testimony on Bush's tactics

Richard Clarke came across as calm, credible — and courageous — in his testimony Wednesday.

The government's former top counterterrorism adviser began with an expression of contrition before the bipartisan commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, directing his comments to relatives of the victims: "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed."

His comparison of the Clinton and Bush administrations' approaches to terrorism was dramatic and damning. The Clinton White House, he said, had "no higher priority" than combating terrorism — while the Bush White House made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Not surprisingly, several commission members tried to challenge Clarke's motives. John Lehman, a former Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan who now is chair of J.F. Lehman & Co., questioned whether Clarke was "an active partisan trying to shove out a book."

Clarke never flinched. He pointed out that the last time he had to declare party loyalty was 2000 — when he requested a Republican ballot in the Virginia primary. He noted that he had served in the White House under Reagan and both Bushes. He addressed head-on the notion that he was aligned with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry.

"Let's just lay that one to bed," he testified. "I'm not working for the Kerry campaign." While he co-teaches a class with a long-time friend and professional associate who works for Kerry, Clarke stated unequivocally that he would not work for a Kerry administration.

Clarke forcefully countered suggestions that his criticisms of Bush contradict his closed-door testimony to the commission as well as his public statements during his White House tenure.

"In the 15 hours of (closed-door) testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," he said. "And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq ... the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Those words were followed by a long silence, punctuating their power. Clarke has raised unsettling questions about this administration's approach to terrorism, before and after Sept. 11. These questions will not go away.

White House attempts to discredit this public servant have been aggressive to the point of unseemliness. Clarke proved Wednesday that he is fully capable of defending his honour.

A Stronger UN

U.N. Urged to Probe U.S. Role in Haiti
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 26, 2004

Filed at 1:04 p.m. ET

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (AP) -- Caribbean leaders said the U.N. General Assembly should investigate Jean-Bertrand Aristide's claims that the United States staged a coup in Haiti and forced the ouster of the country's first democratically elected president.

The 15-nation Caribbean Community also said it was considering rejecting the U.S.-backed government of Haiti.

At the first day of a two-day summit Thursday, Caribbean leaders said they were focusing on whether to recognize a government that praises the rebels who helped oust Aristide.

Jamaican officials said Aristide will take permanent asylum in South Africa, but not until it holds general elections next month. Aristide has been in temporary exile in Jamaica since March 15, despite protests from U.S. and Haitian officials.

Caribbean leaders are ``still upset and uncomfortable'' about Aristide's departure, and made that clear to U.N. special envoy Reginald Dumas when he listened to their debate, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas told The Associated Press.

``We are prepared to discuss the possibility of identifying exactly what were the circumstances,'' Douglas said. ``We are taking this matter to the U.N. General Assembly for clarification.''

"And the U.N. must mean something. Remember Rwanda, or Kosovo. The U.N. didn't do its job. And we hope tomorrow the U.N. will do its job. If not, all of us need to step back and try to figure out how to make the U.N. work better as we head into the 21st century."

George W. Bush
Press conference in the Azores
March 16, 2003

(hat tip Billmon)

Brutality Brutalizes the Brutalizer

In Army Survey, Troops in Iraq Report Low Morale

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A18

The survey was part of a study initiated by the Army last summer after a number of suicides provoked concern about the mental well-being of soldiers in Iraq. The report faulted the Army for how it handled mental health problems, saying some counselors felt inadequately trained and citing problems in distribution of antidepressant medication and sleeping pills.

But perhaps the most surprising findings were the grim conclusions about troop morale, which indicate that Iraq is taking a toll that goes beyond casualty figures.

The Pentagon has been intensely worried that more frequent and longer combat tours will prompt more soldiers to get out of the Army rather than reenlist, especially if it means a second stint in Iraq or Afghanistan. Army insiders say it is likely that brigades from three divisions that served in Iraq over the past year -- the 101st Airborne, the 3rd Infantry and the 4th Infantry -- are likely to be sent back in 2005.

The Pentagon data on morale also appear to give official confirmation to a more informal survey conducted last summer by Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper. That survey found about half of troops who filled out questionnaires described their unit's morale as low and their training as insufficient, and said they did not plan to reenlist.

Col. Virgil Patterson, who oversaw the Army survey, said he was "somewhat surprised" by the findings on troop morale. He noted that when the survey was taken, soldiers were still feeling the effects of a brutally hot Iraqi summer, and that since then troops have better living conditions and are better able to communicate with their families.

"It was a pretty miserable set of circumstances at the time," he said. "We speculate that all of those contributed to the factor of low morale."

Patterson said he could not place the numbers in historical context because similar surveys have not been conducted before. "This is the first time we've ever gone into an active combat theater and asked soldiers how they are doing, so we have no comparative data," he said. The study, conducted from late August through early October 2003, surveyed 756 Army soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait, focusing on units that had engaged in combat.

Reaction to the Army's survey was mixed among several experts.

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a Vietnam War veteran, said, "It's not particularly surprising, especially given the frustrating nature of the combat they're facing now, with patrols and bombs going off."

But a senior Army commander who spoke on the condition of anonymity expressed alarm.

"I'd be extremely worried by these numbers," said the officer, who specializes in morale issues. Having more than half the soldiers surveyed say they are unhappy should "set off alarm bells," the officer said.

Jonathan Shay, a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, called it "a painful report to read." Shay, who wrote two books on cohesion and leadership problems in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, said the report shows morale and cohesion were "seriously low" among troops in Iraq.

Think this might have something to do with it?

WASHINGTON – To former military police Master Sgt. Lisa Girman and two of her fellow soldiers, May 12 was just "another night in the desert" restraining unruly Iraqi war prisoners. But in January, the three Pennsylvania MPs were discharged from the military for kicking and punching Iraqis, including one allegedly linked to the ambush of the Jessica Lynch convoy. [Editor's note: In the original version, Girman's name was misspelled.]

In a similar case, a Marine guard testified in February that beating uncooperative Iraqi detainees was common. In all, eight Marines have been charged for mistreating detainees, one of whom died in custody.

Now, the US military has charged six more American soldiers with assault, indecent acts, cruelty, and maltreatment in connection with the alleged abuse of as many as 19 detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

From detainee abuse to the excessive use of force and disputed killings of civilians, the Iraq conflict is producing its share of legal and ethical lapses by US service members, despite strenuous efforts by US commanders to avoid them.

The breaches involve only a tiny fraction of the more than 150,000-strong US occupation force, which military ethicists and human rights groups have given generally good marks for their comportment in Iraq. Still, such violations could cause disproportionate damage to the US military's image among Iraqis.

"The forces of gravity that drag you down to the level of your enemy are very powerful," says Albert Pierce, director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at the US Naval Academy. "Sometimes they are inherent in conflict, sometimes they are part of an inherent strategy by the enemy," he says, adding that US commanders are making an "extraordinary effort" to resist such forces.

Nixon Was More Efficient

We keep the WaPo's Al Kamen around to remind us of the painfully obvious but overlooked:

And now former anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke is beating up on the administration, and the Bush folks are acting as if they just heard last weekend that he had a book coming out. Which is just about true, although the book was physically in the White House months ago.

Clarke, bound by the usual pre-publication review agreement, shipped it to the National Security Council on Nov. 4 for a review that lasted at least a couple of months, the White House said.

Not once, apparently, did the NSC reviewers mention to the communications or political people that they had an election bomb on their hands.

Buzz is that the NSC types apparently felt it would have been inappropriate to do so. What? Once again the Bush White House stubbornly refuses to use the levers of power for political purposes? So maybe there is some legal, moral or ethical constraint. This is Washington, for crying out loud.

Had the political people gotten their hands on the book, they might have rushed the vetting so the book could have come out in December. (This in turn would have strengthened the argument that Clarke put it out now only for sales and political purposes.) Or they could have tried an extended rope-a-dope to delay publication until after the election. (Risky with a wily bureaucrat like Clarke, but . . .)

At the very least, they could have improved NSC deputy chief Stephen Hadley's performance Sunday on "60 Minutes" or the impression they are scrambling in defense. And how about a good, old-fashioned Washington hatchet job on Clarke? With more time, they could have done a thorough check for tax problems, various vices, latent thespianism and so forth.

What good is an Enemies List if you don't know how to work it?

Speak Truth To Power At Your Own Risk

White House Wages A War on Clarke
Bush Aides Move to Head Off Damage

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A01

James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, said he had been stunned by the ferocity of the White House campaign but said Clarke "is raising fundamental questions about the credibility of the president and his staff in regard to what they did to keep America safe."

"They are vulnerable, which is why they are attacking so hard," Thurber said. "You have to go back to Vietnam or Watergate to get the same feel about the structure of argument coming out of the White House against Clarke's statements. They've had multiple people rebutting him, with information that is incomplete and selective at best."

White House communications director Dan Bartlett said officials had to take Clarke seriously because "at face value, based on his résumé and experience, you would think this guy is credible.

"Particularly because of how egregious the accusations are, you couldn't let them stand," he said.

In their effort to undermine Clarke, Bush's aides departed from some of their most cherished practices. They invited reporters into West Wing offices where they rarely tread, for on-the-record interviews with top officials. They released an e-mail from Clarke to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that they contend is at odds with the account Clarke gave during his testimony to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They said he was disgruntled because his application to be deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security had been rejected.

An official also read reporters an e-mail that Rice had sent Clarke chastising him for skipping several of her morning staff meetings.

Perhaps most surprising, aides who routinely spar over such distinctions as "White House official" and "senior administration official" granted Fox News permission to unmask Clarke as the anonymous briefer in an August 2002 White House conference call that highlighted the administration's efforts in the war on terrorism. The administration's allies say Clarke's statements that day conflict with allegations in his book.

In contrast to his assertions that the Bush administration did not consider terrorism an urgent problem, Clarke told reporters in that briefing that before the attacks, Bush's aides had developed "a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda." He said the administration also approved a fivefold increase in CIA funding for covert action to pursue al Qaeda.

Clarke said Wednesday that as an administration official delivering the background briefing, he focused on positive developments but left out the administration's failings.

Officials from both parties said it would be at least a couple of days before it is clear whether the offensive succeeded in eroding Clarke's credibility or whether the public, and especially independent voters, would wind up viewing him as a courageous whistle-blower.

Joe Lockhart, a press secretary in the Clinton administration, said he believes the White House is going to pay a price for focusing more on Clarke as a person than on the substance of his contentions. "This was classic political triage," he said. "You do what you think you need to do to get through the day. At the end of the day you feel pretty good about yourself, but you may have created a bigger problem for yourself down the road."

Ex-Aide's Book Corners Market in Capital Buzz
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

Published: March 26, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 25 — On the first day, the hottest new book in town sold out in an hour at Politics and Prose and sales clerks turned away dozens of disappointed buyers. On the second day, the store called three national book wholesalers, which announced they did not have a single copy left.

That was when Barbara Meade knew that Richard A. Clarke, the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," was the genuine article, an unexpected literary phenomenon whose account of counterterrorism failures within the Bush administration has been flying off the shelves this week.

"It's reached a point now where if you're going to be in the loop in Washington you probably have to say you've read the book," Ms. Meade, co-owner of Politics and Prose, said, adding that she believed she now has enough copies to last through the weekend.

In Washington, Mr. Clarke's book is not just the talk of the town, it is practically the only conversation in town, having — in just four days — hijacked the news agenda and placing him in the ranks of other best-selling Washington authors like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. On Amazon.com, it is ranked first, outselling even "The South Beach Diet." And some booksellers around the country are struggling to keep up with demand for the book, which has gone into its fifth printing since it went on sale on Monday.

Mr. Clarke, the Bush administration's former counterterrorism chief, says officials failed to heed warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks and then neglected the threat of Al Qaeda as they turned their attention to Saddam Hussein.

In this city, those incendiary charges are dominating political chatter at breakfast tables, dinner tables and even on the basketball court, where David Sirota, spokesman for the Center for American Progress, discussed it last night after shooting hoops with Congressional workers and former presidential campaign advisers at the Sidwell Friends School.

"It's all that people are talking about," said Jim Jordan, the Democratic strategist, who said he was planning to buy his own copy on Thursday.

There are also signs that the book's appeal is extending beyond the insular world of Washington in a week in which Mr. Clarke's story was splashed across the front pages of national newspapers and featured on televised news broadcasts as he testified on Wednesday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Writers writing for Readers

Read this first. I have a very different story to tell, but it starts like this. The guy should be on your daily reads, this is bookmark material if you prize good writing.

Brave New World

The prolific Stirling Newberry of The Blogging of the President: 2004 conducted an interview with economist Angry Bear last week. This being Blogovia, the interview was conducted by IM. I may never get used to this. Clink on the BOP link to see the interchange, in which Stirling and AB bemoan the loss of hard data when conducting policy conversations on economic policies, which now seem to be shaped by focus group, the Photoshop of politics. AB's remarks on methodology are helpful in understanding the information drought we currently live in. I'm just going to quote Stirling's conclusion, however, as I find it resonating with me:

What you have then, in the end, is a revolt of the technocrats. The people who, under normal circumstances, deploy formidable intelligence and skill in doing the vast analytic and number crunching work that our society runs on, but does not often appreciate. That they have come out of the wood work is, in itself, a story which should not be understated or ignored. The “defection of the elites” is a crucial stage in the collapse of institutions, and those that rouse this group of people – trained to find, sort and organize details, by habit and turn of mind consistent and reasonable, and tenacious once the facts have convinced them of the importance of a task – do so at their own risk.

And that is why, some day somewhere, there will be an official who wonders why, "why oh why" as DeLong might say – they ever decided to bait the bear.

Then I remembered reading the following by Harold Mayerson in yesterday's WaPo:

Step back a minute and look at who has left this administration or blown the whistle on it, and why. Clarke enumerates a half-dozen counterterrorism staffers, three of whom were with him in the Situation Room on Sept. 11, who left because they felt the White House was placing too much emphasis on the enemy who didn't attack us, Iraq, and far too little on the enemy who did.

But that only begins the list. There's Paul O'Neill, whose recent memoir recounts his ongoing and unavailing battle to get the president to take the skyrocketing deficit seriously. There's Christie Todd Whitman, who appears in O'Neill's memoir recalling her own unsuccessful struggles to get the White House to acknowledge the scientific data on environmental problems. There's Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who told Congress that it would take hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to adequately secure postwar Iraq. There's Richard Foster, the Medicare accountant, who was forbidden by his superiors from giving Congress an accurate assessment of the cost of the administration's new program. All but Foster are now gone, and Foster's sole insurance policy is that Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress were burnt by his muzzling.

In the Bush administration, you're an empiricist at your own peril. Plainly, this has placed any number of conscientious civil servants -- from Foster, who totaled the costs on Medicare, to Clarke, who charted the al Qaeda leads before Sept. 11 -- at risk. In a White House where ideology trumps information time and again, you run the numbers at your own risk. Nothing so attests to the fundamental radicalism of this administration as the disaffection of professionals such as Foster and Clarke, each of whom had served presidents of both parties.

The revolt of the professionals poses a huge problem for the Bush presidency precisely because it is not coming from its ideological antagonists. Clarke concludes his book making a qualified case for establishing a security sub-agency within the FBI that would be much like Britain's MI5 -- a suggestion clearly not on the ACLU's wish list. O'Neill wants a return to traditional Republican budget-balancing. The common indictment that these critics are leveling at the administration is that it is impervious to facts. That's a more devastating election year charge than anything John Kerry could come up with.

Then, this morning, I finally get a chance to, er, "open" The Hill and find our old friend Joshua Micah Marshall--and I'm assuming all of these folks are operating independently--:

Terror aides strangely keep turning on Bush

By Josh Marshall

It’s hard to remember another president who has suffered more abuse and betrayal from the government’s career civil service than George W. Bush. Again and again, it seems, the president hires some seemingly seasoned career counterterrorism hand, only to find out later that he’s actually a Democratic plant, a partisan stooge or just a plain fool.

We already know the story of that notorious turncoat, retired Ambassador Joe Wilson, and his wife, CIA clandestine operative Valerie Plame (whom Rep. Jack Kingston [R-Ga.] pegged as a “glorified secretary”). The CIA foolishly entrusted Wilson with a fact-finding mission to the African nation of Niger to find out whether Saddam Hussein was buying “yellowcake” uranium there for his allegedly reconstituted nuclear weapons program. After getting this plum assignment, Wilson turned on the president with all manner of unfounded accusations.

Now we have Richard Clarke, whom we’re now told was either a liar (Paul Wolfowitz), a fraud out to sell a bunch of books (Scott McClellan), an out-of-the-loop rube (Dick Cheney), or just a moron who couldn’t get the job done (National Security Council [NSC] spokesman Jim Wilkinson and just about everyone else on the White House payroll).

Clarke, of course, worked for the last four presidents (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II) in a series of national-security and counterterrorism roles. Condi Rice kept him on as counterterrorism czar at the NSC when the Bush administration took over from Clinton. And then later, after Sept. 11, the White House appointed him to a less central, but still critical, post as top NSC aide on cyberterrorism and critical infrastructure.

Clearly the White House thought he was top-flight, but now it seems he was just another mix of backstabber and boob of the Joe Wilson variety - a hapless egomaniac or, as columnist John Podhoretz called him yesterday in the New York Post, a “a self-regarding buffoon.”

Ya wonder why they leave?

The Contrarian

The perfect storm that's about to hit

Rising oil prices and a weak dollar could shatter the global economy

Jeremy Rifkin
Wednesday March 24, 2004
The Guardian

The average nationwide price of a gallon of gasoline in America reached a record high of $1.77 this month. The steady spike in prices has left analysts wondering if this is a harbinger of even more dramatic increases as motorists head into the spring and summer months. Get ready for what might become the economy's version of the perfect storm later this summer. The devastation could quickly spread to the UK and the rest of the world, with dire consequences for the global economy.

The first hint of what might be in store came last month when Opec announced its decision to withdraw 1m barrels of crude oil a day from the market. Opec is worried about the weakening value of the dollar: it has lost one-third of its value in just under two years. Since Opec sells oil for dollars, the oil-producing countries are losing precious revenue as the value of the dollar continues to erode. And because oil-producing countries then turn around and purchase much of their goods and services from the EU and must pay in euros, their purchasing power continues to deteriorate. (The euro is currently valued at $1.23.)

How will the weaker dollar affect oil prices? Philip K Verleger, the dean of US oil market analysts and a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics, suggests that "oil-exporting countries may decide to adjust their price band to reflect the falling value of the dollar". If the dollar continues to slide, he warns, we could see oil prices rising from the current $38.18 a barrel to a record high of $40 by midsummer.

There are other dark clouds on the horizon. US crude oil inventories are at the lowest point since the mid 70s, and the retail gasoline market is operating with little reserve margin as we move into the summer months, where more travel will increase demand. The dwindling oil reserves are made worse by the White House decision to replenish the strategic petroleum reserve, further reducing the amount of gasoline available.

Verleger says gasoline could climb as high as $3.50 a gallon before levelling off at $2 by the autumn. How high prices eventually soar could depend on still other factors, including potential oil disruptions in Venezuela and the Middle East. There is also the prospect that one or two major refineries might fail during peak demand this summer - not that unusual when increased consumer pressure forces refineries to produce at peak capacity without taking the time for proper maintenance.

Say Bye-Bye to Cheap Oil
Surplus capacity is history. The jolts will start with $3 gas pump prices.
By Paul Roberts

March 25, 2004

For the tens of millions of American motorists patiently waiting for gas prices to come back to Earth, the news from the oil markets is not encouraging.

For the last year, government forecasters have reassured us that the unusually high oil prices we've seen since 2002 — around $30 a barrel — were temporary: As soon as global markets recovered from the mess in Iraq, oil prices would drop and gasoline prices would eventually follow.

Yet nearly 12 months after "victory" in Iraq, oil prices are at an eye-popping $38 a barrel, or about $15 above the two-decade average, and some forecasters are now offering a far less sanguine prognosis: Not only will oil stay high through 2005, but the days of cheap crude are history. These aren't exactly glad tidings for a global economy designed to run on low-priced oil, nor for a White House that gambled it could deliver low oil prices with a mix of diplomatic muscle and market liberalization.

What happened? In simplest terms, what we're seeing are the final months of a 25-year oil boom. That boom was sparked by the oil shocks of the 1970s, when sky-high prices touched off a feeding frenzy among oil producers. Eager to cash in on the good prices, oil companies and oil-rich states drilled thousands of new wells, built massive pipelines, developed fantastic exploration and production technologies and generally expanded their capacity to find and pump oil.

If these predictions come true--and there is every reason to believe they will--it is easy to forsee some of the follow-on effects to the economy. The first will be in the airline industry, still fragile in the wake of the recession and 9/11. SUV sales will take a hit, and it is SUV sales which has been propping up those "rosy" economic numbers, with interest rates staying low. But cheap loans aren't going to be all that attractive in the face of $3.50 a gallon gas.

And about those cheap loans:

Businesses Urged to Plan For Higher Interest Rates
Fed Bank Chiefs Raise Issue in Speeches

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 25, 2004; Page E04

With the U.S. economic recovery gaining steam, businesses should start planning for the day when the Federal Reserve will have to start raising short-term interest rates from their current low levels, Jack Guynn, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, warned yesterday.

Businesses should not assume "in their long-term plans that this extraordinary period will continue indefinitely," Guynn said, according to the text of a speech he delivered in Johnson City, Tenn.

Several Fed officials, including Chairman Alan Greenspan, have noted in recent speeches that they do not plan to leave their target for a key overnight interest rate, the Federal funds rate, at a 46-year low of 1 percent forever. But they also have repeatedly stressed that they can be "patient" in deciding when to start raising rates because inflation is so low, businesses have ample unused production capacity and hiring remains sluggish.

Guynn, however, went further than others have publicly in warning businesses about the potential dangers of low interest rates, which can encourage speculative investments or temporary booms in certain pockets of the economy. Some Fed critics have said rock-bottom rates have already pumped up the prices of houses, stocks, bonds and other assets to possibly unsustainable levels.

Widgets, not People

Does anyone besides me notice a troubling pattern here?

U.S. sent medically unfit soldiers to Iraq, Pentagon acknowledges

By David Goldstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - To meet the demand for troops in Iraq, the military has been deploying some National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers who aren't fit for combat.

More than a dozen members of the Guard and reserves told Knight Ridder they were shipped off to battle with little attention paid to their medical histories.

Those histories included ailments such as asthma, diabetes, recent surgery and hearing loss. Once in Iraq, the soldiers faced severe conditions that aggravated their medical problems, and the medical care available to them was limited.

David Lloyd, a 44-year-old mechanic with the Tennessee National Guard, died of a heart attack in Iraq last August. His wife, Pamela Lloyd, said her husband didn't know he'd had a problem, but his autopsy showed three blockages in his coronary arteries.

"He should have never been deployed," she said. "He was supposed to have been given a thorough physical. He had none. The only thing he had was the shots."

"They funneled us through the medical part: boom, boom, boom," said Michael Scott, an Iowa National Guardsman who had a herniated disc. "They let it be known they weren't real interested in hearing about stuff. `No, you're fine right now.'"

A memo from the European Regional Medical Command in Germany, where many injured soldiers were sent, criticized the pre-deployment medical screening and said soldiers who were unfit for Iraq were having to be sent home. Deploying them was a risk to their health and an added cost for the military, it said.

The memo contained the concerns of Col. Holly Doyne, a physician based there at the time. Doyne has been deployed to Kuwait and couldn't be reached for this article. Another Army medical officer, who didn't want his name used, confirmed that Doyne's memo was distributed to various stateside medical officials and commanders.

Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official, acknowledged that some medically unqualified troops have been sent to Iraq but said "the percentages are extremely small." He said the Pentagon was taking steps to improve medical screening.

How many soldiers are unfit is unclear. Each soldier who spoke with Knight Ridder said he or she knew of others who - like themselves - were sent to Iraq despite health problems ranging from allergies requiring refrigerated medications to heart disease.

Several also said many soldiers weren't given physicals but only were asked a few cursory questions about their health by the medical screeners.

Veterans Protest Reduced Medical Exams for Returning Soldiers

BY BRUCE ALPERT
c.2004 Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON -- The Army is scaling back the medical exams offered to soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, discouraging routine blood tests, electrocardiograms and X-rays, according to a Pentagon memo.

The directive from Brig. Gen. Richard Ursone, an Army assistant surgeon general, is drawing criticism from some veterans organizations. Rather than scaling back on medical exams, these critics say, the Pentagon ought to be making them mandatory and more comprehensive to enable earlier diagnosis of the kinds of medical problems faced by veterans of the first Gulf War 13 years ago.

In a Jan. 20 memorandum to regional medical commands, Ursone said: "Performance of routine screening laboratory, radiologic and electrocardiographic tests in this setting is extremely low yield and is discouraged."

Even if giving those tests is "supported by evidence based medicine," Ursone said in his memo, they "may be deferred if the soldier is without symptoms and the laboratory tests will delay release from active duty." The directive applies to soldiers leaving active duty from all Army units.

Pentagon public information officers, when asked about the memo, could not say whether the new medical exam policies are being implemented for the other military services.

Mike Duggan, American Legion deputy director for national security, said the veterans group views the Army decision as a step backward.

"Our position has been and continues to be that soldiers, active or reservists, deserve to have a complete physical when they leave the service," Duggan said.

The military currently requires only that soldiers answer a health questionnaire both prior to and after deployment overseas, with an actual medical exam being optional.

"You leave it up to them and they are, quite understandably, in a hurry to get out," Duggan said. "But getting a complete exam can be so important in terms of diagnosing any medical problems, including some that might not have active symptoms."

Jack Trowbridge, deputy commander for administration at Bayne-Jones Army Community Hospital at Fort Polk, La., said that while the post-deployment physicals have been scaled back since Jan. 20, the military is still able to assess if there are any medical problems demanding immediate follow-up.

"We make sure they are fit to go back home," Trowbridge said.

Uncurious, Disengaged

A grateful reader thanks Salon for the Washington Bureau and its chief, Sidney Blumenthal:

The controversy raging around Clarke's book -- and his testimony before the 9/11 commission that Bush ignored warnings about terrorism that might have prevented the attacks -- revolves around his singularly unimpeachable credibility. In response, the Bush administration has launched a full-scale offensive against him: impugning his personal motives, claiming he is a disappointed job-hunter, that he is publicity mad, a political partisan (Clarke, in fact, voted for Republican Sen. John McCain for president in the Republican primaries in 2000) -- as well as ignorant, irrelevant and a liar.

Rice now claims that "we were at battle stations." But Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward in "Bush at War" saying that before 9/11, "I was not on point ... I didn't feel that sense of urgency." Cheney alleges that Clarke was "out of the loop." But if he was, then the administration was either running a rogue operation or doing nothing, as Clarke testifies. Was the Bush administration engaged in an undercover, off-the-boards operation apart from the president's designated special assistant? Cheney's charge leads to absurdity.

(thanks, Susan)

A Uniter, Not a Divider

Visit by Bush to snarl roads, spur protests

By Scott S. Greenberger and Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff, 3/25/2004

President Bush will swoop into Boston for a quick fund-raiser this afternoon that could net his campaign $1 million and also draw several thousand protesters, force the closure of a school, and disrupt traffic near the Park Plaza Hotel.

Tracey Ganiatsos, a spokeswoman for the Boston Transportation Department, said the US Secret Service told the city it intends to close several streets near the hotel "for a good portion of the day," but the streets involved will not be disclosed publicly for security reasons. Special parking restrictions will also be in effect.

The president's visit unexpectedly canceled classes for 1,425 children at the Boston Renaissance Charter School, a K-8 institution on Stuart Street a block away from the hotel. The Boston Public Schools system, which provides about 30 buses to transport Renaissance students, said it could not guarantee timely pick-up of students at dismissal time, said Dudley Blodget, chief operating officer of the Renaissance School's foundation. The school also feared that the 300 parents who pick up their children would not be able to reach the school.

"It's a sad situation that you have to close off school because of a fund-raising event," said Roger F. Harris, Renaissance headmaster.

Jonathan Palumbo, spokesman for the Boston Public Schools, said his transportation director only found out about the visit yesterday. The school department has few schools in the area, and they will not be directly affected, Palumbo said, although school officials anticipate delays at dismissal time.

The Bush campaign has invited about 500 people to the late afternoon event, all of whom are being asked to contribute $2,000, the individual maximum for the 2004 election cycle. The president will deliver a speech, but in order to hold down costs there will be no food or entertainment.

The Boston Fire Department's a cappella group will not be part of the program, however. The mayor's office did not feel it was appropriate for uniformed officers to perform at a political function, spokesman for the mayor Seth Gitell said. The Fire Department was unable to be reached for comment.

To hell with the plebs, there are dollars to be harvested.

Image Issues

I'm having a problem. I want to blog MoDo's column because she actually scores some decent points. She also makes an ass out of herself a couple of times and asks her readers to play along, which just makes me nuts. So here is what I'm going to do: I'll blog her piece, including the part where she insults her source and us, if you will mount a campaign to have the Times hire me to replace her. I can toss up as fetching a photo as she can. I'm actually blonde and leggy and can go thigh-bone to thigh-bone with Ann Coulter. I promise not to have disappointing love affairs with Hollywood types. I will, in fact, make you proud of me by producing, on the Times Op-Ed page, high quality work which doesn't insult its audience, its subjects or the author. You know my work. This is up to you. Oh, and unlike the Anthrax, I have a body to go with those legs, and a mind that sits on top of it. My appeal is more New York Review of Books than New York Post. Lawyers fear me. Need I say more?

Here's Dowd, with the journalistic Serious Paper Mistakes in bold:

Truth as a Weapon
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: March 25, 2004

WASHINGTON

As the White House was sliming Richard Clarke, the 9/11 families were stroking him.

Several relatives of victims surrounded the ex-counterterrorism chief after his testimony yesterday and reached out to pat him. After being condescended to, stonewalled, led on and put off by the White House, they were glad to hear somebody say: "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you."

"Mr. Clarke is the first person who has apologized to the families and held himself accountable," said the lovely Kristen Breitweiser of New Jersey, whose husband died in the south tower. "I am enormously grateful for that." She and other widows left the hearing room to protest Condoleezza Rice's lame no-show.

If only Sandy Berger had told the incoming Bush officials that Al Qaeda was no big deal, they might have gotten alarmed about it. They were determined to disdain all things Clinton, including what they considered his overemphasis on terrorism.

Dick Cheney, Rummy et al. were on amber alert, "preserved in amber," as Mr. Clarke put it, obsessing on old G.O.P. issues that had been hot when they were last in power, like a menacing Saddam and a Star Wars missile shield to protect America from the awesome might of the Evil Empire.

Terrorism wasn't really their cup of tea anyhow.

As Mr. Clarke writes, the ascension of Al Qaeda and the devolution of Iraq were topics that called for nuance: "Bush and his inner circle had no real interest in complicated analyses; on the issues that they cared about, they already knew the answers, it was received wisdom."

The Bush crew was thinking big, and Osama seemed puny to them.

Donald Rumsfeld told the 9/11 panel that there had been no point retaliating for the Cole bombing in October 2000, "four months after the fact," because that might have sent a signal of weakness.

So it was too late to whack Osama four months later, but not too late to re-whack Saddam 12 years later?

As he admitted to the commission on Tuesday, the defense secretary didn't like the idea of going after Osama in Afghanistan because "it didn't have a lot of targets." You just ended up bombing rocks instead of palaces. "Afghanistan was something like 8,000 miles from the United States. . . . You can pound the rubble in an Al Qaeda training camp 15 times and not do much damage; they can put tents right back up."

So, not showy and not convenient? Crummy excuses, Rummy.

Paul Wolfowitz was completely uninterested in Al Qaeda unless he could use it as a rationale to invade Iraq as part of his grandiose dream to remake the Middle East in his image. (And John Ashcroft was just too busy covering up immodest statues and trying to cut counterterrorism funds.)

In the Clarke book, Mr. Wolfowitz fidgets as Mr. Clarke urges that armed Predators target Osama at a meeting in April 2001. "Well," Wolfie whines, "I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden."

Besides confirming what we already knew — that national security in this White House has been as ideologically driven as the domestic agenda — the Clarke book and the commission hearings are most chilling in describing how clueless the agencies charged with sorting through clues were under Clinton and Bush.

Reprising the scene in the White House on 9/11, Mr. Clarke says Dale Watson, the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism chief, called him. "We got the passenger manifests from the airlines," Mr. Watson said. "We recognize some names, Dick. They're Al Qaeda."

Mr. Clarke recalled: "I was stunned, not that the attack was Al Qaeda but that there were Al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that F.B.I. knew were Al Qaeda." Mr. Watson told Mr. Clarke that "C.I.A. forgot to tell us about them."

Mr. Clarke's argument that the Bush team's misguided adventurism in Iraq has actually spawned more terrorism and diverted resources has panicked the Bushies, who are running as heroic terror warriors.

It's always gross to see a White House stoop to smearing the character of someone seen as a threat. It was sickening when the Clinton White House smeared Monica Lewinsky, and it's sickening now.

Maureen, girlfriend, it appears to me that you missed that part of the lecture where neither a journalist or a columnist stakes their credibility on the way a story subject looks, attractiveness or lack there-of isn't the basis for a judgement. Ms. Breitweiser has a whole lot of reasons for credibility, the least of them that she is "lovely," which is condemnation with faint praise in the pretty derby. She faints all over Dick Clarke, and that somehow enhances his message? Or hers?

It was sickening when you bought the party line and smeared Al Gore's wardrobe, and Wes Clarke's, girlfriend. You seem a little hung up on appearances. You participated in the wardrobe and hairstyle deconstruction of Hillary, and you've got the ovaries to talk about the little Monica slam the Clintonmachine attempted, which was pathetic and ignored while you fueled the Gore slam down? Mo, your credibility with the marginal left, which is what it seems you want to keep marginal, is on thin ice. Referring to female subjects of your pieces is off the table for Novak and Saffire and it isn't any more attractive when you do it.

I suggest therapy for your image issues, and a better editor. You don't need botox, you need to understand why you hate your readers so much.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Oregon county bans all marriage

Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Posted: 9:14 AM EST (1414 GMT)

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) -- In a new twist in the battle over same-sex marriage roiling the United States, a county in Oregon has banned all marriages -- gay and heterosexual -- until the state decides who can and who cannot wed.

The last marriage licenses were handed out in Benton County at 4 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. EST) Tuesday. As of Wednesday, officials in the county of 79,000 people will begin telling couples applying for licenses to go elsewhere until the gay marriage debate is settled.

"It may seem odd," Benton County Commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters in a telephone interview, but "we need to treat everyone in our county equally."

State Attorney General Hardy Myers said in a statement that he was "very pleased" with Benton County's decision. "It is my sincere hope that the legal process will provide clarity for each of Oregon's counties."

The three County commissioners had originally decided to start handing out gay marriage licenses this week but on Monday reversed that decision amid a growing firestorm of lawsuits across the country, and decided instead to put a temporary halt to all marriages.

Rebekah Kassell, a spokeswoman for Basic Rights Oregon, a pro-gay marriage group, told Reuters; "It is certainly a different way for county commissioners to respect their constitutional obligation to apply the law equally to everyone.

"We appreciate that they are willing to say they are not going to participate in discrimination."

Tim Nashif, the spokesman for the Defense of Marriage Coalition, said; "Oregon not only has the only county in the nation issuing illegal (same-sex) marriage licenses, we probably have the only county in the nation refusing to issue marriage licenses at all."

thanks to See Why? A long, hard blog and pogge.

Clarke Hearing

I haven't seen a hearing like that since Watergate. There'll be roundups all over the web in minutes but I want to make two points.

Bob Kerrey made the point that Fox News violated the confidentiality standards of journalism, the very one that Bob Novak is hiding behind right now on his Valerie Plame Wilson leak, when it leaked the transcript of Richard Clarke's press backgrounder of August, 2002. For a "news" organization to do this is one of the grossest, most partisan violations of ordinary jounalistic integrity I have ever seen.

The other point is that, in a day of partisan questioning, Clarke never cracked or slipped or mis-spoke in spite of numerous attempts to slip him up. In that regard, when Clark directly attacked the veracity of Condi Rice's statements to the press, he did not have to use the word "lie." He just left his complete contradiction of what she alleged sitting there for the observer to draw their own conclusions. It was devastating, and there were several moments like that throughout the hearing where Clarke just put out the facts, un-spun, and let them sit in a silent hearing room. Silent, because the interlocutor was left speechless.

What effect will this have? To early to tell, but for anyone who was paying attention it was a stinging indictment of Bush anti-terrorism policies (or lack thereof). He hit everybody hard, including Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller. Condi looks like a freelance crook and her refusal to testify in public is looking very bad.

Any of you who have the guts, check Freep and bring back what you hear. I wonder what Tacitus will have to say. I may even stop in at Indepundit myself this afternoon.

I have an appointment this evening and can't be sure I'll get another post up this afternoon, so this is an OPEN THREAD to talk about Clarke's testimony.

UPDATE:
Here are the first takeWaPo and NYT stories. I'll put up a link to the transcript when it is available.

MORE:Even the lapdog CNN is playing this story pretty rough:

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Richard Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, gave a damning indictment of the Bush administration's pre-9/11 strategy in the war on terror Wednesday.

Clarke has come under sharp criticism from the White House which has aggressively rejected his accusations. One Republican commission member, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, suggested Clarke was trying to sell his new book.

Condi is in "slime and defend" mode, her first rejoinder is to attack Clarke in person, rather than rebut the substance.

Big Lies and Big Liars

Bush and Clinton Aides Grilled by Panel
By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC SCHMITT

...under an agreement with the White House last year, one member of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was allowed to read through a full library of the briefings, and two other commissioners were allowed a partial review.

Ms. Gorelick said at the hearing Tuesday that information in the documents "would set your hair on fire, and not just George Tenet's hair on fire," referring to the director of central intelligence.

Though barred under secrecy regulations from discussing much of what was in the reports, she said that there had been "an extraordinary spike" of intelligence warning about Qaeda attacks in the Daily Brief during 2001 and that "it plateaued at a spike level for months."

Ms. Gorelick's comments came as the commission released a staff report finding that Mr. Rumsfeld did not order the preparation of any new military plans against Al Qaeda or its Taliban sponsors during the seven months between his arrival at the Pentagon and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report said that despite the intelligence alerts throughout the year, there was an impression among specialists at the Pentagon that Mr. Rumsfeld and his new team were "not especially interested in the counterterrorism agenda."

A separate staff report on the government's diplomatic response to the terrorist threat found that Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and her deputies rebuffed a proposal by aides in early 2001 that the administration step up its support for anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.

The report said that Ms. Rice had instead spent more than seven months trying to formulate policies to deal with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, policies that were still not in place by Sept. 11 and, White House aides said, might have taken as long as three years to implement.

Conason in Salon:

JC: Why did they keep you on, if they were so uninterested in what you were focused on? And then why did they downgrade your position?

I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January [2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.

Empire In Fact

Expansion of military bases overseas fuels suspicions of U.S. motives

BY MICHAEL KILIAN

Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has dramatically expanded its military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, building a vast network of bases designed to counter what military officials call an "arc of instability."

U.S. military installations in the region extend from Turkey to near the Chinese border, and from former Soviet republics in the north to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The facilities surround Iran; are situated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and are close to Syria and Lebanon. Several were created to address the confrontation with Iraq, and continue to support operations there.

"No one could have anticipated in the summer of 2001 that the United States would be basing forces at Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, or conducting a major military operation in Afghanistan," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress last year.

Experts fear the ubiquity of U.S. forces may fuel belief in radical Islamic claims that America is bent on controlling the oil and politics of the Islamic world. A poll that the nonpartisan Pew Research Center conducted in Muslim nations in the region found significant portions of their populations believed just that.

Experts believe the threat implicit in a nearby American military presence - especially after the Iraq invasion - could inflame Islamic nations such as Iran.

"The first thing to recognize is that other countries will view this in different ways than we do," said Marcus Corbin, senior analyst for the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "They will view this sometimes as an aggressive, hostile encirclement. Iran is probably the best example. It is almost literally surrounded. A huge chunk of its borders are with countries where the U.S. has vastly increased its presence or become a close ally.

"The point is to realize how threatening this is to other people," he added. "This is hard to do, because we don't necessarily think of ourselves as a crusading people invading other countries willy-nilly."

Tom Engelhart presented an essay on military hegemony, military bases and the footprint of empire by Chalmers Johnson in January.

In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has been proposing -- this is usually called "repositioning" -- many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are already under construction -- at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil air base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian border, and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the north. (This does not count the previously mentioned Anaconda, which is currently being called an "operating base," though it may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait -- 1,600 square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square miles -- that we now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.

Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls our new "family of bases" include: In the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe -- Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia -- Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa -- Morocco, Tunisia, and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00 civilians since 1992, when, to quash an election, the military took over, backed by our country and France); and in West Africa -- Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

If you are unfamiliar with the US military's base structure, Johnson's essay is an eye opener. Between military members, dependents, contractors and civilian employes, more than a half-million people are flung across the planet in American bases, which have an economy all of their own. The Airlift Command constitutes a private ailine which services this economy.

Over the last couple of decades, Johnson's work has been to document the de facto empire of military hegemony that has been spread out across the world. This essay for The Nation Institute is part of the cautionary tale he has gathered in his latest book, The Sorrow of Empire. The size of the military-industrial economy now threatens our economic health. In a week when we have learned that the Medicare trust fund is in trouble, after learning that the administration lied about the cost of the "benefit" increases (mostly benefiting Big Pharma, medical insureres and corporations) and budget deficits as far as the eye can see, Johnson's warnings come none too soon.

Goo'bye, Bob

In the larger scheme of the geopolitics of life and death we read about daily, this isn't an important story. But if you, like me, grew up with NPR, this is a shock. I've been waking up every weekday with the sound of this voice for 25 years. I'll have to work some sources today to get the back story on this one. It sounds like insiders saw this one coming. I'll have to look at the last two ratings books, too.

NPR Yanks Top-Rated Show Host
'Morning Edition' Ousts Bob Edwards

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A01

Bob Edwards, who for 25 years has been the signature voice of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," is being removed from the show by NPR managers, effective April 30. "Morning Edition" is the No. 1 morning show on radio, with almost 13 million listeners.

"I would have loved to have stayed with 'Morning Edition,' " said Edwards, 56. "But it's not my candy store."

An NPR announcement that he would become a senior correspondent for NPR News was premature, he said yesterday.

NPR executive vice president Ken Stern called the change part of a "natural evolution" that "had to do with the changing needs of our listeners." It was "a programming decision about the right sound," said Stern, who expressed confidence that Edwards would remain with the network.

The sound of "Morning Edition" has been inseparable from Edwards's rich baritone since the show was launched in 1979. And "Morning Edition," in turn, has played a huge role in NPR's success and that of its member stations.

"The audience doubled for NPR overall in the last 10 years," Edwards said. "Who else can say that?" Noting "Morning Edition's" top ranking in the morning, he added: "Stern, Imus, all those people are in our wake."

The Big Boy

Fred Kaplan (whom I generally find credible) on Richard Clarke at Slate:

I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

As I said earlier down in the comments, Clarke is one of the rare real heavies that are so talented that they survive changing administrations. The guy has to be a genius to survive where he did. A genius of both substance and knowing how to work the market in the West Wing. That doesn't mean that he wasn't an a**hole, but that whatever his character flaws, his brilliance outshone it. The culture of Washington is extremely unforgiving, so when a guy like this hangs around, it is because he adds value to whatever he touches, you can't just push yourself, you have to give the powers something for themselves. There aren't a hundred people a year who can survive that. By the way, in this town arrogance isn't a failing, it's a survival skill.

If Wishes Were Horses

Like all of the rest of you, I'm looking forward to reading Richard Clarke's book. I had the 9/11 Commission hearing on C-Span all day today and I'm very interested in his testimony tomorrow. We sure as hell didn't learn anything we didn't already know today, tomorrow may be different.

I've put up an Amazon wish list link up there on the right, right under my email address--actually, Mel Goux put it up, and she tells me the link is wonky and doesn't work all the time. If you can't get it to work, try a screen refresh and click again. I haven't had any problem, but that's what I've been told. Anyway, the Clarke book is on the list, along with a bunch of other things, some of them necessities I can't afford, some of them things that would be quality of life enhancements. I haven't had any new clothes or shoes in six years that weren't gifts. Just sayin'.

Tim Dunlop is reading and blogging Against All Enemies at Road to Surfdom if you want to test drive it before you buy.

If you want to point out books that would be interesting to discuss together--like Chalmers Johnson's Sorrows of Empire which I mentioned earlier this month--feel free to email or use a comments box. Movable Type has an option for me to receive an email with your comments, so I receive every comment you make and read every one. I can reply to you by email, or in comments, or both and I have done all these things. It's relatively easy to get my attention.

TChris, subblogging at TalkLeft has an interesting post up about anti-Bush books which seem to be all the rage this year. Interesting...

Phase Three

Iraqi Cleric Intensifies Opposition to Interim Constitution
Ayatollah Sistani Sends Letter to U.N. Threatening Boycott of Meetings

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; 3:27 PM

BAGHDAD, March 22 -- Iraq's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric intensified his opposition to the country's interim constitution in a letter released Monday, threatening to boycott meetings with U.N. envoys who are expected to help chart the transition from American occupation if the constitution is endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.

The threat by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani marked another dramatic assertion of the reclusive, 73-year-old cleric's authority in the attempts to fashion a political arrangement after the U.S. administration of Iraq ends on June 30. While Sistani has already made clear his objections to the interim constitution, the letter was forceful in questioning its legitimacy, demanding that it be amended and warning of the consequences of not revising a document praised by its supporters as the most liberal in the Arab world.
....
The document calls for nationwide elections to be held by the end of January 2005 to choose a 275-member transitional assembly. That body will serve as a legislature, draft a permanent constitution and choose a president and two deputy presidents. By unanimous decision, the three-member executive will then choose a prime minister and cabinet to run the government.

At the time, Shiite members of the Governing Council said Sistani objected to two key provisions in the constitution: a clause that gave Kurds effective veto power over a permanent constitution and another that allows either of the deputy presidents -- likely a Kurd and a Sunni Arab -- to reject decisions of a Shiite president. While most groups in Iraq contest the precise figures, Shiites are believed to number about 60 percent of the population, with Sunni Arabs and Kurds the largest minorities.

In the letter released Monday, Sistani specifically mentioned only his objection to the three-member executive. He said it "lays the foundation for sectarianism in a future political system." Supporters of the arrangement have contended that the veto power of the deputy presidents was the most decisive way to protect the interests of minority Sunnis and Kurds. But it clearly curbs the authority of a Shiite president, and Sistani said he believed it would create deadlock that could only be broken by foreign intervention.

Iraqi leaders have said they will ask the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution legitimizing the handover of authority on June 30. Sistani said in the letter that he feared U.S. officials would seek to include the constitution in such a resolution. If it was endorsed in any way, Sistani said, he would boycott meetings with U.N. envoys due to arrive in Iraq soon. They are expected to help craft an interim authority that will take over from the U.S. administration in June and stay in power until the elections in January.

"We warn that any such step will be unacceptable to the majority of Iraqis and will have dangerous consequences," he said.

Juan Cole's informed comment on this situation yesterday:

"That a calm and cautious figure like Sistani is talking about the potential of the interim constitution's approval of loose federalism to destabilize or even break up Iraq alarms me no end".

Fourth Generation Warfare strategist William Lind remarks:

What are the implications of Phase III for America’s attempts to create a stable, democratic Iraq? It is safe to say that they are not favorable. First, it means that the task of re-creating a real, functioning Iraqi state – not just a “government” of Quislings living under American protection in the Green Zone – has gotten more difficult. Fourth Generation war represents a quantum move away from the state, compared to Phase II, where the Baathists were fighting to re-create a state under their domination. The fractioning process will continue and accelerate, creating more and more resistance groups, each with its own agenda. The defeat of one means nothing in terms of the defeat of others. There is no center to strike at, no hinge that collapses the enemy as a whole, and no way to operationalize the conflict. We are forced into a war of attrition against an enemy who outnumbers us and is far better able to take casualties and still continue the fight.

We will also find that we have no enemy we can talk to and nothing to talk about. Since we – but not our enemies – seek closure, that is a great disadvantage. Ending a war, unless it is a war of pure annihilation, means talking to the enemy and reaching some kind of mutually acceptable settlement. When the enemy is not one but a large and growing number of independent elements, talking is pointless because any agreement only ends the war with a single faction. When the enemy’s motivation is not politics but religion, there is also nothing to talk about, unless it is our conversion to Islam. Putting these two together, the result is war without end – or, realistically, an American withdrawal that will also be an American defeat.

Pass the Popcorn

Interview: Richard Clarke

Julian Borger in Washington talks to former White House insider Richard Clarke about US's vulnerability to al-Qaida before the September 11 attack.

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday March 23, 2004
The Guardian

JB: Condoleezza Rice wrote today in response to your book - that the Bush administration did have a strategy for eliminating al-Qaida and that the administration worked on it in the spring and summer of 2001? Is that true?

RC: We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it.

JB: What about the claim that the administration did work hard on the issue?

RC: Its not true. I asked - on January 24 in writing to Condi - urgently for a meeting on cabinet level - the principal's committee - to review the plan and I was told I can't have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal's meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaida was not important to them.

JB: In the plan developed under the Clinton administration, was the potential use of ground forces included?

RC: That option was included in the plan, and the Clinton people had never rejected it. Yes it was there. But when they finally did the ground invasion they kind of botched it, because all they did initially was send special forces with the northern alliance. They did not insert special forces to go in after Bin Laden. They let Bin Laden escape. They only went in two months after.

JB: So were there any principals meetings about al-Qaida in all this time?

RC: It didn't come up in the principal's meetings. Between April and July only four of the 30 or 35 deputy principal meetings touched on al-Qaida. But three of those were mainly about US-Pakistan relations, or US-Afghan relations or South Asian policy, and al-Qaida was just one of the points. One of the meetings looked at the overall plan. It was the July one. April was an initial discussion of terrorism policy writ large and at that meeting I said we had to talk about al-Qaida. And because it was terrorism policy writ large [Paul] Wolfowitz said we have to talk about Iraqi terrorism and I said that's interesting because there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States. There hasn't been any for 8 years. And he said something derisive about how I shouldn't believe the CIA and FBI, that they've been wrong. And I said if you know more than I know tell me what it is, because I've been doing this for 8 years and I don't know about any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US since 1993. When I said let's start talking about Bin Laden, he said Bin Laden couldn't possibly have attacked the World Trade Centre in '93. One little terrorist group like that couldn't possibly have staged that operation. It must have been Iraq.

JB: So what were all the principal's meetings about then?

RC: There were a lot of meetings on 'Star Wars'. We had a lot of meetings about Russia policy, because Condi is a Russian specialist. There were a lot of meetings on China.

JB: And after the February meeting any more on Iraq?

RC: Yes there were many more, it was central. The buzz in national security staff administration wanted to go after Iraq.

JB: Do you think they came into office with that as a plan?

RC: If you look at the so-called Vulcans group [Bush's pre-election foreign policy advisors] talked about publicly in seminars in Washington. They clearly wanted to go after Iraq and they clearly wanted to do this reshaping of the middle east and they used the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse to test their theories.

JB: Do you think President Bush was already on board when he came to office.

RC: I think he was. He got his international education from the Vulcans group the previous year. They were people like Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz. They were all espousing this stuff. So he probably had been persuaded. He certainly wasn't hearing any contrary view during this education process.

JB: If there had been meetings on terrorism in that first eight months, do you think it would have made a difference?

RC: Well let me ask you: Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. She didn't hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others.

JB: So might they have stopped the September 11 attacks?

RC: I don't want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance.

JB: A reasonable chance? A good chance?

RC: There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn't take it.

JB: Condoleezza Rice argued today that when President Bush was asking you to find evidence linking September 11 to Iraq, he was simply showing due diligence, asking you to explore the options.

RC: That's very funny. There are two ways of asking. There's: 'check every possibility - don't assume its al-Qaida look at everybody'. That's due diligence. Then there's the: 'I want you to find every shred of evidence that it was Iraq and Saddam' - and said in a very emphatic and intimidating way, and the other people who were with me got the same impression as I did. This was not due diligence. This was: 'come back with a memo that says it was an Iraqi attack'.

JB: And when you didn't find any evidence, the memo was bounced back?

RC: Yes

JB: Stephen Hadley [deputy national security advisor] said he bounced it back saying just update this?

RC: Well as soon as he got it he said update it, even though it was very current. Hadley's a good lawyer, he knows how to cover his ass. He not going to write: 'I don't like the answer'. But when your memo is immediately bounced and its got very current information and its bounced back to you and you're told to do over, its pretty clear what the implication is.

JB What do you think drove these people on Iraq?

RC: Some are ideologues - they have a superpower vision of us reshaping the Middle East. Changing the historical balance. Condi Rice has this phrase: 'We needed to change the middle east so terrorists would not fly aircrafts into buildings'.

JB: Do you believe they felt they had to finish what Bush's father started?

RC: That's a big part of it. For Wolfowitz and Cheney feels some guilt for having stopped the war, a couple of days early, not that we should have marched on Baghdad but at least we should have gone after the Republican Guard.

JB: Do you believe there were also political motives.

RC: You have to bifurcate the White House team between the national security types and the political types. For the political types like Karl Rove this has been a godsend. They ran on the war in the congressional elections two years ago. They're running on the war now. They're painting this election as a vote on terrorism, a vote against Osama Bin Laden. And they're succeeding to a certain extent because 70 per cent of American people last year thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But the political benefit clearly a secondary benefit.

JB: Do you believe the administration believed the intelligence on Iraqi WMD?

RC: We all believed Saddam had WMD. What I kept saying was: So what?. They said he could give it to terrorists. But I said he's not that stupid. If he gave WMD to terrorists he would lose power. The question was: Is there an imminent threat or had we contained him? And I thought we had successfully contained him. I didn't see it as a first-tier issue.

JB: Did the Pentagon and the office of special plans play an important role in the processing of intelligence?

RC: Certainly. The people in Rumsfeld's office and in Wolfowitz's operation cherry-picked intelligence to select the intelligence to support their views. They never did the due diligence on the intelligence that professional intelligence analysts are trained to do. [The OSP] would go through the intelligence reports including the ones that the CIA was throwing out. They stitched it together they would send it out, send it over to Cheney. All the stuff that a professional would have thrown out. As soon as 9/11 happened people like Rumsfeld saw it was opportunity. During that first week after September 11, the decision was made. It was confirmed by president We should do Afghanistan first. But the resources necessary to do a good job in Afghanistan were withheld. There was not enough to go in fast, to go in enough to secure the country. Troops were held back. There were 11,000 troops in Afghanistan. There were fewer in whole country than police in the borough of Manhattan

JB: The White House is suggesting that this is sour grapes from a Clinton holdover, scoring political points.

RC: I was a Bush [senior] holdover. I'm not a registered Demcrat. I don't want a job in the Kerry admin. What I want to do is to provide the American people with a set of facts and let them draw their own conclusions.

JB: What conclusions did you draw about President Bush's leadership style.

RC: He doesn't like to read a lot - not terribly interested in analysis. He is very interested in getting to the bottom line. Once he's done he puts a lot of strength behind pushing it, but there's not a lot of analysis before the decision.

JB: Do you think Britain had much influence in the run-up to the war?

RC: They would have done it without Britain. I don't think it made a lot of difference. I think the British were able to help Colin Powell to persuade them to go to the UN. It did go to the UN for a period of time, and it may have helped a little. It may also have forced president to issue a statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time. There hasn't been a lot of follow through, and I don't think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us. I think Blair tried to influence the decision making and thought he could do better inside, but his influence was small.

JB: What was Cheney's role in all this.

RC: Quite enormous. Huge. Very quietly and behind the scenes he sat in all the national security meetings chaired by Condi Rice, and no vice president had done that before. He would listen and then give his thoughts. But he bought the compromise that it was al-Qaida first, Iraq second.

Truth or Consequences, Again

First to last, Iraq was clearly Bush's No. 1 priority

The director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew S. Natsios, told the Chronicle last week that most of Afghanistan was still in the control of local war lords. The southeastern quadrant of the country, he said, remains in the hands of the Taliban, a subtribe allied to al-Qaida.

Fighting between Pakistani troops and al-Qaida suspects demonstrates that the loose-knit band of terrorists is dug in and even flourishing along the Afghan border.

Administration officials, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney, still make the case that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, giving many Americans the false impression that Saddam had a hand in 9/11, justifying the invasion of Iraq.

The administration makes a plausible case that a democratic Iraq eventually will change the dynamic in the entire Middle East. Perhaps it will, but not any time soon. Successful elections cannot be held in Iraq until insurgents and imported terrorists have been pacified, yet the level of violence is, if anything, increasing. Almost every day, more U.S. troops and civilians and uncounted Iraqis are killed or wounded.

Soon after the administration announced its program to promote democracy throughout the Arab world, Secretary of State Colin Powell last week assured Arab nations that the United States would not force its democratic aims on friendly despots such as those in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a principal source of support for Islamic militancy and the font of al-Qaida.

If the war on terror were so important, why did the Bush administration at first resist creation of a Department of Homeland Security?

Instead of focusing on al-Qaida, the White House repeatedly tasked the CIA to hunt for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, weapons that have not been found and might not have existed at the time of the invasion. The Pentagon was so dissatisfied with the CIA's performance it created its own intelligence unit, which allowed itself to be deceived by Iraqi exiles.

The war on terror requires unusually close cooperation between all of the world's civilized nations. However, the invasion of Iraq estranged the United States from some of its principal allies and forfeited precious good will toward the United States throughout the world.

The question that remains is not whether Clarke's allegations are accurate in every detail. His is only one side of the debate. The overriding question is whether the United States' war on terror has benefited in some measurable way from the war in Iraq. So far, the answer is no.

This is unnecessarily tick-tocky. The issue at hand is whether or not Clarke's allegations are correct, not whether there are two sides to debate. If he is correct, then he provides all of the ammunition necessary for an impeachment. The documentary history is all available.

From the Center

Phil Carter at Intel Dump, hardly a lefty, has a pretty devastating take-down of David Frum's NRO piece on Richard Clarke's book.

Frum: Clarke seems to have become so enwrapped in the technical problems of terrorism that he has lost sight of its inescapably political context. One reason that his line of argument did not get the hearing in the Bush admininstration that he would have wished was that he did tend to present counter-terrorism as a discrete series of investigations and apprehensions: an endless game of terrorist whack-a-mole. The Bush administration thought in bigger and bolder terms than that. They favored grand strategies over file management. Clarke may have thought that he was dramatizing his case by severing the threat from al Qaeda from its context in the political and economic failures of the Arab and Islamic world. Instead, his way of presenting his concerns seems to have had the perverse effect of making the terrorist issue look small and secondary - of deflating rather than underscoring its importance.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt - for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? - or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate - and it's the wrong side.

Carter: What's Mr. Frum saying? Is he saying that Mr. Clarke's allegations were right, but that he just wasn't articulate enough to sell his agenda to the President? Is Mr. Frum, who was part of the White House political apparatus, saying that Mr. Clarke's real failures were political -- not factual? Did the Bush Administration really ignore a national security threat because one of its advisors couldn't find a way to sell the problem politically? If true, this statement by Mr. Frum is a damning indictment of the entire White House and National Security Council, and it indicates a near-total breakdown of the national security process. The idea behind the NSC staff, intelligence community, Joint Chiefs, and all the other systems in the national security process is to professionalize the decisions of the President in this area -- not to politicize them. Now comes Mr. Frum, saying essentially that the White House ignored its in-house expert on terrorism because he couldn't package it well enough. That's a really disturbing relevation -- especially because it comes from one of the President's own.

Politics at Your MD

New Warning Urged On Antidepressants
Alert Would Address Suicidal Tendencies

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 23, 2004; Page A03

The Food and Drug Administration urged drugmakers yesterday to put new warning labels on popular antidepressant medications, including Paxil, Zoloft and Luvox, alerting doctors and consumers to watch for suicidal tendencies, hostility and agitation in patients taking the drugs.

The agency's action focuses on 10 antidepressant drugs in all and follows a warning by the British government last year advising physicians not to prescribe most widely used antidepressants to children. Last month, families of American adolescents who killed themselves while taking the medications implored the FDA to take comparable steps, and an expert advisory committee urged greater vigilance in the use of the medications in children with depression.

The agency said it does not know whether the medications -- which include several drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs -- are responsible for reported side effects such as inner restlessness, agitation and suicidal thoughts in some people. Officials said they are drawing greater attention to known cautionary information while a team of outside researchers completes a comprehensive analysis of the possible risks.

Patients taking the drugs who experience behavioral side effects should contact their physicians, said Russell Katz, director of neuropharmacological drug products at the FDA. If the symptoms are new or severe, he added, doctors should consider lowering the dose or stopping the drug.

Yesterday's move by the agency calls for warning-label changes for adults as well as children, and for patients who are depressed as well as those who use the drugs for unrelated problems.

"The advice applies across the board whether the drugs are used for any indication -- psychiatric or not," Katz said.

Critics of the medications called yesterday's move a victory and demanded that the FDA go further. Although Prozac is the only one of this class of drugs that has been specifically approved to treat depression in children, doctors are writing tens of thousands of prescriptions for many of the others, based on their clinical judgment that the drugs are safe and effective.

But the NYT says:

The agency's decision to issue such a broad warning was a surprise. Top F.D.A. officials have long insisted that their decisions are driven only by clear-cut evidence from well-run clinical trials. But in a conference call with reporters yesterday, agency officials said that no studies had shown a convincing link between drug therapy and suicide. Suicide is such a rare side effect that studies on the subject have been difficult to interpret, the regulators said.

Still, the agency issued the advisory anyway.

"It warns physicians that patients' depression may become worse," said Dr. Russell Katz, the agency's chief of neurological drugs, "that they may develop suicidal thinking or behavior after the initiation of treatment."

A series of secret studies, which were conducted by drug companies and became public last year, seemed to show that depressed children and teenagers given antidepressants were more likely to become suicidal than those given placebos. The studies also showed that most antidepressants were not effective in treating depression in children and teenagers. Those studies are still under review at the agency.

What is going on here?

Since everything the Bush appointees do is political, view this through a political lens. This is a dumb ruling, a pathetic attempt to shield drugmakers from liability in the event of suicide. It is unsurprising to learn that depressed people are at greater risk than non-depressed people.

The new generation of anti-depressants, Prozac and its children, do help a lot of people, but don't work for everyone. Their efficacy in children and adolescents has not been established, although they are widely prescribed.

Are they overprescribed? Show me a drug that isn't. This isn't science, it's politics.

Good and Evil

Lifting the Shroud

On "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the previously unsayable: that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed "war president," had "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." After a few hours of shocked silence, the character assassination began. He "may have had a grudge to bear since he probably wanted a more prominent position," declared Dick Cheney, who also says that Mr. Clarke was "out of the loop." (What loop? Before 9/11, Mr. Clarke was the administration's top official on counterterrorism.) It's "more about politics and a book promotion than about policy," Scott McClellan said.

Of course, Bush officials have to attack Mr. Clarke's character because there is plenty of independent evidence confirming the thrust of his charges.

Did the Bush administration ignore terrorism warnings before 9/11? Justice Department documents obtained by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, show that it did. Not only did John Ashcroft completely drop terrorism as a priority — it wasn't even mentioned in his list of seven "strategic goals" — just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in counterterrorism funds.

Did the administration neglect counterterrorism even after 9/11? After 9/11 the F.B.I. requested $1.5 billion for counterterrorism operations, but the White House slashed this by two-thirds. (Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has been attacking John Kerry because he once voted for a small cut in intelligence funds.)

Oh, and the next time terrorists launch an attack on American soil, they will find their task made much easier by the administration's strange reluctance, even after 9/11, to protect potential targets. In November 2001 a bipartisan delegation urged the president to spend about $10 billion on top-security priorities like ports and nuclear sites. But Mr. Bush flatly refused.

Finally, did some top officials really want to respond to 9/11 not by going after Al Qaeda, but by attacking Iraq? Of course they did. "From the very first moments after Sept. 11," Kenneth Pollack told "Frontline," "there was a group of people, both inside and outside the administration, who believed that the war on terrorism . . . should target Iraq first." Mr. Clarke simply adds more detail.

Still, the administration would like you to think that Mr. Clarke had base motives in writing his book. But given the hawks' dominance of the best-seller lists until last fall, it's unlikely that he wrote it for the money. Given the assumption by most political pundits, until very recently, that Mr. Bush was guaranteed re-election, it's unlikely that he wrote it in the hopes of getting a political job. And given the Bush administration's penchant for punishing its critics, he must have known that he was taking a huge personal risk.

So why did he write it? How about this: Maybe he just wanted the public to know the truth.

I'll bet he spent the last day wishing he hadn't written it, unless he is a lot thicker skinned than I. I spent the last day watching the roll out and wondering what kind of human could survive the fire the Bushies leveled on this man. What they are doing to him is so vile that it roils my stomach.

These are vile people, doing vile things. It is long past time that we are rid of them.

Thanks

We are heading into a new cycle which is going to include recipes, I'm having a serious food jones these days. Eddie and I appreciate all you've done, but we are still a thousand dollars away from the work he needs. If you can hit the tip jar, thank you. If you are like me and have to pay it forward, thanks for your prayers.

The Baghdad Blogs

The Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy is Back to Baghdad and blogging it live. The portrait he paints is of a security situation which has deteriorated markedly from his last tour.

I returned to Baghdad last Monday night, six weeks after my last rotation here as a Monitor correspondent. To get here, I left Amman, probably later than I should have, with a Jordanian driver at the helm of a white GMC truck – the land-boat of choice for the runs to and from Baghdad. A delayed flight had gotten us started from Amman later than I wanted, but I comforted myself that the heavily traveled western road into Baghdad hadn’t suffered from any attacks in recent months. At least none that I had heard about.

About 10 minutes outside of Baghdad, around midnight, we and the other GMC driving with us (under the logic that there’s safety in numbers) are brought to a screeching halt by a US military roadblock: Two humvees parked in the middle of the desert highway surrounded by wary troops. The lead driver immediately jumps out of his car and begins to shout and flail his arms. I don’t speak Arabic, but I could tell the driver was frustrated. Roads are inexplicably and unpredictably shut here often, and nerves are always frayed. I’m certainly not immune.

"Read the rest" isn't something you hear me say very often, but Dan's blog is going to be a terrific resource for us in days to come. War zones are "up is down" places, danger comes in strange guises, and I've read enough enough of Murphy's coverage to think he is going to be a reliable voice, within the constraints placed on any one journo: it's one perspective, one set of experiences, and as Blogoviads know, that's not enough. Chris Allbritton of Back to Iraq hopes to be back to Iraq by the end of the month, blogging live from the theater.

And here is Salam Pax in the Guardian today, blogging the Iraqi blogosphere:

Do you know how many Iraqi bloggers have joined the Blogosphere after the war? come on ... try a guess ...

Bookmarks
My personal regular Iraqi blog reads are Baghdad Burning and Healing Iraq. and since I am either too lazy or too busy (depends how you look at it), it is good we have them to tell us about the recent attacks in Baghdad and Basra - Zeyad who writes Healing Iraq is a dentist working in Basra.

All of these are my regular bookmarks. You might want to add them to yours.

The Yes Man

Misoverestimated
Yes, the hard-liners have outflanked and humiliated Colin Powell.
But don't feel sorry for him. He has no one to blame but himself.
By Michael Steinberger
Issue Date: 4.1.04

Powell's tenure at Foggy Bottom has not been completely devoid of successes. He negotiated a peaceful, face-saving resolution to the crisis with China over a downed American spy plane in April 2001. He played a key role in back-channel discussions that led to Libya's recent decision to give up its nuclear ambitions and cooperate in the fight against terrorism. He was also instrumental in persuading Bush to dispatch U.S. Marines to Liberia last summer and to earmark more money for Africa's AIDS crisis. And he has proven to be an enormously popular figure within the State Department, giving the embattled institution a much-needed morale boost (by, among other things, surrounding himself with career diplomats rather than political appointees).

But measured against the expectations that greeted his appointment, these are puny achievements. What most troubles people who know Powell is the passivity with which he has endured the many setbacks and slights. For instance, there is no evidence that he protested the decision to put the Pentagon in charge of administering postwar Iraq; no evidence, either, that he tried to intervene when Warrick was barred from going to Baghdad, or that he spoke up when the Pentagon began blocking other State Department appointees to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have repeatedly muscled in on Powell's turf, Bolton has repeatedly subverted his authority. But if Powell has voiced any displeasure to the president, or even to Rice, it is the best-kept secret in Washington. "I don't think he's fighting, and I can't understand why," says one high-ranking official from the first Bush administration.

Actually, there is an explanation for Powell's inaction, and it has little to do with his uniformed past. True, he is a military man, accustomed to falling in line; as Caspar Weinberger once put it, "Colin is essentially a good soldier. He does his duty and carries out orders." Habits formed over a lifetime are hard to break, and Powell's natural inclination is to swallow his differences and salute. Yet it's the fact that those differences are never strongly held that mainly accounts for Powell's inaction. He has opinions but few, if any, real convictions, and there's no ground he won't cede in the interest of expediency and ambition. Says Richard Kohn, "He's a man with no core of ideology, vision, or principle other than to serve the United States."

The only times in his career that Powell put up a fight were over gays in the military and over Bosnia. He fought on those because they fed exactly into what has been his one true cause: protecting his beloved Army, from both potential Vietnams and from wooly-eyed civilians generally. But even then, the real story was not so much what he did as what he didn't do. These were cases in which he feared the country's civilian leadership was once again screwing things up for the Army, yet he didn't resign in protest -- even as he urged others to do just that. For Powell, even the Powell doctrine proved expendable. The Bush administration has turned the doctrine on its head in Iraq -- by waging preemptive war, by using less than overwhelming force, and by placing U.S. troops in a hostile environment with neither a plausible postwar plan nor an exit strategy. That Powell was complicit in this effort says pretty much all there is to say about his attachment to principle.

And over at The Black Commentator:

Powell is personally culpable in the kidnapping of President Aristide. Is it any wonder that TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson calls Colin Powell “the most powerful and damaging black to rise to influence in the world in my lifetime.”

Assassination Policy

Show of strength before Gaza pullout

By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent

The assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin was probably designed to show that an Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza as the first stage of a strategy of "disengagement" is motivated by design not weakness.
....

The war against Hamas also has a long way to go.

Decadence

Liberal Oasis's Bill Scher goes dead tree with an Op-Ed in the Strib yesterday:

This month, CIA Director George Tenet warned the Senate that the Al-Qaida ideology was gaining ground: "The steady spread of Usama bin Ladin's anti-US sentiment though the wider Sunni extremist movement... ensures that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future[,] with or without al-Qaida in the picture."

Therein lies the tough nut: We have to do more than defeat a group of people, we have to defeat an idea. That's tricky business, but you surely can't defeat an idea unless you understand what that idea is.

Tenet's testimony leaves the impression that he thinks Al-Qaida's interest in attacking the United States is an end to itself. And Bush, of course, never spent any time educating the voters on what is driving them. He simply told us they "hate freedom" and left it at that.

But it's not that simple. As terror expert Jason Burke explained in the book "Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror," the attacks are not an end, but a means. They are propaganda tools to "radicalize and mobilize those Muslims who have shunned [Bin Laden's] call to action [by] proving that there is a cosmic battle between good and evil underway and that Islam ... is in peril." In turn, Bin Laden believes the world's Muslim's will "rise up," earn "the blessing of God [and] cast off the shackles that have been laid upon them by what he sees as centuries of 'humiliation and contempt.' "

If that's the case, then it's easy to see how a war with Iraq could be counterproductive to the war on terror. If Bin Laden wanted a "cosmic battle," he got what he wanted. Tenet's analysis that Bin Laden's message is spreading beyond his immediate organization bolsters that notion.

It appears that Europe wants to get out of this trap. Recently, both the German chancellor and the European Union foreign policy chief spoke of addressing "root causes" of terror in addition to combating the "symptoms."

That's the sort of liberal talk that American conservatives deride as "decadence." But if Europe concludes that Bush made a strategic error with Iraq and tries a new strategy, that's not "decadence," that's pragmatism. And if radical Islamic terror continues to display strength, Bush supporters may increasingly worry that come November, American voters will be pragmatic too.

Danger

POSTCARD FROM BAGHDAD
STREET CRIME
by Jon Lee Anderson
Issue of 2004-03-29
Posted 2004-03-22

The blast from the bomb that blew up the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad in mid-March knocked me out of my chair and sent my coffee flying out of its cup. A few seconds later, there was a burst from what sounded like a Kalashnikov. Gunfire has become routine in Baghdad, and there are explosions almost every day, but this was the biggest blast I had heard since Saddam’s palaces and municipal buildings were being attacked by the United States, exactly a year ago. I am staying in the same hotel, the Palestine, I stayed in then, with its views of the Tigris and, on the other side of the river, the big Presidential complex, which is now occupied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, in what is called the Green Zone. (Everything outside its reinforced walls—in other words, the rest of Iraq—is referred to as the Red Zone.) A great gray plume of smoke was billowing into the night sky, and I went up to the roof to get a better view. Several other hotel guests were already there: Iraqis, Koreans, Italians, Spaniards, a number of Americans, a couple of South Africans. During the past year, hundreds of foreigners—journalists, entrepreneurs, the paramilitary representatives of private security firms—have made their way to Iraq. One entire floor of the Palestine is occupied by employees of Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. When the elevator stops on their floor and the doors open, Nepalese Gurkha guards with snub-nosed submachine guns are standing in the hallway to check out who’s getting off.

Baghdad is a much more dangerous place than it was a year ago. A few days before the Mount Lebanon explosion, someone set off a bomb in front of a perfume shop in the same neighborhood—Al-Karrada, a predominantly Shiite section of the city. The target of the attack, who died, was the brotherin-law of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. Jaafari’s brother-in-law was not involved in politics, but he was presumably easier to get to than Jaafari, and killing him may have been worth it just to get a message across.

The fall of Saddam has improved the lives of many Iraqis, especially professionals such as doctors, engineers, and teachers, whose salaries have significantly increased. And the streets are clogged with traffic, which wasn’t true before the war. A great many Iraqis took advantage of the temporary suspension of import duties at the border with Jordan and bought cheap secondhand cars. The Internet, which was strictly controlled under Saddam, is available everywhere, as are a wide variety of computers, domestic appliances, and cell phones. These life-style improvements notwithstanding, very few people venture out on the streets after dark, and almost no one I know dares drive after ten-thirty. This is because of the staggering increase in the number of rapes, murders, armed robberies, carjackings, and kidnappings. Saddam emptied the country’s prisons a few months before the war, and perhaps a hundred thousand criminals returned to the streets. Young girls are now walked to and from school by their fathers or brothers, for fear they might be snatched. Women generally dress much more modestly than they did before, wearing either baggy black abayas or helmet-like hijab head scarves.

It is not only the wealthy who are targeted for robbery and extortion. As in countries like Colombia and Mexico, wives and children of schoolteachers and mechanics are kidnapped along with politicians and rich businessmen. A couple of months ago, the twelve-year-old son of an Iraqi friend of mine, a driver who lives in a working-class neighborhood, was kidnapped one morning while walking to school. My friend had recently bought a nice secondhand car, which he was very proud of and loved to show off. That was probably his big mistake. The kidnappers demanded fifty thousand dollars in ransom. He bargained them down to six thousand dollars, sold his new car, and paid up. Several hours later, the boy was released a few blocks from his home. Since then, my friend has not let his son out of the house, even to go to school.

Everyone is on edge here, but foreigners are the main targets of assassination. A few days ago, a German and a Dutch engineer were murdered on the road between Baghdad and Karbala at about the time a journalist friend of mine was driving along the same route. He was travelling with a security detail that was supposed to keep suspicious cars away, but suddenly he realized that a black BMW—the car of choice for assassins in Iraq—had pulled up alongside him. The BMW raced past and then doubled back. As it went by a second time, my friend saw several men inside, staring at him intently. Assassins usually rake the driver’s side of a car with bullets on their second or third pass, causing a crash. My friend’s driver took evasive measures and escaped down a side road.

This is not an abstraction for me. I have a friend, an American, who will be back in Baghdad in a couple of weeks. More peaceful, more free my a**.

Beyond Tick-Tock

Corrente notices that the Grey Lady hides the story. WaPo fronts it.

Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response
President Pushed Iraq Link, Aide Says

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events.

Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark paneled room.

"Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam did this."

"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied.

"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq, Saddam."

For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday.

Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."

Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' " Clarke writes.

Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."

On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.

I thought that Leslie Stahl paid too much attention to tick-tock journalism, but Clarke was strong and the critique is pretty devestating. We'll see where it goes; if it puts W on the defensive, it would be about time, and about facts. Facts are stubborn things, and the press doesn't care for them very much. The press prefers conflict, and will try to make this story be about dueling quotes.

There were a bunch of stories on NPR last week about declining circulation in the daily papers. It hasn't occured to them yet to consider that the way they cover stories might be a problem for a public which picks up the local rag first thing in the morning looking for facts rather than the familiar journalistic yada. Over there on the right is a live link to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. Josh seems stuck on those stubborn facts.

UPDATE: via Billmon, the 60 Minutes transcript, courtesy of Sadly, No. I'm listening to the gaggle and the "slime and defend" has already started.

Do The Right Thing

Terry Mattingly and Douglas LeBlanc are GetReligion, a blog which fact-checks religion stories in the secular press. In today's post, Terry does an excellent job of laying out the facts and context around the story of the Methodist minister, Rev. Karen Dammann, which I posted this morning (as well as critiquing the Allen Cooperman/WaPo story I posted):

Meanwhile, the verdict is now in. A jury of 13 pastors found the Rev. Karen Dammann innocent of violating her church's teachings against homosexual conduct by clergy. In effect, the jury found the United Methodist Church itself guilty of having an unclear law, or at least one that can be considered unclear by those who oppose the teachings contained therein. The Seattle Times reported:

Actually, these flocks and their shepherds appear to have a lot in common.

What Terry points out is that this issue heightens the progressive/traditionalist splits in all the denominations in this country, as well as causing considerable friction between their shrinking first world populations and their growing second and third world ones. This issue has a lot of history: it has come up every year at the quadrennial conferences of the UMC, PCUSA and PECUSA for more than thirty years. When the consecration of openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson came up last year, I like the stand taken by DC's Bishop. He said, "We've been fighting with this for 30 years. It is time to do the right thing."

Bad Science, Bad Education

The failures of abstinence-only

By Naomi Ninneman, 3/21/2004

Abstinence-only education has been in the news recently. In his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed doubling federal funding for it. But many people are surprised when they find out what the "only" in "abstinence-only" really means.

It means, under the federal regulations governing these programs, that educators are prohibited from telling students that condoms can prevent pregnancy and HIV/AIDS.

They cannot discuss the facts even when talking to sexually active teens who are at high risk of contracting HIV. According to these guidelines, condoms and other forms of contraception can only be discussed to emphasize their failure rates. Some programs, for example, provide students with two lists: one of diseases they can get when having unprotected sex and another of diseases they can get when using a condom. The lists are the same. Both include HIV, but the fact that condoms are roughly 96 percent effective in preventing the spread of this disease is nowhere to be found.

This marks a radical departure from traditional sex education, which focuses on a comprehensive approach to preventing teen pregnancy, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases. It also makes abstinence-only programs dangerous.

Perhaps that is why, despite the backing of President Bush, recent polls show that only 15 percent of Americans favor the abstinence-only approach. But do the programs work?

It's not easy to answer that question definitively, since no effort has been made at the federal level to rigorously evaluate their effectiveness. The Department of Health and Human Services hired Mathematica Policy Research Inc. in the late 1990s to complete a federal assessment but directed researchers to evaluate only 11 handpicked programs, instead of a random sample of the hundreds of federally funded programs. Further, Mathematica's soon-to-be-released interim report will not evaluate any of the programs for behavioral change. In other words, it won't tell us whether these programs are leading kids to have less sex or more sex, or whether that is affecting rates of pregnancy and infection.

Meanwhile, studies that looked at behavioral change have produced results that are hardly reassuring.

In Minnesota, for example, a recent study of the state's abstinence-only program, Education Now and Babies Later, found that sexual activity among participating students doubled between 2001 and 2002 and that the number who said they would probably have sex during high school nearly doubled, as well.

In 2001, researchers at Columbia University found that, although a limited number of students who signed so-called "virginity pledges" delayed sexual activity for more than a year, they were also one-third less likely to use protection when they did have sex -- a massive failure from a public health perspective. This year, the same researchers found that students who signed the pledges contracted sexually transmitted diseases at roughly the same rate as students who did not.

In the public health community, this raises serious concerns about why the federal government is spending millions of dollars on programs that have not been proven effective. It is even more disturbing, given the research findings on comprehensive sex education programs. Numerous rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that these programs help teens delay sexual activity, use contraceptives when they do become sexually active, and reduce their number of partners.

Because it's not about facts, it is about ideological purity. Chris Mooney is tracking Bushco's bad science. I really find this infuriating--this is denying a decent education in human sexuality to kids who need it.

Our Man in Islamabad, II

CNN ends up with “much egg on its face”

By Khalid Hasan

The excitement began because of an interview President Pervez Musharraf had granted to visiting CNN anchor, Aaron Brown. The President told him in answer to a question about the military operation in progress in South Waziristan that the resistance being offered by the besieged militants suggested that they might be defending a “high-value target” who had “very likely” been surrounded. He said the fierce resistance being experienced led him to believe that it was a senior al-Qaeda leader. “Who, I don’t know,” he added.

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, said he could not confirm that Ayman al-Zawahiri was the leader who had been surrounded. “We don’t know,” he said. “No one from Pakistan government has given this name.” An American counterterrorism official said in Washington, “They believe they have cornered a high-value target, but no one can be certain at this point.”

However, CNN, taking its cue from the President’s carefully-worded remarks, “ran with the bit in its mouth and kept running until late into the night,” as the New York-based journalist put it. The principal reason CNN went over the top with the al-Zawahiri story was the presence of its anchor Aaron Brown in Pakistan, who had actually arrived to cover US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit. It is the practice at American television networks that if one of their high-profile stars arrives in a country, they consider that arrival by itself newsworthy and deserving of extensive coverage. Top news anchors like Aaron Brown are expected to file a major story wherever they go. Therefore, when President Musharraf told the American TV news anchor what he told him about the South Waziristan operation, CNN decided that it had a world exclusive and it night be the first to report the biggest story since the capture of Saddam Hussein.

CNN has actually ended up with a lot of egg on its face and shown the immaturity and lack of professionalism of its news managers. On Friday morning, its top news executives decided that the al-Zawahiri story had to be downgraded. Other networks showed more maturity than exhibited by CNN. They took due note of the story but did not go over the top as CNN had.

Age of Unseriousness

While American first responders go unfunded by the unserious Bush administration, we aren't the only ones betrayed by our government:

Official: UK would fail to cope with major terror attack
By Geoffrey Lean, Paul Lashmar and Sophie Goodchild

21 March 2004

Britain could not cope with a terrorist bombing on the scale of this month's atrocity in Madrid, the country's top emergency planners have admitted. It would be even less able to deal with the aftermath of the chemical, biological or nuclear attack predicted by ministers and the security services.

Resources for emergency planning have declined in real terms since the destruction of the World Trade Center, according to those in charge. They say their staff lack vital equipment and training, that the Government keeps its plans secret from them and that the public has not been given enough information on how to react to an incident.

Patrick Cunningham, the leader of Britain's 500 emergency planners, called the situation "unbelievable", and described the country as gripped by "a culture of complacency". Iain Hoult, their chairman in southern England, added: "We are very, very badly prepared."

Prevention of a terrorist attack has also been overshadowed by another embarrassment for the Government. Britain's security services face censure for allowing a key suspect in the investigation into the Madrid bombings to disappear. Mohammed al-Garbuzi ­ believed to have been in close contact with Jamal Zougam, who is being held by the Spanish police in connection with the attacks that killed 202 people ­ fled his London home on Wednesday night, despite being well-known to MI5.

These developments came on a day when people in more than 300 cities across the world marched in protest at the occupation of Iraq. The numbers marching in London and many other places were substantially down on the pre-war protests of a year ago, but the number of places across the globe where protesters took to the streets was up on 2003.

Many will have been concerned about the increased risk of terrorist attack. They are not alone. This week representatives of Britain's local authorities are to meet the Government to demand more resources before the country is caught unawares by terrorists. The Local Government Association will tell the Cabinet Office and the Deputy Prime Minister's Office that funds for emergency planning must be increased after being frozen since before 11 September 2001.

The money provided for planning has remained at £19m a year since April 2001, a decline in real terms. No increase is expected next year, and under the Civil Contingencies Bill, now before Parliament, even this amount will no longer be guaranteed: emergency planners will have to compete with other local authority priorities for funds.

Your Rights

Judge Rules on Abortion Records

Associated Press
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page A09

NEW YORK, March 20 -- A New York hospital has been ordered to turn over abortion records to the Justice Department, which is seeking them for its legal battle over the Partial-Birth Abortion Act.

A Manhattan federal judge, Richard Casey, ruled Thursday that New York-Presbyterian Hospital must comply with the Justice Department's request.

Judges in other jurisdictions, including Chicago and San Francisco, have refused in recent weeks to order abortion records released from hospitals there.

But a federal judge last week ordered the University of Michigan Health System to turn over its records for possible inclusion in the case.

Legal observers say that because of the divergent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court may ultimately have to rule on the issue.

Casey said the records are not covered by federal privacy laws because information identifying the women who received the late-term abortions could be deleted. New York-Presbyterian Hospital said it was considering an appeal.

Here's the brand new law which this violates.

The Greatest of These

Methodist Jury Acquits Gay Pastor

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page A01

After a three-day trial, a jury of fellow ministers acquitted an Ellensburg, Wash., pastor of violating United Methodist Church law by living openly as a lesbian, saying the church has not clearly declared homosexuality to be incompatible with Christian teaching.

Yesterday's verdict is a milestone for liberals in the church who want to reverse its ban on "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals" in the clergy, and it is a defeat for conservatives seeking to hold the line against the gay rights movement in the church and in secular society.

If the Rev. Karen Dammann had been convicted, she could have lost her job as pastor of the 200-member First United Methodist Church in rural Ellensburg and been permanently removed from the ministry.

Methodists on both sides of the issue predicted that the decision would reverberate through the 8.3 million-member denomination, much as the consecration of a gay bishop has embroiled the Episcopal Church in a debate between the authority of scriptural passages that condemn homosexuality and the desire to be an inclusive, tolerant religious community.

The not-guilty verdict "will be shocking to most United Methodists, because there is no question about what the Reverend Dammann is doing," said the Rev. James V. Heidinger, president of Good News, a conservative renewal movement in the church. "It was assumed by most of us that we were just going through due process to make sure her rights were protected, but that she obviously was in violation of church law."

Dammann had tested the Methodist Church's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gays in the clergy by writing a Feb. 14, 2001, letter to her bishop saying she was "living in a partnered, covenanted, homosexual relationship."

Dammann, 47, and her partner, Meredith Savage, 44, a wetlands biologist, have lived together for eight years and were married this month in Portland, Ore., after county officials there began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. They are rearing a 5-year-old son who was borne by Savage and legally adopted by Dammann.

The three-day trial in a church social hall in Bothell, Wash., followed the same pattern as a civil trial, with witnesses questioned by a prosecutor and a defense counsel. But both were ministers, not lawyers, and the proceeding was overseen by a retired bishop who sat by a single candle, representing the presence of the holy spirit.

Under church rules, a conviction requires at least nine votes, or two-thirds of the 13 jurors. Eleven jurors voted not guilty, and two were undecided.

In a written statement, the jury said it reached its decision "after many hours of painful and prayerful deliberation and listening for and to the word of God." Although it found Dammann to be a "self-avowed practicing homosexual," the jury said it did not have "clear and convincing evidence" that she was guilty of the charge of "practices declared by the United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teachings."

This is one battle, not the war, in the Methodist church and all of the others. It sure is nice to have some good news to report. I'll have more later, after I've had time to digest the ruling.

Counter-terrorism

Juan Cole has rather a lot to say this morning as we all fortify our tinfoil hats for Richard Clarke's appearance on 60 Minutes this evening:

As a comment on Clarke's experience. In fall of 2002 I taught my course on wars in the Middle East here at the University of Michigan. And I told the class that on September 12, Wolfowitz wanted to bomb Iraq in retaliation. The class laughed. I mean they burst out into giggles. I was taken aback. I was just telling the story as we knew it then. I hadn't been going for a laugh. Out of the mouth of babes . . .

Love the One You're With

Eddie is really sick. He has dental abcesses and needs about $1200 of vet work right now. Can you help?

He stands next to me like a little soldier and I can't help. Can you? This is humiliating for me. My cat is sick and I can't fix it.

--M

Our Man in Islamabad

While CNN was whipping up the mobs on Friday with "breaking news" all over the place and cancelling their scheduled program to follow the snipe hunt/Afghan branch ("Might be Ayman al-Zawahiri!!!!!!!!"), I was listening to Blitzer bluster even louder than usual--had to be on all afternoon, poor baby--and reading this:

But interviews with top Afghan and US intelligence officials reveal a number of reasons the US has failed so far to catch Mr. bin Laden and his coterie of fighters. The difficulties, which cannot be easily overcome, are numerous:

• Few of America's local spies trust the US military or US intelligence agents, who by one account rotate in and out within three months.

• Most of America's human intelligence comes from local interpreters, many of whom have their own personal scores to settle, and have a history of giving false information.

• American technological advantages in satellite imagery and phone intercepts are almost useless in a country with few phones to monitor.

"Without human intelligence, this operation will be meaningless," says a senior Afghan intelligence officer, who requests anonymity. "Instead of catching Osama, the Americans will only create more opposition for themselves."

Most Afghans want the Americans to stay and rebuild the country, this Afghan intelligence officer adds, noting that Afghans regularly provide American intelligence agents and soldiers with tip-offs of Taliban movements. But individual American agents don't spend enough time in Afghanistan to know who is telling them the truth.

"American intelligence agencies change their staff every three months," he says. "How is it possible for a foreigner to come to Kandahar or Khost, to understand the society or the psychology, to know a man's tribal relations, his past behavior, his personal motives, whether he is honest or if he is telling a lie? It is not possible in three months."

Poor intelligence has led to mistakes.

In December 2001, a tip from the warlord, Badshah Khan Zadran, sent American AC-130 gunships and Navy fighters to attack a convoy of vehicles full of Afghan tribal elders on their way to show allegiance to the post-Taliban government; 65 civilians were reportedly killed.

In July 2002, at least 48 people were killed and 117 wounded when US warplanes attacked a wedding party in the town of Deh Rawud in central Afghanistan. The US military said a gunship had come under fire in the area.

More recently, on Dec. 6, 2003, US forces admitted mistakenly killing nine children when they bombed the home of a suspected Taliban commander near the town of Ghazni. The attack, prompted by "extensive intelligence" was precise, but the target left the location an hour before.

"I believe as long as you use local, infamous warlords, you'll always have problems," says Ali Ahmed Jalali, the Afghan interior minister, who maintains an extensive intelligence service. "Some of these warlords wanted to ensure mistakes were made, to keep the war going. There are cases where misinformation has been fed into the system."

So I'm reading this and listening to the Wolfster huff and puff, and I'm thinking, "This is a created media event to cover up the fact that "war week" as campaign event isen't working out so well." The fact of the matter was that if the Pakistani ISI was chasing Al Qaeda, they'd hardly have a clue about who it is. Pervez Musharraf remains in power only because they allow it, they are at least as sympathetic to AQ as they are to him, and it is unlikely the tribal chiefs in the area are going to be any more cooperative with them than with the US.

Our man Pervez put on a little show for Colin Powell, who had been in Islamabad the previous day to elevate Pakistan to "major ally" status, so he gets a show--a politically helpful one--in exchange for certifying Pak as a recipient for major arms shipments. How we will explain this to our friends the Indians is not certain, but it is clear that we don't have much of a diplomatic posture with regard to this explosive sittuation. Sort of like our lack of posture with Korea. It's worth noting that all of these potentially explosive situations have a nuclear triangle warning on them, unlike Iraq. In other words, the most dangerous proliferation situations are getting the least attention.

In short, the actual interests of the country with regard to security are nowhere in sight. Our "war" president has a very limited attention span, limited interest, limited intelligence. Listening to his speeches this week has been an exercise in Yogic self-control of breathing and pulse rate. His little subject-verb sentences with a Manichaen adjective thrown in here and there--the epic battle of good and evil--will probably drive me mad before we get anywhere near the election, and I don't have all that far to go after three and a half years of up-is-downism.

News from the Front

Jcecil3 is a theoblogger who usually confines himself to progressive Catholic topics. This past week he posted a disturbing conversation with a servicemember who had returned from Iraq. I reproduce it here:

I ran into someone I know in the military who served in the war in Iraq. Because I support the troops, even if I question Bush, I was keeping my anti-war sentiments to myself, and I don't think this guy and I ever talked politics before.

This is an "unofficial report" from one person's perspective, so I make no claim to know how much is really true. All I can say is that I have no reason to doubt my source.

While this doesn't rise much above the standards of heresay, given the paucity of good reporting in the traditional media, first hand accounts may be the only way we can build a mosaic that represents reality.

Year 2 of ....

Newsday opines the obvious:

Year 2 in Iraq may be worse
The terror attacks come from those who have a lot to lose from a free nation; they intend to drive the West away before a government can take hold.

The American people are justifiably concerned about how long the violence will last and how many young U.S. soldiers will be killed or wounded in Iraq. Partly that is the result of the administration selling the public on its belief a year ago that stabilizing Iraq would be a relatively easy task. The Bush administration certainly did nothing to prepare domestic public opinion for the long, hard road that nation-building requires, especially in a country with the brutal ethnic tensions of Iraq.

The administration of President George W. Bush made the task all the more difficult by arrogantly pursuing the Iraq mission by itself, without making any genuine attempt to build a broad international coalition, as the first Bush administration did in 1991. This White House attitude was: We are going to do this whether you like it or not; join us. But that also reflected the Pentagon's view that the post-war period wouldn't be all that difficult so why bother to build a coalition: Better to be free to act alone.

The next year in Iraq will be as difficult as the last year. More difficult. Car bombings, hotel bombings, sniper fire and ambushes will not abate. The United States wants to hand back sovereignty to the Iraqi people this summer, even as the Iraqis - the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Kurds and all the other factions there - work to construct an interim government, write a constitution and then elect a government.

The terrorist goal is to weaken Western morale and force the United States out of Iraq well before any new form of government can take hold. That is what the bombing in Spain was all about. That is what the bombings of hotels in Iraq were all about.

Stained Blue Dress

The New York Times rediscovers The Clenis.

Clinton Aides Plan to Tell Panel of Warning Bush Team on Qaeda
By PHILIP SHENON

Published: March 20, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 19 — Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act.

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.

At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed.

"It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president's cyberterrorism adviser.

The sworn testimony from the high-ranking Clinton administration officials — including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser — is scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

They are expected to testify along with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who will answer for the Bush administration, as well as George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence in both administrations.

While Clinton officials have offered similar accounts in the past, a new public review of how they warned Mr. Bush's aides about the need to deal quickly with the Qaeda threat could prove awkward to the White House, especially in the midst of a presidential campaign. But given the witnesses' prominence in the Clinton administration, supporters of Mr. Bush may see political motives in the testimony of some of them.

....
In his testimony, Mr. Clarke is also expected to discuss what he believed to be the Bush administration's determination to punish Saddam Hussein for the Sept. 11 attacks even though there was no evidence to tie the Iraqi president to Al Qaeda.

The issue is addressed in a new book by Mr. Clarke, and in an interview to promote the book on "60 Minutes" on CBS-TV scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Clarke said that the White House considered bombing Iraq in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, even when it became clear that Al Qaeda was responsible.

"I think they wanted to believe there was a connection, but the C.I.A. was sitting there, the F.B.I. was sitting there, saying, `We've looked at this issue for years — for years, we've looked, and there's just no connection,' " Mr. Clarke said. He recalled telling Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that "there are a lot of good targets in a lot of places, but Iraq had nothing to do" with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The White House has insisted that it acted aggressively throughout 2001 on the warnings to deal with the threat from Qaeda terrorists, and that there was an exhaustive staff review throughout the spring and summer, with a proposal ready for President Bush in early September to step up the government's efforts to destroy the terrorist network.

The Clinton administration witnesses may face difficult questions at the hearings about why they did not do more to deal with Qaeda immediately after the Cole attack and the discovery the previous winter that Qaeda terrorists had come close to coordinated attacks timed to the Dec. 31, 1999, festivities for the new millennium.

"There was no contemplation of any military action after the millennium plots, and there should have been," said Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the commission and a former senator from Nebraska.

"The Cole is even worse, because that was an attack on a military target," he said. "It was military against military. It was an Islamic army against our Navy. Just because you don't have a nation-state as your adversary doesn't mean you should not consider a declaration of war."

No, not enough was done on Clinton's watch. But the facts already in the public record indicate that the Bushies completely lost interest in AQ to focus on Saddam from day 1. Notice that Shenon doesn't mention that, which is pretty central to Clarke's book.

Stupid Pet Tricks

Irish eyes won't smile when Bush pays visit
Jimmy Breslin

March 18, 2004

Bush goes to Dublin to speak at a meeting of European nations. The size of Ireland makes any corner of the country easy to reach by protesters. The Bush government has been discussing places for safe meetings in the empty west of Ireland. The people around Bush feel any unfriendly crowd is a frontal assault that requires the 10th Mountain Division to defend. The Bush people think that the west of Ireland will be friendly. They are that out of touch with Ireland. The people will go anywhere to protest against Bush and his war. A corner of Mayo, or Grafton Street in Dublin, are equally good. The mails in my office and house have been filled with notices of war protest marches coming up in New York. The murmur of New York runs all over the world.

The Irish Herald newspaper printed that Bush will have 700 people with him, and the American security people have asked for immunity for anybody who shoots and kills a protester. This could be a standard request, but it looks like hell to see it in print in Ireland.

Bush revels in crowds from these low IQ states who have at best an eight-grade reading level. All through long dark years of poverty, Ireland never gave upon the most stringent, classic education. And the country now might be the best read people on earth. This is American ignorance at its highest: Bush and Kerry in a he said, he said confrontation about Kerry's statement that a foreign leader likes him more than Bush. Bush said, in a classic statement, that nobody running for president should make a claim if he can't back it up with facts. Bush said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and talked of mushroom clouds. If he can back it up, the world could end.

The Irish can be expected to rail against cheap lies and this could cause Bush to be embarrassed in front of the world.

The Bushistas tried the same on their trip to London last year. The request for immunity didn't play well then, and won't play well in Ireland.

Here's a thought experiment for you: imagine Vladimir Putin or Aleksandr Krwasawniewski making a state visit to the US and making the same demand. Does that get you in touch with the level of arrogance?

Everyday Theology

Teresa Nielsen Hayden indulges in some ecclesiastical history and theology on an AP story:

Holy Trinity, Batman!

So just remember, kids: when you hear someone talking about “traditional Christianity,” this is what they mean.

Ding Dong the Bells are Gonna Chime

Enlightenment to the North!

via pogge:

Gay couples win right to marry in Quebec
Last Updated Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:05:15

MONTREAL - Same-sex couples in Quebec celebrated Friday as the province's top court ruled that they have the right to marry.

The Quebec Court of Appeal's decision matches similar rulings from Ontario and British Columbia.

"This is wonderful," said Michael Hendricks, one of two men at the centre of the legal case. He and longtime partner René Leboeuf sought the right to get married.

"The floodgates seem to be open and it looks like Canada is going to become the first North American country that has equal marriage," Hendricks told a news conference.

Hendricks and Leboeuf hope to wed at the Montreal courthouse next month. They've been together for 31 years.

A lower court ruled in the couple's favour in 2002, but the decision was challenged by some religious groups. On Friday, Quebec's Court of Appeal upheld the original ruling, saying the traditional definition of marriage is discriminatory and unjustified.

In 2002, the Quebec Superior Court ruled that restricting marriage to a union between a man and a woman was unjustified under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Prime Minister Paul Martin has vowed to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriages, but he's waiting for the Supreme Court of Canada to clarify the constitutionality of gay marriage.

Canada seems to be decades ahead of us on a whole lot of scores. My congratulations to our northern cousins.

UPDATE:via Talkleft we learn that Oliver Willis believes the culture war is over and the right lost:

First off, the fifties were never as puritanical as Ozzie & Harriet. The "greatest generation" enjoyed more than their fair share of vice, from late nights out on the town to explicit stag flicks at the moose lodge. The free-love sixties didn't just appear out of the vapor, but were just the ongoing evolution of an American trend. We are by nature puritanical; it is in the DNA of this country from the first settlers who arrived, living on in the guise of our modern cultural scolds (Bill Bennett, Dr. Laura, and Joe Lieberman). It isn't that explicit sex and dirty talk has forced itself on an unreceptive populace, but that a sort of cultural libertarianism has become the norm in America. The extremists at both ends of the spectrum - including those who would restrict what you want to see, and those who think you should see what you don't want to - have been increasingly marginalized.

It isn't that sex-based media force-feeds us. We actively seek it out. This is a classic case of people telling the media up front the politically correct answer, but when they get behind the safety of their homes it is a whole new story. Billions of internet searches went hunting for Paris Hilton's x-rated video, or Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction". One of the reasons why right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch is shelling out billions of dollars for the DirecTV satellite network is that they generate cash like crazy from pay-per-view porn. It isn't just New York and LA buying this stuff and searching for it on Google. Red America loves it too, they just don't talk about it as much. Old Rupert wants Jenna Jameson on HIS bottom line.

Bait and Switch

Off the Mark on Cost of War, Reception by Iraqis

By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01

A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.

Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.

Much of the focus on prewar expectations vs. postwar reality has been on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But while that was the central justification for the war in Iraq, the administration also made a wide range of claims about the ease of the invasion and the benefits that would result. Though comparisons between expectations and results are complex, it appears that the administration, based on limited human intelligence and conversations with a small corps of Iraqi exiles, was overly optimistic.

White House officials, who did not respond to requests for information for this report, acknowledge that the financial costs have been greater than expected but say they are pleased with the progress toward democracy, security and prosperity in Iraq.

Bush, who will deliver a speech today outlining the successes of the past year, gave a taste of his themes in an address in Kentucky yesterday to troops just back from Iraq. "A year ago, Iraq was ruled by the whims of one cruel man," Bush said. "Today, Iraq has a new interim law that guarantees basic rights for all: freedom of religion, the right to cast a secret ballot and equality under the law." Iraqis, he said, are "building a country that is strong and free, and America is proud to stand with them."

On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."

That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone.

The transcript of that interview has been pulled from the USAID Web site, the agency said, "to reflect current statements and testimony on Iraq reconstruction." The earlier $1.7 billion figure was "the best estimate available at the time, based on very limited information about the conditions inside of Iraq."

I don't think additional commentary is necessary.

What They Don't Tell You

Iraqi Reporters Rebuff Powell, Leave News Conference
Fri Mar 19, 2004 07:50 AM ET

By Luke Baker

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi journalists walked out of a Baghdad news conference given by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday in protest at lack of security and the killing of two Iraqi journalists by U.S. troops.

"We declare our boycott of the conference because of the martyrs," Najim al-Rubaie of Iraq's Distor newspaper said in a statement read at the start of the news conference as Powell and Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer looked on.

"We declare our condemnation of the incident which led to the killing of the two journalists...who were killed at the hands of the American forces."

More than 30 Iraqi journalists then stood up and walked out.

Employees of Dubai-based satellite television channel Al Arabiya say U.S. soldiers opened fire on a car carrying an Arabiya crew on Thursday evening after another car ran through a checkpoint. Cameraman Ali Abdelaziz was killed and correspondent Ali al-Khatib died in hospital on Friday morning.

After the walkout, Powell said he respected the right of the journalists to express their feelings.

"It is something that would never have happened at an earlier time in the history of Iraq, certainly not in the last 30 years," he said.

Powell said he regretted the loss of life of the journalists, and all loss of life in Iraq.

"But let's be clear who is responsible for this," he said. "Those individuals left over from the old regime do not want to see the Iraqi people live in peace. They do not want to see democracy take root."

Powell said he did not have the full details of the Arabiya incident but he was certain that troops would not have deliberately killed journalists. He said that sometimes in the confusion after a guerrilla attack, "mistakes happen, tragedies occur."

Iraqi journalists demanded an investigation into the incident.

"We walked out because we need them to ensure that we are safe under the occupation and yet they have done nothing," Ahmed al-Samraee, an Iraqi producer with the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite channel, said after the walkout.

"I saw these people killed. They were shot dead on purpose," he said.

Didn't hear about this on CNN.

Up is Down

Mark at The Cautious Man reminds us of the words of Bruce Springsteen:

"The question of whether we were misled in the war with Iraq is neither a liberal or conservative question or Democratic or Republican question. It's an American question. And protecting the democracy we ask our sons and daughters to die for is our responsibility and it's our trust. And demanding accountability is our job as citizens. That's the American way so that truth will out."

Krugman this morning:

"But the bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it. "

One Year Out

Juan Cole's Welcome to the Quagmire

The Kurds had blocked an American attempt to bring in 12,000 Turkish troops to fight the insurgents in the Sunni Arab areas, ensuring that U.S. soldiers remained on the front line in Fallujah and Ramadi. The U.S. was weak in the north and relied heavily on the Kurdish militias, or peshmergas. Were the majority Shiites to grow weary of Coalition Provisional Authority rule and begin an uprising of their own, the Americans in Baghdad came to recognize, the entire country could fall into chaos.

If acceptable compromises cannot be reached among the major players, the country could easily fall into chaos. All the leading factions, including the Kurds and the more militant Shiites, have large, well-armed militias at their beck and call. The low-grade guerrilla insurgency of the Sunni Arabs also is likely to continue for some time. It may not, however, be the most challenging issue Iraqis face as they attempt to hammer out a new destiny -- a destiny not imposed on them by the will of the Bush administration.