The Gift of Blog

I thank God for Steve Gilliard and Meteor Blades. I thank God for these strong and fresh voices. This medium is gift and grace, and I'm grateful to be here, grateful for you, honored to know you. Thanks for reading, and please support these other strong voices.

Thank you, Mel, for the Gift of Blog, and I can't wait to meet you and Mr. Brushstroke this week.

Kingdom of Fear

Attack on Foreign Workers Adds to Oil Sector Worries
Nervousness May Boost Barrel Price of Crude

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 31, 2004; Page A18

For months, fears of a terrorist attack on major petroleum facilities have helped drive crude oil and gasoline prices steadily upward. Now, just as prices were starting to retreat from record levels, a deadly assault in one of the industry's most vital hubs has raised those worries to new heights.

This weekend's hostage-taking episode in the Saudi Arabian city of Khobar was an attack on residents of a housing complex rather than refineries or terminals or pipelines, so it will have no direct impact on petroleum supplies. But it showed that Islamic militants are capable of striking in the heart of the kingdom's oil-producing region, so it is bound to intensify concerns about the vulnerability of tightly wound world markets to a supply disruption, analysts said yesterday.

"In terms of real physical flows of oil, it won't do anything," said Fareed Mohamedi, chief economist at PFC Energy, a Washington-based consultancy. "But from a psychological point of view, this just confirms the incredible fears in the market. This is reality, this is not just speculation. . . . And this is the main artery of oil. It's ground zero."

Not only was the attack the second in a month against Westerners working in the Saudi oil industry, but unlike the previous episode, which took place near a Red Sea petrochemical complex, this one came in the nation's eastern zone where the bulk of the kingdom's oil is piped to a densely-packed network of refineries and export terminals on the Persian Gulf. The episode is all the more worrisome, given Saudi Arabia's current status as the only nation with a significant amount of spare production capacity. Oil wells and refineries nearly everywhere else are producing flat out to meet growing global demand.

"The fact that you've had two in one month suggests that there is a concerted effort to target oil facilities in particular," said Simon Wardell, senior energy analyst at the World Markets Research Center in London. "So this will raise that risk element, the extra premium that's put on prices in case something very bad happens. And if something very bad does happen in Saudi Arabia, that could cause real shortages."

The attack came at a time when Saudi Arabia has vowed to use its vast capacity to bring down prices because of fears that soaring energy costs could derail the global economic expansion. Earlier this month, when crude prices surged to nearly $42 a barrel, Saudi officials announced that they would immediately increase production to about 9 million barrels a day from about 8.5 million, and raise output even further to whatever level was demanded by the market.

The Saudis are the only member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries capable of making such promises. Although the kingdom is no longer the world's biggest producer -- that distinction belongs to Russia -- it sits on about one-quarter of the world's reserves, and unlike Russia, whose wells are pumping as much as possible, the Saudis contend that they could easily ramp up production to 10.5 million barrels a day or more. Based on expectations that the Saudis would overcome objections from other OPEC members at a meeting scheduled for Thursday, crude oil slid as low as $39 a barrel last week.

"The signs of increased production coming into the market were beginning to calm things down, but this [attack] will once again increase the sense of risk and nervousness that has done so much to propel oil prices above $40 a barrel," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

For the longer term, a big unknown factor is how many of the thousands of foreigners working in Saudi Arabia will feel obliged to leave. The Saudis are not as dependent on foreign expertise as they were 25 years ago; they have used their wealth to create a university system that has produced many petroleum engineers, "so they are much better prepared to operate with fewer foreign nationals," said Philip Verleger, an energy expert at the Institute for International Economics.

From a spiritual point of view, this is a reminder of how contingent, dependent and interdependent we all are. Arnold's poem acquires greater poignancy for the reminder.

Tolerating Horror

America's Abu Ghraibs
By BOB HERBERT

Published: May 31, 2004

Most Americans were shocked by the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. But we shouldn't have been. Not only are inmates at prisons in the U.S. frequently subjected to similarly grotesque treatment, but Congress passed a law in 1996 to ensure that in most cases they were barred from receiving any financial compensation for the abuse.

We routinely treat prisoners in the United States like animals. We brutalize and degrade them, both men and women. And we have a lousy record when it comes to protecting well-behaved, weak and mentally ill prisoners from the predators surrounding them.

Very few Americans have raised their voices in opposition to our shameful prison policies. And I'm convinced that's primarily because the inmates are viewed as less than human.

Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, represented several prisoners in Georgia who sought compensation in the late-1990's for treatment that was remarkably similar to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. An undertaker named Wayne Garner was in charge of the prison system at the time, having been appointed in 1995 by the governor, Zell Miller, who is now a U.S. senator.

Mr. Garner considered himself a tough guy. In a federal lawsuit brought on behalf of the prisoners by the center, he was quoted as saying that while there were some inmates who "truly want to do better . . . there's another 30 to 35 per cent that ain't fit to kill. And I'm going to be there to accommodate them."

On Oct. 23, 1996, officers from the Tactical Squad of the Georgia Department of Corrections raided the inmates' living quarters at Dooly State Prison, a medium-security facility in Unadilla, Ga. This was part of a series of brutal shakedowns at prisons around the state that were designed to show the prisoners that a new and tougher regime was in charge.

What followed, according to the lawsuit, was simply sick. Officers opened cell doors and ordered the inmates, all males, to run outside and strip. With female prison staff members looking on, and at times laughing, several inmates were subjected to extensive and wholly unnecessary body cavity searches. The inmates were ordered to lift their genitals, to squat, to bend over and display themselves, etc.

One inmate who was suspected of being gay was told that if he ever said anything about the way he was being treated, he would be locked up and beaten until he wouldn't "want to be gay anymore." An officer who was staring at another naked inmate said, "I bet you can tap dance." The inmate was forced to dance, and then had his body cavities searched.

An inmate in a dormitory identified as J-2 was slapped in the face and ordered to bend over and show himself to his cellmate. The raiding party apparently found that to be hilarious.

According to the lawsuit, Mr. Garner himself, the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, was present at the Dooly Prison raid.

None of the prisoners named in the lawsuit were accused of any improper behavior during the course of the raid. The suit charged that the inmates' constitutional rights had been violated and sought compensation for the pain, suffering, humiliation and degradation they had been subjected to.

Fat chance.
....
The treatment of the detainees in Iraq was far from an aberration. They, too, were treated like animals, which was simply a logical extension of the way we treat prisoners here at home.

I'm glad for Herbert's piece, but it will take massive outcry on the part of the public to change any of this and it ain't gonna happen. Lock 'em up and throw away the key is the public's perception. The idea that the measure of the people is the way it cares for the despised doesn't have much currency.

Memorial Day

Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Thanks (as always) to Reid Stott, intrepid coder, Bump has a small but important format revision. You may have noticed that we got clobbered by comment spam over the weekend. To make Bump no longer vulnerable to such things, you will now have to preview your comments before you can post them. I hope that you don't find this to be more than a slight delay, but it is one which will keep me from having to hand delete pharmacy ads by the dozens. Thanks for your understanding.

UPDATE: I'll have a thought for this holiday later today, but I invite you to take a look at Reid's moving meditation, as well. I consider myself fortunate to have such thoughtful folk around me.

Exposure

From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity
Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks

By Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 31, 2004; Page A01

It was a typical week in the life of the Bush reelection machine.

Last Monday in Little Rock, Vice President Cheney said Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry "has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all" and said the senator from Massachusetts "promised to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts within his first 100 days in office."

On Tuesday, President Bush's campaign began airing an ad saying Kerry would scrap wiretaps that are needed to hunt terrorists.

The same day, the Bush campaign charged in a memo sent to reporters and through surrogates that Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents.

On Wednesday and Thursday, as Kerry campaigned in Seattle, he was greeted by another Bush ad alleging that Kerry now opposes education changes that he supported in 2001.

The charges were all tough, serious - and wrong, or at least highly misleading. Kerry did not question the war on terrorism, has proposed repealing tax cuts only for those earning more than $200,000, supports wiretaps, has not endorsed a 50-cent gasoline tax increase in 10 years, and continues to support the education changes, albeit with modifications.

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

The assault on Kerry is multi-tiered: It involves television ads, news releases, Web sites and e-mail, and statements by Bush spokesmen and surrogates -- all coordinated to drive home the message that Kerry has equivocated and "flip-flopped" on Iraq, support for the military, taxes, education and other matters.

"There is more attack now on the Bush side against Kerry than you've historically had in the general-election period against either candidate," said University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communication. "This is a very high level of attack, particularly for an incumbent."

Brown University professor Darrell West, author of a book on political advertising, said Bush's level of negative advertising is already higher than the levels reached in the 2000, 1996 and 1992 campaigns. And because campaigns typically become more negative as the election nears, "I'm anticipating it's going to be the most negative campaign ever," eclipsing 1988, West said. "If you compare the early stage of campaigns, virtually none of the early ads were negative, even in '88."

In terms of the magnitude of the distortions, those who study political discourse say Bush's are no worse than those that have been done since, as Stanford University professor Shanto Iyengar put it, "the beginning of time."

Maybe, but the shear volume is new and historic. As well as being wearing on my nerves.

To Be and To Do

This is a blog. By the way I've defined it, it's a blog that moves pretty fast. Sometimes I point you to stories that take a while to read while I move on. Today, I want to point you to one that you and I both need to spend some time with. We can talk about it here after we've had time to reflect. Go here. If you haven't read Studs Terkel's Working, put it on your to-do list along with Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and go to the library when it opens tomorrow. This is really important stuff. It's about who we believe we are and what we believe about what we do. I think that's worthy of some conversation.

Thanks go out to Omnium who "gets" what I'm trying to do here. A good reader is a writer's most precious gift

Bought and Sold

The Paper Trail
Did Cheney Okay a Deal?
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER AND ADAM ZAGORIN

Sunday, May. 30, 2004

Vice President Dick Cheney was a guest on NBC's Meet the Press last September when host Tim Russert brought up Halliburton. Citing the company's role in rebuilding Iraq as well as Cheney's prior service as Halliburton's CEO, Russert asked, "Were you involved in any way in the awarding of those contracts?" Cheney's reply: "Of course not, Tim ... And as Vice President, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the [Army] Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the Federal Government."

Cheney's relationship with Halliburton has been nothing but trouble since he left the company in 2000. Both he and the company say they have no ongoing connections. But TIME has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official—whose name was blacked out by the Pentagon—that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer. Dated March 5, 2003, the e-mail says "action" on a multibillion-dollar Halliburton contract was "coordinated" with Cheney's office. The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year.

The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's [Vice President's] office." Three days later, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract, without seeking other bids. TIME located the e-mail among documents provided by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems says the Vice President "has played no role whatsoever in government-contract decisions involving Halliburton" since 2000. A Pentagon spokesman says the e-mail means merely that "in anticipation of controversy over the award of a sole-source contract to Halliburton, we wanted to give the Vice President's staff a heads-up."

Cheney is linked to his old firm in at least one other way. His recently filed 2003 financial-disclosure form reveals that Halliburton last year invoked an insurance policy to indemnify Cheney for what could be steep legal bills "arising from his service" at the company. Past and present Halliburton execs face an array of potentially costly litigation, including multibillion-dollar asbestos claims.

This is not going to go anywhere, but it's nice to know about it.

The Old Soldiers

The Price Of Giving Bad Advice

By William A. Whitlow
Sunday, May 30, 2004; Page B07

As the war in Iraq drags on, conservative citizens, mostly Republican, face a growing dilemma in the November election.
....
The supposedly urgent need to attack Iraq was based partly on inflated, creative intelligence information, some of which originated with Ahmed Chalabi, an associate of the vice president and deputy secretary of defense. The information from Chalabi led the vice president and defense secretary to believe that war with Iraq would be a "cakewalk" and U.S. forces would be received with open arms. This belief resulted in a fatal flaw in developing a complete war strategy. A principal tenet of forming a strategy -- have a "war termination" phase -- was neglected. Although the tactical and operational phases of the war were conducted flawlessly by superior field commanders, the absence of a complete strategy has needlessly cost lives.

Our service members are the ultimate victims of this incomplete strategy, misguided policy and false intelligence. It is inconceivable and derelict not to have a viable war termination strategy for an operation as complex as a major theater war. America's citizens and our service members deserve far better for their sacrifices. This combination of things -- misleading the president with false intelligence and omitting a principal element from our war strategy -- is reason enough to seek change in the vice presidency and senior defense leadership, civilian and military.

It is our patriotic duty to speak out when egregiously flawed policies and strategies needlessly cost American lives. It is time for the president to ask those responsible for the flawed Iraqi policy -- civilian and military -- to resign from public service. Absent such a change in the current administration, many of us will be forced to choose a presidential candidate whose domestic policies we may not like but who understands firsthand the effects of flawed policies and incompetent military strategies and who fully comprehends the price.

The writer is a retired major general in the Marine Corps. He served as director of the expeditionary warfare division in the office of the deputy chief of naval operations

Ripped from the headlines

Exhausted by the Daily Grind, Iraqis Pay Little Heed to Politics

Iraqi Council Members Oppose U.S., U.N. on President

Unchecked Lawlessness Stresses Iraqi Society

Security Spending Increases In Iraq;
Safety Concerns Grow As Handover Nears

Najaf, Kufa Clashes Strain Cease-Fire Pact

Army Report Warned in November About Prison Problems

It was amusing to listen to Richard Perle on This Week this morning talking about how swimmingly everything is going in Iraq as I scrolled down the Washington Post in my browser and found all these headlines next to each other in the order I post them above.

Operation Enduring Confusion

Tim Rutten:
Regarding Media
N.Y. Times' latest misstep is also greatest

The controversy now surrounding the New York Times' prewar coverage of Iraq is the most serious of the credibility crises that have afflicted America's mainstream news media over the past two years.

In substance and implication, the Times' admission this week that — in the months leading up to the war — it repeatedly published false and exaggerated stories concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction far outstrips the significance of the Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley scandals.

After all, Blair's exhaustively documented fraud and plagiarism spree for the New York Times — though long and appalling — ultimately came to little more than phony descriptions of rural landscapes and patio furniture. Even the stories he wrote while covering the Washington, D.C., sniper case were of no consequence. Kelley's years of fraudulent self-aggrandizement, though prominent on the pages of USA Today, were too absurd ever to have been taken seriously by anyone outside the paper's masthead. At the end of the day, both men were marginal journalistic figures whose misconduct resulted from editors' failure to detect their personal pathologies.

The reports published in the Times between October 2001 and April 2003 are far more disturbing: Not only do they involve false information circulated as the country struggled to make up its mind about the war, but they involve highly regarded reporters and editors of unquestioned accomplishment operating by the rules at the very heart of the journalistic establishment. Moreover, many of those most deeply enmeshed in this failure — particularly reporter Judith Miller and then-Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, now one of the Times' two managing editors — remain deeply involved in covering national security issues.

Miller, a distinguished and experienced Middle East hand who shared a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, wrote or cowrote four of the six dubious stories cited by the Times in an extraordinary editors' note published Wednesday. The note of more than 1,000 words, which appeared on the bottom of Page 10, was novel in that it declined to name a single one of the reporters or editors who worked on the stories.

"In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged…. The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature," the note read in part. "They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq." It went on to name Ahmad Chalabi as the source of Times articles going back to 1991 and admitted that he "has introduced Times reporters to other exiles." As the editors also noted, Chalabi and his associates were "paid brokers" of information regarding weapons of mass destruction to the Bush administration whose officials, in turn, provided official confirmation to the Times reporters concerning the exiles' stories.
....

When it comes to questions of timing, newspaper decisions sometimes are complex. For example, Bill Keller — the New York Times' executive editor, who, along with others at the paper, declined to be interviewed for this column — told the Wall Street Journal that the editors' note had been planned since April. This Sunday, the paper's public editor, Daniel Okrent, will use his column to examine the affair, focusing — Times sources say — at least in part on Miller's and Abramson's performance.

Meanwhile, next week's edition of New York magazine will contain a critical profile of Miller, while a piece on Chalabi in the New Yorker — according to sources there — will touch on the Iraqi's relationship with the Times, which at one point employed his daughter. Meanwhile, the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books will contain another appraisal of the Times' coverage by Michael Massing, former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, who has been the most formidable of the Times' critics in this affair. In fact, the paper's note singled him out by name.

Viewed in this context, the Times' explanation looks like a leaky lifeboat launched in the teeth of a gathering storm.

Keller, for his part, isn't tossing anybody over the side. In his interview with the Journal, he defended Miller as "a smart, relentless and unbelievably well-sourced and fearless reporter." Her critics, he said, are purveyors of a "misinformed, venomous mythology that had grown up focused on the personality of one reporter."

Strangely, while the Times was preparing its editors' note, it failed to contact former executive editor Howell Raines, who was asked to resign in the wake of the Blair scandal. The note's allusion to "rushing" stories into the paper was widely interpreted as a swipe at Raines, whose push to make the Times more competitive is blamed by the current management for an alleged breakdown in standards.

The question worth asking is this: would the American voting public have been so willing to go to war (it wasn't particularly in favor until Powell's speach to the UN) absent the war drums that were beaten by the WaPo and the NYTimes? While Rutten is playing media critic for the LATimes, I don't recall that they asked serious questions about the rationale for war, either. All of the Bigs went into the tank for the WMD argument.

As I look back on it now, I and my few friends who opposed the war on purely moral grounds two years ago were treated as nutters who would be the first to die in a sarin gas attack on the Washington Metro system. Two years out, the possibility seems much more likely, but launched from somewhere other than Baghdad.

In the Beauty of the Lilies

The Price

Ten dead in 24 hours.

What was it that John Kerry said about Viet Nam?

Confusion and Alarum

Deadlock Seen on Presidency in Iraqi Talks
By DEXTER FILKINS and STEVEN R. WEISMAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 29 — American, Iraqi and United Nations officials deadlocked Saturday over the selection of an Iraqi president, even as they appeared to strike a deal over the most important cabinet ministers for the new government that is to take over on July 1.

On one side of the deadlock are the United Nations envoy, Lakdar Brahimi, and the chief American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, who are backing the former foreign minister, Adnan Pachachi. Leaders of the Iraqi Governing Council support a rival, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar. Both men are Sunnis.

Some Iraqi officials said Saturday that Mr. Brahimi had reached agreements with Mr. Bremer and Iraqi leaders on six important cabinet positions. Two people close to the Iraqi Governing Council said Mr. Brahimi had reached agreements to name three Shiites, two Kurds and one Sunni to high-level jobs in the cabinet. That mix reflects the ethnic and religious balancing act under way.

According to these sources, the two Kurds were Barham Salih, who would become the foreign minister, and Hoshyar Zebari, who would be named the defense minister. The Kurds, deprived of the top jobs of prime minister and president, would get these two important cabinet posts. Three members of the majority Shiite population would be in line for the cabinet: Adel Abdul Mahdi as the finance minister, Thamir Ghadbhan as the oil minister, and Dr. Raja Khuzaie as the health minister.

In addition to the president being a Sunni Arab, the last of the six cabinet officials mentioned would also be Sunni: Samir Sumaidy, who stands to become the interior minister.

The stage appears set for a showdown on the presidency on Sunday.

American officials say they are backing Mr. Pachachi in large part because they believe he would adhere to the interim constitution that was hammered out earlier this year and is meant to guide the new government until elections are held.

Mr. Pachachi played a prominent role in drafting the interim constitution, which provides for broad individual rights, a largely secular governmental framework and a federal system that grants broad autonomy to the Kurds. There is concern that a new Iraqi government, swept by majority opinion, might decide to disregard its protections.

In this situation, the Iraqi Governing Council has been pressing its views aggressively. "Ambassador Bremer, he will leave, and the U.N., they will leave," said Yondam Kanna, a member of the Iraqi council. "We are the ones who will have to answer to the Iraqi people."

One person close to the Iraqi Governing Council said Mr. Brahimi had reached agreements on the choices for two vice presidents: Ibrahim Jafari, the leader of the Dawa Party; and the Razh Shawees, a senior member of the Kurdish Democratic Party. "It's 99 percent certain," one of the insiders said of all these candidates, though some change is possible as the whole package is finally assembled. If the selections are made official, they would reflect the balance Mr. Brahimi has been trying to strike between the majority Shiite population and Iraq's minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

Mr. Salih, Mr. Zebari and Mr. Shawees are all ethnic Kurds, and their selection seems to reflect a desire to placate the Kurdish leadership, which had demanded that a Kurd be appointed either president or prime minister. Some American and Iraqi leaders worry that the Kurds, who flourished under American protection in 1990's, will be tempted to try to detach themselves from the Iraqi state.

We are all clear, aren't we, that we are debating style and show points? This is all window dressing? That none of this really matters to Iraqi governance and they know it?

Ah, I thought so.

Real Reporting

Link to Jane Mayer's new and exhaustive article on Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial head of the Iraqi National Congress. My friend Peg has some quibbles with matters of fact in an earlier comment, but I think the article is fair. It's an encyclopedic piece and took me most of yesterday afternoon to read. The New Yorker is once again engaged in some of the most interesting journalism around.

Bless The New Yorker for giving aid and comfort to writers like Mayer and Sy Hersh.

Challenging Florida

CNN asks Florida court for ineligible voters list
County boards reviewing list for accuracy

From Robert Yoon
CNN Washington Bureau
Friday, May 28, 2004 Posted: 6:50 PM EDT (2250 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As Florida county election boards review a list of thousands of potentially ineligible voters -- including some who may be felons -- CNN is suing the state, claiming the public and media should also be able to review the list.

"Florida's 2000 felon purge program resulted in over 50,000 legal voters being disenfranchised," said Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho in a written statement. "When asked for assurances that the [2004 felon list] was 90 percent accurate -- the minimum level local supervisors of elections requested for such a list -- we were told that it was better than the 2000 list, with no data to support its accuracy."

In this, CNN is acting not only like a responsible news organization, it is being a good citizen. This is an obvious step and it is too bad none of the Florida State news organizations stepped up to the challenge. In honor of this bold move on CNN's part, I promise not to engage in any CNN bashing for the next week (unless, of course, Kelli Arena makes another one of those egregious, partisan speculations that had the blogosphere up in arms this past week.)

When Reality Collides with Ideology

Discipline Takes a Break at the White House
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — The country may be deeply divided about President Bush, but even his harshest critics used to offer their grudging admiration of one of the greatest talents of this White House: its extraordinary discipline and message control.

No more.

For months now, the same administration whose members once prided themselves on never contradicting one another in public has been riven by conflicting pronouncements. Senior officials keep missing opportunities to keep their signals straight, prompting cases of vicious backbiting that one senior member of Mr. Bush's national security staff said with disgust the other day "make us sound like Democrats.''

Reporters who spent the first two-thirds of Mr. Bush's term looking for any crack between the tight-lipped members of the administration suddenly feel as if they have stepped into an amusement park, with different hawkers openly selling disparate policies, explanations and critiques.

And as a few candid members of the administration are starting to admit, it is beginning to take a toll - leaving allies to wonder how Mr. Bush might next change course in Iraq. It is one reason, foreign leaders say, that despite President Bush's recent string of speeches, they are uncertain how sovereign the new "sovereign" government of Iraq will be after the handover on June 30, or how long American troops might remain.

The administration has said they will be there "as long as necessary and not a day longer,'' but aides were scrambling a few weeks ago to assure Congress that if the new Iraqi government asks American forces to leave, they will - whether their mission is completed or not.

It has all sown such confusion that a European foreign minister, asked on a recent visit what he thought of the latest administration plan for the handover, smiled and responded, "Last week's or this week's?''

Pick Appears to Catch Bush Administration Off Guard

By Mike Allen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 29, 2004; Page A16

The Bush administration appeared to be caught off guard and somewhat confused yesterday after the Iraqi Governing Council nominated a physician with longtime CIA ties as the post-occupation prime minister. Officials in Washington scrambled to respond after the Iraqis took the public lead in a process that was supposed to be run by a U.N. envoy.

In a telephone conversation at 2:30 p.m., a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy sounded uncertain about whether Ayad Allawi would head Iraq's interim government after the United States transfers limited authority on June 30.

"We may or may not have heard the last word on the prime minister," the official said. "You have to put a lot of pieces together first."

A senior administration official in Baghdad said that L. Paul Bremer, the civilian U.S. administrator, and Robert D. Blackwill, the U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq, knew about the impending selection on Thursday. But officials in Baghdad feared a leak and told few officials in Washington. Some members of President Bush's war cabinet knew where the process was heading but were surprised by the timing of the council's decision.

The administration's statements were reserved because the United States did not want to appear to be driving the process, officials said, especially because of the country's past ties with Allawi.

The confusion extended to the United Nations in New York, where chief spokesman Fred Eckhard at first said that the U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, had been in the room for the selection by the U.S.-appointed council but then later corrected himself to say that Brahimi had not been there.

"It's not how we expected it to happen," Eckhard told Reuters.

By day's end, Brahimi and Bremer had both endorsed Allawi, and a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said without equivocation that Allawi will take office.

One of the working assumptions among senior foreign policy officials in the Bush administration had been that Iraq's new prime minister, the most important of the 30 jobs to be filled, would not come from the Governing Council. None of the 25 council members, all handpicked by the U.S.-led coalition, has rallied significant popular support, according to several public opinion surveys over the past few months.

Bushco is coming off the rails.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

via Suburban Guerilla:

How war in Iraq derails real war on terror

May 28, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

The president talks about homeland security but, under the malign influence of the vice president and the ''neo-con'' intellectuals, he has made the war in Iraq a substitute for the real war on terrorism. Almost three years after the World Trade Center attack, O'Hare Airport does not have the equipment necessary to inspect checked luggage because the Transportation Safety Administration does not have the money to pay for the equipment.

But $25 billion more is going to his criminal war. The public still gives the president high marks on his success in the war on terror, mostly because they are judging by the war in Afghanistan and the early success in Iraq. However, our airports and our seaports are still not safe. How many more years will it take?

And how many years to straighten out the messes at the FBI and the CIA? A recent estimate was six years. When will that start?

Thus, despite all the talk about security during the years since the bombing of the World Trade Center, very little has been done to improve the security of our republic, other than talk. The majority of Americans expect another attack. They are wise to do so.

Because the terrorists will almost certainly try something before the presidential election, the container ships and airport checked baggage are perfect targets -- and not much better defended than was Logan Airport in September 2001. Think of a ''dirty" bomb exploded in New York or Long Beach Harbor.

If all the time and money and energy expended on finding ''weapons of mass destruction'' and capturing Saddam Hussein had been spent on protecting this country by measures besides harassing air travelers, the country would be much safer.

This is the real story of the Global War on Terror: it's all yack. As a resident of the Greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, I'm aware of just how much a target we are and I'm very uncomfortable to be living here. I imagine that New Yorkers feel much the same way.

Above and Beyond

Tillman killed by friendly fire

Billy House
Republic Washington Bureau
May. 29, 2004 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals football player who died in April while a U.S. soldier fighting in Afghanistan, likely was killed by friendly fire, an Army investigation has concluded.

News of that finding was disseminated Friday to some members of Congress and some Tillman family members just as the Memorial Day weekend was to begin, including today's dedication ceremonies in Washington of the World War II Memorial.

"It does seem pretty clear that he was killed by friendly fire," said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which was alerted to the information by the Army's Legislative Liaison Office.

"This does not take away one iota from the heroic nature and courage of the man. The source of that fire is of little consequence in terms of heroism," Franks said. He said that after learning of the Army's conclusions, he made some follow-up inquiries and was satisfied the information was accurate.

Friendly-fire accidents are an inevitable part of warfare, according to an expert, who agreed that it should not diminish acts of heroism.

"It's tragic, and we probably feel worse about it," said Stephen Walt, a professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "But warfare is a inherently unpredictable activity. Friendly-fire accidents are a part of modern warfare and probably existed as far back as the Stone Age."

The Army reported last month that Tillman, 27, was killed April 22 while leading his team of Army Rangers up a remote southeastern Afghanistan hill to knock out enemy fire that had pinned down other U.S. soldiers.

As Tillman and other soldiers neared the hill's crest, the Army reported, Tillman directed his team into firing positions and was shot and killed as he sprayed enemy positions with fire from his automatic weapon.

The Army did not specify who fired the shot or shots that killed Tillman.

For his actions, the Army posthumously awarded Tillman the Silver Star, its third-highest award for combat valor, saying Tillman led his Ranger team that day "without regard for his own safety" and was shot and killed heroically trying to save his comrades. The Army said his actions helped the trapped soldiers maneuver to safety "without taking a single casualty."

The word hero sure gets thrown around a lot these days. I wonder what it means?

Muy Grande

Terrorism Warnings

Published: May 29, 2004

Attorney General John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., created unease on Wednesday with their vague warning that Al Qaeda is planning an attack in the United States. It wasn't so much the grimly familiar warning. It was the absence of Tom Ridge.

The public understands that warnings are not likely to be specific. But two and a half years after 9/11, bureaucratic turf battles over the nation's security are inexcusable. The 2002 law that established the Department of Homeland Security gave Mr. Ridge the responsibility of coordinating terror-related intelligence analyses and threat assessments. His color-coded terror advisories are often mocked. But at least they signal Washington's best relative estimate of risk.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Ashcroft failed to bring Mr. Ridge with him — and Mr. Ridge had been on television that very morning assuring viewers that there was no new intelligence requiring an increase in the threat level. That left everyone wondering what to make of Mr. Ashcroft's different message. The official explanation, that Mr. Ashcroft just wanted to show pictures of wanted terrorists, deepened the confusion. His comments, and those of other officials, about terrorists perhaps wanting to disrupt the election, presumably to hurt the incumbent, were horribly inappropriate.

At a time when public vigilance is undeniably important, the administration needs to be far more competent and consistent — and apolitical — when it talks about threats.

If this is the best they can do to get the preznit re-selected, they should be displaid in public stocks on the capital Mall this holiday weekend. If I were voting for cheap goods like this, I'd rather head to my local dollar store. At least I'd arrive home with some new coasters or something similar.

Empire

A Hollow Sovereignty for Iraq

Published: May 29, 2004

President Bush said yesterday that he would transfer "complete and full sovereignty" to an interim Iraqi government in barely a month. But nothing even close to that is likely to happen. Recent developments suggest that this "sovereignty" will have little substance and that the president still has no coherent plan to create the security and political trust required to negotiate a constitution and hold fair elections. The sovereignty timetable remains driven by the American electoral calendar and growing Iraqi impatience with an incompetent and deeply unpopular occupation.

That unpopularity also taints the American-appointed Governing Council, which makes the council's announcement yesterday of the selection of Iyad Alawi, one of its most prominent members, as interim prime minister disheartening. The choice of Mr. Alawi, a Shiite exile with close ties to former Baathist generals and to the Central Intelligence Agency, hardly signals a fresh start. The manner of his designation raises questions about the authority of the United Nations' special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi. Paul Bremer III, Washington's proconsul, didn't even give Mr. Brahimi time to announce his support for Mr. Alawi before striding into the council's meeting to offer congratulations.

Mr. Alawi and the other appointees — who are expected to be named shortly — will have to overcome serious obstacles to establish legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq's people. These include the interim government's lack of an electoral mandate and its dependence on a huge, American-dominated military force, over which it will have little authority.

Because Washington left this issue largely out of the draft resolution now before the Security Council, one of the first acts of the interim government will have to be a one-sided negotiation over American forces that is unlikely to enhance its stature. Under current plans, the new government would have no authority to stop American forces from attacking any Iraqi target. It would have a theoretical right to request a full American withdrawal, which would leave it virtually defenseless.

The United States is handing the interim government a deteriorating military situation. American commanders, desperate to avoid clashes heading into the June 30 transfer, have granted dangerous concessions to Sunni and Shiite insurgents, greatly strengthening the hand of sectarian militias answerable neither to Baghdad nor to Washington.

The latest deal, reached on Thursday in Najaf, handed a partial victory to an anti-American Shiite firebrand, Moktada al-Sadr. The arrest order against him has been "suspended," and he has been allowed to keep his Mahdi Army intact. In return, Mr. Sadr agreed to pull his fighters off the streets of Najaf, and most American soldiers will leave Najaf as well. Mr. Sadr offered a similar deal in mid-April, but Washington turned him down. In the ensuing weeks, relations with Iraq's Shiite majority grew increasingly — and, it now appears, unnecessarily — strained as American fire pressed ever closer to Najaf's sacred sites.

The climb-down in Najaf seems like a repeat of the cynical deal American commanders cut four weeks ago with Sunni rebels in Falluja, effectively turning the city over to former Baathist commanders acceptable to the insurgents. If America's military role is now reduced to partnering with the best-armed insurgents, it is doing nothing to make Iraq more governable by its future elected leaders.

The only comfort to be drawn from the problematic nature of the June 30 transfer of sovereignty is that it at least points in the right direction, toward the eventual end of a mismanaged occupation whose costs mount with every passing day.

Good puppet press that it is, the Times is attempting to find the pony in a room filled with horseshft. The people of Iraq are not liable to be equally fooled. If Americans and the US press want to pretend that this fake sovereignty actually means something, than we can also pretend to be surprised by the violence which follows on.

Our Deadly Personnel

Army Personnel Chief Aims to Keep Ranks Full

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 28, 2004; Page A21

Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief, is facing a challenge no American officer has had to contemplate for at least a century: keeping the all-volunteer Army fully manned as it undergoes sustained ground combat.

The United States has not had a draft since 1973. The last time the Army took many casualties without conscript troops was during the war in the Philippines, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, and in which 4,374 U.S. troops died -- five times the toll so far in Iraq.

"We're in uncharted waters, in the sense that we're recruiting and retaining an all-volunteer force in a time of war," Hagenbeck said in a recent interview in his office in the Pentagon.

Right now, Hagenbeck said, indicators on recruiting new soldiers and retaining current ones are good.

For example, 14,611 first-term soldiers have reenlisted this year -- about 98 percent of the Army's goal of having 14,918 of those younger troops re-up by this point.

The numbers for career soldiers are even better, he said. Surveys of intentions of soldiers, and of possible recruits, indicate that target and similar ones for other soldiers will continue to be met. Nor, he said, has the Army had to pull out the stops with bonuses and other incentives to meet personnel goals.

But, he added, "How that will play out over the coming months and years remains to be seen."

The soldiers, he said, are generally doing okay. "There's no question that there's stress on the United States Army -- it would be foolish not to say so." But, he continued, "I think the good news is that by and large, they feel like they're doing something useful, something bigger than themselves, something for the nation."

His biggest worry, said Hagenbeck, a career light infantry officer, is how mothers, teachers and coaches, who influence the youths' enlistment decisions, come to think about military service.

"That's the one I am holding my breath about every day," he said.

Hagenbeck was the commander of the 10th Mountain Division from 2001 to 2003, and during that tour served as deputy commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Then he was chosen to be the Army's personnel chief.

"It's the hardest job I've ever had," he said. "The whole business of a volunteer force is, we've got to make sure we can man and maintain a volunteer Army in the difficult environment we have right now."

The reason he was selected for the job of personnel chief, Hagenbeck said, is that he came from a field command and stays in touch with other senior officers in the field. Done right, he said, "it's a very intuitive job. You can crunch numbers all day long, but commanders in the field know that there are a lot of nonquantifiable reasons that a soldier stays in, and that's why I'm here."

Tom Ricks makes clear elsewhere in the article, if you parse it, that things aren't quite as rosy as Hagenbeck makes out. The reality is that the readiness level of the Army is currently the worst it has been since the draft was abolished in 1973. The deployment of two crack training units (which I discussed here on Wednesday) means that the Army is really scraping to come up with warm bodies. It's too soon to know what re-enlistment rates are going to do over the long haul, since stop loss orders are still in effect for the troops who have been scheduled to be mustered out over the last year. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant fraction will elect not to re-up. Since it is frequently economic pressures which drive initial enlistment, those who leave may not be that hard to replace. We will have a better sense of how this is going later this year, when the first set of home rotations begin. Among other things, this Iraq adventure is a huge risk for the overall health and readiness of the Army.

The New Boss

Iraq Council Nominates Allawi for Prime Minister
No Indication if He Is Choice of U.S. Authorities or U.N. Envoy

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 28, 2004; 9:26 AM

BAGHDAD, May 28--Ayad Allawi, a leader of one of the major Iraqi exile organizations who once led a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, was nominated Friday by Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council to be the country's new prime minister.

The nomination was unanimous and Allawi was congratulated afterwards by L. Paul Bremer, the civilian U.S. administrator in Iraq.

But there was no confirmation of assertions by Allawi's allies that he was indeed the choice of U.S. authorities and of the U.N.'s special representative here, Lakdar Brahimi. Brahimi has been leading efforts to form an interim Iraqi government to assume limited political authority on June 30.

Allawi heads the Iraqi National Accord, an exile group supported for years by the CIA. The INA was a rival to the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who was the Pentagon's favorite exile.

Allawi's following includes secular Shiite Muslims, Suunis and Kurds. He is also the top security official on the current governing council, which apparently strengthened his candidacy.

Once a member of Hussein's Baath Party, Allawi fled Iraq while in medical school and became an enemy of the former Iraqi leader. Hussein attempted to have him killed at one point.

Allawi himself was the leader of a coup attempt that went awry in 1996, after it was infiltrated by the regime's intelligence service.

Earlier this week, Hussain Shahristani, a Shiite nuclear scientist who had become the top choice of the United States and the United Nations to become Iraq's prime minister withdrew from consideration after objections from Allawi and other formerly exiled Shiite politicians, according to officials involved in the political transition.

The significance of this, if any, will be unpacked over the weekend. Brooks and Shields on The Newshour this evening should be entertaining.

Deconstruction and Reconstruction

In the Scrapyards of Jordan, Signs of a Looted Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ

Published: May 28, 2004

SAHAB, Jordan, May 26 — As the United States spends billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq's civil and military infrastructure, there is increasing evidence that parts of sensitive military equipment, seemingly brand-new components for oil rigs and water plants and whole complexes of older buildings are leaving the country on the backs of flatbed trucks.

By some estimates, at least 100 semitrailers loaded with what is billed as Iraqi scrap metal are streaming each day into Jordan, just one of six countries that share a border with Iraq.

American officials say sensitive equipment is, in fact, closely monitored and much of the rest that is leaving is legitimate removal and sale from a shattered country. But many experts say that much of what is going on amounts to a vast looting operation.

In the past several months, the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, has been closely monitoring satellite photographs of hundreds of military-industrial sites in Iraq. Initial results from that analysis are jarring, said Jacques Baute, director of the agency's Iraq nuclear verification office: entire buildings and complexes of as many as a dozen buildings have been vanishing from the photographs.

"We see sites that have totally been cleaned out," Mr. Baute said.

The agency started the program in December, after a steel vessel contaminated with uranium, probably an artifact of Saddam Hussein's pre-1991 nuclear program, turned up in a Rotterdam scrapyard. The shipment was traced to a Jordanian company that was apparently unaware that the scrap contained radioactive material.

In the last several weeks, Jordan has again caught the attention of international officials, as pieces of Iraqi metal bearing tags put in place by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, established to monitor Iraqi disarmament during Mr. Hussein's rule, have been spotted in Jordanian scrapyards. The observation of items tagged by the commission, known as Unmovic, has not been previously disclosed.

"Unmovic has been investigating the removal from Iraq of materials that may have been subject to monitoring, and that investigation is ongoing," said Jeff Allen, a spokesman for the commission. "So we've been aware of the issue," he said. "We've been apprised of the details of the Rotterdam incident and have been in touch with Jordanian officials."

Recent examinations of Jordanian scrapyards, including by a reporter for The New York Times, have turned up an astounding quantity of scrap metal and new components from Iraq's civil infrastructure, including piles of valuable copper and aluminum ingots and bars, large stacks of steel rods and water pipe and giant flanges for oil equipment — all in nearly mint condition — as well as chopped-up railroad boxcars, huge numbers of shattered Iraqi tanks and even beer kegs marked with the words "Iraqi Brewery."

"There is a gigantic salvage operation, stripping anything of perceived value out of the country," said John Hamre, president and chief executive of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington research institute, which sent a team to Iraq and issued a report on reconstruction efforts at the request of the Pentagon last July.

"This is systematically plundering the country," Dr. Hamre said. "You're going to have to replace all of this stuff."

We are going to pay and pay and pay for the non-existant planning for this ruinous project.

Eyes East

Possible slowdown in China's economy has global ramifications

By Ken Moritsugu and Tim Johnson

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BEIJING - China's economy is expanding at a blistering pace, and 8,000 miles away in North Port, Fla., the construction industry is feeling the heat.

So many freighters are tied up shipping goods to China, there aren't enough left to deliver cement for the booming housing market in North Port, which is south of Sarasota.

"I panicked," said North Port homebuilder Nick Bonsky, who in early May couldn't find any concrete, of which cement is a key ingredient. When he finally got some, it cost plenty. "I wasn't expecting China to have that much of an immediate and direct impact."

After two decades of rapid growth, China's economy is having a global impact in all kinds of surprising ways.

The Asian giant is no longer just a source of cheap exports. Its voracious appetite for raw materials has driven up prices worldwide and created shortages. China consumes 55 percent of the world's cement, 40 percent of its steel and 25 percent of its aluminum. China's growing demand for oil is one reason crude prices are so high.

China is propelling growth throughout Asia by sucking in imports from neighbors.

"It's very hard to discuss the world economic outlook without a discussion of China," John Taylor, the U.S. undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said recently.
....
China's imports rose 40 percent in 2003, making it the world's third-largest importer and stoking growth elsewhere.

China's role is still dwarfed by that of America. The United States imported $1.3 trillion last year compared with $413 billion for China. And 40 percent of China's imports go into personal computers and other products that are exported again, often to the United States.

"It's going to be a long time before China can play the role of the United States, if ever," said Nicholas Lardy, a Chinese expert at the Institute for International Economics, a research center in Washington.

Still, China is large enough today to affect other countries, notably those in Asia.

China's massive purchases of factory equipment from Japan sparked a recovery in that country's long-dormant economy.

"The turnaround in Japan is really all an echo of what's going on in China," said Bob Froehlich, the vice chairman of Scudder Investments in Chicago.

China has supplanted the United States as South Korea's No. 1 export market.

"Every economy in Asia is transforming itself to deal with China as its largest trading partner," said Tim Condon, chief economist in the Hong Kong office of ING Financial Markets.

A Chinese slowdown could hit certain U.S. industries that sell heavily to China, including soybeans, airplanes and semiconductors.

Technology companies are weighing the consequences of a China slowdown, said Greg Sheppard, the Silicon Valley-based vice president of market intelligence at iSuppli, a consultant to the tech industry.

"It's starting to enter into their consciousness," he said.

China surpassed Europe three years ago as the largest export market for American soybeans, and soybean farmers are enjoying high prices, thanks to a combination of a poor harvest and growing Chinese demand.

A slowdown would mean an easing of commodity prices - good news for consumers but bad news for mining countries such as Australia, Chile and South Africa.

China's appetite for soybeans, for animal feed and cooking oil, has helped Argentina and Brazil climb back from economic crises.

"With their economies in shambles, if China hadn't been growing like that, they'd have been far worse off," said John Baize, an agricultural trade consultant based in Falls Church, Va. "That's the reality of what China has done."

This is still off the radar screen, but the interlocking global economy means that our fortunes are becoming evermore intermingled with those of this awakening giant. High gas prices right now also owe something to the increasing thirst of the Chinese market.

When "Objectivity" Lies

Paul Krugman reflects on The Press and The Truth.

The truth is that the character flaws that currently have even conservative pundits fuming have been visible all along. Mr. Bush's problems with the truth have long been apparent to anyone willing to check his budget arithmetic. His inability to admit mistakes has also been obvious for a long time. I first wrote about Mr. Bush's "infallibility complex" more than two years ago, and I wasn't being original.

So why did the press credit Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn't possess? One answer is misplaced patriotism. After 9/11 much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief.

Another answer is the tyranny of evenhandedness. Moderate and liberal journalists, both reporters and commentators, often bend over backward to say nice things about conservatives. Not long ago, many commentators who are now caustic Bush critics seemed desperate to differentiate themselves from "irrational Bush haters" who were neither haters nor irrational — and whose critiques look pretty mild in the light of recent revelations.

And some journalists just couldn't bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters.

Finally, let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to be prepared for an avalanche of hate mail. You had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation, and you had to worry about being denied access to the sort of insider information that is the basis of many journalistic careers.

The Bush administration, knowing all this, played the press like a fiddle. But has that era come to an end?

A new Pew survey finds 55 percent of journalists in the national media believing that the press has not been critical enough of Mr. Bush, compared with only 8 percent who believe that it has been too critical. More important, journalists seem to be acting on that belief.

Amazing things have been happening lately. The usual suspects have tried to silence reporting about prison abuses by accusing critics of undermining the troops — but the reports keep coming. The attorney general has called yet another terror alert — but the press raised questions about why. (At a White House morning briefing, Terry Moran of ABC News actually said what many thought during other conveniently timed alerts: "There is a disturbing possibility that you are manipulating the American public in order to get a message out.")

It may not last. In July 2002, according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post — who has tried, at great risk to his career, to offer a realistic picture of the Bush presidency — "the White House press corps showed its teeth" for the first time since 9/11. It didn't last: the administration beat the drums of war, and most of the press relapsed into docility.

But this time may be different. And if it is, Mr. Bush — who has always depended on that docility — may be in even more trouble than the latest polls suggest.

And now for something completely different....

All the news today is pretty dark, so it is time for something completely different. Here is a link to the Washington Post's Cicadacam for updated pictures of the cicada emergence in Washington. If you've never seen these remarkable insects, it's worth a look. I'm dodging them when I go walking every day, they are big and dopey.

What Has Iraq Done To US?

The fall of the vulcans

Iraq may spell the end of an evangelical belief in American military power
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday May 27, 2004

The Guardian

Iraq has turned into a disastrous defeat for America and Britain. All the current debate is essentially about damage limitation. The Bush administration invaded Iraq on what has proved to be a false prospectus. It has made a terrible mess of the occupation. It has created more terrorist threats than were there before. Its military has shamed America with the torture in Abu Ghraib. It has provoked waves of anti-Americanism. And the whole business has been a vast, hugely expensive distraction from the pressing challenges that face America and Europe, including poverty, global warming and the very real struggle against the al-Qaida assassins of New York and Madrid. Even if things get better in Iraq, this indictment will stand.

Everyone is asking what America has done to Iraq. But the more important question is: what has Iraq done to America? Redefined it, to be sure, in a new era of world politics. But how? There's a pessimistic interpretation, which sees the American army "specialists" of Abu Ghraib as representative figures - harbingers of a meaner, coarser hyperpower. Here's a more optimistic answer: Iraq could mean the beginning of the end of vulcanism.

The vulcans is what the Bush foreign policy team called themselves, as they prepared for office. A 55ft high statue of the Olympian blacksmith, purveyor of thunderbolts to the gods, famously towers above Birmingham, Alabama, home town of Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. As the American writer James Mann shows in his fine book Rise of the Vulcans, the key members of Bush's team had certain things in common. Their formative experiences were in the study or practice of military power. They believed, from the outset, in using the post-cold war moment to establish unchallengeable US military supremacy. Most of them believed in the assertive use of that military power to spread "American values" and fight "evil", defined in muscular Christian terms. And they thought America should not be too encumbered by allies, treaties or international organisations. Vulcan could do it alone.

Of course, there were differences between them. Those who had fought in the Vietnam war, like Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, were most reluctant to commit American soldiers to another war. The Vietnam draft avoiders such as Bush himself and vice president Dick Cheney ("I had other priorities in the 60s than military service"), were less reluctant to send others to do what they themselves had not done. The soldiers were keenest on diplomacy; the businessmen-politicians on war. Nonetheless, this vulcan approach defined the Bush administration from the outset. And from the first meeting of Bush's national security council, months before 9/11, they talked of Iraq.

Many people leap to the conclusion that they would have done it anyway. The extraordinary inside accounts, published by Bush's former anti-terrorism supremo Richard Clarke, former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, and the reportorial outsider-turned-insider Bob Woodward, don't bear this out. Rather, the invasion of Iraq was a characteristically vulcan response to the real sense, created by the 9/11 attacks, of America being at war. Bush pushed for an Iraq war plan, then hesitated. He sought reassurance from his intelligence chiefs that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. "It's a slam dunk," CIA boss George Tenet told him. Unfortunately, Tony Blair reinforced that belief.
....
We are drifting towards a lamentable position where Rumsfeld's old Europe, the anti-Iraq war alignment of France and Germany, is seen to be the party of Kerry, while Iraq war allies of the United States, such as Tony Blair and the Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, cling to Bush. At the moment, Blair is an electoral asset for Bush, while Chirac is an electoral liability for Kerry. At the very least, the French should make it more clear that their opposition is to Bush but not to America, while Blair should make it plain that his support is for America rather than for Bush.

Finally, the crucial election for Europe - not the European elections next month, but the American one on November 2 - will be decided by Americans for American reasons. And the deciding factor may not be any foreign entanglement, nor even the economy, but the candidacy of Ralph Nader, which is likely to take pivotal anti-Bush votes away from Kerry, as it did from Al Gore in 2000. If only Nader would stand down.

Now Nader is, in many of his concerns, truly European. It occurs to me that the European Union is having some difficulty finding a new president of the European commission. So why don't we kill two birds with one stone? If we really want to help the vulcans from the American stage, let's make Ralph Nader president of the European commission.

The level of anxiety I'm hearing from international readers of this weblog regarding the upcoming election is far greater than that evinced by about half of the electorate here.

Disregard for the Truth

Some Seek Broad, External Inquiry on Prisoner Abuse

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A14

In response to mounting evidence that detainees in U.S. military custody were badly abused in Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon has launched an array of investigations, assessments and reviews aimed, officials have insisted, at exposing those responsible for the misdeeds and preventing recurrences.

But a close look at what is being investigated, and who is doing the investigating, reveals gaps in the web of probes as well as limitations on the scope, with none of the inquiries designed to yield a complete picture of what went wrong or address suspicions of a possible top-secret intelligence-gathering operation that may have helped set the stage for the misconduct.

"I can't tell if all the inquiries represent attempts to patch new holes opening in the boat every day, or if they're part of some carefully designed strategy to have lots of activity going on around the center of this thing without probing the center itself," said John Hamre, who served as deputy secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and now heads the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

With one inquiry completed and five more underway -- not to mention dozens of criminal investigations into alleged abusive treatment of detainees inside and outside military-run facilities -- Pentagon officials continue to promise that all trails will be pursued wherever they lead and that the guilty will be held accountable.
....
"I really doubt whether the Defense Department can investigate itself, because there's a possibility the secretary himself authorized certain actions," said Wayne A. Downing, a retired four-star Army general who headed a Pentagon task force that examined the Air Force barracks case. "This cries out for an outside commission to investigate."

The closest the Pentagon has come to initiating an overarching independent review of detainee treatment is Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's appointment May 7 of a four-member panel to help advise him. The panelists include two former defense secretaries (James R. Schlesinger and Harold Brown), a retired Air Force general (Charles A. Horner) and a onetime Republican House member from Florida (Tillie Fowler).

Schlesinger, the panel's chairman, said in a brief interview yesterday that the roles of top commanders, the possible involvement of government intelligence agencies and other key issues will be studied. But the panel has just two months to draft a report, and its charter calls only for identifying gaps in existing inquiries and recommending changes in training, organization and policies related to the handling of detainees.

In Congress, too, the investigative effort has yet to match major probes of the past. Republican leaders have resisted calls from Democratic lawmakers to establish a special panel of inquiry, as was done in the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s, or authorize a blue-ribbon commission, like the one now investigating government mistakes related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Instead, congressional action has been kept within regular committee channels, principally the armed services committees. And only the Senate committee, under the leadership of John W. Warner (R-Va.), has shown investigating vigor, convening a series of hearings that some senior House Republicans have complained are ill-advised and serve only to give more political ammunition to critics of the Bush administration.

The Senate inquiry has been hampered by the Pentagon's failure to provide it with a complete copy of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report examining abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. After protests from committee staff last week, the Pentagon attributed the omissions to technical glitches and pledged to supply the missing pages. Although Warner has said he believes the department is working in good faith with the committee, some congressional staff members suspect the Pentagon withheld particularly sensitive documents.

"We need a master commission," said Eugene R. Fidell, a prominent lawyer who handles defense cases. "This is a very grave set of issues. The country's international reputation is on the line."

The Shadow Knows

via Suburban Guerrilla:

Jimmy Breslin

That George Bush made a speech to his country the other night and did not utter a word about the prison torture in Baghdad was an omission of the greatest magnitude. Bush and the people who tell him what to say, somebody named Karl Rove is the main influence, didn't have the slightest conception of what the 30 murders are.

They think it's something you can leave out of a major speech and nobody will notice.

And the people associate it immediately with Nazis.

The people in the White House had not the slightest idea that even in the middle of a war, murder is the Main Event. There can be no way of distracting people from 30 homicides.

You'll read about the most interesting murders by Americans forever.

The White House thinks the country is composed of these low-IQ Southern towns that explode into applause and admiration when Bush walks onto the stage at some Army base.

The one military center Bush avoids is Dover Air Force in Dover, Del., where they bring in the dead bodies from Iraq.

Bush pretends they do not exist. He has the base sealed from cameras and reporters.

He also pretends that the prison torture scandal does not exist. But in attempting to make the nation into a convention of Southern suckers, he revealed exactly how slow-thinking he is. For in omitting the prison torture scandals, he only made things wide open for a stool pigeon, an informer, a rat, to detonate the murder investigations and leave Bush without a shred of credibility. If he had any heart and honor, the least he could have done was mention that he was surprised and sickened and the thing was so much worse than the original snarls - "the actions of a few soldiers."

If the White House thinks that talk of a rat, a witness turning, is only for police stations, they might look first at the history of their city. At 1:30 in the afternoon of March 20, 1973, Judge John Sirica opened his office door to give a message to his secretary, Mrs. Alease Holley. He saw one of his law clerks, Richard Azzaro, talking to James McCord. He was a defendant in the Watergate break-in case and was about to be sentenced by Sirica.

McCord had an envelope that he wanted to give to Sirica. The judge retreated into his office. He was an old scuffler, out of the back rooms of neighborhood stores and small fight clubs. You couldn't get him to touch that envelope with a gun at his back. The White House could have had that envelope filled with hundreds and set him up, Sirica thought.

He had a probation officer take the envelope from McCord and deliver it to the courtroom. Sirica came out and read McCord's letter. Which said that others were involved, and that people had threatened and committed perjury.

That letter went up to the president, Richard Nixon, and we had a new one. It was the power of a turncoat witness. Look out for them in Baghdad. This is an enormous national case these informers will be talking about.

Democracy Now!

Bush's health care scam

By Robert Kuttner | May 27, 2004

IF THE MESS in Iraq and the high price of oil were not crowding out other election year issues, health care would top the list. Premium costs keep increasing, out-of-pocket charges keep being shifted onto consumers, and the number of uninsured is at an all-time high.

President Bush, speaking Tuesday at a Youngstown, Ohio, community health center, promised to help more uninsured Americans obtain affordable health care. But his key proposals are dubious health policy, waste taxpayer dollars, and are unlikely to increase coverage. They deserve more attention because they epitomize Bush's utterly cynical approach to governing.

Here's what Bush would do.

First, he relies on tax credits. A family earning $25,000 or less could receive a "refundable tax credit" (that is, a government payment) of up to $3,000 toward the purchase of health insurance. The trouble is that the average family health insurance policy provided by employers in 2003 cost $9,000, and individually purchased policies cost even more.

A family with $25,000 income, even with a $3,000 subsidy from Bush's plan, would still have to pay $6,000 out of pocket. Families with $25,000 or less are just scraping by. How many can afford to spend almost a quarter of their total income on health insurance?

Worse, individual health insurance policies are the least efficient way to provide health coverage because they are more costly than group plans to administer. And they leave families with any history of illness vulnerable to denial of insurance on grounds of a "preexisting condition." (About half of the uninsured have histories of serious medical problems.) So, few people currently without insurance would actually benefit from Bush's tax credit scheme.

About two-thirds of workers earning under $25,000 already have employer-provided insurance. For them, the tax credit would be a windfall; it would not reduce the number of insured. Younger and healthier workers would opt out into low-cost individual plans, raising the cost to other workers. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the net effect would be a loss of employer-provided insurance.

Second, the president, working with the National Federation of Independent Businesses (the very conservative small-business lobby), proposes something called Association Health Plans. The idea is that small businesses can organize themselves into associations to purchase health insurance collectively at lower rates.

This sounds like a good idea, except that small businesses are already free to do that. The magazine that I edit, with 23 employees, has long been a member of just such an association so we can purchase affordable insurance for our staff.

The new and insidious wrinkle in the Bush proposal is that it would exempt such associations from regulations that currently prohibit discrimination against individuals based on health status. With this new provision, insurers could offer very favorable rates for health plans whose members were limited to the young and the healthy.

As younger workers bail out of larger insurance pools, middle-aged workers and their dependents, as well as those with histories of illness, would face huge rate increases. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that some 20 million Americans would face higher insurance costs if this proposal were enacted. Both The Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine, not exactly lefty news organs, have published articles pointing out the serious flaws in this approach.

Why would the business federation support such a scheme? One reason is that it stands to make more than $100 million a year organizing and selling such plans.

Bush would also increase the tax benefits of so called Health Savings Accounts. Under this scheme, taxpayers can set up tax-sheltered accounts similar to IRAs and then use the proceeds to pay out-of-pocket health costs. Bush wants to expand these so they can also be used to pay premiums.

But very few low-income people use such accounts. They are beneficial mainly to people in higher tax brackets. They also create incentives for people to buy policies with very high deductibles, which defeats the goal of preventive medical care.

Taken together, Bush's new plans would cost the Treasury more than $100 billion over 10 years in lost revenues. He proposes to make up that loss by cutting two proven programs that actually do help more people get health care -- Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

So this is how our president proposes to "help the uninsured." If the United States is a democracy worthy of the name, we the voters owe it to ourselves to look beyond the photo-ops and misleading rhetoric to the real details.

Snip, Snip, Snip

2006 Cuts In Domestic Spending On Table

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A01

use put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and others that the president backed in this campaign year.

Administration officials had dismissed the significance of the proposed cuts when they surfaced in February as part of an internal White House budget office computer printout. At the time, officials said the cuts were based on a formula and did not accurately reflect administration policy. But a May 19 White House budget memorandum obtained by The Washington Post said that agencies should assume the spending levels in that printout when they prepare their fiscal 2006 budgets this summer.

"Assume accounts are funded at the 2006 level specified in the 2005 Budget database," the memo informs federal program associate directors and their deputies. "If you propose to increase funding above that level for any account, it must be offset within your agency by proposing to decrease funding below that level in other accounts."

J.T. Young, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the memo, titled "Planning Guidance for the FY 2006 Budget," is a routine "process document" to help agency officials begin establishing budget procedures for 2006. In no way should it be interpreted as a final policy decision, or even a planning document, he said.

"Agencies have asked for this sort of direction," Young said. "Budgeting is basically a year-long process, and you have to start somewhere. They'll get more guidance as the year goes along."

The funding levels referred to in the memo would be a tiny slice out of the federal budget -- $2.3 billion, or 0.56 percent, out of the $412.7 billion requested for fiscal 2005 for domestic programs and homeland security that is subject to Congress's annual discretion.

But the cuts are politically sensitive, targeting popular programs that Bush has been touting on the campaign trail. The Education Department; a nutrition program for women, infants and children; Head Start; and homeownership, job-training, medical research and science programs all face cuts in 2006.

"Despite [administration] denials, this memorandum confirms what we suspected all along," said Thomas S. Kahn, Democratic staff director on the House Budget Committee. "Next February, the administration plans to propose spending cuts in key government services to pay for oversized tax cuts."

Compassionate conservatism=cutting core services and turning campaign promises on their heads. Ergo, compassionate conservatism=lying.

No Daylight?

Blair jumps the gun on Iraqi veto

PM out of step with Washington on troops
Michael White, Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday May 26, 2004

The Guardian

Tony Blair jumped the gun yesterday when he unequivocally promised that the new government in Baghdad will be able to exercise a veto over controversial US-led military operations after the handover of sovereignty on June 30.

The prime minister's remarks at his monthly Downing Street press conference appeared to go further than the White House, Pentagon or Foreign Office.

It was left to Downing Street officials to insist that the remarks applied to British forces, though not necessarily to US troops.

The prime minister, trying to address widespread scepticism in the Arab world and Europe that the transfer of power will be genuine, said: "Let me make it 100% clear, after June 30 there will be the full transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi government.

"If there is a political decision as to whether you go into a place like Falluja in a particular way, that has to be done with the consent of the Iraqi government and the final political control remains with the Iraqi government."

Mr Blair's words go significantly further than the stance of Washington. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, spelled out the US position, stressing that if they disagreed with the new Iraqi authorities on certain operations, "US forces remain under US command and will do what is necessary to protect themselves."

Tony knows he's going down, and that "shoulder to shoulder" rhetoric isn't playing well with the British public. This is unlikely to give him the breathing room he's looking for.

Eating the Seed Corn

Army may be sending training base troops to Iraq

Tue May 25, 6:52 AM ET

By Dave Moniz and John Diamond, USA TODAY

The Army, pressing to meet the need for combat troops in Iraq (news - web sites), is making contingency plans to deploy an elite unit whose mission is to play the enemy in rigorous field exercises. It is the latest sign of the Army's personnel crunch, say some experts.

The 2,500-member unit called "OPFOR," or opposition force, trains Army armored units in maneuvers at Fort Irwin in California, a sprawling base in the Mojave Desert just south of Death Valley where exercises are intended to simulate real combat.

Ali Bettencourt, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon (news - web sites), said the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Irwin has not yet received orders to Iraq but is among those units being looked at.

"The OPFOR is among some of the best trained units we have in the Army and they are a deployable unit," Bettencourt said.

Army officials briefed Rep. Jerry Lewis (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., whose district abuts Fort Irwin, and made clear the decision to send the OPFOR to Iraq is a virtual certainty, according to Jim Specht, a spokesman for Lewis. The unresolved issues are precisely when the unit will deploy and where in Iraq it will go. The Army is also considering leaving behind a nucleus of OPFOR to prepare whatever unit comes in to substitute as the enemy in upcoming exercises. Lewis was concerned the deployment would close the base but was assured by the Army that military field exercises will continue.

The deployment decision, Specht said, "will be made sooner rather than later," and is driven by two factors: OPFOR's ability to handle urban and desert combat, especially against insurgents, and what Specht said is the need "to give somebody else a break for a while" among the units that have had lengthy deployments in Iraq.

Maj. Chris Belcher, a Fort Irwin spokesman, declined to comment on the unit's deployment plans, but said since it has been assigned to Fort Irwin, the unit has never been sent to combat. Its potential call-up highlights the strains on the 480,000-member Army, which has the bulk of the 138,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq.

"The thought that OPFOR is now being thrown into the mix in Iraq is deeply shocking because it absolutely shows where we are now," said retired Army colonel Kenneth Allard, an author and lecturer on military history and strategy. "We've always managed to maintain the basic integrity of the training base. That is the seed corn of the Army."

There have been increasing signs that the Pentagon is finding it hard to meet the demand for fresh troops in Iraq. Pentagon planners recently decided to keep at least 135,000 U.S. troops there into next year to counter the stubborn insurgency. The Pentagon had hoped to cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 105,000 this summer. In another unexpected move to meet the need for more troops, military officials announced this month that they are sending a brigade of troops from South Korea (news - web sites) to Iraq.

This is a huge story the traditional media isn't telling you. Deploying OPFOR means that our Army is completely hollowed out. If a real threat (North Korea) were to pop up now, we are nearly defenseless. Rummy broke the Army.

Cry "Havoc" and Let Slip the Dogs of War

U.S. military arrests war's 'bargaining chips'
Rights groups say practice holding people to pressure wanted relatives to surrender violates laws
BY MOHAMAD BAZZI
MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

May 25, 2004, 4:57 PM EDT

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops wanted Jeanan Moayad's father. When they couldn't find him, they took her husband in his place.

Dhafir Ibrahim has been in U.S. custody for nearly four months. Moayad insists that he is being held as a bargaining chip, and military officials have told her that he will be released when her father surrenders. Her father is a scientist and former Baath party member who fled to Jordan soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"My husband is a hostage," said Moayad, 35, an architect who carries a small portrait of Ibrahim in her purse. "He didn't commit any crime."

In a little-noticed development amid Iraq's prison abuse scandal, the U.S. military is holding dozens of Iraqis as bargaining chips to put pressure on their wanted relatives to surrender, according to human rights groups. These detainees are not accused of any crimes, and experts say their detention violates the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. The practice also risks associating the United States with the tactics of countries that it has long criticized for arbitrary arrests.

"It's clearly an abuse of the powers of arrest, to arrest one person and say that you're going to hold him until he gives information about somebody else, especially a close relative," said John Quigley, an international law professor at Ohio State University. "Arrests are supposed to be based on suspicion that the person has committed some offense."

U.S. officials deny that there is a systematic practice of detaining relatives to pressure Iraqi fugitives into surrendering. "The coalition does not take hostages," said a senior military official who asked not to be named. "Relatives who might have information about wanted persons are sometimes detained for questioning, and then they are released. There is no policy of holding people as bargaining chips."

But Iraqi human rights groups say they have documented dozens of cases similar to Moayad's, in which family members who are not accused of any crimes have been detained for weeks or even months and told that they would be released only when a wanted relative surrenders to U.S. forces.

"We have many cases of Americans going to a house looking for someone, and when they can't find him, they take another family member in his place," said Bassem al-Rubaie, director of the Council of Legal Defense Care, a group of Iraqi lawyers that has been campaigning for prisoner rights. "This has been going on since the early days of the American occupation."

In a recent report, the International Committee of the Red Cross quoted military intelligence officers as saying that between "70 and 90 percent" of the nearly 8,000 Iraqis detained by occupation forces had been arrested "by mistake." In some cases, the report found, U.S. troops continued to hold people for several months after they had been cleared of any wrongdoing.

Human rights groups first criticized the United States for detaining the relatives of wanted Iraqis in November, when U.S. forces arrested the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Hussein's longtime deputies. After Hussein was captured last year, al-Douri became the most wanted man in Iraq, and Washington put a $10 million bounty on his head.

Al-Douri's wife and daughter are still in U.S. custody, although rights monitors say they have not been charged with any crime. Rights groups say the United States is committing a war crime by detaining al-Douri's relatives without charge. "Taking hostages is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions -- in other words, a war crime," Human Rights Watch wrote in a January letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

International Rules About Civilians

Both the fourth Geneva Convention and the two Additional Protocols extend protections to civilians during war time.

* Civilians are not to be subject to attack. This includes direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks against areas in which civilians are present.
* There is to be no destruction of property unless justified by military necessity.
* Individuals or groups must not be deported, regardless of motive.
* Civilians must not be used as hostages.
* Civilians must not be subject to outrages upon personal dignity.
* Civilians must not be tortured, raped or enslaved.
* Civilians must not be subject to collective punishment and reprisals.
* Civilians must not receive differential treatment based on race, religion, nationality, or political allegiance.
* Warring parties must not use or develop biological or chemical weapons and must not allow children under 15 to participate in hostilities or to be recruited into the armed forces.

Threat Assessment

Ridge Acknowledges Terror Threats, but 'Nothing Specific'
By KIRK SEMPLE

Published: May 26, 2004

Tom Ridge, the secretary of Homeland Security, confirmed today that officials have intercepted new communication among suspected terrorists suggesting a possible attack in the United States, but he said the government did not plan to raise the nation's terror alert level, currently at the midpoint of a five-level scale.

"There is absolutely nothing specific enough" that warrants a change in the alert level, he said on NBC's "Today."

In interviews on several morning shows, Mr. Ridge appeared to be seeking to diminish the alarm caused by a report from The Associated Press on Tuesday that officials had information about a specific threat this summer.

The news agency reported that the government had new intelligence indicating that a group of terrorists already deployed inside the United States was preparing to launch a major attack in the next few months. The intelligence did not include a time, place or method of attack, the A.P. reported, quoting an unnamed senior counterterrorism official.

Mr. Ridge has warned since April of potential threats in the United States over the summer, particularly coinciding with high-profile events such as the two national political conventions.

"I can confirm that we have seen for the past several weeks a continuous stream of reporting that talks about the possibility of attacks on the United States," Mr. Ridge said on "Today." But he said the flow of information was "not unlike what we've seen for the past several years."

The AP had the early news of this story on Monday, but none of the Bigs picked it up. NPR is now reporting "specific, credible threats" which means we'll be at orange or red alert in time for the conventions this summer. Since the Bushies haven't really done anything to make the Homeland safer, and the AP is reporting that the Iraq war has created at least 18,000 new Al Qaeda members, (I can't find the AP link, but here is Reuters report) I expect something bad to happen, and I sorta wish I didn't live near DC.

Mars Chronicles

Bush speech alarms even war enthusiasts

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Washington -- Even the staunchest supporters of President Bush's Iraq enterprise were less than cheered by his speech to the nation Monday night outlining the path forward, some describing the administration as being in a state of panic.

In particular, the neoconservatives who provided the intellectual argument that an invasion of Iraq could provide a template for democracy in the Middle East are expressing open alarm that this effort is dangerously off course.

"There's no question the administration has been in total panic mode, and they don't need to be, because Iraq is salvageable," said Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that has been a hotbed of support for the war. "But I think there is still so much indecision about what to do that it's going to be hard for them to do the right thing."

Many administration hawks were drawn from the neoconservative intellectual ranks, notably deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architect of the idea that the United States could make Iraq a democratic beacon.

Their dismay comes as some Republicans in Congress fear that Bush's Iraq policy has become unhinged, given the relentless bad news coming out of Iraq: a multiheaded insurgency among Shiites and Sunnis, the assassination of the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the steady rise in U.S. casualties.

Others on the political right, as distinct from their more interventionist neoconservative colleagues, have begun openly attacking the administration. Wall Street Journal contributing editor Mark Helprin called Abu Ghraib "a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought." He asked why the administration was trying to occupy Iraq with current troop levels, "even as one event cascading into another should make them recoil in piggy-eyed wonder at the lameness of their policy."

Some of Bush's supporters concede the administration has committed blunders over the past year. Many suggest a sharp change in course -- such as adding thousands of troops, or moving up elections or forcefully quashing insurgents -- which they contend Bush did not promise Monday.

"It was important for Bush to remind the American public of the cost of failure," said Michael Rubin, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and another neoconservative war supporter. "Basically, Bush was letting us see the forest through the trees."

However, he said, "the devil's in the details, and with the stakes so high, we can't ignore the details."

Yet while criticizing the administration for failures of execution, few neoconservatives have abandoned their belief that the war was a good idea or that it is intimately linked, as Bush insisted Monday, with fighting terrorism.

Joining the neoconservatives in support of the basic war effort are Democratic hawks such as Rep. Tom Lantos of San Mateo, the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee.

"Iraq is clearly waiting to see if we will help develop a more open society or whether we will tire, declare a Pyrrhic victory and leave," Lantos said, urging persistence and greater international involvement.

"Nobody is admitting defeat, and if anything they are taking an even harder line," said Charles Pena, head of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, which opposed the invasion and urges a speedy withdrawal.

Some contend that neoconservatives resemble the communists they once ridiculed, blaming the failures of communist ideology on the Kremlin's execution.

"It's an argument that shows that they didn't understand the problem to begin with, that you just cannot use military force to dictate outcomes everywhere in the world," Pena said. "It's based on this presumption that somehow we have to turn Iraq into a democracy, that that will somehow make us safe, which presumes Iraq was a threat to begin with."

War supporters have been emphasizing the bright spots in the occupation, such as the relative calm in some parts of the country.

Many compare the current situation in Iraq with the darkest moments of World War II, when rampant despair clouded victories that lay ahead.

Neoconservatives warn, however, that the administration seems headed on a dangerous course. Pletka charges the administration with "subcontracting" the political process to the United Nations. Many are particularly worried by the decision to enlist a former Republican Guard general to pacify Fallujah, site of a bloody Sunni insurgency last month. Handing over security to factional militias is a recipe not for elections but for civil war, they contend. They urge instead a crackdown by U.S. forces.

"The truth is it wouldn't take much actually to turn this around, not that they necessarily will," said Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century, a leading neoconservative think tank. "There are a lot of very positive trends going on in Iraq, and I think if you take care of the security situation and the political trend lines toward real elections, in fact I think Iraq is more than salvageable."

It takes a lot to leave me speechless. This did it. The PNACers didn't tell us, but they moved from K Street to another planet at some point in the last year.

Oopsie

The Times climbs down. This is the sad story of a great paper. I haven't seen Judith Miller's byline in days. If the Times hadn't willingly gotten on the War boat, who else might have refused to board?

F*ck the First Responders

I dislike blogging the Center for American Progress's Progress Report or The Daily Misleader, however valuable they are (and I certainly wouldn't want to do without either) but the latter just arrived and it made me so damned angry that I have to blog it. The hypocrisy and demagoguery that the Bushies have used around the very heros of 9/11 makes me want to throw things.

THE DAILY MIS-LEAD

BUSH IGNORES SICK 9/11 FIREFIGHTERS & COPS

Over the last month, President Bush has repeatedly recounted how he was
inspired by
the courage of the firefighters and the police" in the
aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He recounted how, when
standing atop a pile of rubble at Ground Zero, he was told by a firefighter,. But more than two years later, he continues to
ignore the needs of firefighters and police officers who are now suffering
adverse health effects from their rescue efforts at Ground Zero. The
situation has reached a head: yesterday, 1,700 cops and firefighters were
forced to sue in court for the medical help they desperately need ].

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Your bill for the war

Sean Gonsalves - Cape Cod Times

05.24.04 - Amount you owe for the war in Iraq: $4,000. Make check payable to Uncle Sam's Iraq Quagmire Fund. If you dispute any portion of this bill call 1-800-IMPEACH-THIS.

According to Doug Henwood, author of "After the New Economy," $4,000 is the amount that each household will have to fork over in taxes to foot the Iraq occupation bill.

"I feel a little callous about talking about the economic impact of the war in Iraq, which seems like an afterthought next to the human toll. But at a time when civilian budgets are being cut at every level, when clinics are closing and professors at our public universities have to pay for their own photocopying because there's allegedly not enough money, it's amazing how much we're spending," Henwood says.

Henwood pegs the military costs in Iraq to date at about $143 billion, with the tab rising $4 billion to $5 billion a month.

Reconstruction has cost about $20 billion so far, with another $50 billion to $100 billion still needed, Henwood reports.

"If the occupation goes on for three years, which is what the military pundits say is likely, the total bill could come to $362 billion. Add to that an estimated 0.5 percent knocked off GDP growth because of high oil prices, and that's another $50 billion," he says.

Add it all up, and the bill comes to nearly $4,000 per household, not including interest. "I wonder how people would react if they got a bill from Washington for that amount," he said.

And when Iraq settles into what ever its new status quo is (whenever that will be) what will you have gotten for your $4,000? A chronic, low-level civil war? 14 permanent bases that need to be protected from a hostile populace?

Was it worth it?

Please stand by

Alas, another power outage at Melanie Mattson's manse. Posting will resume shortly. Until then, talk amongst yourselves...

Fallen and Forgotten

Afghanistan, the war the world forgot
By Colin Brown and Kim Sengupta

25 May 2004

'We've got to make sure this time that we do it properly'
Tony Blair, 5 April, 2002

'It's a basket case. It's a forgotten country'
Eric Illsley, Labour member of Foreign Affairs Select Committee, yesterday

Three years after the overthrow of the Taliban and George Bush's declaration of victory in the first conflict in the war on terror, Afghanistan is a nation on the edge of anarchy.

A devastating indictment of the Allies' failure to help reconstruct the country in the wake of the 2001 conflict is to be delivered in a parliamentary report.

The Independent has learnt that an all-party group of MPs from the Foreign Affairs Committee has returned from a visit to the country shocked and alarmed by what they witnessed. They warn that urgent action must be taken to save Afghanistan from plunging further into chaos because of Western neglect.

As President Bush and Tony Blair unveil their plans today for the future of Iraq through the draft of a new United Nations resolution, the MPs warn that the mistakes of Afghanistan could be repeated with similar tragic consequences in Iraq.

Eric Ilsley, a Labour member of the committee, said: "Afghanistan is a basket case. It's a forgotten country." Shortly after the conflict, Mr Blair pledged to the Afghan people: "This time we will not walk away from you", as the United States and Britain had been accused of doing following the mujahedin's war against the Soviet Union.

But MPs and international aid agencies say that is, in effect, what has happened. With the focus of Washington and London firmly on Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has been allowed to unravel. The remaining infrastructure is shattered, opium production is rocketing, and the Taliban and warlords are back in control of large areas.

The committee, chaired by Labour MP Donald Anderson, will charge in their report, due out in July, that Nato and the West failed to fulfil their promise to restore order and democracy to Afghanistan.

They will urge Mr Blair to press for Nato countries to fulfil their commitments in Afghanistan at the organisation's summit in Istanbul at the end of June. The committee believes Nato countries are holding back troops from Afghanistan because they may be needed in Iraq.

The MPs' assessment follows similar warnings by humanitarian organisations. Earlier this month, a report by Christian Aid described how aid efforts were in jeopardy because of Western inaction.

With Nato forces suffering from a shortage of manpower and materials and the Americans concentrating on hunting Osama bin Laden, Western organisations and diplomats, including the British ambassador, Rosalind Marsden, are dependent on private security firms for protection. Mr Ilsley said: "It's very worrying. We arrived in Kabul and found our ambassador has a private security firm acting as her bodyguards who look like the Men in Black. They were in civilian clothes and armed to the teeth."

The security situation was so fraught that the committee reported to the Foreign Office that they felt several MPs, including the former minister Gisela Stuart, were in danger during a demonstration in Kabul.

The Nato commander in Afganistan, Major General Rick Hillier of the Canadian Army, told the visiting MPs that he had asked for 10 helicopters for his force of more than a thousand but not a single aircraft had been delivered.

John Stanley, a former Conservative defence minister, said: "We were told in no uncertain terms by the top Nato general that the situation in delivering Nato expansion in Afghanistan is very disturbing indeed."

Hamid Karzai, President of the interim Afghan government, praised the role of British troops in getting warlords to disarm in his meeting with the parliamentary delegation. Afghan officials say he is under pressure from the US to hold elections in September, prior to the American presidential elections in November, so that President George Bush can show how democracy has been successfully nurtured in the country.

However, the Afghan elections, originally scheduled for June, have already been postponed once due to the unsafe security situation. The UN reports that attacks by the Taliban have led to only 1.6 million out of the 10.5 million eligible electors being registered.

The Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey added: "The UK troops are doing a wonderful job but we found only 30 looking after an area the size of Scotland. It's a disgrace. Allowing the Afghan operation to remain a forgotten theatre means warlords, funded by drugs profits, will continue to flourish."

Misunderpronounciate

Bush's telling Abu Ghraib gaffe

Given the importance of President Bush's Iraq address, it's the wrong time to be petty, but someone needs to say that his stumbling over the pronunciation of Abu Ghraib was a stunning gaffe -- and yes, I mean "gaffe" in the Washington definition of the word, as in a slip of the tongue that inadvertently reveals what the speaker really thinks -- or in this case, doesn't bother to think.

Abu Ghrabe, Abu Ghribe, Abu Ghrab, it didn't necessarily matter how Bush pronounced it, as long as he showed a weary, fed-up familiarity with the word and all it meant, and a determination to make sure this sort of scandal never happened again. But he didn't. That may have been the most important moment of Bush's speech, and the president fell on his face again, badly.

Fish Rot from the Head

Ex-Inmate Alleges U.S. Abuse at Guantanamo
A Briton held for two years says prisoners were brutally beaten and sexually humiliated.

By Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writer

MANCHESTER, England — A Briton who spent two years in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused his American captors of subjecting him and other inmates to a catalog of brutality: beatings, forced injections, sleep deprivation and shackling in painful positions.

Jamal Harith, 37, described how he endured a beating in which a guard jumped up and down on his legs when he resisted an injection of an unknown drug, one of 10 such injections that left him feeling woozy and disoriented. He said interrogators forced him to spend long periods in painful positions on his knees or bound in chains that cut into his skin. On some days, according to his account, guards chained him to the floor for up to 15 hours in an interrogation room with cold air blowing in, forcing him to urinate on himself.

Harith said he witnessed dozens of beatings inflicted by a team of guards known as the Extreme Reaction Force. A guard with a video camera often taped the incidents, he said. Inmates suffered broken arms and legs, and bloodied and swollen faces, he said.

Harith's account of conditions at Guantanamo echoed some of the reports of abuse at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spoke with The Times last week in one of his first interviews with a U.S. newspaper.

Harith's detailed description of captivity in the secretive facility is difficult to confirm. But he said the evidence of wrongdoing in Iraq — depicted in now-infamous photographs — makes it harder to dismiss allegations that similar misconduct by U.S. prison guards occurs at Guantanamo.

"It's just like what was happening in Iraq. They'd say the same thing: 'Oh, yeah, really,' " Harith said.

"But the fact that you've seen pictures, then you can believe it, relate to it. All I can say is I have spoken to the people this has happened to. I have seen the effects. I have seen people beat up — the swollen faces, the limping back or being dragged back. I've seen the effects of it. I cannot produce pictures. All I can say is what happened."

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller supervised the prison in Guantanamo before he was sent in March to run U.S. detention facilities in Iraq. Critics have suggested that Miller declared it was time to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib by introducing the kind of aggressive techniques used to interrogate suspects in Guantanamo. Miller denies this.

And remember Afghanistan?

U.S. unit in Iraq scandal is linked to Afghanistan

Douglas Jehl and David Rhode/NYT

Monday, May 24, 2004

WASHINGTON A military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was also in charge of questioning at a detention center in Afghanistan where two prisoners died in December 2002 in incidents that are being investigated as homicides.
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For both of the Afghan prisoners, who died in a center known as the Bagram Collection Point, the cause of death listed on certificates signed by U.S. pathologists was blunt force injuries to their legs.
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Interrogations at the center were supervised by Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which moved early in 2003 to Iraq, where some of its members were assigned to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. The company's service in Afghanistan was known, but its work at Bagram at the time of the deaths has now emerged in interviews with former prisoners and military officials and from documents.
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Two men arrested with one of the prisoners who died in the Bagram detention center said in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday that they had been tortured and sexually humiliated by their American jailers. They said they were held in isolation cells, black hoods were placed over their heads, and their hands at times were chained to the ceiling. "The 10 days that we had was a very bad time," said Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer and father of two who said he felt he would not survive at times during his imprisonment. "We are very lucky."
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The account provided by the two men was consistent with those of other former Afghan prisoners, including those interviewed by The New York Times and cited in reports by human rights officials. In interviews, the two men and other former prisoners who were held at the center in Afghanistan at that time have described an environment similar in some ways to that of Abu Ghraib, whose outlines have been depicted in photographs and testimony. At both places, prisoners were hooded, stripped naked and mocked sexually by female captors, according to a variety of accounts.
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In Iraq, at least three members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who had been assigned to the joint interrogation center at Abu Ghraib have been quietly disciplined for conduct involving the abuse of a female Iraqi prisoner, an army spokesman said. At least one officer, Captain Carolyn Wood, served in supervisory positions at both units. She was at the Bagram Collection Point from July 2002 to December 2003 and then moved to the joint center at Abu Ghraib, army officials said.

Systemic Problem? Ya think?

Musical Chairs

Trying to get at the real story of what's happening to Gen. Ricardo
Sanchez this morning has been a chase. This seems to get the closest to penetrating the veil of mystery around this transfer:

The LA Times says:

"Sanchez being replaced has been the plan forever," one senior defense official said. "The entire time there was a plan for Multinational Forces Iraq. The plan was for Sanchez to stand it up and then turn it over to someone else."

"He's been there going on 14 months now," another senior defense official said. "Anybody trying to draw a line between the natural progression of looking for somebody to rotate into that position to the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib would be just wrong. There's absolutely no connection whatever."

However, when the plan for reorganizing the command structure in Iraq was initially reported in January, Abizaid told defense reporters that Sanchez would stay on to oversee the fight against the insurgency. Pentagon officials gave no reason for the change.

It was unknown what Sanchez's next assignment would be.

The NY Times adds:

For several weeks, senior military and Pentagon officials said, a leading plan was to promote General Sanchez to four-star rank, making him the Army's senior-ranking Hispanic officer and rewarding his work in Iraq by giving him the Southern Command, which has responsibility for most of Latin America.

Under that plan, officials said, General Craddock would have been awarded a fourth star, and taken General Sanchez's place in Baghdad as head of the new Multinational Force Iraq, after June 30.

But something happened in the past few days to derail that plan. Even as the military's top worldwide commanders met in Washington for a two-day conference, defense officials would not say Monday night what caused the plan to change.

Under a new plan, General Craddock would move to the Southern Command, opening the spot for General Casey in Iraq, one defense official said.

"Casey is a more forceful type than Craddock," said the defense official, who suggested that the last-minute changes may have been a result of Mr. Rumsfeld and his top advisers deciding they needed "a different personality."

"More importantly," said the official, "where is Sanchez going, because Craddock is going to Southcom instead, leaves no seats when the music stops."

All of this looks like it has something to do with this story that broke over the weekend:

Prison Visits By General Reported In Hearing
Alleged Presence of Sanchez Cited by Lawyer

By Scott Higham, Joe Stephens and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01

A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

Grim and Grimmer

The head and subhead in the print edition are much more transparent: Occupation to end, troops to stay

Bush: Iraqis to rule, but U.S. to stay
By Richard Benedetto, USA TODAY

CARLISLE, Pa. — President Bush unveiled a five-step plan Monday intended to propel Iraq's transition to a self-governing, democratic nation and assure an increasingly nervous American public that attacks on U.S. troops will subside and calm will replace chaos.

Under the plan, which would turn over control of Iraq to an interim Iraqi government June 30, "the occupation will end, and Iraqis will govern their own affairs," Bush said.

But Bush said U.S. troop levels in Iraq will remain at 138,000 for "as long as necessary" and military leaders will continually reassess troop strength. "If they need more troops, I will send them," he said in the 34-minute speech.

Bush said the United States will pay for a new maximum-security prison and, if Iraqis approve, tear down Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. troops abused Iraqi prisoners.

The speech was more a defense of Bush's policies and a review of successes in building schools and bridges than it was a blueprint of new details or initiatives.
It was intended to reassure the public at a time of violence in Iraq, the scandal over treatment of prisoners and falling support for the war and Bush's leadership.

But Bush did not name Iraqi officials who will take over the government and he did not set a date for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. As the transfer of authority nears, he warned, "Terrorists are likely to become more active and more brutal. There are difficult days ahead, and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic.

"America's task in Iraq is not only to defeat an enemy, it is to give strength to a friend — a free, representative government that serves its people and fights on their behalf. And the sooner this goal is achieved, the sooner our job will be done."

Iraq takes heavy toll before election

WASHINGTON (AP) — Five months before the election, President Bush confronts a grim picture in Iraq of rising casualties, growing violence, skittish allies and Arab anger. To the administration's dismay, the setbacks have drowned out news of an improving economy at home and have pushed Iraq to the top of Americans' concerns. Those anxieties have helped drive down Bush's approval ratings to the lowest point of his presidency and stirred deep doubts about his handling of Iraq. (Related item: Bush seeks to reassure America he has plan to halt Iraq violence)

The numbers add up to serious political problems for a president seeking a second term.

"The air is coming out of the balloon right now," said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. "The support they had is eroding. They have to do something to stop the leak."

On the defensive, Bush scheduled a prime-time television address Monday night to try to persuade the country that he has a clear strategy to cut through the chaos and produce a democratic and peaceful Iraq. But even as Bush was outlining his plan, the White House was unable to say what price America would have to pay in lives or money in Iraq or how long U.S. troops would have to remain there.

Words alone have not been enough to convince the world about Bush's strategy.

"This is really going to be determined by events in Iraq," said Emory University politics professor Merle Black. "Obviously they're not in his control. You can't talk your way out of what's going on in Iraq."

And here is what the international community heard (and didn't hear) last night:

Iraqi quagmire threatens to sink Bush

By PAUL KORING
Tuesday, May 25, 2004 - Page A18

WASHINGTON -- U.S. President George W. Bush is twice mired: in the quagmire of an Iraqi occupation gone wrong, and in the sinkhole of domestic politics, where the failures in Baghdad threaten to drown his chances for re-election in November.

In order to truly persuade critical swing voters, Mr. Bush requires a very different message than he does when trying to persuade the rest of the world to help create a stable Iraq. So when he recast his objectives for Iraq in last night's televised speech, it was supposed to satisfy two audiences.

Few Americans will cast their ballots next November on whether prospects for Middle East peace have improved or Baghdad's streets are safer. But they do want their troops home, and some, at least, despair of America being vilified abroad -- even as Mr. Bush's generals warn that more troops, not fewer, may be needed until after Iraqis hold their first-ever free elections, scheduled for late this year.

A quick handover of authority to Iraqis and of responsibility to the international community might help. It would go a long way toward legitimizing the post-June 30 Iraqi government if its still unnamed members are not "seen as American lackeys," said Amatzia Baram, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

But any truly independent Iraqi government with real authority could interfere with continuing U.S. military operations, a chance no president is about to take. And the rest of the world still wants no part of the huge risks inherent in sending troops to Iraq.

The handful of countries with militaries big enough to make meaningful troop contributions -- France, Germany and Russia -- have all ruled it out. Turkey has been told its forces are not welcome. And even if yesterday's new United Nations Security Council resolution leads to the legitimization of the interim Iraqi government, it won't take the pressure or the spotlight off the Americans.

"One of the dirty little secrets about June 30 is that the U.S. still won't allow Iraqis to control their own destiny," said James Steinberg, director of foreign-policy studies at Washington's Brookings Institution, which invited a panel of experts yesterday to discuss the post-transfer Iraq. U.S. forces would retain wide-ranging powers under the new resolution -- which may help to sell the deal at home, but may make it even harder to push through the Security Council.

Just last month, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was vaguely suggesting that as many at 15 more troop-contributing countries might send forces to Iraq after the handover. Now, with the insurgency intensifying and the prison-abuse scandal further sullying the Americans' reputation, the challenge is to keep the foreign troops already in Iraq from bailing.

It's "important to take the 'U.S face' off the occupation," Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said yesterday.

That might make it more palatable to Iraqis and the rest of the world, but the harsh reality is that no other face can replace Uncle Sam's in Iraq -- even that of the United Nations, unless the Germans, French and Russians come onside. And those governments, hostile to the war in the first place, have shown no enthusiasm for helping Mr. Bush out of the mess they believe he was wrong to create.

The President's biggest problem is that he is fast running out of ways to justify both the initial war and the occupation. Saddam Hussein's banned arsenals turned out to be a mirage. There is no evident progress toward making the war a beachhead for democracy in the Arab world. And the moral high ground of ousting a brutal dictator has eroded.

"There has been a complete collapse of trust in the United States," said Shibley Telhami, who is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. "The moral argument was the last thread," he said, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal "severed it."

For Mr. Bush, that makes sharing the costly and difficult task of enlisting the rest of the world that much more difficult. And without the rest of the world in Iraq, his sales pitch looks shaky at home.

Down, Down, Down

Bush Losing Support on Iraq, Poll Finds
President's Approval Ratings Hits Lowest Point

By Dan Balz and Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 24, 2004; 5:16 PM

Public approval of President Bush's handling of the conflict in Iraq has hit its lowest point in the latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll, with growing fears that the United States is bogged down, rising criticism of Bush's handling of the prison abuse scandal and slippage in support for keeping U.S. troops there until order is restored.

Support for Bush on virtually every aspect of the Iraq conflict has declined in the past month as the administration has battled insurgents on the ground and grappled with the expanding investigation into the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

The new poll underscored the political challenges that confront Bush as he goes on national television tonight to defend his Iraq policy and outline the steps that will lead to a transfer of governing authority to a new Iraqi government on June 30.

Bush's overall approval rating declined to 47 percent, the lowest the Post-ABC News polls have recorded since he took office, with 50 percent saying they disapprove. Just four in 10 Americans gave the president positive marks for his handling of Iraq, the lowest since he launched the conflict in March 2003.

Democrats continue to give Bush low marks across the board, but his political standing has been weakened by an erosion in support among independents and by signs of potential disaffection among his typically rock-solid Republican base.

A month ago Bush's overall approval rating stood at 51-47 percent and virtually all of the decline since then is attributable to a drop of 7 percentage points among Republicans. Just 20 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of independents approve of how he is handling the presidency.

On Iraq, a majority of Democrats (87 percent) and independents (58 percent) give him negative marks. Among members of his own party, support, while strong, declined 8 percentage points during the past month to 75 percent.

The president received higher marks for managing the war on terrorism, although the 58 percent approval rating in the latest poll marked the first time Bush has dropped below 60 percent on that question since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush's Iraqi approval rating now stands lower than his economic approval rating. In the latest poll, 44 percent said they approved of how he has handled the economy compared with 54 percent who disapproved. The last two employment reports have shown significant new job creation, and while Bush's economic ratings remain negative, they are not as low as they were in March.

Setting the Stage

Here is the background against which W gives his War College speech tonight:

Iraq war's costs spiral beyond 1991 Gulf War
May 23, 2004

The price of the bloodier-than-predicted war and occupation of Iraq is nearing twice that of the 1991 Gulf War, and the economic consequences are complex and far-reaching, analysts have said.

And predictions by an Australian economist and his colleague that the current conflict would top $US173 billion ($A248.83 billion) appeared closer to the likely cost than some other estimates.

In the runup to the invasion, the White House's then-Office of Management and Budget director, Mitch Daniels, had said a war would probably cost $US50 billion ($A71.92 billion) to $US60 billion ($A86.3 billion).

Daniels dismissed estimates of costs of $US100-200 billion ($A144-288 billion) made by White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, also since departed, as "likely very, very high".

But, Congress has already appropriated $US100 billion ($A143.83 billion) just to keep troops in Iraq until the end of September this year, said the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments' military budget analyst, Steven Kosiak.
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President George W. Bush's administration this month asked for another $US25 billion ($A35.96 billion), mostly for Iraq, for the next fiscal year. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also warned he would be back for more.

In all, the bill for military operations alone would be likely to amount to $US150 billion ($A215.75 billion) by the end of September 30, 2005 -- far more than the 1990-91 Gulf War's $US61 billion ($A87.74 billion) price, Kosiak said.

Before the current conflict, Australian economics professor Warwick McKibbin co-authored a study on the economic implications with Andrew Stoeckel of the Center for International Economics.

Their study suggested even a short conflict could have a broad economic cost of $US173 billion ($A248.83 billion) in 2003, rising to $US1.04 trillion ($A1.5 trillion) by 2010.

McKibbin and Stoeckel's study predicted that a longer, bogged-down war could cost $US237 billion ($A340.88 billion) in 2003, rising to $US3.57 trillion ($A5.13 trillion) by 2010.

"I think our study is still very relevant," said McKibbin, a fellow of the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Death Total Tops 800

Another grim milestone was reached on Sunday with the deaths of two more American soldiers in Iraq. Despite the recent American pullout, the deaths occurred in the city of Fallujah, bringing the death total above 800. UPI reports:

Two U.S. soldiers were killed and five others were wounded Sunday in a suicide attack near the city of Fallujah, in Western Iraq.

Iraqi sources said a suicide bomber drove a booby-trapped car into an American military column near Fallujah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Baghdad.

They said the attack was immediately followed by mortar fire directed at the same convoy, killing and injuring the soldiers.

As of Monday, the Department of Defense listed 797 American military deaths [pdf] in Iraq. Our count was in line with the military's until a few weeks ago and the discrepency is still undetermined. We are, however, confident in our numbers.

Shutting the Window on the Draft

Like Jerome Armstrong at Bad Attitudes, I've been thinking about reinstating the draft and wondering if it might not be such a bad thing, sort of along the standard liberal lines of: making it harder to get broad support for unnecessary wars, democratizing the services with the participation of a broader range of social classes, etc. Like Jerome, this piece brought me back to my senses, as this writer so often does.

Katha Pollit in The Nation:

Supporters of the draft are using it to promote indirectly politics we should champion openly and up front. It's terrible that working-class teenagers join the Army to get college funds, or job training, or work--what kind of nation is this where Jessica Lynch had to invade Iraq in order to fulfill her modest dream of becoming an elementary school teacher and Shoshanna Johnson had to be a cook on the battlefield to qualify for a culinary job back home? But the solution isn't to force more people into the Army, it's affordable education and good jobs for all. Nobody should have to choose between risking her life--or as we see in Abu Ghraib, her soul--and stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. By the same token, threatening our young with injury, madness and death is a rather roundabout way to increase resistance to military adventures. I'd rather just loudly insist that people who favor war go fight in it themselves or be damned as showboaters and shirkers. I'm sure the Army can find something for Christopher Hitchens to do.

The main effect of bringing back the draft would be to further militarize the nation. The military has already thrust its tentacles deep into civilian life: We have ROTC on campus, Junior ROTC in the high schools, Hummers in our garages and camouflage couture in our closets. Whole counties, entire professions, live or die by defense contracts--which is perhaps one reason we spend more on our military budget than the next twenty-five countries combined. (Did you know that the money raised by the breast cancer postage stamp goes to the Defense Department?) Conscription will make the country more authoritarian and probably more violent, too, if that's possible--especially for women soldiers, who are raped and assaulted in great numbers in today's armed forces, usually with more or less impunity.

If we want a society that is equal, cohesive, fair and war-resistant, let's fight for that, not punish our children for what we have allowed America to become.

Feel-Good GOTV

Strip clubs register voters, urge them to go to polls

The Associated Press

BELOIT, Wis. -- Strip club owners are putting a little bada-bing in the presidential campaign by asking patrons to turn their eyes away from the stage for a moment to fill out a voter registration form -- and then vote against President Bush.

"It's not to say our industry loves John Kerry or anything like that," said Dave Manack, associate publisher of E.D. Publications, which publishes Exotic Dancer magazine. "But George Bush, if he's re-elected, it could be very damaging to our industry."

Fearful that conservatives might turn off the colored lights for good, a trade organization for adult night clubs is asking owners to register customers and employees and then encourage them to cast their ballots against the president. Micheal Ocello, president of the Association of Club Executives, said the group believes Bush's brand of conservatism is bad for business.

"We must do everything within our power to help ensure that Bush and his ultra-conservative administration are removed from the White House," Ocello wrote in a letter to nearly 4,000 club owners.

Heather Layman, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said she doesn't know why the businesses would consider the president unfriendly to their industry. But, speaking of the GOP's own voter-registration drive this year, she said: "I have to admit that the strip club owners are not a group we targeted."

Adult night clubs rake in an estimated $15 billion annually and employ 500,000 to 750,000 people, Manack said.

In southern Wisconsin, more than 200 people have registered in the past month at the bar Diamond Jim's and the strip club Isabella Queen, both located between Janesville and Beloit. They are the first of Wisconsin's 80 strip clubs to provide voter registration services. "I'm actually fighting for my survival," said owner Jim Halbach.
ACE members in Ohio have registered about 2,000 people in just a few weeks, said chapter president Luke Liakos.

In North Carolina, ACE chapter president David Baucom said he plans to distribute registration forms in his 16 clubs to encourage voting but won't be putting down the president -- his business hasn't had any problems since Bush took office. "We just want people to vote," Baucom said.

The Plan

U.S., Britain Present New Iraq Resolution
New Plan Would Transfer 'Governing Authority' in Iraq to Interim Government by End of June

The Associated Press
Monday, May 24, 2004; 11:15 AM

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States and Britain presented a new U.N. resolution Monday that would transfer "governing authority" in Iraq to a sovereign interim government by June 30 and authorize a multinational force to maintain peace with Iraqi consent.

The draft resolution was an attempt by the Bush administration to win international backing for its post-occupation plans in Iraq, which have been severely shaken by violence in the country.

With his approval ratings sinking after repeated setbacks in Iraq, President Bush is also seeking to rebuild support at home. He is to deliver a nationally televised speech Monday night aimed at convincing U.S. voters he has a political and security blueprint that can stabilize Iraq.

The resolution was introduced Monday at a closed-door meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Council ambassadors heading into the meeting, who had received advanced copies of the draft, reacted positively.

Though the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq officially ends June 30, the United States is maintaining more than 130,000 troops in the country -- raising concerns among some European nations that Iraqis will not feel U.S. occupation is over.

The U.S.-British draft would give the new Iraqi government the right to review the mandate of the U.S.-led multinational force, U.N. officials said Monday.

It would also give the interim government control over oil and gas resources and a fund now in the hands of the United States and Britain where oil revenue has been deposited.

Debate leading up to the proposal has centered over the amount of power Iraq's caretaker government will have and the degree of influence the government will have over the armed forces.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq, said Monday he was briefed on the resolution's outlines by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"I think here there really is broad agreement," Fischer said. "A consensus is produceable, possible and desirable."

The Bush administration has sought mostly unsuccessfully for months to persuade other countries to send peacekeepers to beef up the multinational component of forces in Iraq -- and it was unclear if the new resolution, if approved, would convince any other countries to join in.

At the same time, U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is trying to decide the makeup of the interim Iraqi government due to take power on June 30.

Brahimi will likely announce by the end of this week the names of a president and prime minister, as well as two vice presidents and Cabinet ministers, Iraqi Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi told the Kuwait News Agency Monday.

Methinks we'll hear the roll-out of this in W's speach this evening. This is the first wire service story, I'll be waiting for and looking for some deeper reporting this afternoon.

UPDATE: Reuters advances the story:

The definition of sovereignty is a contentious issue, with the Bush administration attempting to assure U.N. Security Council members they would not be asked to approve an occupation under another name.

British ambassador Emyr Jones Parry told reporters the resolution "underlines clearly that all sovereignty will be returned to the Iraqis, that the interim Iraqi government will assume total responsibility for its own sovereignty."

But the text is bound to run into criticism by France, Germany, Russia and others. It does not give a definite timetable for deployment of the U.S.-led force and instead calls for a review after a year, which a new Iraqi government can request earlier.

A review, however, would be similar to an open-ended mandate and would not mean the force would leave unless the Security Council, where the United States has veto power, decides it should do so.

The resolution, contrary to expectations, does not give an "opt out" clause that would allow Iraqi troops to refuse a command from the American military. Instead it calls for arrangements "to ensure coordination between the two."

In other words, this is lipstick on the pig.

The NPD Bubble

The Other Long Occupation: Bush in a Bubble
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

All presidents live in a bubble, but Democrats, European officials and a group of moderate Republicans say that Mr. Bush lives in a bigger bubble than most. As the problems of the occupation and insurgency in Iraq have intensified, they say, Mr. Bush has appeared to retreat more than ever into his tight circle of aides.

"He needs to break out of that cocoon a little bit, and to listen to more advice than he gets from his vice president and his war cabinet," said Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, a frequent critic of the president. "This administration has seen Congress as an enemy and a constitutional nuisance. The world right now is in trouble, and we need to have a Congress and a president and an executive branch that's working together."

Over the next five weeks, Mr. Bush will take a few steps out of the bubble in a series of speeches, starting on Monday night at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., that will outline his strategy for transferring power to the Iraqis by a June 30 deadline. But in a classic White House public relations offensive, Mr. Bush will in essence be informing the globe of his prelaid plans.

"The president talked about being humble when he was running for office," Mr. Chafee said, "but the opposite seems to be true."

This past weekend, Mr. Bush seemed more inside his bubble than usual. After a commencement speech on Friday in the largely Bush-friendly territory of Louisiana State University, the president ended up at his Texas ranch.

He spent part of Saturday afternoon falling off his mountain bike and sustaining minor injuries on a 17-mile ride, and he skipped the graduation of his twin daughter Jenna from the University of Texas, where university officials had predicted protests if Mr. Bush turned up. Later in the day, Mr. Bush went to a private family dinner in Austin, at a restaurant called Moonshine, to celebrate Jenna's graduation.

The president repeated the pattern in New Haven on Sunday, when he attended a family dinner celebrating the graduation of the other twin, Barbara, from Yale. But once again, he planned to skip the actual commencement, on Monday. Yale officials, too, had predicted that there would be large protests if the president appeared.

The larger question is this: Inside the bubble, what is Mr. Bush's level of concern about the turmoil in Iraq? Does he think that the sunny predictions of Vice President Dick Cheney and the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, were all wrong? Does he blame them, or himself?

In public, a president who is determined not to be Jimmy Carter is relentlessly upbeat. In private, he is described by some people who have seen him recently as grim and subdued.

"I think the president is concerned in the sense that he appreciates some very difficult decisions are going to have to be made," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In an interview, Mr. Lugar said that in a recent meeting the president had been receptive to his ideas, along with those of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "We were not shy, and it was about a 45- or 50-minute period," Mr. Lugar said.

Nonetheless, the even-keeled Mr. Lugar sent a warning to Mr. Bush on Saturday, when Mr. Lugar questioned the administration's war against terrorism in a commencement speech at Tufts University.

"Military action is necessary to defeat serious and immediate threats to our national security," Mr. Lugar said. "But the war on terrorism will not be won through attrition, particularly since military action will often breed more terrorists and more resentment of the United States."

In the interview, when asked if Mr. Bush was properly handling the troubles in Iraq, Mr. Lugar replied, "I don't know."

This is classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder behavior. When things go wrong as a result of arrogance and overreach, rather than seeking greater consultation, the NPD pulls away and isolates, claps hands over the ears and sings "La-la-la, I can't hear you."

In another classic NPD move, W will be speaking tonight from the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In January, a visiting scholar at the College released a damning report on the War on Terra. W is just begging the media to revisit it. NPDs love to pick at the scabs of their mistakes rather than learn from them and let them heal.

UPDATE: From a loyal reader who has dealt with NPD within the family, here are some additional characteristics to look for:

1. The same repeated statements (yes, I know this will come as no surprise, but the reason we’re not all in agreement is because we just haven’t been listening. Really screwy logic, but there you have it). Concepts of nuance and shame are completely foreign, which only leaves beating around the head, increasing the volume (which is what repeating the statements in essence is), or retreating into silence. Bush is not sneering as he says “I can’t hear you”. He genuinely can’t hear the rest of us. I used to think it was because the opposing arguments weren’t persuasive enough, but I think it’s much more ingrained than that.

4. The tipping point for Bush personally hasn’t come yet. In his own mind he still believes he’ll be a 2-term president (as an aside, part of me wonders what he knows that we don’t yet – maybe the voting systems, maybe something else). When he realizes he needs to actually fight, then look out. The fireworks will really begin.

Coalition of the Billing

The Other U.S. Military
The private contractor biz is hot, vast, and largely unregulated. Is it out of control?

Almost since the first American tank rolled into Iraq last year, the role of private military contractors has been controversial. When Kellogg Brown & Root Inc. (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. (HAC ), billed the government hundreds of millions of dollars to support the invasion, critics griped that it was receiving preferential treatment because of ties to the Bush Administration -- and was overcharging to boot. When the bodies of four security guards employed by Blackwater USA were mutilated in Fallujah in March while escorting food deliveries to U.S. troops, Marines laid siege to the city, igniting widespread violence. And when a classified U.S. military report came to light in late April alleging abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, private military contractors (PMCS) found themselves in the center of a firestorm.

The end of the Cold War and Pentagon efforts to increase efficiency, speed the delivery of services, and free troops for purely military missions have triggered a boom in the outsourcing of work to private contractors. Indeed, with the strength of America's armed forces down 29%, to 1.5 million, since 1991, contractors have become a permanent part of the military machine, doing everything from providing food services to guarding Iraq Administrator L. Paul Bremer.

Now, along with the heady growth, come mounting concerns that an industry dependent on taxpayer dollars has been spiraling out of control. That has Congress, the Defense Dept., and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq scrambling to draft regulations that make contractors -- both on the security and services/reconstruction side of the industry -- more accountable.

Like many businesses that have to staff up rapidly, some security contractors have cut corners in the rush to expand. On the ground in Iraq, contractors appear to have operated with little or no supervision. Mercenaries are not choirboys, but some outfits have signed up hired guns trained by repressive regimes. And revelations that civilians are performing sensitive tasks such as interrogation have jolted Congress and the public. "This outsourcing thing has gone crazy," says Gary D. Solis, a former Marine Corps judge advocate and now adjunct law professor at Georgetown University. "You have a lot of people with heavy weaponry answerable to no one."
....
Yet in the wake of Abu Ghraib, critics, including current and former military officials, are starting to ask some hard questions: Has the military pushed outsourcing too far too fast? Where do you draw the line? And who's in charge? A June, 2003, report by the General Accounting Office concluded that there are no Defense Dept.-wide policies "on the use of contractors to support deployed forces," a situation that sows confusion.

Few analysts see a fundamental problem with contractors building base camps, serving food, and cleaning toilets -- the logistical side of making war. The growing concern is about using contractors to perform functions such as security and interrogation. A report by Major General Antonio M. Taguba concluded that two interrogators-for-hire, one from CACI and one from Titan Corp. (TTN ), in conjunction with military officers, "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." Titan says the individual worked for a subcontractor.

"Why the hell were contractors there in the first place?" asks John D. Hutson, a former Rear Admiral and Navy judge advocate general who is now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. "I have a problem with people carrying weapons in an offensive way. And I have a serious problem with people in sensitive positions, like interrogators."

Blindsided by the Abu Ghraib scandal and allegations that PMCs have hired questionable employees, Congress is putting the Pentagon on notice to get a grip on mercenaries and even more benign contractors. House and Senate bills would require Defense to provide Congress with a plan for collecting data on contractors and clarifying the responsibilities of commanders who manage them. This Wild West of a business is not going to go away, but it could get a lot tamer fast.

By Spencer E. Ante in New York, with Stan Crock in Washington

Heart of Darkness

Did Somebody Say War?
By BOB HERBERT

There is a terrible sense of dread filtering across America at the moment and it's not simply because of the continuing fear of terrorism and the fact that the nation is at war. It's more frightening than that. It grows out of the suspicion that we all may be passengers in a vehicle that has made a radically wrong turn and is barreling along a dark road, with its headlights off and with someone behind the wheel who may not know how to drive.

Our Darkest Days Are Here

the history of the world, several great civilizations that seemed immortal have deteriorated and died. I don't want to seem dramatic tonight, but I've lived a long while, and for the first time in my life, I have this faint, faraway fear that it could happen to us here in America as it happened to the Greek and Roman civilizations.

Too many Americans don't understand what we have here, or how to keep it. I worry for my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. I want them to have what I've had, and I sense it slipping away.

Gen. Zinni: 'They've Screwed Up'

Now, in a new book about his career, co-written with Tom Clancy, called "Battle Ready," [Retired General Anthony] Zinni has handed up a scathing indictment of the Pentagon and its conduct of the war in Iraq.

Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time - with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: “This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don’t feel it needs to be done now.”

War without Plans

Bill Clinton attacks Bush over Iraq
By Tom Murphy and Angus MacSwan

23 May 2004

Bill Clinton said yesterday that the UN, not America, should be taking Iraq towards democracy, and that George Bush erred in forcing out UN weapons inspectors and going to war without UN support.

"There are so many people who suspect our motives," the former US president said in an address in Brazil. "I don't think Iraq was about oil and imperialism but it was about unilateralism over co-operation as a way to shape the world in the 21st century."

Mr Clinton said the best way to take Iraq to a democracy was multilaterally, with the UN in a leading role. He said the Bush administration should have given UN inspectors a final chance to look for the weapons which it had accused the Iraqi leader of hoarding.

Any military intervention, he said, should have involved a multinational force rather than the present "coalition of the willing".

His world view was one of the US supporting "the World Criminal Court, the comprehensive test ban treaty, the Kyoto [Protocol] and other international efforts". It included "promoting health, education and democracy as part of an anti-terrorism strategy". He added that those international organisations need to be strengthened.

Mr Clinton was speaking to 1,000 or so Brazilian business and political leaders at the inauguration of an institute set up by the former Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso.

"Democracy cannot be imposed - the Iraqis have to want it," he said. He backed the Bush decision to go to war in Afghanistan to "root out" al-Qa'ida, but "we have to make more partners and fewer terrorists". Co-operation and ensuring democracy benefited the world's poor would help combat terrorism.

A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart

By Robert G. Kaiser

Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page B01

Americans are hopeless romantics -- we're always looking for the triumph of the good guys and happiness ever after. But any happy endings in Iraq remain so remote that they are invisible from here. Today no one seems able to come up with a realistic definition of what "success" might be. Instead the Bush administration has entrusted the future of the entire enterprise to an Algerian diplomat named Lakhdar Brahimi, whom we expect to assemble an Iraqi government in the next week or two -- an Algerian magic trick.

Many in the new chorus of doubters have enumerated the ways in which the success promised by the Bush administration both before and after the war has eluded us.

We have not made a "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror," the words President Bush used when he declared victory in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" on May 1, 2003. Instead we have stimulated new hatred of the United States in precisely the regions from which future terrorist threats are most likely to arise, while alienating our traditional allies. By embracing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, we abandoned the "honest broker" role that U.S. governments tried to play for four decades in the Middle East, and we confirmed the conspiratorial suspicions of every anti-American Arab. Our credibility has been battered.

We set out to put fear into the hearts of our enemies by demonstrating the efficacy of a new doctrine of preemptive war. Instead, we have shown the timeless nature of hubris. Last week we announced the transfer of 3,600 troops of the overstrained U.S. Army away from the border of what might be the world's most dangerous country, North Korea. They will be sent to help with the war in Iraq, for which we now acknowledge we had inadequate resources.

Contrary to the Bush administration's stated and implied promises -- "we will be greeted as liberators" was the vice president's famous version -- we did not achieve a relatively low-cost triumph in Iraq. Instead we have a crisis of still-growing dimensions. Our occupation policy has changed as often as the color of Madonna's hair. Ominously, as became clear with last week's assassination of Iraqi Governing Council president Izzedin Salim, we cannot even protect the Iraqis who have agreed to work with us.

The war has damaged the good name of the United States in every corner of the globe, has cost unanticipated scores of billions (all of it borrowed) and now threatens long-term damage to our Army and National Guard. War has already disfigured the 3,500 American families whose sons and daughters have been killed or seriously wounded in Iraq, and countless Iraqi families as well.

The United States gets itself into this kind of trouble when it turns away from that most fundamental of American values, pragmatism. The Bush administration's initial reaction to the first attacks on U.S. soil since the War of 1812 was highly pragmatic. It identified the source of the attack and went after it forcefully, with the country's and the world's enthusiastic support.

But even before the war in Afghanistan was won, pragmatism yielded to ideology, and Bush asked the Pentagon to prepare for "preemptive" war against Iraq. There was no traditional casus belli, no classical justification for war.

The war in Iraq was justified with two arguments that now appear dubious at best. The first was the idea that Iraq was an appropriate and important target in the new war against terror, when the United States had no evidence tying Saddam Hussein to any recent terrorism apart from the rewards he paid to the families of suicide bombers in Israel and other Palestinian "martyrs." The second was that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States, its allies and the entire Middle East region, but of course, those weapons have never been found.

It will take years to sort out all that went wrong in Iraq, but in a general way, an explanation is already available. The Bush administration was on notice months before 9/11 about the risks and requirements of deploying our forces for military action abroad, and it defied the warnings. They were contained in a most pragmatic memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to President Bush. Rumsfeld wrote the memo in March 2001, at the very beginning of the new administration. Bob Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush At War," quotes briefly from it. The entire document, which Woodward provided, is haunting reading. Excerpts:

• "In fashioning a clear statement of the underpinning for the action, avoid arguments of convenience. They can be useful at the outset to gain support, but they will be deadly later."

• "There should be clear, well-considered and well-understood goals as to the purpose of the engagement and what would constitute success . . ."

• "The military capabilities needed to achieve the agreed goals must be available . . . "

• "Before committing to an engagement, consider the implications of the decision for the U.S. in other parts of the world . . . . Think through the precedent that a proposed action, or inaction, would establish."

• "Finally -- honesty: U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners. Do not make the effort sound even marginally easier or less costly than it could become. Preserving U.S. credibility requires that we promise less, or no more, than we are sure we can deliver. It is a great deal easier to get into something than to get out of it!"

In other words, Rumsfeld laid out the standards for a serious, pragmatic strategy. The only obviously missing element in his memo was a recognition that military actions inevitably have political components that also require careful planning and shrewd execution.

But when it came time to wage war against Iraq, Rumsfeld ignored his own guidelines. He developed no real strategy for what to do after ousting Saddam Hussein. As James Fallows has reported in the Atlantic Monthly, Rumsfeld actually banned Defense Department officials from participating in CIA- and State Department-led meetings on postwar Iraq. When those meetings produced extensive recommendations, which included warnings about nearly every pitfall we have since fallen into, the Pentagon simply ignored them. We went to war with no political plan for ending it.

Post-modern Presidency

President Plans Drive To Rescue Iraq Policy
Speeches, U.N. Action Will Focus on Future

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01

President Bush will launch an ambitious campaign tomorrow night to shift attention from recent setbacks that have eroded domestic and international support for U.S. policy in Iraq, particularly the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the escalating violence, and focus instead on the future of post-occupation Iraq.

The president will open a tightly orchestrated public relations effort in a speech at the Army War College outlining U.S. plans for the critical five weeks before the limited transfer of political power June 30. The White House then intends to circulate this week a draft U.N. resolution on post-occupation Iraq, wrap up negotiations with Iraqis on an interim government and begin shoring up the coalition to ensure that other foreign forces also stay after June 30, U.S. officials said.

"There's a sense that this week is our chance to create some movement in a different direction. We'll start talking about the future, not the past, by focusing on the U.N. resolution and [U.N. envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi's transition process. Sure there'll still be plenty of arguments, but it will be about the future, and that's a healthy change," said a senior State Department official who would speak only on condition of anonymity.

The diplomatic campaign is a response to serious reversals over the past two months and to growing turmoil. Last week alone, the U.S.-appointed president of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated and a cabinet official was almost killed in a suicide bombing; in a disputed episode, more than 40 people were killed by U.S. troops at what Iraqis said was a wedding party; and 16 arrest warrants were issued for aides or associates of Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime Pentagon favorite to help lead postwar Iraq, on charges related to financial issues, leading him to sever ties with the U.S.-led coalition.

The road ahead could get bumpier. France and Germany are urging that any new U.N. resolution stipulate a cutoff date for U.S. and foreign forces in Iraq. And negotiations by the U.N. and U.S. envoys in charge of identifying a new president, prime minister, two vice presidents and more than two dozen cabinet ministers have been complicated by a Kurdish threat not to participate unless a Kurd gets one of the two top positions.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) criticized Bush's plans for Iraq's future as imprecise. "I am very hopeful that the president and his administration will articulate precisely what is going to happen as much as they can, day by day, as opposed to a generalization," the Associated Press quoted Lugar as saying yesterday at Tufts University.

In the first of at least six presidential speeches on Iraq before June 30, Bush will particularly try to counter growing criticism that Washington has lowered the goal posts for its year-long occupation, U.S. officials said. Critics and Iraq experts have charged that the administration has backed down from its original pledge to create a strong new democracy that would be a catalyst for a broad political transformation in the Middle East and is instead settling on an exit strategy that will leave a fragile government unable to protect itself.

"He will talk about the importance of not lowering our sights and sticking to our goals of a free, peaceful, democratic Iraq, of adhering to our commitment to the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, and of an election in a January time frame," said a White House official who insisted on anonymity.

Bush will also explain the U.S. security and political roles after June 30 until Iraq winds up the second of the three phases -- with the first democratic elections next January -- in the transition to a permanent government by the end of 2005, U.S. officials said. "He'll talk about the importance of Iraqis taking more and more responsibility for security in their own country and about our efforts to train up a professional army and security force," said the White House official.

He's not actually going to come up with a better policy, he's going to shift attention. It's all about surfaces and appearances

Eyes Only

via Suburban Guerrilla, who is truly on fire today:

Rumsfeld bans camera phones
From correspondents in London
May 23, 2004

MOBILE phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

Disturbing new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse, which the US government had reportedly tried to keep hidden, were published on Friday in the Washington Post newspaper.

The photos emerged along with details of testimony from inmates at Abu Ghraib who said they were sexually molested by female soldiers, beaten, sodomised and forced to eat food from toilets.

Rattus Norwegicus

GOP Senator Rips Bush on Iraq, Terrorism

Sat May 22,10:22 PM ET

By MARK PRATT, Associated Press Writer

MEDFORD, Mass. - Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar on Saturday said the United States isn't doing enough to stave off terrorism and criticized President Bush (news - web sites) for failing to offer solid plans for Iraq (news - web sites)'s future.

Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the nation must prevent terrorism from taking root around the world by "repairing and building alliances," increasing trade, supporting democracy, addressing regional conflicts and controlling weapons of mass destruction.

Unless the country commits itself to such measures, "we are likely to experience acts of catastrophic terrorism that would undermine our economy, damage our society and kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people," the Indiana senator said during an appearance at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Lugar said military might alone isn't enough to eradicate terrorism.

"To win the war against terrorism, the United States must assign U.S. economic and diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority that we assign to military capabilities," he said.

He later added, "Military action is necessary to defeat serious and immediate threats to our national security. But the war on terrorism will not be won through attrition — particularly since military action will often breed more terrorists and more resentment of the United States."

Lugar, who was awarded the Dean's Medal for distinguished service in international affairs, said it's still unclear how much control the Iraqi people will have over their nation's security when power is transferred to them June 30.

"I am very hopeful that the president and his administration will articulate precisely what is going to happen as much as they can, day by day, as opposed to a generalization," he said.

It's not the first time that Lugar has criticized Bush, a fellow Republican. In 2003, Lugar and Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top Democrat, warned that the Bush administration had not given enough consideration to what would happen in Iraq after the fighting ended.

Also Saturday, Lugar blamed the Bush and Clinton administrations for not adequately funding the foreign affairs budget, noting that the military's budget is more than 13 times what the nation spends for diplomacy.

The rats are abandoning the ship. This has implications for November.

Out of the Night

via whistlingfish:

US probes deaths of 37 Afghan and Iraqi detainees

Paul Harris in New York
Sunday May 23, 2004
The Observer

American investigators are investigating the deaths of 37 detainees held in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, it emerged yesterday.

The Pentagon said the list of deaths included at least eight unsolved murders, which may have involved assaults that took place during interrogation.

A total of 33 separate cases are being investigated, some of which involve more than one death. Thirty two deaths occurred in Iraq and five in Afghanistan. One of the most high profile cases is the death of Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, an Iraqi air defence chief who died after being wrapped up in a sleeping bag during interrogation. At the time the Pentagon said Mowhoush died of natural causes, but a recently released autopsy showed he died of 'asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression'.

Mowhoush's family in Iraq has repeatedly told reporters that Mowhoush died from torture. Two weeks ago, Mowhoush's son Issam said his father's body was dumped at a hospital, badly bruised and burned. Mowhoush had surrendered to US custody after the arrest of four of his sons.

Other cases include Manadel al-Jamadi, who died at Abu Ghraib of 'blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration', according to his autopsy report. One example from Afghanistan - a 22-year-old man known only as Dilawar - died from 'blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary heart disease.'.

The fallout from the prisoner abuse scandal has had a huge impact on American public opinion about the conduct of the conflict in Iraq. Although President George Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry are still neck and neck in the polls, Bush's approval ratings have slumped since the scandal emerged. It is unlikely to go away either as the maze of investigations and probes continues.

Yesterday it also emerged that some captives in Iraq were abused for fun or as punishment and not just as part of an interrogation process. The development widens the scandal out from just looking at methods employed to extract information and instead paints a picture of everyday brutality.

A series of classified sworn statements from military police involved in the scandal obtained by the Washington Post newspaper revealed several incidents of abuse and humiliation that had nothing to do with interrogation.

They included three men being stripped and handcuffed together after being accused of raping another inmate. Seven other detainees were stripped and built into a 'human pyramid' after being suspected of instigating a riot. A picture of that pyramid has become one of the main images to emerge from the scandal.

Most chillingly another highly publicised image from the scandal, showing a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to him, was also apparently carried out for fun. In the statements obtained by the Post, Sabrina Harman is asked why the man has been treated in this way. 'Just playing with him,' was Harman's response.

The statements also show, however, that military intelligence did demand that prisoners also be tortured as part of a process of 'softening up' detainees ahead of interrogation. A statement from military policeman Jamal Davis alleged that intelligence officers ordered him and other soldiers to 'loosen this guy up for us' and 'make sure he gets the treatment'.

Prison Visits By General Reported In Hearing
Alleged Presence of Sanchez Cited by Lawyer

By Scott Higham, Joe Stephens and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01

A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

Shuck also said a sergeant at the prison, First Sgt. Brian G. Lipinski, was prepared to testify that intelligence officers told him the abuse of detainees on the cellblock was "the right thing to do." Earlier this month, Lipinski declined to comment on the case.

So far, clear evidence has not emerged that high-level officers condoned or promoted the abusive practices. Officers at the prison have blamed the abuse on a few rogue, low-level military police officers from the 372nd, a company of U.S. Army Reservists based in Cresaptown, Md. The general in charge of the prisons in Iraq at the time has said that military intelligence officers took control of Abu Ghraib and gave the MPs "ideas."

A Defense Department spokesman yesterday referred questions about Sanchez to U.S. military officials in the Middle East, warning that statements by defense lawyers or their clients should be treated with "appropriate caution." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the senior military spokesman in Iraq, said Sanchez was unavailable for comment last night but would "enjoy the opportunity" to respond later.

At the April hearing, Shuck also said Reese would testify that Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, who supervised the military intelligence operation at Abu Ghraib, was "involved in intensive interrogations of detainees, condoned some of the activities and stressed that that was standard procedure." The hearing was held at Camp Victory in Baghdad. The Post obtained a copy of the audiotape this past week, and it was transcribed yesterday.

The Sunday chat shows ought to be a laff riot today.

Progressive Christianity on the Move

Activists Urge Bush, Kerry To Focus on Poor in U.S.
'Call to Unity' Conference Begins Tomorrow in D.C.

By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 22, 2004; Page B09

Faith-based activists who believe that ideas for eliminating poverty should be getting more attention in this year's presidential campaign will hold a three-day conference in Washington starting tomorrow.

Between 300 and 400 clergy and lay people from across the country are expected to attend "Pentecost 2004, A Call to Unity: Making Poverty a Religious and Electoral Issue," according to Call to Renewal, the conference's sponsor.

"The poor are kind of missing in action in this campaign so far," said the Rev. Jim Wallis, who heads Call to Renewal, a national network of churches and faith-based groups concerned about poverty. "The Republicans are taking care of their more wealthy constituents. The Democrats want to be the champion of the middle class, and so nobody prioritizes the needs of poor families."

In an invitation to conference participants, who will gather at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Northwest, Wallis wrote that poverty is as much a religious issue as gay marriage and abortion.

"One of every six children still poor in wealthy America is a religious issue," he wrote. "The number of poor families now rising the last two years is a religious issue. One billion people living on less than $1 per day around the world is a religious issue."

President Bush declined an invitation to address the activists but asked Alphonso Jackson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to come in his stead, according to Helena R. Henderson, spokeswoman for Call to Renewal. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) will address attendees on behalf of Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Journalist and author Bill Moyers will give the keynote speech at a luncheon Monday. Later that day, the Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., pastor of Riverside Church in New York, will give the sermon at an 8 p.m. worship service at Washington National Cathedral. Episcopal Bishop of Washington John Bryson Chane and Wallis will officiate.

The conference also will include workshops on how to nurture youth leadership and challenge political candidates to offer concrete, poverty-fighting strategies. Registration for the event, which is open to the general public, costs $55 for one day and $140 for the entire conference.

Wallis said there is a growing interest in combating poverty among religious groups. This year, in a national poll of 1,000 people of diverse faith backgrounds, 78 percent said they would rather hear a presidential candidate's plan for fighting poverty than his position on gay marriage. The poll was commissioned by the Alliance to End Hunger and Call to Renewal and was conducted by Tom Freedman, Bill Knapp and Jim McLaughlin. McLaughlin is a Republican pollster, and Freedman is a leading Democratic consultant.

"Hunger and poverty are on the rise in our country, and this poll confirms that voters want to hear more from political leaders about real solutions to these serious problems," said the Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World and a member of the Alliance to End Hunger.

Another sign of concern that social justice issues are being overlooked was the full-page ad Monday in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. The ad, placed by the Quixote Center of Brentwood, an organization of liberal Catholics, listed 15 areas deserving more attention from political candidates, including health care, civil liberties, the environment, poverty and peace in the Middle East. It carried 1,300 signatures, including the signatures of people representing 36 Catholic organizations.

This is for those of you who complain that religious progressives aren't "doing enough." Of course, this story is buried on the WaPo "religion" page on Saturday, the lowest circulation day of the week for every daily. That's all our fault, I suppose.
Fallwell and company can get A01 treatment, but we can't.

Communion Watch

Via reader Patann, Fr. Andrew Greeley on the Bishop Sheridan flap:

I don't know whom the Catholics in Colorado Springs are supposed to vote for. The Republican platform in the last presidential election also supported abortion in some circumstances. However, it would be interesting to know how many votes will be affected by the bishop's ''excommunication.'' Catholics in the United States have a long history of rejecting clerical intervention in politics.

Nonetheless, the fringe of the hierarchy has been misbehaving. The bishop of Camden informs the governor of New Jersey that, should he show up at the bishop's installation, the bishop will deny him the eucharist. Only problem is that there had been no indication the governor would show up. The bishop of Brooklyn tells state legislators that same-sex marriage would be like marrying an animal pet. The archbishop of the military sacks without due process the Rev. Tom Doyle, who was one of the first to warn of the pedophile problem. The archbishop of Boston engages in a Holy Thursday diatribe about baby boomers, instead of offering to wash their feet.

Where did these guys come from? Never in my wildest moments could I come up with these high jinks for one of my stories. They're not typical, I hasten to add, but they're out there just the same, making the church look terrible.

More seriously, the stylus curiae -- which means the style of the curia but also in a classic pun means the dagger of the curia -- tried to do in the National Review Board, which is supposed to verify the hierarchy's compliance with the protocols for the protection of children. Cardinals Egan and Rigali -- who spent most of their priestly lives in the curia -- stuck the dagger into the board by preventing its second-year review of compliance. The review wasn't exactly canceled; it was ''delayed'' long enough so it wouldn't be done -- a characteristic curial trick. Moreover, the death blow was delivered before the board even knew it was under attack. It was a slick job, not untypical of the curia. The two cardinals proved themselves successful conspirators, apparently unconcerned that their plot would re-create all the doubts about how serious the hierarchy is about protecting children.

Why do it? To reassert their authority. Apparently, like the high- jinks hierarchs, they think the way to recapture their credibility in the wake of the sex abuse scandal is to act like tough, nasty authoritarians. Instead of humility and openness and transparency (of which ex-curialists are incapable), they pretend that they are renaissance princes.

Fed up with the endless hassle -- and the mean, nasty letters they routinely receive from the fringe -- four of the members of the National Review Board are resigning in July. If the compliance review is not somehow salvaged, others will probably quit, too. The curialists will be delighted. Then they can appoint a new board that will do their bidding, like good Catholic laity should. Credibility? Who needs credibility when you have a red hat!

Such an outcome would be intolerable. I have seen evidence that abusive priests are still in rectories. Many bishops have done their best -- most, perhaps -- but others have not. If the review board mechanism fails, there will be no guarantee that children will be safe in Catholic environments. The last two years' efforts at credibility will have been wasted. I demand that those who have resigned -- Anne Burke, Robert Bennett, Leon Panetta and William Burleigh -- withdraw their resignations and take on the red hats in public. The issue -- responsible Catholic leadership -- is too important to be sidetracked by ingenious little plots cooked up, if not exactly in the Vatican Gardens, in some similar place in the United States.

"Vatican Gardens?" I guess that would be the 3200 block of 4th St., NE in Washington, DC. The sign in front reads "United States Conference of Catholic Bishops."

War Crimes

Punishment and Amusement
Documents Indicate 3 Photos Were Not Staged for Interrogation

By Scott Higham and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 22, 2004; Page A01

Prisoners posed in three of the most infamous photographs of abuse to come out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not being softened up for interrogation by intelligence officers but instead were being punished for criminal acts or the amusement of their jailers, according to previously secret documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Several of the photographs taken by military police on the cellblock have become iconic, among them the naked human pyramid, the hooded man standing on a box hooked up to wires, and the three naked prisoners handcuffed together on the prison floor. The documents show that MPs staged the photographs as a form of entertainment or to discipline the prisoners for acts ranging from rioting to an alleged rape of a teenage boy in the prison.

The documents include statements by four of the seven MPs now charged in the abuse scandal: Spec. Sabrina Harman, Spec. Jeremy Sivits, Sgt. Javal S. Davis and Pfc. Lynndie England. Their statements provide new insights into the unfolding case.

For instance, they contain tantalizing hints about the role of military intelligence officers who operated in the shadows of Tier 1A at the prison. One military police officer said in a sworn statement that civilian and military intelligence officers frequently visited Tier 1A at night, spiriting detainees away for questioning out of sight of the MPs inside a "wood hut" behind the prison building. The documents also offer the first detailed account of how the abuse scandal unraveled.

Spec. Joseph M. Darby told investigators that he returned to Abu Ghraib from leave in November and heard about a shooting at the prison's "hard site," which contains Tier 1A. He said that he asked the MP in charge of the tier's night shift, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., if he had any photographs of the cell where the shooting took place.

Darby said Graner handed him two CDs of photographs.

"I thought the discs just had pictures of Iraq, the cell where the shooting occurred," Darby told investigators.

Instead, Darby viewed hundreds of photographs showing naked detainees being abused by U.S. soldiers.

"It was just wrong," Darby said. "I knew I had to do something."

He said that he asked Graner, a Pennsylvania prison guard in civilian life, about the photographs. Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.' "

In the newly obtained documents, the MPs who gave statements describe Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II as the leaders and organizers of the abuse. Frederick was the enlisted man in charge of Tier 1A and worked as a prison guard in Virginia.

Graner, Frederick and Spec. Megan Ambuhl requested lawyers and declined to provide investigators with sworn statements.

Attorneys for several of the charged MPs said their clients were acting at the behest of military intelligence officers at the prison to soften up the detainees for interrogation sessions.

"They were following orders," said Danielle Guebert, an attorney for England. "The orders came from military intelligence."

We are still in tip of the iceberg territory. I heard a report on NPR's Marketplace last night that credible charges of sodomy have been lodged against some of the civilian contractors. That program is late in providing transcripts so I'm looking elsewhere for webconfirmation.

Juan Cole

A Shiite International?

There was more heavy fighting in Karbala early on Friday, after which the city fell eerily quiet. By Friday night into early Saturday morning, Mahdi Army militiamen had mysteriously ceased fighting, and the US had withdrawn from sites like Mukhayyam mosque near the shrine of Imam Husain. Meanwhile, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on his followers to continue to fight even if he is killed.

I have commented on the demonstration, 5000-strong, in Manama, Bahrain, below. It produced a political casualty. The king fired the Interior Minister and declared his opposition to what the Americans are doing in Karbala and Najaf, as well as what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. ' "We share the anger of our people over the oppression and aggression taking place in Palestine and in the holy shrines (in Iraq). People had a right to peaceful protests. We are investigating," the agency quoted the king as saying. ' This is a formal, non-NATO American ally speaking! Bush is even pushing his closest friends into dissociating themselves from him, at least rhetorically.
....
I said the other day I thought Bush was pushing Europe to the left with his policies. I think he is at the same time pushing the Shiite world to the radical Right, and I fear my grandchildren will still be reaping the whirlwind that George W. Bush is sowing in the city of Imam Husain. I concluded in early April that Bush had lost Iraq. He has by now lost the entire Muslim world.

Learning from Mistakes

What Giuliani Missed

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A25

For perhaps 72 hours after 8:45 a.m. Sept. 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani played the role of acting president of the United States.

Of course, the man who was then the mayor of New York had no formal national authority. But from the moment the terrorists attacked, Giuliani was the face of national resolve, the angry but calm voice reassuring Americans -- in Rocky Mountain hamlets no less than on the streets of the Rockaways -- that their country was brave, that it would survive, that it would eventually triumph.

Rudy, as all of us came to know him, lived up to a responsibility that fell to him by default. While the mayor rallied the firefighters and the cops and the rescue workers, President Bush found himself far from the action. He was visiting a school in Florida when the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As The Post put it at the time, he then "boarded Air Force One and, escorted by fighter jets, hopscotched to military installations in Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington." Bush's speech to the nation that night was flat. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, noted in his largely laudatory book "The Right Man" that the president "had given not one indication all day long of readiness for his terrible new responsibilities."
....
If, indeed, some firefighters died inside the World Trade Center because they did not hear an evacuation order, Giuliani does not have to deny the fact, as he did in his testimony. Let's assume Giuliani really does believe they stood their ground in order to rescue civilians. The commission has no choice but to deal with all the evidence that points instead to those communication and coordination problems.

And evidence is what should matter to this commission. It simply can't allow those with an interest in having the Sept. 11 story told a certain way to get in the way of telling us the real story. That means especially telling the story of what went wrong. That's the only way we'll learn how to do things right.

Rudy, listen to Bob Kerrey. You have nothing to fear from an honest account. As you acknowledged yourself, "some terrible mistakes were made," which were, as you also said, inevitable in these excruciating circumstances. Americans came to admire you because they saw you as a tough truth-teller. Don't let worries about your image now tarnish the image you've already earned.

Warning or CYA

FBI warns of possible suicide attacks

From Kelli Arena
CNN Washington Bureau
Thursday, May 20, 2004 Posted: 10:43 PM EDT (0243 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI is warning state and local partners to be on the alert for suicide bombers.

Officials say suicide bombers are often impossible to detect. There is usually no advance intelligence and so-called soft targets such as shopping malls are nearly impossible to protect from such an attack.

What the hell are we supposed to do with this?

Namecalling

'Gooks' to 'Hajis'
By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 21, 2004

The hapless Jeremy Sivits got the headlines yesterday. A mechanic whose job was to service gasoline-powered generators, Specialist Sivits was sentenced to a year in prison and thrown out of the Army for accepting an invitation to take part in the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

But there's another soldier in serious trouble to whom we should be paying even closer attention. His case doesn't just call into question the treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces. It calls into question this entire abominable war.

Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is a 28-year-old member of the Florida National Guard who served six harrowing months in Iraq, went home to Miami on a furlough last October, and then refused to return to his unit when the furlough ended.

Sergeant Mejia has been charged with desertion. His court-martial at Fort Stewart, Ga., began Wednesday, the same day that Specialist Sivits pleaded guilty to the charges against him. If Sergeant Mejia is convicted, he will face a similar punishment, a year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge.

Sergeant Mejia told me in a long telephone interview this week that he had qualms about the war from the beginning but he followed his orders and went to Iraq in April 2003. He led an infantry squad and saw plenty of action. But the more he thought about the war — including the slaughter of Iraqi civilians, the mistreatment of prisoners (which he personally witnessed), the killing of children, the cruel deaths of American G.I.'s (some of whom are the targets of bounty hunters in search of a reported $2,000 per head), the ineptitude of inexperienced, glory-hunting military officers who at times are needlessly putting U.S. troops in even greater danger, and the growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as "hajis," the way the Vietnamese were known as "gooks") — the more he thought about these things, the more he felt that this war could not be justified, and that he could no longer be part of it.

Sergeant Mejia's legal defense is complex (among other things, he is seeking conscientious objector status), but his essential point is that war is too terrible to be waged willy-nilly, that there must always be an ethically or morally sound reason for opening the spigots to such horror. And he believes that threshold was never met in Iraq.

"Imagine being in the infantry in Ramadi, like we were," he said, "where you get shot at every day and you get mortared where you live, [and attacked] with R.P.G.'s [rocket-propelled grenades], and people are dying and getting wounded and maimed every day. A lot of horrible things become acceptable."

He spoke about a friend of his, a sniper, who he said had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. "He realized it was a kid," said Sergeant Mejia. "The kid tried to get up. He shot him again."

The child died.
....
A military court will decide whether Sergeant Mejia, who served honorably while he was in Iraq, is a deserter or a conscientious objector or something in between. But the issues he has raised deserve a close reading by the nation as a whole, which is finally beginning to emerge from the fog of deliberate misrepresentations created by Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. about this war.

The truth is the antidote to that crowd. Whatever the outcome of Sergeant Mejia's court-martial, he has made a contribution to the truth about Iraq.

War requires dehumanization of the "enemy." Those who dehumanize become inhuman themselves.

Dante, Please Pick Up the White Phone

Children Fill Ledger of Death, No Matter How, or How Many
By JAMES BENNET

Published: May 21, 2004

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, May 20 — Set in fields of white, pink and red carnations, the giant cooler here, which usually holds vegetables or flowers for sale to an Israeli company, has been turned over to the dead.

It was to this cooler that, inevitably, the Palestinian doctor came Wednesday morning, when, just as inevitably, the latest Israeli Army raid touched off a parallel struggle to define reality. Were there, in fact, children among the dead, as the Palestinians claimed? How many? Did they die from Israeli sniper fire or from militants' explosives?

The doctor, Ahmed Abu Nikera, had had enough of these questions. In the dank, shadowy room, he yanked and pulled to open the bloodstained white cloth wrapping one of the bodies as tightly as a mummy.

"This is a child," he said, after he revealed the pale gray face of Ibrahim al Qun, 14. "This is the exit wound." He pointed at the ragged, softball-sized black hole where the boy's left eye had been. A sniper's bullet entered at the back of the boy's head, he said.

Still, in the icy book of accounts that one carries to follow this conflict day after day, something else also had to be noted: During the fighting Tuesday night, Dr. Ali Moussa of Al Najar hospital had said there were seven people under the age of 18 among the dead; a list of names and ages compiled by Palestinian hospital officials Wednesday morning showed four people under 18.

Along with the chaos of gunshots, tank shells, planted bombs and armored bulldozers that accompanies life here, there is a dense fog of war. There is also a war of fog, of often fuzzily presented but always sharply conflicting versions of reality.

Like so many characteristics of this conflict, the tension over competing truths is shared across the desert, in Iraq. There, American soldiers and insurgents are not only fighting very different kinds of battles, but also describing very different ones. In the end, it seems that the contest of descriptions matters more, at least to the leaders and to the analysts who guide them.

Whether the casualties on any given day are on one side or the other or both, there is also, in a dark space somewhere, a reality. There is a dead child; there is an exit wound.

How many dead children is too many is a question often asked by Palestinians and Israelis, but it shows no hint of being resolved.

A couple of hours after the visit to the cooler, life here took another cruel and bewildering twist. On Wednesday afternoon, an Israeli helicopter gunship and a tank opened fire as demonstrators approached a neighborhood on Rafah's outskirts that the Israelis seized Tuesday.

Men with agony in their faces ran carrying little boys who bled from many shrapnel wounds. It was bedlam, panic, a vertiginous glimpse of hell.

Bennet makes a point which can't be repeated often enough: heaven and hell are not fuzzy, spiritual ideas which happen "out there" in some sort of life after death. They are daily realities which we make right here, right now. We seem to have some sort of sick affection for hell. We have a lot more experience with it than we do with heaven.

Too Much Information

New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge
Abu Ghraib Detainees' Statements Describe Sexual Humiliation And Savage Beatings

By Scott Higham and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A01

Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.

The fresh allegations of prison abuse are contained in statements taken from 13 detainees shortly after a soldier reported the incidents to military investigators in mid-January. The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan, according to copies of the statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The statements provide the most detailed picture yet of what took place on the cellblock. Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.

"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees," said Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, detainee No. 13077. "And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything."

The prisoners also provided accounts of how some of the now-famous photographs were staged, including the pyramid of hooded, naked prisoners. Eight of the detainees identified by name one particular soldier at the center of the abuse investigation, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., a member of the 372nd Military Police Company from Cresaptown, Md. Five others described abuse at the hands of a solider who matches Graner's description.

"They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen," said Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, detainee No. 151362. "They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks."

The Pentagon is investigating the allegations, a spokesman said last night.

"There are a number of lines of inquiry that are being taken with respect to allegations of abuse of detainees in U.S. custody," Bryan Whitman said. "There is still more to know and to be learned and new things to be discovered."
Threats of Death and Assault

The disclosures come from a new cache of documents, photographs and videos obtained by The Post that are part of evidence assembled by Army investigators putting together criminal cases against soldiers at Abu Ghraib. So far, seven MPs have been charged with brutalizing detainees at the prison, and one pleaded guilty Wednesday.

The sworn statements, taken in Baghdad between Jan. 16 and Jan. 21, span 65 pages. Each statement begins with a handwritten account in Arabic that is signed by the detainee, followed by a typewritten translation by U.S. military contractors. The shortest statement is a single paragraph; the longest exceeds two single-spaced typewritten pages.

While military investigators interviewed the detainees separately, many of them recalled the same event or pattern of events and procedures in Tier 1A -- a block reserved for prisoners who were thought to possess intelligence that could help thwart the insurgency in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein or locate weapons of mass destruction. Military intelligence officers took over the cellblock last October and were using MPs to help "set the conditions" for interrogations, according to an investigative report complied by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. Several MPs have since said in statements and through their attorneys that they were roughing up detainees at the direction of U.S. military intelligence officers.

Most of the detainees said in the statements that they were stripped upon their arrival to Tier 1A, forced to wear women's underwear, and repeatedly humiliated in front of one another and American soldiers. They also described beatings and threats of death and sexual assault if they did not cooperate with U.S. interrogators.

Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them. "Most of the days I was wearing nothing else," he said in his statement.

Hilas also said he witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures.

"The kid was hurting very bad," Hilas said.

Hilas, like other detainees interviewed by the military, said he could not identify some of the soldiers because they either covered their name patches or did not wear uniforms. But he and other detainees did know the names of three, including Graner and Sgt. Javal S. Davis, both of whom have been charged and now face courts-martial. Some of the detainees described a short female MP with dark hair and a blond female MP of medium height who watched and took part in some of the abuses. Three female MPs have been charged in the case so far.

Hilas told investigators that he asked Graner for the time one day because he wanted to pray. He said Graner cuffed him to the bars of a cell window and left him there for close to five hours, his feet dangling off the floor. Hilas also said he watched as Graner and others sodomized a detainee with a phosphoric light. "They tied him to the bed," Hilas said.

Graner's attorney, Guy L. Womack, did not return phone messages yesterday. In previous interviews, he has said that his client was following the lead of military intelligence officers.

Mustafa Jassim Mustafa, detainee No. 150542, told military investigators he also witnessed the phosphoric-light assault. He said it was around the time of Ramadan, the holiest period of the Muslim year, when he heard screams coming from a cell below. Mustafa said he looked down to see a group of soldiers holding the detainee down and sodomizing him with the light.

Graner was sodomizing him with the phosphoric light, Mustafa said. The detainee "was screaming for help. There was another tall white man who was with Graner -- he was helping him. There was also a white female soldier, short, she was taking pictures."

Another detainee told military investigators that American soldiers sodomized and beat him. The detainee, whose name is being withheld by The Post because he is an alleged victim of a sexual assault, said he was kept naked for five days when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib and was forced to kneel for four hours with a hood over his head. He said he was beaten so badly one day that the hood flew off his head. "The police was telling me to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling, and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet," he said in his sworn statement.

One day, the detainee said, American soldiers held him down and spread his legs as another soldier prepared to open his pants. "I started screaming," he said. A soldier stepped on his head, he said, and someone broke a phosphoric light and spilled the chemicals on him.

Army Overhauls Interrogation Procedures
Army says it will no longer permit the use of such techniques as "stress positions" or sleep deprivation or certain other practices that have been criticized as beyond the Geneva Conventions.

By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- In the face of international criticism and widening congressional scrutiny, the U.S. Army said today it has overhauled interrogation procedures used for Iraqi detainees and that it would no longer permit the use of such techniques as "stress positions" or sleep deprivation.

Under the changes, interrogators will no longer be able to ask for permission to expose prisoners to military dogs, to alter prisoners' diets or force them to stand or squat in uncomfortable positions -- techniques that have been criticized as beyond the limits of the Geneva Conventions.

However, many of the questionable techniques have not been used recently, and others very sparsely, said two senior military officials in briefing Pentagon reporters.

The only extreme techniques that will continue to be allowed are solitary confinement and isolation from other prisoners.

The sudden change in the Army's interrogation techniques comes after worldwide outrage over photos that captured abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, where detainees were stripped, abused and humiliated.

The Pentagon acted as investigations into the abuses have begun to spread into other aspects of military detention practices, including command structure and adherence to the Geneva Conventions in routine prison practices.

The changes detailed today apply only to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Although Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon strategists have said the detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, the new rules represent a "scrubbed'" and shortened version of the rules for questioning being used at Guantanamo, officials said.

Reading the Polls

My DD's poll maven, Chris Bowers, on some poll internals and how they can go wrong:

I am not a subscriber to Gallup, and thus I do not have access to old poll internals. However, if you are willing to take my word for it, in early October of 2000 I spent a couple hours after class one day pouring over the internals of the latest Gallup tracking poll in an attempt to better understand the state of the campaign. One discovery, which has stayed with me to this day, led me to conclude that they were underestimating Gore's support by around 2-3%, and overestimating Bush's support by the same margin. The discovery was that they had incorporated race into their model, and had done so in a way that appeared to more heavily weight white opinion than minority opinion.

Although I lack access to internals from the time, I submit that Gallup and almost every other polling agency was wrong about Gore and Bush in 2000 because their polling models over emphasized white opinion. Further, it is entirely possible that the reason Zogby and CBS were more accurate than other polling services was because they incorporated an accurate model of minority turnout into their data. Considering demographic changes, it is quite likely that minority turnout will constitute an even larger percentage of the national vote in 2004 than it did in 2000. If, for example, the "non-white" vote will make up 22% of the national electorate in 2004, than even a model that assumes 20% minority turnout will be inherently inaccurate. Such a model would add nearly 1% to Bush and subtract nearly 1% from Kerry.

Keep this in mind before you hang your emotional and mental state on the polling data.

Huddle at Mid-Field

Bush Seeks to Rally G.O.P. Around Iraq Plan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 20, 2004

Filed at 1:10 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan Thursday, saying Iraqis are ready to ``take the training wheels off'' by assuming some political power.

He warned that violence is likely to worsen as that transfer approaches.

The president made a rare visit to Capitol Hill as lawmakers prepare to head to their home states for the Memorial Day recess.

``This has been a rough couple of months for the president, particularly on the issues of Iraq, and I think he was here to remind folks that we do have a policy and this policy is going to be tough,'' said Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. ``Things, as I think he commented, are very likely to get worse before they get better.''

Several members of Congress said Bush expressed his determination to stick to a June 30 date for handing partial governing authority to Iraqis.

``He talked about 'time to take the training wheels off,''' said Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio. ``The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward.''

It was the second year in a row that Bush met privately with his fellow Republicans just ahead of the congressional break. The stakes were especially high this year: Bush and most lawmakers face re-election, and Iraq is still plagued by chaos and violence six weeks before the handover.

Several GOP lawmakers who attended the meeting said Bush told his audience to brace for more violence after June 30 and he predicted insurgents would try to disrupt subsequent elections.

The lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Bush sought to reassure them that despite his sagging poll numbers, he is eager for the re-election fight. They said the president defended his record on the economy, education and Medicare, all of which are targets for Democratic attacks.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Bush's Iraq policies show incompetence and the only conclusion to draw is that ``the emperor has no clothes.''

``I believe that the president's leadership and the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience,'' the California Democrat said at a news conference.

Some of the 200 or so Republicans emerging from the meeting said Bush's speech was a welcome pep talk. They echoed the White House line on key issues.

Josh Marshall was on the hill this morning and reports:

The tenor of the event can probably be judged by the fact that the 'rallying cry' coming out of the event seems to have been that things are really bad and almost certain to get worse.

That's a bit of a condescending thing to say about a country which encompasses what is generally considered to be the cradle of civilization. But the thought that an extra set of training wheels may now be available prompts the question of whether the Iraqis might be willing to hand their pair off to the White House.

Cooperative Melanies

Mel Goux is writing this, becaue Mel Mattson's power is out. Posting will return when the power does.

Tales from the Road

I have a new contribution up at The Village Gate. File this one under "all real religion is narrative."

Choosing Your Friends

Attacks by Israel, U.S. will likely fuel perception of war on Islam

By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - In a single, awful day in the Middle East on Wednesday, Israeli forces killed unarmed Palestinian protesters and Arab news reports claimed that a U.S. Army helicopter killed 40 people at a wedding party in Iraq.

Other than the calendar, there was no connection between the two events, and the facts of the second one are very much in dispute. American officials acknowledge that some 40 people died near Iraq's border with Syria but said American forces had attacked suspected foreign fighters, not a wedding party.

In much of the Islamic world, however, three facts may help transform two mistakes into the "clash of civilizations" so desired by Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists: Christian or Jewish troops killed Arabs, they used American-made weapons and the attacks were reported on television.

As a result, many ordinary Arabs are likely to see the events in Gaza and Iraq as one, helping fuel perceptions that Islam is under attack from the West, Middle East experts said.

The United States took the rare step Wednesday of not vetoing a United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israel's tactics in Gaza, and President Bush has said repeatedly that the "global war on terrorism" isn't a war against Muslims.

Nevertheless, the failure of the U.S. occupation to bring stability to Iraq, the Iraq prison abuse scandal and Bush's past support for Israel's tactics against Palestinians have led many Arabs to question that.

"The way we are going is leading us toward the very thing we say we want to be against, which is (a) clash of civilizations," said Edward Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt and now president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

While surveys indicate that most Americans don't see such a conflict, "an increasing majority of Muslims are beginning to see the world as a clash between Muslim civilization and Western civilization," said Husain Haqqani of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"Every incident of the use of force against Muslims, justified or unjustified, is interpreted as a manifestation of that clash," he said.

One result of U.S. actions, Haqqani said, is that "moderate voices are being less and less heard in the Muslim world."

Those moderate voices are the West's natural allies in the Muslim world, and the Islamic radicals' mortal enemies.

"It took Israel 55 years to create the hatred and enmity with the Arab world. But it took Bush one year to create the same level," said Imam Husham al Husainy of the Karbala Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, Mich.

Shibley Telhami, of the University of Maryland in College Park, said he's completing work on a new survey that underscores how far Arab confidence in the United States has fallen.

It's in single digits in countries such as Morocco and Jordan that are nominally friendly to the United States, Telhami said. In Saudi Arabia, nearly two-thirds of those asked in 2000 expressed confidence in the United States. Today, the figure is below 10 percent, he said.

Shrewd Molly

Molly Ivins | We should get Al Qaeda, leave Iraq alone

The accumulation of American errors has cost us the goodwill of the great majority of Iraqis. As their attacks on us increase, so do our responses, so does the number of innocent Iraqis we kill, so does the amount of Iraqis who then hate us and search for vengeance -- in a downward spiral of violence that no one sees a way out of, except for out.

On the plus side, Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. On the minus side, we have encouraged anti-American terrorists everywhere, put ourselves at greater risk of a terrorist attack, lost enormous amounts of goodwill around the world, earned the resentment of many of our closest allies and cost ourselves about $200 billion we really could have used for more constructive projects. The worst possibility is that we have set up the Iraqis for a horrible three-way civil war, a development that was foreseen before the invasion and is looming now.

The dotty part of the debate comes from the neocons, whose idea this was in the first place.

A few weeks ago, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, said, "I think no one can properly assert that the failure to find Iraqi WMD stockpiles undermines the reasons for the war." Really? Well then let me assert it improperly. You told us that it was why we had to go to war, and you can't just stand there and lie about it now. This is like trying to debate the Red Queen.

Sometimes it's more a matter of the neocons not being able to get their act together. Paul Wolfowitz, my fave, said the other day, "No one ever expected this would be a cakewalk." Actually, those were the very words rather famously used by his neocon buddy Ken Adelman, who predicted the war would be a cakewalk. But nothing tops Wolfowitz's classic declaration, "There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq."

The Center for American Progress has an exit strategy I think sounds useful. It is recommending Bush call an emergency international summit immediately, seek to have the United Nations fully oversee the transition, have NATO take the security responsibility and set up an independent trust fund for reconstruction.

Paul Mulshine from of the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger suggests Bush do an LBJ announcement: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president." That would improve the likelihood of the success of a summit, though the administration is in such deep denial about how badly this war is going it seems unlikely.

Just as a political calculation, the administration should consider the center's plan: It's not going to do them any good electorally to keep pretending everything is hunky-dory while we all watch it spiral out of control. According to The Wall Street Journal, the June 30 "handover" date is a complete sham: The United States is picking proxies and advisers at every level. Do you think the Iraqis don't realize that?

One of our more impassioned public scolds, Michael Massing, wrote last week of "our great national narcissism," our notorious lack of knowledge about other cultures, our inability to speak foreign languages and our indifference to the deaths of Iraqis (hundreds of civilians dead in retaliation for the attack on four American contractors).

Excuse me, but I really don't think Americans need a lecture on our many failings -- I think it is time, rather, that we call on one of our greatest strengths.

We are a practical people and often quite shrewd. That means knowing when to cut our losses. Let's use it now. Let's not stand around with our thumbs in our ears pretending the nincompoops who got us into this knew what they were doing.

We were attacked by al-Qaida. Let's go get them and leave the Iraqis to international authorities.

By the Numbers

Support surges for rebel Iraqi cleric
By Roula Khalaf in Baghdad
Published: May 20 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: May 20 2004 5:00

An Iraqi poll to be released next week shows a surge in the popularity of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical young Shia cleric fighting coalition forces, and suggests nearly nine out of 10 Iraqis see US troops as occupiers and not liberators or peacekeepers.

The poll was conducted by the one-year-old Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which is considered reliable enough for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to have submitted questions to be included in the study.

The results of any poll in Iraq's traumatised society should be taken with caution but the survey highlights the difficulties facing the US authorities in Baghdad as they confront Mr Sadr, who launched an insurgency against the US-led occupation last month.

Conducted before the Abu Ghraib prisoners' scandal, it also suggests a severe erosion of American credibility even before Iraqis were confronted with images of torture at the hands of US soldiers.

Saadoun Duleimi, head of the centre, yesterday told the Financial Times that more than half of a representative sample - comprising 1,600 Shia, Sunni Arabs and Kurds polled in all Iraq's main regions - wanted coalition troops to leave Iraq. This compares with about 20 per cent in an October survey. Some 88 per cent of respondents said they now regarded coalition forces in Iraq as occupiers.

"Iraqis always contrast American actions with American promises and there's now a wide gap in credibility," said Mr Duleimi, who belongs to one of the country's big Sunni tribes. "In this climate, fighting has given Moqtada credibility because he's the only Iraqi man who stood up against the occupation forces."

The US authorities in Baghdad face an uphill battle to convince Iraqis that the transfer of sovereignty on June 30 will mark the end of US occupation. With the removal of troops cited as a more urgent issue than the country's formal status, Mr Duleimi said more Iraqis were now looking at US forces as part of the problem rather than the solution.

Respondents saw Mr Sadr as the second most influential figure in Iraq, next only to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most senior Shia cleric. Some 32 per cent of respondents said they strongly supported Mr Sadr and another 36 per cent said they somewhat supported him. Ibrahim Jaafari, the head of the Shia Islamist Daawa party and a member of the governing council, came next on the list.

* Iraq's oil exports fell nearly 1m b/d last week after the bombing of its southern pipeline on May 8, write Caroloa Hoyos and Javier Blas. "This is bigger than people had been expecting," said Neil McMahon of brokers Sanford Bernstein. US data show Iraq's crude exports fell to 860,000 b/d for the week ended May 13, down from 1.8m b/d in April.

As Juan Cole notes, this isn't a zero sum game, people can admire more than one person at a time, but the rising popularity of the younger cleric is largely a result of the occupation. He's made himself on the coat tails of the US, this is a very sharp young opportunist who knows how to read the wind.

Collateral Damage

U.S. Military Says Strike in Western Iraq Killed Up to 40
By REUTERS

Published: May 19, 2004

BAGHDAD, May 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. army said on Thursday it killed around 40 people in an attack on suspected foreign fighters in Iraq near the Syrian border, but disputed reports that the victims were members of a wedding party.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. military in Iraq, told Reuters the attack early on Wednesday was within the military's rules of engagement.

"At 0300 (2300 GMT Tuesday) we conducted an operation about 85 km southwest of al-Qaim...against suspected foreign fighters in a safe house," Kimmitt said. "We took ground fire and we returned fire."

Kimmitt said there were no indications that the victims of the attack were part of a wedding party. He said a large amount of money, Syrian passports and satellite communications equipment had been found at the site after the attack.

But Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, quoting eyewitnesses, said the raid on the village of Makr al-Deeb before dawn had targeted people celebrating a wedding and had killed at least 41 civilians.

"We received about 40 martyrs today, mainly women and children below the age of 12," Hamdy al-Lousy, the director of Qaim hospital, told Al Arabiya. "We also have 11 people wounded, most of them in critical condition."

Arabiya showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road. Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept.

"The U.S. planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," an unidentified man who said he was from the village said on Al Arabiya. "They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village. No bullets were fired by us, nothing was happening," he added.

Guests and relatives at Arab weddings often fire guns in the air in jubilation.

The United States, which is facing a Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq, says foreign fighters are entering Iraq from Syria.

CNN is reporting that Proconsul Bremer is confirming this attack, in spite of what Kimmit says. Hardly the first time the CPA and the military haven't been on the same page.

Gas Prices and the Bush Bill

Bush is saying that if the Senate had passed his energy bill three years ago, we wouldn't be having high gas prices today. Frankly, I don't remember what was in his energy bill, so I googled and found what the Sierra Club had to say about it when Pete Domenici re-introduced it last fall:

# Threatens our coasts and other public lands by allowing new fossil fuel exploration all along the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and more public lands. This will destroy some of our nation's most unique wilderness areas and critical fish and wildlife habitats.

# Fails to increase our use of clean, renewable energy by excluding a Renewable Energy Standard (RES) that would ensure that more of our electricity comes from clean, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.

In short, it would have had exactly no effect on the price of gasoline today.

Snap that Checkbook Closed

Catholics vote with wallets on bishop's Communion ban

One prominent donor says he will withhold $100,000, but others double their contributions.

By Eric Gorski
Denver Post Staff Writer

Post / John Leyba

Ric Kethcart leads efforts to revoke big gifts to the Colorado Springs diocese after its bishop linked Communion access to voting decisions.

A prominent donor to the Colorado Springs Roman Catholic Diocese is leading a charge to revoke large gifts to the diocese unless the bishop reverses his Communion clampdown on Catholic voters.

In a scathing "open letter" to Bishop Michael Sheridan, Parker lawyer and businessman Ric Kethcart says Sheridan's stance hearkens back to McCarthyism and threatens his flock more than the clergy abuse scandal.

Kethcart, a central figure in the diocese's Douglas County fundraising, is threatening to revoke a $100,000 pledge to his Highlands Ranch parish's building project and is enlisting others to take similar steps.

"We don't penalize people for standing back and letting other people seriously make their own judgments on moral issues as long as they properly consider all elements," said Kethcart, a longtime supporter of Colorado Democrats. He shared the letter with other prominent lay Catholics and some clergy.

Peter Howard, Sheridan's executive assistant, said the diocese is willing to sacrifice dollars to stake a moral claim. Already, some Catholics in the 10-county south-central Colorado diocese who support Sheridan's leadership have increased their giving, Howard said.

The pocketbook revolt comes in response to Sheridan's May pastoral letter stating that Catholics shall not receive Communion if they vote for candidates who clash with the church's teachings against four non-negotiable issues. They are: abortion rights, euthanasia, gay marriage and stem-cell research using tissue from aborted fetuses.

This is a basic principle of organizing: those with the power of the checkbook (us) can use it for change. The American Catholic Church pays for a big hunk of the Church Universal (the US and Germany are the Church's largest funders) and there is considerable power in that fact.

All Politics, All the Time

White House Is Trumpeting Programs It Tried to Cut
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Like many of its predecessors, the Bush White House has used the machinery of government to promote the re-election of the president by awarding federal grants to strategically important states. But in a twist this election season, many administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.

For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million.

The administration has been particularly energetic in publicizing health programs, even ones that had been scheduled for cuts or elimination.

Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Mr. Bush had proposed ending the program in each of the last three years.

The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. But Mr. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million.

Whether they involve programs Mr. Bush supported or not, the grant announcements illustrate how the administration blends politics and policy, blurring the distinction between official business and campaign-related activities.

In recent weeks, administration officials have fanned out around the country. Within a 48-hour period this month, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow was in Wisconsin and Illinois, doling out federal aid to poor neighborhoods. Anthony J. Principi, the secretary of veterans affairs, was in Las Vegas to announce plans for a new veterans hospital. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was in South Carolina to announce a new national research laboratory. And a top transportation official was in Portland, Me., awarding a $13 million grant to the city's airport.

In some cases, overtly political appearances are piggybacked onto such trips. Earlier this month, Mr. Principi was in Florida announcing plans for another veterans hospital, in Orlando, with a side trip to Tampa to kick off a national coalition of veterans supporting the re-election of Mr. Bush.

A few days earlier, while traveling to Marco Island, Fla., on official business, Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans stopped in Daytona Beach to attend a large prayer meeting, where he praised Mr. Bush as "a leader you can trust 100 percent of the time."

The combination of official business and politics is neither illegal nor unusual in an election year, though Bush administration officials were reluctant to provide details. In fact, the Bush administration is using techniques refined by President Bill Clinton. The difference is that in the Clinton years the White House was often trying to add and expand domestic programs, not cut them.

The government has byzantine rules for documenting mixed official and political travel. The goal is to ensure that the campaign or some other political group pays for parts of a trip that are purely political.

But as the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, has said, "it is often impossible to neatly categorize travel as either purely business or purely political."

Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for Mr. Evans, said the Republican National Committee paid for the commerce secretary's stop in Daytona Beach on May 6. A local newspaper, The News-Journal, said the prayer meeting there "evolved into a rousing Republican political rally."

The contrast between politics and policy is particularly striking when the administration takes credit for spending money appropriated by Congress against the president's wishes.

Of course, the first four years have been one continuing political campaign for the second four years. It's just a little balder right now.

Away from Prying Eyes

Officer Says Army Tried to Curb Red Cross Visits to Prison in Iraq
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: May 19, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Army officials in Iraq responded late last year to a Red Cross report of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by trying to curtail the international agency's spot inspections of the prison, a senior Army officer who served in Iraq said Tuesday.

After the International Committee of the Red Cross observed abuses in one cellblock on two unannounced inspections in October and complained in writing on Nov. 6, the military responded that inspectors should make appointments before visiting the cellblock. That area was the site of the worst abuses.

The Red Cross report in November was the earliest formal evidence known to have been presented to the military's headquarters in Baghdad before January, when photographs of the abuses came to the attention of criminal investigators and prompted a broad investigation. But the senior Army officer said the military did not start any criminal investigation before it replied to the Red Cross on Dec. 24.

The Red Cross report was made after its inspectors witnessed or heard about such practices as holding Iraqi prisoners naked in dark concrete cells for several days at a time and forcing them to wear women's underwear on their heads while being paraded and photographed.

Until now, the Army had described its response on Dec. 24 as evidence that the military was prompt in addressing Red Cross complaints, but it has declined to release the contents of the Army document, citing the tradition of confidentiality in dealing with the international agency.

I wonder how history will record this time of dark secrets? I can't make a direct link, but my gut tells me that this story is related to the one below.

Controlling Legal Authority

Former Guantánamo chief clashed with army interrogators
General's sacking cleared way for Pentagon to rewrite rules

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Wednesday May 19, 2004
The Guardian

The commander of Guantánamo Bay, sacked amid charges from the Pentagon that he was too soft on detainees, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates.

Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002, apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.

In one of the general's first interviews since his dismissal, he told the Guardian: "I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally."

Gen Baccus's unceremonious departure offers a rare insight into how the Pentagon rewrote the rules of warfare to suit the Bush administration's view of a radically changed world following the terror attacks of September 11 2001.

It also suggests what can happen to military personnel slow to sign on to the Pentagon's changed view of the world. Eighteen months after being removed from Guantánamo, Gen Baccus, 51, and a commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, is still waiting for a new military assignment.

Meanwhile, the systems set in place at Guantánamo following his departure have come to govern detention facilities in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

The connection between Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib grew clearer this month when Gen Baccus's successor at the camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was put in charge of the US military's prisons in Iraq. Gen Miller's recommendations for Abu Ghraib - merging the functions of prison guard and interrogator as he did at Guantánamo - were cited in the Pentagon's internal report on abuse at the now notorious prison.

Yesterday, new evidence emerged that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was systematic, part of a policy instituted at US military detention centres from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq, and not restricted to the seven low-ranking soldiers charged so far in connection with the scandal.

Colonel Thomas Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade at the prison, said interrogators sometimes instructed the military police to strip detainees and shackle them before they were questioned, a report in the New York Times said.

Col Pappas said the practice was among the changes recommended by Gen Miller - and among those resisted by Gen Baccus.

"There is a dynamic tension that exists in that kind of situation," Gen Baccus said. "Often times, those kind of approaches led to questions as to why am I doing that. Am I trying to coddle the detainees? Am I trying to bend to their desires?" he said.

The Pentagon's frustration with Gen Baccus is well documented - although officially denied. Officially, he was unceremoniously relieved of his duties as part of a general re-organisation of the camp, which called for a commander of higher rank.

Gen Baccus insists that he did his job honourably. "In no way did I ever interfere in interrogations, but also at that time the interrogations never forced anyone to be treated inhumanely, certainly not when I was there."

Although the detainees at Guantánamo were not given the protections of the Geneva Convention, Gen Baccus says he took steps to ensure they were not subjected to abuse.

"We had instances of individuals that used verbal abuse, and any time that that was reported we took action immediately and removed the individual from contact with detainees." Gen Baccus said there were fewer than 10 instances of abuse during his seven months in command.

After his departure, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, gave military intelligence control over all aspects of Guantánamo, including the MPs, and Gen Miller was appointed commander.

Memos Reveal War Crimes Warnings
Could Bush administration officials be prosecuted for 'war crimes' as a result of new measures used in the war on terror? The White House's top lawyer thought so
Suspected Taliban and al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base kneel down before military police as prisoners are processed into the detention facility in January 2002
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek
Updated: 6:28 p.m. ET May 17, 2004

May 17 - The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue.

The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes—and that it might even apply to Bush adminstration officials themselves— is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by NEWSWEEK. It urges President George Bush declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions—such as that outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners—was "undefined."

"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," Gonzales wrote.

The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges," the White House lawyer concluded, would be for President Bush to stick to his decision—then being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell— to exempt the treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention provisions.

"Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.

The memo—and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV—are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week's magazine. Newsweek made some of them available online today.

Not all the Loons Nest on Northern Lakes

Susie Madrak reads Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged and brings us the following news from the state of Texas, which looks increasingly like the state of insanity:

Unitarian group denied tax status

By R.A. Dyer

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

AUSTIN - Unitarian Universalists have for decades presided over births, marriages and memorials. The church operates in every state, with more than 5,000 members in Texas alone.

But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Denison Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization -- at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: the organization "does not have one system of belief."

Never before -- not in this state or any other -- has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn's ruling clearly infringes upon religious liberties, said Dan Althoff, board president for the Denison congregation that was rejected for tax exemption by the comptroller's office.

"I was surprised -- surprised and shocked -- because the Unitarian church in the United States has a very long history," said Althoff, who notes that father-and-son presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams were both Unitarians.

His church is just one of several Unitarian congregations in North Texas, including churches in Fort Worth, Arlington and Southlake.

Strayhorn's ruling, as well as a similar decision by former Comptroller John Sharp, has left the comptroller's office straddling a sometimes murky gulf separating church and state.

What constitutes religion? When and how should government make that determination? Questions that for years have vexed the world's great philosophers have now become the province of the state comptroller's office.

Questions about the issue were referred to Jesse Ancira, the comptroller's top lawyer, who said Strayhorn has applied a consistent standard -- and then stuck to it. For any organization to qualify as a religion, members must have "simply a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power," he said.

"We have got to apply a test, and use some objective standards," Ancira said. "We're not using the test to deny the exemptions for a particular group because we like them or don't like them."

Since neither the Society of Friends nor the Disciples of Christ have a creedal test, I wonder if they qualify for tax exempt status in Texas.

Descending Insanity

U.S. Faces Growing Fears of Failure
Wolfowitz Concedes Errors as Damage Control Continues

By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 19, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration is struggling to counter growing sentiment -- among U.S. lawmakers, Iraqis and even some of its own officials -- that the occupation of Iraq is verging on failure, forcing a top Pentagon official yesterday to concede serious mistakes over the past year.

Under tough questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a leading administration advocate of the Iraq intervention, acknowledged miscalculating that Iraqis would tolerate a long occupation. A central flaw in planning, he added, was the premise that U.S. forces would be creating a peace, not fighting a war, after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

"We had a plan that anticipated, I think, that we could proceed with an occupation regime for much longer than it turned out the Iraqis would have patience for. We had a plan that assumed we'd have basically more stable security conditions than we've encountered," Wolfowitz told the senators.

The testy hearing reflected growing anxieties with only six weeks left before political power is to be handed over to Iraqis. The United States is now so deeply immersed in damage control -- combating security problems and recriminations from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and making a third attempt at crafting an interim government in Baghdad -- that lawmakers and others say Iraq faces greater uncertainty about the future than it did when the occupation began with great expectations a year ago.

"There are a lot of people across this country who are very, very worried about how this is progressing, what the endgame is, whether or not we are going to achieve even a part of our goals here -- and the growing fear that we may in fact have in some ways a worse situation if we're not careful at the end of all this," warned Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), echoing comments of several committee members.

President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the United States is facing "hard work" in Iraq that is "approaching a crucial moment." But he said he will not be swayed from the goal of helping Iraq become a "free and democratic nation at the heart of the Middle East."

"My resolve is firm," he said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This is an historic moment. The world watches for weakness in our resolve. They will see no weakness. We will answer every challenge." But lawmakers challenged Wolfowitz with their fears that the U.S.-led coalition still does not have a viable plan in place for the transition -- and that failure could be costly.

"A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy and that we are committed to making it work. If we cannot provide this clarity, we risk the loss of support of the American people, loss of potential contributions from our allies and the disillusionment of Iraqis," said Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the panel.

U.S. successes in Iraq have been "dwarfed" by two deficits created by the administration -- a "security deficit" and a "legitimacy deficit," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.).
....
"Anyone in his right mind would say, 'What you're giving me is an impossible task and a no-win situation,' " said an Iraqi adviser to a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The crisis over mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib has also complicated the political transition, with fears among Iraqis that any association with an interim government named by U.N. and U.S. diplomats will undermine their political aspirations.

Some military officers are also concerned that Washington is now cutting back on its original goal of eliminating major flash points in Iraq before June 30. They say the United States has basically retreated in Fallujah, handing over control of the Sunni city to a former Iraqi general who is now commanding some of the very insurgents U.S. forces were fighting -- again, in the name of expediency.

"What we're trying to do is extricate ourselves from Fallujah," said a senior U.S. official familiar with U.S. strategy who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. "There's overwhelming pressure with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the White House to deliver a successful Iraq transition, and Iraq is proving uncooperative."

I watched some of Wolfowitz's testimony yesterday. He remains firmly embedded on a planet which is not this one. I have an abiding affection for science fantasy novels, but I don't have any desire that they be confused with foreign policy in the here and how. What I heard yesterday was a fantasy novel.

Goodbye, Felix

Tony Randall dead at 84
Actor best known for TV's 'Odd Couple'

Tuesday, May 18, 2004 Posted: 4:34 PM EDT (2034 GMT)

(CNN) -- Tony Randall, the Emmy Award-winning actor who made the role of fussy neatnik Felix Unger his own in TV's "The Odd Couple," has died. Randall was 84.

"He was the funniest man in movies and on television, and nothing was as much fun as working with him," Doris Day, Randall's co-star in several films, told the AP. "I'm so glad that his last few years with his wife and children were so happy. I loved him very much and miss him already."

Tony Randall was not only a terrific actor, he was a terrific human being. He had a long and fulfilling career as both actor and arts administrator as founder of The National Actors Theater, the only full-time repertory company in this country which provided the meat of the American theater tradition to the public as well as work in some of the best of the tradition for scores of actors. He was a visionary as well as one of the most sophisticated senses of humor to ever grace the legitimate stage. I will miss him.

Open Thread

In a meeting most of the afternoon. Chat amongst yourselves.

Bad Science=Death

Opposition to Condoms

Published: May 18, 2004

The Bush administration's enlightenment on AIDS treatment has not, alas, been matched in AIDS prevention programs. Spurred by the religious right, the administration and Congress have fenced off one-third of the nation's international AIDS prevention funds to be used for abstinence programs starting in 2006, even though such programs alone are insufficient.

The administration is using pseudoscience to justify its decisions. Randall Tobias, its AIDS coordinator, has said numerous times that condoms are not effective at preventing the spread of AIDS in the general population. He repeated this assertion while testifying in the House of Representatives in March, citing the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Mr. Tobias is wrong. The dean of the London School wrote to him to say that the school had never produced any such report, and that its research shows that condoms do work.

Mr. Tobias and others in the administration often cite Uganda as a place where AIDS transmission was reduced by teaching youth to be abstinent. But Ugandans — and more neutral researchers — say that condom use plays a big role. In Zambia and Brazil, condom use has also reduced AIDS transmission, but administration officials do not talk about these countries. They have removed information about condom use and references to the value of sex education and condom promotion from the Web sites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for International Development. Their benighted policies put millions at risk.

- AIDS Epidemic Update 2003 :

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.

Overruled

Gandhi Reportedly Gives Up Her Bid to Lead India
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 18, 2004

Filed at 8:51 a.m. ET

NEW DELHI (AP) -- Sonia Gandhi no longer wants to be India's first foreign-born prime minister, members of her Congress party and its allies said Tuesday, citing security fears that overshadow the country's top political dynasty.

Sitaram Yechury, a member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist, a Congress party ally was told that she would not be prime minister.

``A delegation of Congress met us and informed us that there will be a change of leadership of the Congress Parliamentary Party and the CPP will meet to elect a new leader,'' Yechury said outside Gandhi's New Delhi residence.

All bets have been placed on Manmohan Singh as the new Congress candidate for prime minister. He was the architect of India's economic liberalization program during the last Congress-led government from 1991 to 1996 and many believe he would be able to strike a balance between demands for leftists and policies that benefit businesses.

Investors fear that if she becomes prime minister Gandhi would have to backtrack on her pledge to go forward with economic liberalization, or that the leftists could block key reforms such as the privatization of state-run companies.

That sent markets plummeting on Monday, when the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, had its biggest drop in its 129-year history.

The benchmark index of the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, ended up 8.6 percent at 4,877.02 points on the news Tuesday.

In the US, the Supreme Court dictated the executive. In India, the stock exchange did. I don't think either is desirable.

Jumping the Shark

As Violence Deepens, So Does Pessimism

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 18, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 17 -- With stunning brazenness, pinpoint timing and devastating force, the suicide car bomber who killed the head of Iraq's Governing Council on Monday gave shape to a feeling among Iraqi and U.S. officials and common citizens that the country is almost unmanageable.

With the transfer of limited powers to a new Iraqi government scheduled to take place in six weeks, U.S. and allied forces have been unable to eradicate threats to Iraq's stability, and no one has predicted a reduction in violence before the June 30 handover.

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is trying to create the caretaker government that will assume authority, but on Monday debate over the details of his plan took a back seat to a more basic question: If Iraq's titular president, Izzedin Salim, can be blown up at the gates of occupation headquarters, what kind of country is being handed over to Iraqis?

"We could not imagine the deterioration leading to such a point. It's getting worse day after day, and no one has been able to put an end to it. Who is going to protect the next government, no matter what kind it is?" said Abdul Jalil Mohsen, a former Iraqi general and member of the Iraqi National Accord, a prominent party represented on the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, which Salim headed this month under a rotating system.

"There's no question: A small band of people can paralyze the country," said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of the council. "They are armed and organized and this is the difficulty. The people who did this have no respect for anything of value. It's a real danger to Iraq, the Iraqis and to an agenda to achieve any kind of democracy."

Inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified U.S. administration compound that Salim was about to enter when the suicide bomber struck, expectations are grim. "It will take a lot of doing for this not to end in a debacle," a senior occupation official said. "There is no confidence in the coalition. Why should there be?"

On Baghdad's hot and dusty streets, Iraqi working people also expressed a deep sense of pessimism. "Our country is at a loss. I don't think that even after the handover the government will control things," said Ali Fakhri, who owns a fabric store in the Kadhimiya district.

"Just look around," said Bakran Ohan, who sells baby clothes. "Do you see any police? Any soldiers? There is a complete lack of security. It won't change from day to night on June 30."

Salim's death was a high-profile reminder of the broader violence affecting Iraq. Central Iraq, home to a long-running revolt by Sunni Muslims, is plagued by daily roadside bombings, occasional car bombings and frequent assassinations of Iraqis working with the U.S.-led administration. To the south, frequent clashes over the past six weeks have pitted U.S. and allied forces against a persistent insurgency led by Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr. Fighting has all but paralyzed several southern cities.

Hostile bands operate freely in cities that straddle the main routes in and out of Baghdad. Foreigners who travel Iraqi roads run the risk of being kidnapped, and reconstruction projects in many parts of the country have come to a standstill.

Car bombs have been used repeatedly with devastating effect in Baghdad and other parts of the country since August, when the first of them destroyed the Jordanian Embassy. Since then, targets have included the U.N. headquarters, Red Cross headquarters, several police stations and two entrances to the Green Zone.

U.S. officials say assassinations and attacks on government buildings are designed to drive a wedge between the occupation authority and Iraqi citizens. When the Iraqi National Accord issued a letter of condolence after Salim's slaying, it noted that six of its members have been killed over the past six months. Salim is the second Governing Council member to be killed since the group's formation last summer.

Since late April, the Iraqi press has reported at least a dozen attempts to kill Iraqis working -- or suspected of working -- with the Americans. On April 28 in Baghdad, a mob hanged three men, each accused of working "as a spy for the enemies of Islam," according to a message left at their feet. The next day, gunmen shot an employee of Baghdad's Sadr City district town hall at his home. The assailants left a letter in his pocket warning against holding a funeral. On May 8, gunmen in Yusufiya, south of Baghdad, killed the head of the town council as he drove on a main street. Farther south in Samawah the next day, gunmen ran the car of the deputy mayor off the road and shot him and three passengers.

Last week, a man in a red mask put a stick of dynamite at the door of a local tribal leader, Roukan Mughier Atwan. It exploded while Atwan was trying to douse it with water, killing him and one of his daughters. Atwan had met with U.S. officials, part of consultations that military authorities try to carry on with traditional leaders; his brother, Thayer, said a letter had been posted nearby promising death to anyone who helped the Americans.

Juan Cole's Informed Comment:

One thing Williams does not bring up is the degree to which much of the turmoil is the direct result of poor American decision-making. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi army. The decision to try to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. Decisions, the rationale of which most observers would have difficulty seeing. The whole Iraq enterprise has been run from the beginning as a plot, with no transparency and all kinds of ulterior motives, and that is what has sunk it.

Family Matters

The Wastrel Son
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 18, 2004

He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he's still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

One by one, our erstwhile allies are disowning us; they don't want an unstable, anti-Western Iraq any more than we do, but they have concluded that President Bush is incorrigible. Spain has washed its hands of our problems, Italy is edging toward the door, and Britain will join the rush for the exit soon enough, with or without Tony Blair.

At home, however, Mr. Bush's protectors are not yet ready to make the break.

Last week Mr. Bush asked Congress for yet more money for the "Iraq Freedom Fund" — $25 billion for starters, although Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, says that the bill for the full fiscal year will probably exceed $50 billion, and independent experts think even that is an underestimate. And you know what? He'll get it.

Before the war, officials refused to discuss costs, except to insist that they would be minimal. It was only after the shooting started, and Congress was in no position to balk, that the administration demanded $75 billion for the Iraq Freedom Fund.

Then, after declaring "mission accomplished" and pushing through a big tax cut — and after several months when administration officials played down the need for more funds — Mr. Bush told Congress that he needed an additional $87 billion. Assured that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, and warned that American soldiers would suffer if the money wasn't forthcoming, Congress gave Mr. Bush another blank check.

Now Mr. Bush is back for more. Given this history, one might have expected him to show some contrition — to promise to change his ways and to offer at least a pretense that Congress would henceforth have some say in how money was spent.

But the tone of the cover letter Mr. Bush sent with last week's budget request can best be described as contemptuous: it's up to Congress to "ensure that our men and women in uniform continue to have the resources they need when they need them." This from an administration that, by rejecting warnings from military professionals, ensured that our men and women in uniform didn't have remotely enough resources to do the job.

The budget request itself was almost a caricature of the administration's "just trust us" approach to governing.

It ran to less than a page, with no supporting information. Of the $25 billion, $5 billion is purely a slush fund, to be used at the secretary of defense's discretion. The rest is allocated to specific branches of the military, but with the proviso that the administration can reallocate the money at will as long as it notifies the appropriate committees.

Senators are balking for the moment, but everyone knows that they'll give in, after demanding, at most, cosmetic changes. Once again, Mr. Bush has put Congress in a bind: it was his decision to put American forces in harm's way, but if members of Congress fail to give him the money he demands, he'll blame them for letting down the troops.

As long as political figures aren't willing to disown Mr. Bush's debt — the impossible situation in which he has placed America's soldiers — there isn't much they can do.

So how will it all end? The cries of "stay the course" are getting fainter, while the calls for a quick exit are growing. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that the nation will end up disowning Mr. Bush and his debts.

That will mean settling for an outcome in Iraq that, however we spin it, will look a lot like defeat — and the nation's prestige will be damaged by that outcome. But lost prestige is better than ruin.

The Ugly Truth

Guards' Testimony Paints Grisly Picture of Prisoner Abuse

By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- When CIA officers brought the Iraqi detainee to Abu Ghraib prison, his head was covered with an empty sandbag and Army guards were ordered to take him directly to a shower room that served as a makeshift interrogation center at the overcrowded, shell-damaged facility outside Baghdad.

An hour later, amid intensive questioning by intelligence officers, the prisoner collapsed and died. Only then did interrogators remove the hood to reveal severe head wounds that had never been treated.
The dead prisoner, whose identity still has not been made public, would become famous around the world in the photograph of a body wrapped in plastic sheeting and packed in ice -- among the most indelible images made public in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

An account of his final hours, and of the failure to provide medical attention to a severely wounded prisoner, is contained in sworn testimony provided to Army investigators by military police guards at Abu Ghraib.

Even after he died, the documents say, officials continued to pursue their own agendas: They haggled over who was responsible for the body. Eventually, the body deteriorated to where it had to be disposed of.

The official documents describing the grim episode, obtained Monday by the Los Angeles Times, were based on testimony at a secret military court hearing last month on the charges against Sgt. Javal Davis, one of seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company accused of beating and humiliating Iraqi detainees.

"He wasn't dead at first," said Spc. Jason A. Kenner of the nameless detainee, explaining that guards were told not to remove the prisoner's hood when they took him to the shower room.

"We didn't know how much he was injured. He went into the showers for interrogation, and about an hour later he died on them. I was sent to find out what was going on. Later that day, they decided to put him on ice. ..."

"After he passed, the sandbag was removed and I saw that he was severely beaten on his face," Kenner testified. "At the time, they would interrogate people in the shower rooms. He was shackled to the wall. ... The shower room was just used because there was no other space available."

Another guard in the 372nd Company, Spc. Bruce Brown, added: "I heard of a dead detainee being stored in the hard site. We would spray air freshener to cover the scene. ... They finally took the body away."

In their testimony, Kenner and Brown agreed that the CIA brought the prisoner to Abu Ghraib and ordered guards to take him to the interrogation facility without removing the hood. They disagreed on who was involved in the subsequent questioning: Kenner said it was the CIA alone while Brown said the CIA and military intelligence officers worked together.

Both Kenner and Brown referred to the CIA by its commonly used pseudonym, the OGA, or Other Government Agency.

On Monday, a CIA spokesman said he could not comment on the matter because it is under investigation by the agency's inspector general's office in conjunction with ongoing military investigations.

A key defendant in the scandal said in a sworn statement to Army investigators that mistreatment of prisoners was known and condoned throughout Abu Ghraib and no one ordered a halt to the abuses -- or to the photographing of humiliated inmates.

"Everyone in the company from the commander down" knew what was going on, asserted Pfc. Lynndie England, the Army soldier seen laughing, smoking and flashing the thumbs-up in front of naked male Iraqis in photographs. "The pictures were shown to anyone who wanted to see them. Cpl. (Charles) Graner told me he showed them to his platoon sergeant and platoon leader."

England told investigators that guards forced detainees to crawl on their hands and knees on broken glass, threw a nerf football at handcuffed prisoners and forced male detainees to wear women's "maxi pads."

She also said Graner, with whom she is now pregnant, applied needle and thread to prisoners after beating them.

"Cpl. Graner would personally stitch up detainees if the wound weren't too bad," she said. "He would take pictures of his work. One particular incident Cpl. Graner ran a former Iraqi general into a wall and split his lip. Cpl. Graner stitched up his lip."

Read the rest if you have a strong stomach. I don't.

And the greatest of these...

I've a new post up at The Village Gate. The topic is love, the subject is gay marriage and this happy day in the Bay State.

UPDATE: At the request of a commentor, here is the full essay cross-posted.

I've spent some of today in a prayer of gratitude for all of the happy couples in Massachussetts today. The news photographs have lifted my heart today and have been a necessary corrective to the rest of the days news, as this has been another dark day. But today I got to meditate on love, possibly the most sacred capacity of the human person, and to join, in spirit, all of the celebrating couples.

For those of you not of the Catholic persuasion, this might be a good moment to reflect with me on the nature of marriage as sacrament. Allen Brill's tradition, in fact most of mainline Protestantism, does not see marriage as a sacrament, which is something which belongs to Catholicism and the Eastern Churches. Anglicanism does regard matrimony as one of the seven traditional sacraments, but their theology of sacrament is slightly different from that of Catholicism and the Eastern Churches.

So, then, what's a sacrament? The Roman Church's understanding of the sacraments has evolved over time, but the contemporary understanding is that a sacrament is a place where salvation is revealed in time and space, a place in our ordinary lives where God is especially present and the sacrament itself has some salubrious effect (efficaciousness) on those who participate in it. That's right, participate. With the exception of the sacrament of penance, all sacraments are considered public and the celebration of the whole Church, the Body of Christ. The priest is necessary for all sacramental celebrations but two: matrimony and extreme unction (last rites.)

For Holy Matrimony to occur, the ministers of the sacrament are the couple themselves. The priest acts as the church's witness and offers the Church's sanction (as well as civil society's, since he is authorized to sign the certificate.) The couple act as ministers of the sacrament when they offer each other their full, consciouss and active assent to the vows they make to each other. The Church recognizes that the vows and assent could happen anywhere, which is why the Church also recognizes that there is a difference between pre-marital and pre-matrimonial sex, for example. All sacraments are also mysteries, and symbol of the greatest mystery, a God who loves and forgives.

Today many great mysteries occurred in Massachussetts, in public. Many, many more happened all over the world as two people admitted their love for each other and began making promises based on that love. It is a good day to celebrate love in all of its manifestations.

Confederation of Dunces

Predictable Toast
Why the end is near for Donald Rumsfeld... and why the worst of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal is yet to come
By Jeff Koopersmith

So there we have it, this week's pundit fodder: lunatic servicemen and women torturing and murdering Iraqis, and lunatic Islamic fundamentalists torturing and murdering an American.

This is the reason that Mr. Bush should hasten his resignation, for the totality of his past mismanagement and his proven lack of wisdom -- and of course for his role in setting a deficient example for our men and women in uniform.

Truthtelling

Robert Scheer:
Thread of Abuse Runs to the Oval Office
Phony justifications for war led to brutal intelligence-gathering.

Someone's lying — big-time — and neither Congress nor the media have begun to scratch the surface. Clearly we now know enough to stipulate that the several low-ranking alleged sadists charged in the Iraq torture scandal did not control the wing of the prison in which they openly and proudly did the devil's work.

That power was in the hands of high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers who established abusive conditions that were condemned by the Red Cross in a complaint to U.S. authorities well before the horrid incidents that recently shocked the nation.

The Red Cross complaint — and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week — raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors.

According to the report, the organization's delegates visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and witnessed "the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness" for days.

"Upon witnessing such cases, the [Red Cross] interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process.' " The report said that what Red Cross representatives saw "went beyond exceptional cases" and was "in some cases tantamount to torture."

The Red Cross complained directly to the authorities at that time, two months before the now-infamous photographs were taken.

The White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have for months stubbornly ignored and kept from the public the conclusions of both the Red Cross report and the even more damning internal report done by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for the Pentagon in March.

The Taguba report clearly stated that the MPs had been instructed to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses" and were using sexual humiliation, attack dogs and beatings to break prisoners.

It would appear that the Pentagon still doesn't want to admit the seriousness of the problem, having now assigned Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to run Abu Ghraib despite the fact that it was Miller who last summer officially reported on conditions in Abu Ghraib and seems to have enabled, if not authorized, the torture that ensued in the autumn.
....

"I'd like to know who was the one that was giving instructions to the military intelligence personnel to turn up the heat," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the nominal head of Abu Ghraib during the time in question, said in an interview on NBC. Unfortunately, that question needs to be addressed to the president of the United States.

The big lie that the United States is merely a selfless battler against terrorists, with no other agendas, opens the door for brutality against any who dare resist. Bush has exercised an arrogance unmatched by any U.S. president in a century and brandished God's will as his carte blanche. His unilateral, preemptive "nation-building" — and the settling of old scores in the name of fighting terror — grants license to treat anybody, including U.S. citizens, in a barbaric manner that cavalierly sweeps aside all standards of due process.

Through the Roof

Oil Hits New High on Supply Fears
Mon May 17, 2004 10:17 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices struck a new high on Monday on simmering concern that rapid fuel demand growth will outpace global supplies at a time when traders fear a sabotage attack on the Middle East oil infrastructure.

U.S. light crude (CLc1: Quote, Profile, Research) reached $41.85 a barrel, the highest price since the New York Mercantile Exchange launched the crude contract in 1983. Later it eased to $41.28, down 10 cents on the day. London's Brent crude (LCOc1: Quote, Profile, Research) eased 12 cents to $37.74 a barrel.

"The short-term is dominated by low gasoline stocks in the United States and Europe and deterioration of the Middle East situation. Neither is likely to change much in the months to come," said Societe Generale economist Frederic Lasserre.

Low U.S. gasoline inventories ahead of peak demand in the summer months, a surge in global consumption driven by healthy economic growth and worries that instability in the Middle East may disrupt supplies have attracted investment hedge funds to oil in droves. Crude prices are up $9 a barrel, or 28 percent, since the end of last year.

The United States has led consumer countries' calls on the OPEC producer cartel to release more supply as fears gather of inflation and a slowdown in economic growth.

OPEC, which controls half of world crude exports will convene informally later this week on the sidelines of an Amsterdam conference and again in Beirut on June 3 for a full ministerial meeting.

Ministers will discuss a proposal from Saudi Arabia to raise the group's official production limits by at least 1.5 million bpd to cool prices.

OPEC President Purnomo Yusgiantoro said on Monday the cartel was unhappy with such high oil prices. "High oil prices can cause recession. We are not happy with high oil prices," said Purnomo, who is also Indonesia's oil minister.

Even so, oil dealers are skeptical OPEC has enough spare production capacity to bring prices down as most OPEC countries, except top exporter Saudi Arabia, are producing flat out.

The group is currently pumping more than two million bpd above its official production ceiling of 23.5 million bpd to feed demand, which has been especially strong in China and the United States.

Iran, OPEC's second-biggest producer, has given guarded support to the Saudi proposal, cautioning that oversupply could deflate oil prices toward autumn.

Given the fragility of our economy, this could be the straw on the camel's back.

Internationalization

Italian troops driven from Iraq base

By Christopher Torchia
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, May 17, 2004

BAGHDAD -- Fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr drove Italian forces from a base in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Sunday and attacked coalition headquarters there with grenade and mortar fire as tensions in the Shiite region escalated. Two U.S. soldiers died elsewhere.

Gunmen also killed three Iraqi women working for the U.S.-led coalition.

Two Iraqi fighters were killed and 20 were wounded in battles in Nasiriyah, mostly at two bridges crossing the Euphrates River, residents said.

The Italian troops evacuated as their base came under repeated attack. Portuguese police were called out to support the Italians, seeing action for the first time since the force of 128 deployed to Nasiriyah in November, a Portuguese duty officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

At least 10 Italians were wounded, one critically, contingent spokesman Lt. Col. Giuseppe Perrone said by phone. He said the Italians relocated to the nearby Tallil air base.

Elsewhere in Nasiriyah, a convoy transporting the Italian official in charge of the city, Barbara Contini, came under attack as it neared the headquarters of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, Perrone said. Two Italian paramilitary police were wounded.

Fighting in the southern city began Friday. All but two civilian staffers of the coalition were evacuated from their headquarters in Nasiriyah to a military base because of attacks by al-Sadr's fighters. The radical cleric launched an uprising last month and faces an arrest warrant in the murder of a rival moderate cleric last year.

Elsewhere in southern Iraq, assailants in Basra fired a mortar shell that hit a house near a British military base, killing four Iraqi civilians, including 2-year-old twin girls, witnesses said. Four people were wounded. All the victims were related.

Also, gunmen fired on a minibus and detonated explosives in Baghdad yesterday, killing two Iraqi women and the driver and injuring another woman. Police said the women were working for the Americans but did not specify their jobs.

Early yesterday, a female Iraqi translator working with U.S. troops was killed and another was critically injured when gunmen broke into their houses in Mahmoudiyah, said Dawood al-Taee, director of the city's hospital.

The civilian killings appeared to be part of a rebel strategy to deter cooperation between Iraqis and the coalition, which plans to hand over sovereignty on June 30.

One U.S. soldier was killed Saturday night when a bomb exploded beside a vehicle in Baghdad, the Army said yesterday. A second soldier died of wounds suffered during a firefight yesterday south of the capital, the military said.

Sovereignty

Stabilization Efforts Dealt Blow by Suicide Car Bomb Attack
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 17, 2004

Filed at 7:02 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The head of the Iraqi Governing Council was killed in a suicide car bombing near a checkpoint outside the coalition headquarters in central Baghdad on Monday, dealing a blow to U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq ahead of a handover of sovereignty on June 30.

Abdel-Zahraa Othman, also known as Izzadine Saleem, was the second and highest-ranking member of the U.S.-appointed council to be assassinated. He was among nine Iraqis, including the bomber, who were killed, Iraqi officials said.

``Days like today convince us even more so that the transfer must stay on track,'' said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, speaking on CNN.

Kimmitt said that terrorist groups were trying to derail the democratization process in Iraq and that a suicide bomber was responsible.

As the current council president, a rotating position, Saleem was the highest-ranking Iraqi official killed during the occupation. His death occurred about six weeks before the United States plans to transfer power to Iraqis and underscores the risks facing those perceived as owing their positions to the Americans.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Saleem's death should not deter the transfer of power.

``What this shows is that the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from the occupiers to the Iraqi people, and these terrorists are enemies of the Iraqi people themselves,'' Straw said in Brussels, Belgium upon arrival at a European Union foreign ministers meeting. The ministers planned to discuss the latest developments in Iraq.

Saleem, the name he went by most frequently, was a Shiite and a leader of the Islamic Dawa Movement in the southern city of Basra. He was a writer, philosopher and political activist, who served as editor of several newspapers and magazines. The position of council head rotates monthly.

In a statement, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, called the killing a ``shocking and tragic loss.''

``The terrorists who are seeking to destroy Iraq have struck a cruel blow with this vile act today,'' he said. ``But they will be defeated...The Iraqi people will ensure that his vision of a democratic, free and prosperous Iraq will become a reality.''

One Governing Council member, Salama al-Khafaji, said the bombing appeared to be an effort to foment sectarian divisions in Iraq and disrupt the transfer of political power.

Another member, Naseer Kamel al-Chaderchi, blamed the bombing on the same groups that have conducted other attacks, including a bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last year that killed 22 people, including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

There is a cynical part of me which says that whatever government the US decideds to "stand up" is going to be assassinated. There is another part of me which hangs on to hope that this situation can be redeemed.

New World Aborning

I seem to be on something of a feminist tear today. I do not agree with everything Barbara Ehrenreich says, but the conclusion she reaches in the final paragraph I fully support.

Feminism's Assumptions Upended
A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. Giving women positions of power won't change society by itself.

By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."

A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some evidence that male sexual sadism was connected to our species' tragic propensity for violence. That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.

But it's not just the theory of this naive feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that gave women the moral edge — or simply the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority, or at least a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence, was more or less beyond debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our culture, and in polls are consistently less inclined toward war than men.

I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today. Mary Jo Melone, a columnist for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, wrote on May 7: "I can't get that picture of England [pointing at a hooded Iraqi man's genitals] out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, we were morally superior to them."

If that assumption had been accurate, then all we would have had to do to make the world a better place — kinder, less violent, more just — would have been to assimilate into what had been, for so many centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could become the generals, CEOs, senators, professors and opinion-makers — and that was really the only fight we had to undertake. Because once they gained power and authority, once they had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society, women would naturally work for change. That's what we thought, even if we thought it unconsciously — and it's just not true. Women can do the unthinkable.

You can't even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that the problem was that there just weren't enough women in the military hierarchy to stop the abuses. The prison was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski. The top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. And the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq since October was Condoleezza Rice. Like Donald H. Rumsfeld, she ignored repeated reports of abuse and torture until the undeniable photographic evidence emerged.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn't mean gender equality isn't worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman's right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It's just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman — a promotion, a college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the military — is by its very nature a victory for all of humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle — the struggle for gender equality — when in fact we have many more.

The struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance, cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no — not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low." It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

Modernity and its Discontents

Turning Points
Will the Modern Era Come Undone in Iraq?

By Robin Wright

Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page B01

"Beyond those frolicking soldiers, there is a certain cavalier attitude toward Arabs and Muslims that has created a sense that Arabs are guilty until proven otherwise," reflected Hisham Melham, a Washington correspondent for al-Arabiya television. So while America's ambitious postwar initiative to promote democracy in the "greater Middle East," -- which includes imaginative proposals, such as training 100,000 female teachers to instruct and empower girls by closing the gender gap -- will probably still make its debut at three international summits next month, it's unlikely to generate much traction anytime soon.

For now, America's ways have been discredited for many beyond America's borders. The reaction in some quarters is already ridicule. In the end, the most enduring impact of Iraq and the travesty at Abu Ghraib may be to set back the course of the Modern Era for years, even a generation or more.

With emotions so raw and expectations unquenched, I am now anxious about what will fill the vacuum. Disillusioned by what they see as the failure of the world's superpower to provide protections, Muslim societies in search of change may turn inward for sustenance and direction. There are few alternatives. Their own governments -- several of them America's allies -- have banned, imprisoned or exiled genuine opposition.

And that may not only widen the gap with the West, it could also spur an intense clash of civilizations, a prospect I had until very recently rejected. With the shared quest for empowerment, I thought it could be avoided.

But what I fear most is that frustration over Iraq and disgust with Abu Ghraib will give common cause and a rallying cry to far-flung Muslim societies. Until now, al Qaeda -- with its global reach -- has been the exception. Most Islamic groups have had local causes and operated at home or very nearby. And they've always been a distinct minority.

The worst-case scenario is that the Cold War of the 20th century is followed in the early 21st century by a very warm one, with no front lines, unpredictable offensives and a type of weaponry from which we're not yet sure how to protect ourselves. This time the majority could become involved, either by empathizing, sympathizing or actively participating in a cause they see as righting a wrong against them.

The unintended consequence of the Iraq experience could well produce a third generation of militants -- a cadre that didn't fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s or train in bin Laden's camps in the 1990s -- who will launch a conflict whose tactics, targets and goals will be even more amorphous. Their conflict will be more than an intensified or expanded war on terrorism. And, I fear, we'll be groping for a long time to figure out how to counter it -- and how to get back to finishing that final chapter of the Modern Era.

This is an important article. Wright's experience in the Middle East goes back three decades and she understands the region as well as any American reporter I can think of. The question she asks is the key question, and the genuine emotion she demonstrates in this piece shows that she understands the danger of getting it wrong.

Moving Ahead

Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Find Tepid Response in Pews
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Just four months after an alliance of conservative Christians was threatening a churchgoer revolt unless President Bush championed an amendment banning same-sex marriage, members say they have been surprised and disappointed by what they call a tepid response from the pews.

Most of the groups supporting the proposed federal constitutional amendment concede that it appears all but dead in Congress for this election year.

As Massachusetts prepares to become the first state in the nation to allow same-sex marriage on Monday, several high-profile conservatives say they are now pinning their hopes mainly on reaction to events there, betting that scenes of gay weddings in Provincetown may set off a public outcry.

In a last effort to publicize their cause before the impending wave of same-sex marriages, conservative Christian groups are organizing an emergency telecast to churches around the country, bringing African-American clergy members to Washington to lobby the Congressional Black Caucus, and sending members of a group for people who say they are formerly gay to make the rounds of Capitol Hill as well.

Still, the opponents of gay marriage say they are puzzling over why such a volatile cultural issue is not spurring more rank-and-file conservative Christians to rise up in support of the amendment. They are especially frustrated, they say, because opinion polls show that a large majority of voters oppose gay marriage.

"Our side is basically asleep right now," Matt Daniels, founder of the Alliance for Marriage, which helped draft the proposed amendment, said in an interview last week.

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said: "I don't see any traction. The calls aren't coming in and I am not sure why."

Some conservatives warn that the Christian leaders rallying behind the amendment may now face a loss of credibility. Their influence with evangelical believers is a subject of keen interest in Washington, in part because the Bush campaign has made ensuring their turnout at the polls a top priority.

"The danger from the beginning was that if you make your stand on the amendment and you don't win, then you may have undercut your position," said Richard Lessner, the executive director of the American Conservative Union and a former official of the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative group. "They have staked so much on it, they have put all these eggs in one basket and now they are going to lose."

Gay rights groups argue that social conservatives in Washington overestimated the level of anxiety about gay marriage among their supporters. "Other issues are far more important to most Americans, including evangelicals — issues like the economy, jobs, health care, the war in Iraq," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

The amendment's backers contend that the reason people are not responding more vocally is that many grass-roots conservatives do not yet understand how same-sex marriages affect them personally. Although gay groups argue that same-sex marriages involve only the couple marrying, many Christian conservative leaders argue that recognizing such marriages will undermine cultural support for traditional families.
....
But Mr. Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force suggested that watching gay weddings in Massachusetts would make people more accepting, not less.

"The minute you pose the question to somebody, `How will this hurt you?,' they never have an answer," he said. "As this discussion has gone on and people have seen these images of regular people thrilled to be married, it has dispelled the myth and a lot of the fear around same-sex marriage."

My gloss is here.

Tales from the Road

I have a new essay posted at The Village Gate. I expect this one to kick up some controversy. Comment over there or here.

Outside the Box

Knowledge of Abuse May Go Higher Yet

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A01

Army intelligence officers suspected that a Syrian and admitted Jihadist who was detained at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad knew about the illegal flow of money, arms and foreign fighters into Iraq. But he was smug, the officers said, and refused to talk. So last November, they devised a special plan for his interrogation, going beyond what Army rules normally allowed.

An Army colonel in charge of intelligence-gathering at the prison, spelling out the plan in a classified cable to the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, said interrogators would use a method known as "fear up harsh," which military documents said meant "significantly increasing the fear level in a security detainee." Their aim was to make the 31-year-old Syrian think his only hope in life was to talk, undermining his confidence in what they termed "the Allah factor."

According to the plan, interrogators needed the assistance of military police supervising his detention at the prison, who ordinarily play no role in interrogations under Army regulations. First, the interrogators were to throw chairs and tables in the man's presence at the prison and "invade his personal space."

But then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gantlet of barking guard dogs; there, the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogation, barking and loud music, according to Army documents. The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

A spokesman for Sanchez declined comment yesterday, and so it remains uncertain whether the plan was one of 25 requests for unusually tough interrogations that Army officials in Washington have said he approved between October and the present. All involved prolonged isolation of detainees, the officials said on Friday, adding that Sanchez last week issued an order barring requests for approval of particularly severe questioning tactics.

But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon -- suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed.

While the Army has blamed the physical abuses documented in soldiers' photographs on a handful of night-shift soldiers at Abu Ghraib who ignored rules on humane treatment, government officials and humanitarian experts say the order indicates the abuses could instead have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment that had been approved.

They suggest in particular that military intelligence officials may not only have improperly tolerated physical abuses, as stated in the Army's official internal report, but also that they may have deliberately set the stage for them. According to a hypothesis now being explored by members of Congress, this stage was set through a directed collaboration between two units of military police and intelligence officers, virtually unprecedented in recent Army practice.

The interrogation plan for the Syrian "clearly allows for a crossing of the line into abusive behavior," said James Ross, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch who reviewed it for The Washington Post.

What makes its wording so troubling, Ross added, is that it allows "wide authority for soldiers conducting interrogations. . . . Were the superior officer to agree to these techniques, it would be opening the door for any soldier or officer to be committing abusive acts and believe they were doing so" with official sanction.

Congressional testimony by Defense Department and Army officials over the past two weeks has highlighted the fact that the abuses in Iraq -- which mostly occurred in the last quarter of 2003 -- came at a time of heightened pressures in Washington for more robust intelligence-gathering, because of proliferating attacks on U.S. forces and the dwindling intelligence on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials who spoke on the condition that they not be named say that the hunt for data on these two topics was coordinated during this period by Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone, the top U.S. military intelligence official and long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The coincidence in timing has in turn prompted several lawmakers to say they intend to probe more deeply in coming weeks to determine whether the specialists and sergeants controlling the prison guard dogs and pulling hoods over prisoners' heads were in fact implementing policy directives instigated by Washington that may have set the stage for abuses.

"We've got no proof that a person in authority told them to do this activity," Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff, said on May 11.

We'll see. It's in the best interest of the Republicans for this to go away shortly. The congressional Repubs are trying to figure out how to spin this in their favor, but I think it plays against them in the long run--bad presidential tailcoats. In the next few weeks, look for them to be crafting ways to run against Bush on Iraq.

UPDATE: Rumsfeld Approved Iraq Interrogation Plan -Report

Sat May 15, 4:18 PM ET
By Jeremy Pelofsky

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a plan that brought unconventional interrogation methods to Iraq (news - web sites) to gain intelligence about the growing insurgency, ultimately leading to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the New Yorker magazine reported on Saturday.

The U.S. military has now prohibited several interrogation methods from being used in Iraq, including sleep and sensory deprivation and body "stress positions," defense officials said on Friday.

The Gray Zone

The New Hersh piece for your further shocked pleasure. Let's discuss.

The Lessons of History

The Springs of Fate
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: May 16, 2004

Oblivious of the consequences, the impetuous black sheep of a ruling family starts a war triggered by a personal grudge.

The father, a respected veteran of his own wars, suppresses his unease and graciously supports his son, even though it will end up destroying his legacy and the world order he envisioned.

The ferocious battle in the far-off sands spirals out of control, with many brave soldiers killed, with symbols of divinity damaged, with graphic scenes showing physical abuse of the conquered, and with devastatingly surreptitious guerrilla tactics.

Aside from dishing up a gilded Brad Pitt with a leather miniskirt and a Heathrow duty-free accent as he tosses about ancient insults, such as calling someone a "sack of wine," "Troy" also dishes up some gilded lessons on the Aeschylating cost of imperial ambitions and personal vendettas.

The Greek warriors question their sovereign's reasons for war, knowing that he has taken an incendiary pretext (Paris' stealing Helen from Sparta) to provide emotional acceleration to his real reasons — to settle old scores and forge an empire through war.

When Mars rushes into Achilles' soul in his battle with Hector, as Alexander Pope wrote in his translation of Homer's "Iliad," "the springs of fate snap every lock tight."

But Barbara Tuchman, in her book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam," observes that while the Trojans reject advice to keep that dagnab nag, as Rummy might put it, out of the walled city, "the feasible alternative — that of destroying the Horse — is always open."

Cassandra and others warned them. (The always ignored Cassandra is left out of the movie, but she must have sensed that was coming.)

"Notwithstanding the frequent references in the epic to the fall of Troy being ordained, it was not fate but free choice that took the Horse within the walls," Ms. Tuchman writes. " `Fate' as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man's expectation of himself."

A State Department official noted last week that if any of the Bush hawks had read Ms. Tuchman's dissection of war follies, her warning about leaders who get an "addiction to the counterproductive," they might have been less rash.

"The folly" in Vietnam, she writes, "consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world."

The Bush team, working on divine right, doesn't bother checking human precedent.

The president and secretary of defense boast about not reading newspapers, presumably because they don't want any contrary opinion or fact to shake their faith in the essential excellence of their policies.

It's astonishing the amount of stuff these guys don't bother to read, preferring to filter their information through their ideology. They certainly didn't read enough Iraqi history. They delayed looking at photos and reports on Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners. Paul Wolfowitz clearly wasn't bothering to read updated casualty reports.

The deputy defense secretary got cuffed around at a Senate hearing on Thursday when he admitted that he had first read a document that morning detailing questionable rules of engagement for confronting Iraqi prisoners.

As Ms. Tuchman notes, wooden heads are as dangerous as wooden horses: "Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs."

President Bush's Achilles' heel is his fear of wimpiness, and Dick Cheney and Rummy played on that, making him think he had to go to war once the war machine was revved up, or he would lose face and no longer be "The Man."

Maybe the president and vice president will catch "Troy" on their planes as they jet around to fund-raisers. But the antiwar message will probably be lost, except on the official who is both a snubbed Cassandra and a sulking Achilles, Colin Powell. "Wooden-headedness," Ms. Tuchman said, "is also the refusal to benefit from experience."

All That Jazz

U.S. Tries to Adapt as Options Dwindle
A series of policy reversals in Iraq shows strategies yielding to political realities.

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — With a new Iraqi government due in less than seven weeks, U.S. officials have been trying to build a future for the country on lofty concepts of constitutional democracy. In real time, though, a different principle increasingly guides the U.S. mission: Go with what works.

The Bush administration has junked one plan after another since last fall as it has groped its way, by trial and error, to a new order in Iraq. Officials have dumped a plan for grass-roots electoral caucuses, accepted former members of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's regime in the Iraqi government and military, and turned to the United Nations to design the caretaker administration — all despite earlier vows to do otherwise.

This week, American officials took another step sideways by signaling that they will give more power in a transitional government to members of the U.S.-picked Iraqi Governing Council, a group that is resented by many Iraqis and was omitted from earlier plans. The interim government is expected to take office when the United States transfers sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 and serve until the elections that are planned for next year.

The reversals by administration officials show that, again and again, "they've made compromises and adjustments on the ground, even though they inevitably conflict with their democratic vision," said Geoffrey Kemp of the Nixon Center in Washington. "They have an extraordinary capacity to do the practical."

U.S. officials acknowledged that the latest turnaround could undermine their goal of building a government that is acceptable to the Bush administration and legitimate in the eyes of Iraqis. But U.S. choices are increasingly limited by a shortage of time and of Iraqis willing to do business with Americans.

"We've got to get this thing moving, and we just don't have that many friends," said a longtime government expert on Iraq, who asked to remain unidentified. "That means we've got to husband the people who are with us in this. We are very weak."

The transitional government could hold a great deal of power, given Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's statement Friday that, if asked by the Iraqis, the U.S. military would leave.

The latest shift on the interim government, like earlier policy reversals, follows a pattern in which the U.S. adopts a sensible-sounding plan, then collides with reality.

Lakhdar Brahimi, a U.N. envoy asked to draw a blueprint for an interim government, had convinced U.S. officials to support an administration run by nonpolitical technocrats. The plan offered the possibility of preventing ambitious Iraqi politicians from shaping next year's elections in a way that would perpetuate their own hold on power.

Brahimi, an Algerian who served as U.N. envoy in post-Taliban Afghanistan, feared a transitional government tainted by politics would be questioned by Iraqis who felt excluded and could undermine the legitimacy of the elected government that is expected to follow next year.

The U.S. endorsed Brahimi's proposal. Soon, however, Iraqi groups allied with the United States were reminding the administration how much it depends on them.

Two leading Kurdish groups that are part of the current Iraqi Governing Council made clear that they would not support a caretaker government that did not include their leaders, which would be a heavy blow to U.S. goals in Iraq. Influence over predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq, which has delicate relations with neighboring countries that have restive Kurdish populations of their own, is seen as vital to U.S. objectives.
....
The administration made a major strategic shift last month when President Bush asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to have Brahimi draw up the blueprint for the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. After a long period of wariness of U.N. involvement in the Iraq issue, the prevailing view inside the administration now, one U.S. official said last week, is: "Whatever Lakhdar wants, Lakhdar gets."

Bush's comment that the next steps were up to Brahimi "was an astonishing remark, considering what a climb-down it was from where he had been before," said Graham E. Fuller, former vice chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council and a specialist on the Middle East.

But although the U.S. has made a series of practical compromises, it remains to be seen whether it will take the ultimate step of granting control over security to Iraqis, or to a combined authority of Iraqis and the U.N., Fuller said. Such a step would allow the Americans to disengage but would risk having the Iraqis install a government the White House finds unacceptable.

"In effect, the real question is how much the United States is willing to give up to get out in a peaceful way," said Fuller, who is now an independent analyst and writer. "I think that struggle is far from resolved within the administration."

Speaking of Emergences

Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A01

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.

"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.

His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.

U.S. officials emphasized that they could not imagine the new government requesting the departure of almost 170,000 troops when the security situation in the country is so dire. But the new government's ability to assert its authority after the occupation authority dissolves on June 30 has been a central question in the international consultations over the shape of the incoming government, with the United States under pressure to transfer as much political power as possible to the Iraqi people.

"The Iraqi government has to be in a position to govern, and that's why I mean that it has to be a break with the past, " French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said at a news conference in Washington after a preparatory meeting for next month's Group of Eight summit in Sea Island, Ga.

Barnier had been harshly critical of U.S. actions in Iraq before he arrived in Washington, seeming to equate U.S. and Israeli actions in an interview with Le Monde published on Thursday. "What strikes me is the spiral of horror, of blood, of inhumanity that one is seeing on all fronts, from Fallujah to Gaza and in the terrible images of the assassination of the unfortunate American hostage," he told the newspaper. "It all gives the impression of a total loss of direction."

French, Russian and Italian officials pressed yesterday for the new government to be given the authority to halt military actions by U.S. forces. Powell rejected that, saying the forces will remain under the command of an American who "has to be free to take whatever decisions he believes are appropriate to accomplish his mission."

Powell said the Bush administration will set up "political consultative processes" that will keep the interim government informed about military plans and actions. He said the "various liaison organizations and cells" will also give the Americans "full insight into any sensitivities that might exist within the Iraqi interim government concerning our military operations."

Fascinating. A policy decision coming out of the State Department. Whodathunkit.

Wishful Thinking

Fill in the Blanks

Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A22

THE BUSH administration's request to Congress for an additional $25 billion to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is a welcome recognition of budgetary reality. The continuing costs of war are so steep that the Pentagon can't rely, as it had hoped, on sleight-of-hand budgeting and raiding of other military accounts to get through the first months of fiscal 2005, which begins Oct. 1.

Until last week, the administration had insisted that it would delay submitting a bill until next year -- that is, after the election. The administration deserves credit for backing off this unwise plan in the face of mounting costs. The $25 billion it is seeking, though, is merely the first installment, which Congress should keep in mind while considering what other spending and tax cuts are affordable. As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, the administration's supplemental spending request early next year "will surely be much larger" than $25 billion.

Of more immediate importance, Congress should not write the blank check the administration is seeking. The administration wants the money dumped into a "contingent emergency reserve fund." Only broad categories of spending are outlined -- for example, as much as $14 billion for Army "operation and maintenance." The defense secretary would have authority to transfer the money "to any appropriation or fund of the Department of Defense or classified programs." Lawmakers would get five days' notice that money is being moved around.

The Pentagon needs flexibility in the midst of war. It's true, as well, that lawmakers seeking control can quickly degenerate into lawmakers larding a bill with pet projects. But lawmakers need, at the least, an opportunity to object to the transfer of funds, and complete, timely reporting of expenditures. The administration hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt: Congress gave it extraordinary latitude in emergency spending bills passed after Sept. 11, 2001, and it was repaid with spotty and misleading reporting.

Legislators on both sides of the aisle aren't acceding this time around. "This is a blank check," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Numerous other Republicans, including Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (Va.) and some of the panel's most conservative members, expressed similar concerns. "This lacks the kind of transparency that we'd like to have," said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).

The administration seems to be getting the message: Mr. Wolfowitz promised "to work with the Congress to make sure the Congress has the right degree of oversight and the troops have the right degree of flexibility." That will take a set-up significantly different than the administration's gambit.

Now What?

America Adrift in Iraq

Six weeks of military and political reverses seem to have left the Bush administration doing little more in Iraq than grasping at ways to make it past November's presidential election without getting American troops caught in a civil war. The lowering of the administration's expectations might be therapeutic if it produced a realistic strategy for achieving a realistic set of goals. Unfortunately, there appears to be no such strategy, only odd lurches this way and that under the pressure of day-to-day events. That pattern heightens the danger of an eventual civil war or anarchy, the two main things that American forces are ostensibly remaining in Iraq to prevent.

At times, the only unifying theme for Washington's policies seems to be desperation. American field commanders have now signed over the city of Falluja to former officers of the same Baathist army they came to Iraq to fight a little more than a year ago. The original plan of having American marines storm Falluja to avenge the mob murders of four private contractors there was not a wise idea. Handing over the town to these politically ambitious soldiers looks even more shortsighted. Subcontracting security and territory out to rival Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish warlords can only increase the risks of an eventual civil war.

In the diplomatic arena, White House aides are now beseeching the same United Nations they once belittled to rescue the transition, hoping that its special emissary, Lakhdar Brahimi, can somehow produce a plan for an interim government after June 30 that will rescue the nation-building efforts American occupation authorities have badly botched. This could be a positive development. If President Bush is now prepared to yield real authority to the U.N. over transition arrangements, for example, it may create a sense of legitimacy that Washington itself is no longer in any position to bestow. But at this point it may be beyond the U.N.'s power to convince a skeptical world that Iraq will regain any meaningful sovereignty after June 30 if the real decisions on security and reconstruction are still made by Americans.

Members of the discredited, American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council are maneuvering to ensure a share of power for themselves after the council is dissolved next month. This is a terrible idea, linking the new interim government to the occupation regime and prejudicing future elections by giving council members an unfair inside track. Yet the administration seems to be wavering, reluctant to upset the transition timetable by antagonizing any of its few remaining Iraqi allies.

If any of the goals Americans wanted to achieve in Iraq can still be salvaged, it will take more than fumbling crisis management driven by the needs of the Bush re-election campaign. A clear and coherent new course needs to be set without further delay, beginning with aggressive policy and personnel changes to undo the damage of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The U.N. should be given clear authority over transitional political arrangements after June 30, with Washington fully backing Mr. Brahimi's efforts to assemble a caretaker government of credible Iraqis who are not associated with the occupation and are willing to put aside their own political ambitions.

Important constitutional and political decisions should be deferred until elections can be held, but the interim government should assume administrative control over oil revenues and economic reconstruction projects and exercise sovereign authority over the Iraqi police and the courts. And if, as is now generally assumed, it consents to the continued presence of American occupation forces, it will also have to work out a new relationship with these troops, who will remain accountable to Washington, not Baghdad. This will go more smoothly if the administration stops subcontracting security to former Iraqi warlords and private companies and makes sure that all American troops are properly trained for the tasks assigned to them.

How the U.S. Can Get Out

By Yossi Alpher
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A23

• Once pure democratization is abandoned, consider reinstalling the Hashemites -- the post-British, pre-Baath rulers of Iraq who still reign in neighboring Jordan. Most of Iraq's neighbors would be relatively comfortable with such a regime, which could serve U.S. regional interests nicely. Because the Hashemites belong to none of Iraq's rival religious and ethnic groups, they could be more successful at ruling.

• Turn everything over to the United Nations -- to a far greater extent than the involvement being contemplated. This would be popular with the rest of the world and would involve minimal American loss of face. But it would not work without an ongoing and large American military presence, subject to U.N. command. Americans might still be killed in Iraq, but without American control. Moreover, if the United States could not retain an independent military force in Iraq it might be less capable of fulfilling some of its worthy regional objectives, such as coercing Iran and Syria into moderating their regimes and protecting U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.

• Recognize that Iraq without a brutal dictatorial regime holding it together by force is really three countries -- Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the Shiite south and center -- and create them. This is the most revolutionary approach -- but no more so than the idea of occupying Iraq in the first place. The dismantling of Iraq into its components could be lightly camouflaged as an interim federal measure. It might be good for Iraqis but could be dangerous for the region. It might create destabilizing irredentist incentives among the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Syria as well as the Shiites of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, and invite possible intervention by worried or opportunistic neighbors.

• Declare victory and withdraw. Save American (and coalition) lives and avoid more painful mistakes. Put future Saddam Husseins on notice that the United States has adopted a new "hit and run" strategy to remove them without the complications of extended occupation and nation-building. This may turn out in the long term to be the only realistic option.

• Status quo. Hunker down, try to reduce losses, invent new ways to "democratize" Iraq, outlast the prison scandal and hope things improve. This is probably where the United States will go in the short term, because both bureaucratically and ideologically it's the easy option.

But let's at least get some alternative concepts into the pipeline.

Citizenship

G. K. Nelson offers a brief refresher course in Civics 101, for those who need a reminder about the correct relationship between political power, the people and the Constitution of the United Sates of America. He correctly outlines the Framer's intentions for those relationships and shows how contemporary political discourse has distorted them:

I want to stress a very simple point here: Soldiers agree to support and defend the Constitution. Not the United States themselves, nor their elected officials, nor even the citizens of the nation, but the contract we, the people, have agreed will govern us. I constructed that last phrase quite carefully. We, the people, are not ruled by our elected officials, but by the document that circumscribes even their conduct.

Lately, George W. Bush and his cabinet officials have done an astounding job of disinformation, convincing those informed by tradition and nationalism that their critics are “demoralizing American troops and putting them at risk.” In fact, most of the administration’s critics are simply insisting that it act circumspectly, according to constitutional mandate. Far from putting troops at risk, the administration’s critics want to insure they are not deployed haphazardly, nor being used as pawns in the quest of an American empire that is clearly outside both national and international law. Calling this dissent “un-American” is either badly misinformed, deliberately misleading, or both.

Read it all. Mr. Nelson has a gift for both style and conciseness.

The Oilman Presidency

U.S. Oil Prices Hit 21-Year High

By Andrew Mitchell
Reuters
Friday, May 14, 2004; 12:30 PM

LONDON - Oil prices vaulted to a 21-year high Friday for fear that supplies already stretched by world economic expansion could be hit by an attack on Middle East oil facilities.

U.S. light crude touched $41.50 a barrel, an all-time high in the 21-year history of the New York Mercantile Exchange contract. London Brent stood 34 cents higher at $38.83 a barrel.

Warnings from a senior Russian official that deliveries from the world's second biggest oil exporter have hit a ceiling after many years of growth underlined the strain on global supply.

"Realistically, the capacity of suppliers does not today meet growing demand in places such as China or India. And you have to take into account the state of affairs in Iraq," Semyon Vainshtok, head of Russia's oil pipeline monopoly told Reuters.

Economic expansion in China, bolstered by renewed U.S. growth, has placed world supplies under increasing strain, leaving the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, bar top producer Saudi Arabia, pumping almost flat out to meet demand.

Oil's price surge has alarmed consuming nations worried that economic growth could suffer. So far the fears appear to have proved unfounded.

Allowing for inflation, prices are about half those during the oil price shock that followed the 1979 Iranian revolution. Crude averaged $78 a barrel during 1980 when adjusted for inflation to 2002 prices, according to oil major BP. Crude in money of the day averaged $35.69 a barrel in 1980, BP said.

"Apparently $40 crude isn't such a big deal after all, because no one seems to care in terms of consumption," said Katherine Spector, analyst at JP Morgan in New York.

Beach Reading

A READING LIST

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Following are links to reviews of a selection of books about the Bush administration.

'Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror'
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
Former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke's memoir made headlines — and it's a thumping good read.

'Allies: The U.S., Britain, Europe, and the War in Iraq'
By WILLIAM SHAWCROSS
A liberal internationalist ardently defends American and British actions in Iraq.

'American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush'
By KEVIN PHILLIPS
Kevin Phillips detects a pattern of secrecy and deception in four generations of the Bushes.

'America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy'
By IVO H. DAALDER AND JAMES M. LINDSAY
Two veterans of the Clinton National Security Council say that President Bush's foreign policy is nothing less than a "revolution."

'Bush at War'
By BOB WOODWARD
Bob Woodward's remarkable book is something akin to an unofficial transcript of 100 days of debate over war in Afghanistan.

'Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane'
By JOHN PODHORETZ
A columnist for The New York Post pays tribute to the president and also goes on the attack.

'Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror'
By LAURIE MYLROIE
Laurie Mylroie lashes out at the C.I.A. for refusing to agree that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

'Disarming Iraq'
By HANS BLIX
Hans Blix describes his attempt to steer between two intransigent governments, American and Iraqi.

'An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror'
By RICHARD PERLE and DAVID FRUM
Richard Perle and David Frum advocate getting tough with regimes that have been linked with terror.

'Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance'
By NOAM CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky argues that the Bush administration has built upon a long tradition of interventions carried out in the name of "counterterror."

'House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties'
By CRAIG UNGER
Craig Unger says that United States policy toward Saudi Arabia is shaped by the Bush family's financial ties.

'The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush'
By ANN GERHART
In Ann Gerhart's portrait, Laura Bush's independent intellectual life somewhat complicates her image as a traditional wife and mother.

'Plan of Attack'
By BOB WOODWARD
Bob Woodward's book lives up to the hype, offering by far the most intimate glimpse we have been granted of the secretive Bush White House.

'The Politics of Truth. Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's C.I.A. Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir'
By JOSEPH WILSON
Joseph Wilson recounts how he found himself at the center of a scandal embodying many of the core issues swirling around the Bush administration.

'The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush'
By PETER SINGER
The Princeton philosopher Peter Singer examines the ethics of the man he calls America's "most prominent moralist."

'The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill'
By RON SUSKIND
In this account, Paul O'Neill learned that political expediency trumps good policy in the Bush White House.

'The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush'
By DAVID FRUM
David Frum's contribution to the genre of White House memoirs by former speechwriters is often engaging, if not especially revealing.

'Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet'
By JAMES MANN
James Mann's group biography of President Bush's foreign policy advisers begins with Vietnam.

'Ten Minutes From Normal'
By KAREN HUGHES
In her memoir, Karen Hughes portrays George W. Bush as a man without flaws, but reveals little about his behavior in private.

'A Time of Our Choosing: America's War in Iraq'
By TODD S. PURDUM and the staff of The New York Times
Based on reporting from The Times, Todd S. Purdum has written a guide to understanding the causes, conduct and consequences of the war in Iraq.

'Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush'
By JOHN DEAN
In John Dean's account, the Bush White House is ruled by a pervasive culture of secrecy

Spirituality and the Shadow

I have posted a new contribution at The Village Gate, a theological reflection on the abuse scandals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of you have asked why I have been absent from that forum for a while. This essay took me a long time to develop, the subject is painful but it is one I felt called to address. If the subject is of interest to you, I hope you'll wander over and take a look.

Across the Pond

'Bush Link' Hurting Blair on Home Front
Polls Show Serious Damage to Standing, Fueling Speculation About Premier's Future

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page A20

LONDON, May 12 -- Tony Blair's unswerving support for President Bush over Iraq is doing extensive damage to the British prime minister's standing at home and could even lead to his resignation, according to politicians, analysts and polls.

Opposition politicians and critics within his ruling Labor Party are hammering away at the government over allegations that it failed both to properly investigate accusations that British troops have mistreated Iraqi prisoners and civilians and to raise with its U.S. allies accusations about American misconduct.

Blair's cabinet ministers have contradicted one another over how the government dealt with a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross about the abuses. And new polls indicate that the government could sustain big losses in elections for local government and the European Parliament next month as voters punish Blair over Iraq.

All of these problems have helped fuel a new round of speculation about Blair's future, with some colleagues in the House of Commons suggesting that he may feel compelled to step down this summer and turn over the reins to the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown. Blair's closest political intimates insist that will not happen.

Some politicians have advised Blair to distance himself publicly from President Bush, whose policies have never been popular here and who is now considered anathema to a broad cross-section of the British public. But people who know Blair well say there is no chance the prime minister will do so.

"He's been amazingly loyal" to Bush, Bruce George, chairman of the House of Commons defense select committee, said in an interview. "But the image that the media is creating of somebody who is a lickspittle -- who jumps high upon request -- is incredibly damaging to Blair."

George in many ways epitomizes the views of moderate Laborites who have backed Blair. A confirmed pro-American, George argues that the United States and Britain must hang tough in Iraq despite current problems. Yet he also contends that Blair must find a way to demonstrate that his views are being heeded in Washington.

"I know President Bush has his own problems, but I think it would be wise of the prime minister to be able to exercise a little bit publicly the influence he is having," George said. "And if he's not having much influence, then this would cast doubt on why he and the British are paying such a heavy price."

Blair: 'I will remain shoulder to shoulder with George Bush'
Andrew Grice, Political Editor, talks exclusively to the beleaguered Prime Minister

14 May 2004

A defiant Tony Blair said yesterday that he would not change course over Iraq and rejected the growing demands by Labour MPs for him to distance himself from President George Bush.

In his first interview since the crisis over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners caused speculation that he might stand down, the beleaguered Prime Minister told The Independent he was "frustrated" that Iraq was overshadowing what he called the Government's significant achievements on the economy, jobs and public services. He slapped down calls for him to "put some light" between Britain and the US, insisting that it would be exactly the wrong time to do so.

He dismissed "this idea that at the time of maximum difficulty you start messing around your main ally", adding: "I am afraid that is not what we are going to do.

"The most important thing is that we work with our coalition partners and sort it out, get the security situation right, so the Iraqis themselves are capable of doing the security, which is what they want to do. If we succeed in that, that is a huge bonus for the security not just of the region but of the world."

Mr Blair also rejected pressure from Labour MPs for him to show tangible gains from his close relationship with President Bush. He said that he would not "get into the business of seeing the relationship with America as a list of gains you have made. That is not the way I look at it."

He insisted the US was still committed to the "road map" for the Middle East peace process and raised the prospect of an American-backed aid plan for Africa being approved when Britain holds the chairmanship of the G8 nations next year.

The Prime Minister admitted the present crisis meant the Government needed to restate the case for its actions from first principles, a point pressed on him by several ministers at yesterday's meeting of the Cabinet. "We have got to deal with it," he said. "We have got to make sure the country ends up a better country as a result of removing Saddam. You have always got to bring people back to the basic choice.

"I just wish the Iraqi voices were heard more. I think people misunderstand what the Iraqis actually say to us. Of course they want the coalition forces to leave when it is right to do so, but they do not want the country to be left at the mercy of religious fanatics, former Saddam loyalists or terrorists. What they want is the legitimate transfer of sovereignty after 30 June, which we will do."

The Prime Minister said that if Iraqis were asked whether they wanted Saddam to return to power, "they would think you had gone crazy". He went on: "The most important thing is that we work with our coalition partners and sort it out, get the security situation in the right place so that the Iraqis themselves are capable of doing the security.

"I know we are going through a difficult time. People should just take a step back and look at the fundamentals. Despite the appalling stuff about prisoner abuse, we are trying with the majority of the Iraqi people to get the country on its feet. The people who are attacking coalition forces and assassinating construction and aid workers are trying to stop us. We have just got to make sure we prevail and succeed. It is in the interests of the world that we do. The alternative to that is not one we should contemplate." But the Prime Minister admitted the problems in Iraq were crowding out the domestic political agenda in the run up to the 10 June European and local elections.

I once thought that Tony Blair had political instincts that verged on being psychic. How he could have gone so wrong, when the wrong path was so obvious, is beyond me.

"Popular President"

Bad Signs For Bush In History, Numbers
Approval Rating Is Lowest of His Term

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A01

Six months before the November election, President Bush has slipped into a politically fragile position that has put his reelection at risk, with the public clearly disaffected by his handling of the two biggest issues facing the country: Iraq and the economy.

Bush continues to run a close race against Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in national polls, and his reelection committee has spent prodigiously to put Kerry on the defensive in the opening phase of the campaign, with some success. But other indicators -- presidential approval being the most significant -- suggest Bush is weaker now than at any point in his presidency.

Bush's approval rating in the Gallup poll fell to 46 percent this week -- the lowest in his presidency by that organization's measures. Fifty-one percent said they disapprove -- the first time in his presidency that a bare majority registered disapproval of the way Bush is doing his job. A Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday pegged Bush's approval at 44 percent, with 48 percent disapproving.

In contrast, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who were reelected easily, had approval ratings in the mid-50s at this point in their reelection campaigns and remained at or above those levels into November. But Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter had fallen to about 40 percent in their approval ratings at this point in their races and, after continuing to fall even further, lost their reelection bids.

Given the volatility of events, the amount of time before Election Day and hurdles Kerry must overcome, Bush has plenty of time to recover. His advisers said that they recognize the weakness in the president's current standing but that he is far more resilient politically than his detractors suggest. They also argue that in this climate, perceptions of Kerry will be just as important as perceptions of the incumbent, and they have poured tens of millions of dollars into television ads attacking Kerry as a politician lacking clear convictions.

Frank Newport of the Gallup Organization pointed out that, in Gallup's surveys, no president since World War II has won reelection after falling below 50 percent approval at this point in an election year. "Looking at it in context, Bush is following the trajectory of the three incumbents who ended up losing rather than the trajectory of the five incumbents who won," he said.

But Newport was quick to add that history may be an uncertain guide, given the volatility of events in Iraq. "There is the potential for this to be a disruptive year that doesn't follow historical patterns," he said.

This president's problems are linked directly to deteriorating perceptions of how he is dealing with Iraq and the economy. A solid majority of Americans now disapprove of his handling of both. As a result, his overall approval rating has declined. But Bush's advisers said his standing in October, not May, is what counts.

Matthew Dowd, senior adviser for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said Bush occupies a unique position compared with former presidents. In past campaigns, Bush's predecessors have either been above 53 percent in approval by the time of the election and been reelected, or have been below 46 percent and been defeated.

"We're in that place where no presidential reelection campaign has ever been," he said. "People say this is a referendum on the president. It's both a referendum on the president but also a referendum on the alternative."

At this point in the race, strategists in both parties said, a president's approval rating may be a clearer and more reliable measure of where the contest stands than head-to-head matchups with the other party's candidate. They say the public first makes a judgment about the incumbent and then looks more seriously at the challenger.

Douglas Sosnik, White House political director during Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, told the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Phoenix last week that an incumbent's eventual vote is linked more directly to his approval rating than to any other measure and thus serves as a leading indicator early in the race. Dowd, too, has said repeatedly that the president's eventual vote percentage will track closely with his approval rating.

Sosnik argued that the danger for Bush is that negative perceptions of his performance could harden over the next 90 days, and that even improvements on the ground in Iraq or in the economy will not save him by that point in the campaign.

But Sosnik said yesterday that the extraordinary uncertainty that surrounds the campaign could render historical patterns moot. "Perhaps we are in a new era in politics where the lessons of history no longer apply," he said in an e-mail message. "Based on President Bush's current job approval rating, he had better hope so."

Blood and Oil

A Crude Shock
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 14, 2004

So far, the current world oil crunch doesn't look at all like the crises of 1973 or 1979. That's why it's so scary.

The oil crises of the 1970's began with big supply disruptions: the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war and the 1979 Iranian revolution. This time, despite the chaos in Iraq, nothing comparable has happened — yet. Nonetheless, because of rising demand that is led by soaring Chinese consumption, the world oil market is already stretched tight as a drum, and crude oil prices are $12 a barrel higher than they were a year ago. What if something really does go wrong?

Let me put it a bit differently: the last time oil prices were this high, on the eve of the 1991 gulf war, there was a lot of spare capacity in the world, so there was room to cope with a major supply disruption if it happened. This time there isn't.

The International Energy Agency estimates the world's spare oil production capacity at about 2.5 million barrels per day, almost all of it in the Persian Gulf region. It also predicts that global oil demand in 2004 will be, on average, 2 million barrels per day higher than in 2003. Now imagine what will happen if there are more successful insurgent attacks on Iraqi pipelines, or, perish the thought, instability in Saudi Arabia. In fact, even without a supply disruption, it's hard to see where the oil will come from to meet the growing demand.

But wait: basic economics says that markets deal handily with excesses of demand over supply. Prices rise, producers have an incentive to produce more while consumers have an incentive to consume less, and the market comes back into balance. Won't that happen with oil?

Yes, it will. The question is how long it will take, and how high prices will go in the meantime.

To see the problem, think about gasoline. Sustained high gasoline prices lead to more fuel-efficient cars: by 1990 the average American vehicle got 40 percent more miles per gallon than in 1973. But replacing old cars with new takes years. In their initial response to a shortfall in the gasoline supply, people must save gas by driving less, something they do only in the face of very, very high prices. So very, very high prices are what we'll get.

Increasing production capacity takes even longer than replacing old cars. Also, major new discoveries of oil have become increasingly rare (although in my last column on the subject, I forgot about two large fields in Kazakhstan, one discovered in 1979, the second in 2000).

Petroleum engineers continue to squeeze more oil out of known fields, but a repeat of the post-1973 experience, in which there was a big increase in non-OPEC production, seems unlikely.

So oil prices will stay high, and may go higher even in the absence of more bad news from the Middle East. And with more bad news, we'll be looking at a real crisis — one that could do a lot of economic damage. Each $10 per barrel increase in crude prices is like a $70 billion tax increase on American consumers, levied through inflation. The spurt in producer prices last month was a taste of what will happen if prices stay high. By the way, after the 1979 Iranian revolution world prices went to about $60 per barrel in today's prices.

Could an oil shock actually lead to 1970's-style stagflation — a combination of inflation and rising unemployment? Well, there are several comfort factors, reasons we're less vulnerable now than a generation ago. Despite the rise of the S.U.V., the U.S. consumes only about half as much oil per dollar of real G.D.P. as it did in 1973. Also, in the 1970's the economy was already primed for inflation: given the prevalence of cost-of-living adjustments in labor contracts and the experience of past inflation, oil price increases rapidly fed into a wage-price spiral. That's less likely to happen today.

Still, if there is a major supply disruption, the world will have to get by with less oil, and the only way that can happen in the short run is if there is a world economic slowdown. An oil-driven recession does not look at all far-fetched.

It is, all in all, an awkward time to be pursuing a foreign policy that promises a radical transformation of the Middle East — let alone to be botching the job so completely.

Dysfunctional Government

Hastert rips White House
Caucus applauds as Speaker voices his frustrations
By Jonathan E. Kaplan

Republicans on the Hill are so frustrated with the White House that when Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) criticized the administration at a House GOP meeting last week, the caucus burst into applause.

The meeting was only the latest sign in an accumulating body of evidence that lawmakers are unhappy with the way the administration treats them.

One GOP lawmaker at the caucus meeting said Hastert “expressed outright dismay with the White House staff for the way the transportation bill had been handled. They did not give the priority necessary to the issue in resolving it as the Speaker had wanted. It’s in absolute limbo.”

A rank-and-file lawmaker said: “Hastert was frustrated and disappointed that he had not been dealt with openly and fairly and given accurate information. He was not so much speaking to the conference as he was speaking for the conference.”

The catalog of GOP complaints against the executive branch is long. A senior Republican House member said his colleagues frequently disparqage the White House communications team, particularly on articulating its policy in Iraq.

He said there was frustration about a lack of White House effort in pushing the FSC/ETI bill, designed to replace corporate subsidies with tax breaks.

And in March, the Speaker told The Hill that the White House was doing a poor job selling its economic policies.

The are also widespread complaints among lawmakers that the administration’s message machine is out of sync. When, for example, the House passed a bill in March raising penalties for violence against pregnant woman, the White House dimished the political impact by trumping it with the announcement that it would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, even though key House leaders were not on board.

Behind the scenes, the White House is making it clear that it is less concerned about grumbling among members of Congress than with winning hearts and minds beyond the Beltway. It believes that by this measure, the president’s support is solid.

What this tells me is that for all intents and purposes, we have no government right now. The war between State and Defense has crippled the executive branch and Congress is completely dysfunctional, irrespective of its ongoing battle with the White House. This is not good news.

Shattering Incompetence

Strategic decision
Growing sentiment in the Army: Support our troops, impeach Rumsfeld.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal

May 13, 2004 | Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Bush in February of torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. From the dearth of detail Rumsfeld has recalled of that meeting one can deduce that Bush gave no orders, insisted on no responsibility, asked not to see the already commissioned Taguba report. If there are exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to mention them. If he received orders from the commander in chief, he neglected to implement them. One must presume Bush gave none. He acted as he did when he received the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" -- complacent and passive. Bush had asserted that the PDB required no action because it did not include exact times and places of attack; in the Taguba report, however, word about torture was highly specific.

In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld explained that the government asking the press not to report news of Abu Ghraib "is not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news." War is peace.
....
In 1992, Gen. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, awarded the prize for his Strategy Essay Competition at the National Defense University to Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap for "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." His cautionary tale imagined an incapable civilian government creating a vacuum that draws a competent military into a coup disastrous for democracy. The military, of course, is bound to uphold the Constitution. But Dunlap wrote: "The catastrophe that occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were wrong. It's too late for me to do any more. But it's not for you." "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" is being circulated today among top U.S. military strategists.

If you have a couple of minutes, read Dunlap's essay. It's chilling.

World Press Review

The Pro-War Press Breaks With Bush

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, May 13, 2004; 7:42 AM

In the ranks of journalism, they were the coalition of the willing: the newspapers that supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, he says the war "is no longer about freedom or terror. It's about one man's political agenda, and dead American soldiers are obviously not about to get in his way. I thought it was about more than that. I was wrong."

An Antipodean reader pointed out the Murdoch editorial to me yesterday. If Bush has lost Murdoch, he's lost the election.

Compare and Contrast

Bush Ratings Fall Amid Iraq Woes

NEW YORK, May 12, 2004

President Bush's overall approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, 44 percent, in the latest CBS News poll, reflecting the weight of instability in Iraq on public opinion, despite signs of improvement in the economy.

Two weeks ago, 46 percent of Americans approved of the job President Bush was doing. On April 9, his approval rating was 51 percent.

American's opinion of Mr. Bush's handling of the economy is also at an all-time low, 34 percent, while 60 percent disapprove, also a high of the Bush presidency. Increasing employment is seemingly not affecting Americans' view of Mr. Bush's economic policy.

Just as startling, the poll finds that for the first time a clear majority of Americans disapprove of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, believe the United States is not in control of the country and think U.S. troops should turn over power to Iraq as soon as possible, even if the country is unstable.

The highest figure ever recorded, 64 percent, say the result of the war in Iraq has not been worth the cost in lives or money. Only 29 percent, the lowest figure yet, believe the war has been worth it. And just 31 percent of Americans now say the United States is winning the war.

"The public is just very unhappy with what has happened in the war," said Robert Shapiro, a professor of American politics and public opinion at Columbia University. "We are talking about perceptions of the war that are akin to the public’s perception on Vietnam, or lower."

Iraq Prison Scandal Hits Home, But Most Reject Troop Pullout
76% Have Seen Prison Pictures; Bush Approval Slips

Released: May 12, 2004

Summary of Findings

Public satisfaction with national conditions has fallen to 33%, its lowest level in eight years, in the wake of revelations of prisoner abuse committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. President Bush's overall job approval rating also has dropped into negative territory: 44% approve of his job performance, while 48% disapprove.

But confidence in Bush relative to Kerry has eroded on major issues like Iraq and the economy. Bush holds a slight 44%-41% edge as the candidate better able to make wise decisions in Iraq policy; in late March, he held a 12-point advantage (49%-37%). At the same time, Kerry has opened up double-digit leads on both the economy and jobs. Kerry's advantage on the key domestic issue of health care is even larger. Currently, 51% say Kerry would be better able to improve the health care system, while just 29% say that about Bush.

The Pew story has nice charts. I love nice charts. They are the picture of truth slowly seeping into the national consciousness.

Photo Op as Policy

Rumsfeld Pays Surprise Visit to Iraq
Defense Chief Says Trip No 'Inspection Tour' of Abu Ghraib Prison

By Josh White
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 13, 2004; 8:40 AM

BAGHDAD, May 13 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived in Iraq Thursday afternoon in a surprise visit to reach out to U.S. soldiers and to meet privately with his top generals in the field.

The brief trip comes amid controversy in Washington about allegations of prisoner abuse and questions about leadership within the military's chain of command.

Rumsfeld said the whirlwind trip is not intended to quell Iraqi concerns about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Baghdad, though he said he plans to speak to members of the Coalition Provisional Authority as well as those in charge of U.S. detainee operations in Iraq to hear their thoughts on the situation.

"We're not on an inspection tour," Rumsfeld told reporters Wednesday afternoon aboard an Air Force E-4B jet on his way to Kuwait, where he switched planes before heading to Baghdad. "If anyone thinks I'm there to throw water on a fire, they're wrong."

He is accompanied by his advisors and by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, the Navy's Inspector General, is on the trip as well.

Rumsfeld's specific itinerary on the ground in Iraq on Thursday was kept secret due to security concerns, but he said he planned to meet with troops during the day. Rumsfeld arrived at the Baghdad airport about 1 p.m. (5:00 a.m. EDT).

Rumsfeld took a Chinook helicopter from the Baghdad airport and then convoyed to a nearby palace--adorned in marble and ornate chandeliers--that has been converted into a Combined Joint Task Force 7 operations center. Rumsfeld met with several top generals, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and was briefed on the status of general activities in Iraq as well as specific issues related to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Rumsfeld's trip coincides with a series of Pentagon inquiries into the treatment of detainees at U.S. facilities around the world, in light of the abuses discovered at Abu Ghraib.

As if. File this one with the other photo ops of Preznit Turkee, Preznit Flightsuit and Jerry Bremer's designer suits and combat boots. This misadministration only does image and they are under the impression that image and substance are the same thing. Silly fools.

Gulag Archipelago

Secret US jails hold 10,000

13.05.2004
By ANDREW BUNCOMBE and KIM SENGUPTA

WASHINGTON - Almost 10,000 prisoners from President George W. Bush's so-called war on terror are being held around the world in secretive American-run jails and interrogation centres similar to the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison.

Some of these detention centres are so sensitive that even the most senior members of the United States Congress have no idea where they are.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Cuba, this American gulag is driven by the pressure to obtain "actionable" intelligence from prisoners captured by US forces.

The systematic practice of holding prisoners without access to lawyers or their families, together with a willingness to use "coercive interrogation" techniques, suggests the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib now shocking the world could be widespread.

Iraq has become a holding pen for America's prisoners from 21 countries, according to a report from the international campaign group Human Rights Watch.

The US military is keeping prisoners at 10 centres, most of which were used by Saddam Hussein's regime. The total in January was 8968, and is thought to have increased.

Prisoners are being held from, among other countries, Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Yemen.

A report in the Washington Post has revealed that up to 8000 Iraqi prisoners are being held at Abu Ghraib, the jail west of Baghdad also known as the Baghdad Central Correctional Facility or BCCF, and nine other facilities inside Iraq.

It is impossible to know for sure because the Pentagon refuses to provide complete information.

Officials say prisoners range from those accused of petty crimes to detainees believed to be involved in attacks on US forces, though it is increasingly clear that many hundreds are simply Iraqi civilians swept up in raids by US and British soldiers.

Military and diplomatic sources say a number of detainees were taken to Iraq from Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, the US military still holds 300 or more prisoners at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at facilities in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Asadabad.

What is bothering me this morning is that if this information were widely known, I'm not sure it would bother anyone. That the US is now operating the world's largest gulag should give Americans pause, but we have to learn about it from a British paper.

Improvisation

Iraqi Politicians Press for Wider Role
U.S.-Appointed Leaders Seek New National Council With Expanded Powers

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 12 -- Politicians on Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council are pushing for significant changes in the interim government being crafted by a U.N. envoy, posing a new complication to the Bush administration's plan to relinquish civilian administrative powers here in 50 days.

With the Iraqi Governing Council set to dissolve on June 30, members said they wanted to form a new national council in order to retain influence in the interim government. The members want a new council to share power with the government outlined by Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy for Iraq. Brahimi's blueprint envisions a caretaker executive branch consisting of a president, a prime minister and a 25-member cabinet of specialists, according to U.S. and U.N. officials.

Senior U.S. officials responsible for Iraq policy oppose the Governing Council's idea. But council members said they would not abandon the proposal because they said the country's interim constitution gives them the authority to form the transitional government that will replace them. They added that proposals advanced by Brahimi, a veteran diplomat whose role has the endorsement of the Bush administration, are not binding.

"We shall listen to the ideas of Mr. Brahimi, but his ideas are not compulsory for us," said Izzedine Salim, the current holder of the council's rotating presidency. "The Governing Council is the one responsible for forming the government."

In contrast with Brahimi's proposed executive branch, which emphasizes technical expertise over political connections, Governing Council members are calling for another body in the interim government that would be composed of representatives of various political groups. Such a body would give the new government credibility, they insist, and it would provide an essential check on the executive.

"The new government needs political weight," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a large Shiite Muslim political party. "The major, important political parties and currents should be there."

Brahimi has said he supports the idea of convening a large national conference in July to select an advisory body that would have limited powers. But Brahimi opposes forming such an entity before June 30 or granting it lawmaking powers, as some in the Governing Council are seeking, a U.N. official involved in the transition said. Brahimi has proposed an interim government of technical experts whose powers would largely be limited to the day-to-day operations of the country and preparing for national elections early next year, the U.N. official said.

"It should be a caretaker government," the official said.

Senior U.S. officials said Wednesday they supported Brahimi's proposal. The officials also said it would be impossible to hold a national conference before the planned June handover.

"That won't happen. It can't be done," a senior official with the U.S. occupation authority said. "It's simply not possible to have a conference in the time frame before the 30th of June."

Governing Council members are still debating the contours of a new entity, but they have said they want a body that would enjoy wide authority, including control over the budget and the right to appoint new cabinet members. "It will be a sort-of safety valve," Abdel-Mehdi said. "Since we will not have an elected government, it will assure people that we have controlled results and we are not going for a dangerous adventure."
....
The difference of opinion about the formation of a new council threatens to cause a confrontation between the occupation authority and many of its closest political allies in Iraq at a time when both sides deem cooperation crucial to the success of the handover of power. But so far, neither side appears to be budging.

There is little time remaining to resolve the matter. U.S. officials have said they want members of the interim government to be named by June 1, to give them a month to prepare for their new jobs.

It is not yet clear who will determine membership in the new government. Brahimi has said he will not decide and instead will consult with the occupation authority and the Governing Council. U.S. and U.N. officials said it was likely that Brahimi would weigh names in collaboration with members of the Governing Council and two senior representatives of the U.S. government: L. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator of Iraq, and Robert D. Blackwill, a senior official with the National Security Council who is in Iraq to work on the political transition. Officials close to the process said the choice of president and prime minister also will involve consultations with the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.

Brahimi, Bremer and Blackwill have spent the past week meeting with various groups of Iraqis, from tribal sheiks to provincial leaders, in an attempt to identify promising candidates. Members of the Governing Council have been holding similar meetings.

Senior U.S. officials involved in the process said they had not reached any conclusions on who would be nominated. Brahimi also has not made any decisions, his spokesman said.

"It's a process that's evolving minute by minute, hour by hour," said the spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi. "We have more questions than answers at this stage."

In other words, there is no way that they can come up with an imposed solution which is going to have any kind of legitimacy and avoid chaos. I hear elsewhere that Brahimi is looking to wash his hands of the matter and get out.

Creation Myths

I have a new entry up at The Village Gate. Actually, I'm just introducing an essay by a dear friend of mine in which he challenges us to rethink religious questions by changing the metaphorical framing we use. It's a delightful piece--he's a graceful writer--and I invite you to take a look if such questions are of interest to you.

Manipulating the Consumer

The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America
Ruhl Lecture on Ethics delivered at The University of Oregon

By John S. Carroll, Editor, Los Angeles Times

Several years ago, at the Los Angeles Times, we too had an insurrection. To outsiders the issue seemed arcane, but to the staff it was starkly obvious. The paper had published a fat edition of its Sunday magazine devoted to the opening of the city's new sports and entertainment arena, called the Staples Center. Unknown to its readers — and to the newsroom staff -- the paper had formed a secret partnership with Staples. The agreement was as follows: The newspaper would publish a special edition of the Sunday magazine; the developer would help the newspaper sell ads in it; and the two would split the proceeds. Thus was the independence of the newspaper compromised — and the reader betrayed.

I was not working at the newspaper at the time, but I've heard many accounts of a confrontation in the cafeteria between the staff and the publisher. It was not a civil discussion among respectful colleagues. Several people who told me about it invoked the image of a lynch mob. The Staples episode, too, led to the departure of the newspaper's top brass.

What does all this say about newspaper ethics? It says that certain beliefs are very deeply held. It says that a newspaper's duty to the reader is at the core of those beliefs. And it says that those who transgress against the reader will pay dearly.

The commitment to the reader burns bright at papers large and small. Earlier today, we honored Virginia Gerst with the Payne Award. Working at the Pioneer Press in the suburbs of Chicago, she was ordered to publish a favorable review of a restaurant that didn't deserve it. Her publisher, eager to get the restaurant's advertising dollars, insisted. Unwilling to mislead her readers, Virginia
Gerst lost her job after twenty-seven years at the paper.

It was never my privilege to know Robert Ruhl, who died in 1967 after years of service in Medford. I am certain, though, that at least part of the reason he is remembered with such respect is that he was, in the end, a servant of the reader.

I suspect, too, that he would look favorably on those who took a stand recently at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Pioneer Press and other newspapers where the reader had been treated cavalierly.

And he would be vexed, I suspect, by another aspect of today's journalistic landscape.

All across America, there are offices that resemble newsrooms, and in those offices there are people who resemble journalists, but they are not engaged in journalism. It is not journalism because it does not regard the reader — or, in the case of broadcasting, the listener, or the viewer — as a master to be served.

To the contrary, it regards its audience with a cold cynicism. In this realm of pseudo-journalism, the audience is something to be manipulated. And when the audience is misled, no one in the pseudo-newsroom ever offers a peep of protest.

If Mr. Ruhl were here, I feel certain he would not approve.

Toward a Mature Society

The Perils of a Righteous President
Faith without doubt leads to moral arrogance

... Faith without doubt leads to moral arrogance, the eternal pratfall of the religiously convinced. We are humble before the Lord, Bush insists. We cannot possibly know His will. And yet, we "know" He's on the side of justice—and we define what justice is. Indeed, we can toss around words like justice and evil with impunity, send off mighty armies to "serve the cause of justice" in other lands and be so sure of our righteousness that the merest act of penitence—an apology for an atrocity—becomes a presidential crisis. "This is not the America I know," Bush said of the torturers, as if U.S. soldiers were exempt from the temptations of absolute power that have plagued occupying armies from the beginning of time.

As the nation suffered the disgrace of Abu Ghraib last week, I traveled through Turkey and Jordan—our staunchest Islamic allies in the region—and talked with moderate politicians, businesspeople and military officials. Most found Bush's moral talk either duplicitous or fatuous. "Liberate Iraq? Rubbish," said a prominent Jordanian businessman. "You occupy Iraq for the strategic and economic benefits. You are building the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad. Halliburton and Bechtel are running everything, at enormous profits. And then I watch Bush on Al-Arabiya and all I see is his sense of moral superiority. He brings democracy and freedom to the barbarians. But who are the barbarians? Even before the Abu Ghraib pictures, we saw male soldiers searching Iraqi women and humiliating Iraqi men by forcing their heads to the ground."

The President's moral convictions are, no doubt, matters of true faith—and the Jordanian businessman is a member of an authoritarian establishment with much to lose if Islamic radicals or, faint chance, democrats take charge. But Bush's moral certainty almost seemed delusional last week in the vertiginous realities of Iraq. A distressing, uninflected righteousness has defined this Administration from the start, and it hasn't been limited to the President. Bush's overheated sense of good vs. evil has been reinforced by the intellectual fantasies of neoconservatives like I. Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, who serve Bush's two most powerful advisers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It was neoconservatives who provided the philosophical rationale for the President's gut response to the evildoers of Sept. 11: a grand crusade—yes, a crusade—to establish democracy in Iraq and then, via a benign tumbling of local dominoes, throughout the Middle East. Those who opposed the crusade opposed democracy. Those who opposed the President coddled terrorists (according to recent G.O.P. TV ads). They were not morally serious.

But democracy doesn't easily lend itself to evangelism; it requires more than faith. It requires a solid, educated middle class and a sophisticated understanding of law, transparency and minority rights. It certainly can't be imposed by outsiders, not in a fractious region where outsiders are considered infidels. This is not rocket science. It is conventional wisdom among democracy and human-rights activists—and yet the Administration allowed itself to be blinded by righteousness. Why? Because moral pomposity is almost always a camouflage for baser fears and desires. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives share a primal belief in the use of military power to intimidate enemies. If the U.S. didn't strike back "big time," it would be perceived as weak. (Crushing the peripheral Taliban and staying focused on rooting out al-Qaeda cells wasn't "big" enough.) The President may have had some personal motives—doing to Saddam Hussein what his father didn't; filling out Karl Rove's prescription of a strong leader; making the world safe for his friends in the energy industry. The neoconservatives had ulterior motives too: almost all were fervent believers in the state of Israel and, as a prominent Turkish official told me last week, "they didn't want Saddam's rockets falling on Tel Aviv." At the very least, they were hoping to intimidate the Palestinians into accepting Ariel Sharon's vision of a "state" without sovereignty.

Abu Ghraib made a mockery of American idealism. It made all the baser motives—oil, dad, Israel—more believable. And it represents all the moral complexities this President has chosen to ignore—all the perverse consequences of an occupation.

What's true for individuals is also true for societies: true spiritual and emotional maturation begins when you become willing to admit to your shadow side and to integrate that knowledge into your self-understanding. Only then can wisdom begin, and wisdom needs the fertile soil of humility in order to grow.

Awful Consistency

An Afghan Gives His Own Account of U.S. Abuse
By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: May 12, 2004

KABUL, Afghanistan, Wednesday, May 12 — A former Afghan police colonel gave a graphic account in an interview this week of being subjected to beating, kicking, sleep deprivation, taunts and sexual abuse during about 40 days he spent in American custody in Afghanistan last summer. He also said he had been repeatedly photographed, often while naked.

"I swear to God, those photos shown on television of the prison in Iraq — those things happened to me as well," the former officer, Sayed Nabi Siddiqui, 47, said in the interview on Sunday at his home in the village of Sheikho, on the edge of the eastern town of Gardez.

His account could not be independently verified, but members of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission accompanied a reporter during the interview and said his story matched the one given to them last fall, shortly after his release and long before the abuse at the Abu Ghraib near Baghdad came to light.

The commission, which was set up by the transitional government of President Hamid Karzai in 2002 and receives money from the United States Congress and other foreign donors, has in recent months received 44 complaints against various actions by American forces.

Those include several on the abuse of detainees who have alleged rough and degrading treatment, including being stripped naked and doused with cold water, even before the pictures of prisoner abuse emerged in Iraq. Afghan military and police officials say they have heard similar stories from detainees and their families.

After queries to the Pentagon about Mr. Siddiqui's case, the United States embassy in Kabul issued a statement early Wednesday, saying, "The U.S. military has launched an immediate investigation."

It quoted the American ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, as saying, "To the best of our knowledge this is the first time anyone in the military chain of command or the United States Embassy has heard of this alleged mistreatment."

But a member of the human rights commission said members had mentioned details of Mr. Siddiqui's case, apparently the first complaint of sexual abuse from a detainee in Afghanistan, to American military officials here last year.

Mr. Siddiqui says that he was wrongly detained on July 15 after he reported police corruption and that someone then accused him of being a member of the Taliban.

He showed a Defense Department letter detailing his stay, as detainee BT676, in a jail at the Bagram air base outside Kabul from Aug. 13 to 20, 2003, and his release after it was decided that he posed "no threat to the U.S. Armed Forces or its interest in Afghanistan."

Mr. Siddiqui said he had also been held for 22 days at the American firebase at Gardez, where United States infantry and Special Forces are based, and where he said the worst abuses occurred. He then spent 12 days at the Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan, and finally about a week in Bagram, he said.

He described being humiliated repeatedly during his detention in all three places.

"They were taunting me and laughing and asking very rude questions, like which animal did I like having sex with, and which animal do you want us to bring in for you to have sex with," he said of his time in Gardez.

"They were mimicking the sounds of a sheep, a cow and a donkey," he said, "and asking which one I would like to have sex with. They kept insisting, and they were kicking me so much that eventually I said a cow."

"And they made insults about our women," he added. He said the American interrogator, through a translator, had taunted him, asking: "Do you know that your wife and daughter are prostitutes now?"

"The Americans were asking this and the translators were translating, and they were all laughing," he said. "And I was in my full police uniform with insignia showing my rank."

More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"

"There was a translator there," Mr. Siddiqui went on, "and I said, `Maybe because I am away from home.' "

The fascination with homoeroticism and sodomy probably says something fairly ugly about us as a people. The fact that sexual abuse is a default setting for us both fascinates and repels me. More reflection needs to be applied to this.

Blessed

I have been hanging on every word written by Kurt Vonnegut for nearly forty years, God help me. He's still cranking out a regular column. At age 81, I hope I'll be able to still find the keyboard.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

Lies

Protecting the System

Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A22

THE BUSH administration still seeks to mislead Congress and the public about the policies that contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Yesterday's smoke screen was provided by Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Mr. Cambone assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration's policy had always been to strictly observe the Geneva Conventions in Iraq; that all procedures for interrogations in Iraq were sanctioned under the conventions; and that the abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison were consequently the isolated acts of individuals. These assertions are contradicted by International Red Cross and Army investigators, by U.S. generals overseeing the prisoners, and by Mr. Cambone himself.

Start with adherence to the Geneva Conventions, which Mr. Cambone's boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has publicly derided as outdated and which the administration acknowledges are not being adhered to at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison. Mr. Cambone said yesterday that the administration considered all detainees at Abu Ghraib to be covered by either the Third or Fourth Geneva Convention. But he also confirmed a statement by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the current commander at Abu Ghraib, that techniques officially available for interrogation have included hooding, sleep deprivation and stress positions. An official report by the Red Cross confirms that those techniques as well as harsher ones have been used systematically, and not only at Abu Ghraib. The report says they have been employed by tactical military intelligence units all over Iraq, including at a permanent facility at the Baghdad airport. According to Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an Army report says that the policy for Iraq specifies that permission of the commanding general can be sought for the use of "sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs."

The Third Geneva Convention, which applies to prisoners of war and captured insurgents, says that they "may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind" as a way to make them answer questions. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which covers people under foreign occupation, says "no physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against" them, "in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties." A senior Army official, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, testified that the Army believes its "harsh" techniques are allowed under these provisions. The Red Cross, which is designated by the conventions as their monitoring organization, believes otherwise: That the U.S. practices are in violation was one of the principal findings of its February report. U.S. forces were systematically breaking the conventions in five major ways, the report found, three of which concerned the treatment of prisoners under interrogation. It described the abuse as "standard operating procedure."

Mr. Cambone made no attempt to reconcile his claim of U.S. adherence to international law with the actual procedures his office has helped to promulgate. Instead he insisted that the crimes at Abu Ghraib -- which, though they went beyond the established practices, were based on the same principles -- were the responsibility of the guards and their commanders, and not the intelligence-gathering system. In this he was contradicted by the witness sitting next to him, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who repeated the conclusion of his own investigation: that the practices were introduced by intelligence interrogators who were improperly placed in command of the guards.

These contradictions go to the heart of this scandal and its impact. The sickening abuse of Iraqi prisoners will do incalculable damage to American foreign policy no matter how the administration responds. But if President Bush and his senior officials would acknowledge their complicity in playing fast and loose with international law and would pledge to change course, they might begin to find a way out of the mess. Instead, they hope to escape from this scandal without altering or even admitting the improper and illegal policies that lie at its core. It is a vain hope, and Congress should insist on a different response.

Fact v. Spin

The Abu Ghraib Spin

Published: May 12, 2004

The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

The senators called one witness for the morning session, the courageous and forthright Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who ran the Army's major investigation into Abu Ghraib. But the Defense Department also sent Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, to upstage him. Mr. Cambone read an opening statement that said Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it and that any deviation had to come from "the command level." A few Republican senators loyally followed the script, like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who offered the astounding comment that he was "more outraged by the outrage" than by the treatment of prisoners. After all, he said, they were probably guilty of something.

These silly arguments not only obscure the despicable treatment of the prisoners, most of whom are not guilty of anything, but also ignore the evidence so far. While some of the particularly sick examples of sexual degradation may turn out to be isolated events, General Taguba's testimony, and a Red Cross report from Iraq, made it plain that the abuse of prisoners by the American military and intelligence agencies was systemic. The Red Cross said prisoners of military intelligence were routinely stripped, with their hands bound behind their backs, and posed with women's underwear over their heads. It said they were "sometimes photographed in this position."

The Red Cross report, published by The Wall Street Journal, said that Iraqi prisoners — 70 to 90 percent of whom apparently did nothing wrong — were routinely abused when they were arrested, and their wives and mothers threatened. The Iraqi police, who operate under American control and are eventually supposed to help replace the occupation forces, are even worse — sending those who won't pay bribes to prison camps, and beating and burning prisoners, according to the report.

The Red Cross said most prisoners were treated better once they got into the general population at the larger camps, except those who were held by military intelligence. "In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel," the report said.

It was alarming yesterday to hear General Taguba report that military commanders had eased the rules four times last year to permit guards to use "lethal force" on unruly prisoners. The hearing also disclosed that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, had authorized the presence of attack dogs during interrogation sessions. It wasn't very comforting that he had directed that these dogs be muzzled.

These practices go well beyond any gray area of American values, international law or the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Cambone tried to argue that Mr. Rumsfeld had made it clear to everyone that the prisoners in Iraq were covered by those conventions. But Mr. Rumsfeld's public statements have been ambiguous at best, and General Taguba said that, in any case, the Abu Ghraib guards had received no training. All the senators, government officials and generals assembled in that hearing room yesterday could not figure out who had been in charge at Abu Ghraib and which rules applied to the Iraqi prisoners. How were untrained reservists who had been plucked from their private lives to guard the prisoners supposed to have managed it?

These are failures at the level of policy and the responsibility accrues to the executive branch, Rumsfeld and Bush.

The Eyes of the World

In Shameful Photos, the Specter of Failure

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; 7:00 AM

The latest photographs of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison are being greeted with a chorus of "shame" in the international online media. In the infamous images, online commentators see racism, imperialism and sadism. Even supporters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq sense a profound defeat looming for the United States and its ambitions in the region.

The notion that the abuses were the work of a small group of enlisted personnel is almost universally rejected.

Lousy Religion Reporting

New bloggerBiblio has spent a day chasing down the background of NPR Religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty (a story Atrios surfaces last week.)

Ms. Hagerty appears to have plenty of violations of NPR ethical guidelines. Go take a look at Biblio's research, and then you might want to give both NPR ombud Jeffrey Dworkin and the general manager of your local NPR affiliate a letter of complaint.

In the week since Atrios raised the issue, it appears that none of the complaints addressed to Dworkin have received any response. Complaints directed to local stations are liable to receive a prompter response.

The Investigatory Reports

The NYT has a fairly tough story, but it is buried inside the A section.

Red Cross Found Abuses at Abu Ghraib Last Year
By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: May 11, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 10 — In a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison last October, Red Cross inspectors were so unsettled by what they found that they broke off their visit and demanded an immediate explanation from the military prison authorities.

As recounted in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, prisoners were being held "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," apparently for several days.

The inspectors were also able to document the exact sort of behavior that has produced a firestorm over the last two weeks: "acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the heads for prolonged periods — while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position."

The report also said military intelligence officers had confirmed the inspectors' impression that those "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."

The 24-page report, completed in February, appears to contradict several statements by senior Pentagon officials in recent days concerning how and when the military learned of potential abuses in Iraq, how they reacted to reports of abuses and how widespread the practices might have been.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said Monday that the organization's president, Jakob Kellenberger, complained about the prison abuses directly to top Bush administration officials during a two-day visit to Washington in mid-January when he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Antonella Notari, the chief spokeswoman for the international committee in Geneva, suggested that Mr. Kellenberger had raised the issue with senior administration officials because the situation had not improved sufficiently after the prison authorities in Baghdad had been informed of the criticisms.

"If it's a serious problem and it persists, we would make use of our contacts with higher-ranking people," she said.

Ms. Notari said the February report had been based on private interviews with prisoners of war and civilian internees during the 29 visits the committee's staff had conducted in 14 places of detention across Iraq between March 31 and Oct. 24, 2003.

The Red Cross document, which also covers abusive behavior at prisons run by the British armed forces, was first disclosed by The Wall Street Journal.

The report said that as far back as May of last year, the Red Cross reported to the military about 200 allegations of abuse, and that in July it complained about 50 allegations of abuse at a detention site called Camp Cropper. The latter complaint included one case in which a prisoner reported having been deprived of sleep, kicked repeatedly and injured, and had a baseball tied into his mouth. Medical examinations supported the prisoner's account.

The report called some of the abuses "tantamount to torture."

Mr. Powell's spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said Monday that "when such information came to us, as it did over the course of time, late last year and early this year, we certainly took note of the information."

One would hope they did a little more than "take note."

The WaPo fronts the story:

Mistreatment Of Detainees Went Beyond Guards' Abuse
Ex-Prisoners, Red Cross Cite Flawed Arrests, Denial of Rights

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 10 -- Problems in the U.S.-run detention system in Iraq extended beyond physical mistreatment in prison cellblocks, involving thousands of arrests without evidence of wrongdoing and abuse of suspects starting from the moment of detention, according to former prisoners, Iraqi lawyers, human rights advocates and the International Committee for the Red Cross.

U.S.-led forces routinely rounded up Iraqis and then denied or restricted their rights under the Geneva Conventions during months of confinement, including rights to legal representation and family visits, the sources said.

In a report in February, the Red Cross stated that some military intelligence officers estimated that 70 percent to 90 percent of "the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake." Of the 43,000 Iraqis who have been imprisoned at some point during the occupation, only about 600 have been referred to Iraqi authorities for prosecution, according to U.S. officials.

The Red Cross study, posted Monday on the Wall Street Journal's Web site, concludes that the arrest and detention practices employed by U.S.-led forces in Iraq "are prohibited under International Humanitarian Law."

Now, facing international outcry over photographs of prisoner abuse less than two months before the planned handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, U.S. officials plan to dramatically reduce the number of Iraqis in military custody, from more than 8,000 to fewer than 2,000, according to people with knowledge of the issue. The release will send legions of prisoners, many of them angry and hardened by their incarceration, home to Sunni Muslim-dominated parts of north-central Iraq where resistance to the U.S. occupation has been fiercest.

American detention tactics have turned Iraqis such as Satae Qusay, a kebab chef, against an occupation they once supported. Qusay said he was arrested in June while visiting the house of his brother, a former low-ranking Baath Party official, and did not see an attorney during his subsequent three-month detention in a fog-bound prison camp in the southern city of Umm Qasr. There, he said, he was forced to endure a shower of soldiers' tobacco juice, eat food off a dirty floor and urinate on himself when he was prohibited from using bathrooms.

"They freed us from an oppressor," said Qusay, 40. "But now I think they came to laugh at us."

Prisoners and relatives of detainees interviewed for this article produced prison release papers, Red Cross visitation documents or identification bracelets as evidence of incarceration over the past year. The descriptions of abuse during arrest or imprisonment could not be independently verified.

The focus on abuse inside the Abu Ghraib prison and other U.S.-run detention facilities has obscured broader problems that began well before Iraqis arrived at the facilities, according to lawyers and rights advocates.

Here's a link to the ICRC report (large PDF) if you want to follow along while Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba testifies before the SASC this morning.

Awaiting the Grownups

The Mixed-Up Politics of the Deficit
By ROBERT B. REICH

...The Fed is now widely expected to raise short-term rates at its meeting next month, and the yield on 10-year Treasury notes has been inching higher. But if the market were behaving rationally, long-term rates would already be far higher in anticipation of an interest-rate crunch. Who in their right mind would lend dollars today, to be repaid in 3 or 5 or 10 years, without insisting that debtors pay substantial interest?

John Kerry's economic plan — rolling back the Bush tax cut for people earning more than $200,000 and re-establishing strict rules requiring that any new spending be offset with other spending cuts or new revenue — is based on this view. Yet so far, the vast increase in government borrowing hasn't affected long-term rates that much.

Capital markets do not always behave rationally, of course. Perhaps bond traders just aren't paying attention to the gathering storm. Maybe they've been distracted by the Fed's low short-term rates. Maybe they're Republicans.

Another explanation is more consistent with economic and political rationality. Bill Clinton, and now John Kerry, have taught the bond traders on Wall Street an important and comforting lesson: no matter how big deficits grow under Republican presidents, eventually a Democratic president will come along to clean up the mess. That confidence is helping to keep long-term rates down, despite the current out-of-control deficits.

More than a decade ago, the federal deficit was more than $300 billion — about 5 percent of the economy. President Bill Clinton and Congressional Democrats reversed this profligate trend by slashing spending and raising taxes. The strategy was hard to swallow, and not at all popular — not a single Republican member of Congress voted for Mr. Clinton's 1993 budget. Some of us in the president's cabinet thought he had gone further than he needed to; there was too little money left for education, job training and health care.

But there is no disputing that the plan had the intended effect. Deficits that had ballooned under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were brought firmly under control. Bond traders breathed great sighs of relief. Wall Street beamed.

Mr. Kerry has wisely and responsibly decided to take the same route. If he becomes president next January, he will inherit a budget mess not unlike that which Mr. Clinton inherited. And Mr. Kerry has already committed himself to following Mr. Clinton's lead and imposing fiscal restraint. He has scaled back some of his more ambitious spending plans, and has somberly told his Democratic audiences that the country must get its fiscal house in order before addressing the larger needs of society.

Undoubtedly, Mr. Kerry's resolve has contributed to the bond traders' calm. In the event that Mr. Kerry is not elected and President Bush gets a second term, the fiscal picture will become substantially worse. But bond traders will still take comfort in the knowledge that another Democrat will eventually come along to fix it.

You see, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in the economic equivalent of Nixon going to China: Republican presidents can get away with utterly irresponsible fiscal policies because there's no one to their right who will make too much trouble for them. Democratic presidents can get away with fiscal austerity because there's no one to their left who will make their life too difficult. But the irony should not be missed. John Kerry's promise of fiscal responsibility might just save George Bush's presidency.

The Home Front

via yankee doodle, the hardest working man in the Blogosphere:

Rural Onawa man posts number of troops killed in Iraq
By Tammy Sue Struble, Journal correspondent

ONAWA, Iowa -- There it is, along Monona County Road K45 heading north from Blencoe to Onawa -- a number. A big number hanging from a mailbox post. A roadside reminder of soldiers who have given their lives in the war in Iraq.

The first thing each morning, Ken Mertes of rural Onawa boots up his computer and checks the number of casualties. Some days he changes the mailbox sign two or three times a day.

Mertes never thought it would go this far.

"It just happened," he says. "I didn't have a conscious thought of continuing it. It was just a statement for the moment, at first."

Before Memorial Day 2003 Mertes painted a sign with the number of soldiers who had died in the war -- just to help make people aware. After a few days, he made a new number and stapled it to the painted sign. Then he decided to make numbers and change them. He didn't really intend to continue keeping track. But then someone stole the sign. That's when Mertes became determined.

He created larger numbers that were easier to change. Now, each number is 10 by 14 inches and spans the bottom of his mailbox.

Vietnam veteran

Mertes joined the U.S. Navy after he graduated from school at 17 and stayed for three years. He had some schooling and worked as an electronic technician on radar navigation on planes. He served on one tour in Vietnam. Of that tour he says, "I have no recollection of the (historical) events. I wasn't interested in protests or dwelling on it."

Retired after 32 years with Qwest Communications, Mertes, known as "Ma Bell," was the only "Bell" employee in town for some time.

Mertes keeps busy as a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. He is also president of the local 7103 Communications Workers of America. Occasionally, he finds himself on trips to Washington, D.C.

"I think the number I put up there -- the dead -- is what it takes to make people to remember the dead. We also need to remember and mourn the wounded -- the seriously wounded that get sent home," he said.

With that, he headed to his garage and picked up the number '4.' He then changed the digits on his mailbox from 760 to 764.

For every casualty, he explained, there may be as many as 10 soldiers injured.

Mertes concluded, "This is a war. This is the result. People can make up their own minds if it's worth it. These are just the facts -- the numbers."

The Greatest Failure in a Generation

I listen to CNN's "Crossfire" most afternoons, not for enlightenment, but to hear the pure and distilled RNC talking points for the day. They were delivered today by the always loathsome Robert Novak. I'm going to make a project out of this today because this particular spin point is going to get people killed to the extent that it gains any currency. The transcript isn't up yet so I'm going on my memory.

With regard to the Abu Ghraib scandals, the new meme is that we (and the media) are over-reacting. It wasn't that bad, so a few people got humiliated, nobody ever died of humiliation.

Well, people are going to die if we fail to understand exactly how serious this scandal is. These photographs, and those and the videos which will inevitably follow, have revealed the most serious moral and military crisis in this country since the Viet Nam war, and the rest of the world knows it, even if we don't. The rest of the planet has never been much taken by claims of American exceptionalism. We are very alone in consuming that particular Kool Aid.

Michael Berube nails it:

For Abu Ghraib presents us with a real moral crisis, and by "real" I mean "as opposed to the moral crisis posed by oral sex in the Oval Office." (Which, by the way, was sleazy and colossally stupid, though not quite unconstitutional. For the record, I oppose oral sex in the Oval Office, and I promise to work to stop it whenever it occurs. But I mention this only because Lieberman's denunciation of Clinton from the Senate floor is what got him a spot on the Gore ticket and a shot at national prominence in the first place.) To put this another way: this is the worst military and geopolitical scandal in a generation, and anyone who doesn't realize it just isn't worth taking seriously-- about this or anything else.

In the eyes of the rest of the world, the US has lost what ever moral credibility it had in the wake of the launching of this unnecessary war. Those who are already laboring to bring death and destruction to our shores have been given additional incentive to be about their work.

The Bush misadministration is fscking up by the numbers in the way they are dealing with this scandal. I am delighted by their political miscalculation, but filled with dread for the way they are recruiting terrorists for OBL and all of the other shadowy organizations that have sprung up in the last year.

The rape photos are already out there. TalkLeft tracked them down in Australia. I'll leave the link to the photos with her. You'll need a strong stomach. The news organization Jeralyn found has a squicky agenda, but reports that these photos are being traded around like baseball cards among the soldiers in Iraq, which I find quite believable. I also find it quite credible that these photos are already showing up on porn sites, but I'm not going to go look for them, it isn't my hobby. There is controversy about whether or not these photos are authentic, based on the uniforms of the purported troops: there was considerable flak at the beginning of this war that both American and Brit troops deployed with jungle camo rather than desert. The photos show jungle camo.

In short, there is utterly no way to overstate the importance of this scandal's significance. The rest of the planet gets it, even if we don't. There is now graphic evidence that the USA is no better than the base tyrants it has so often decried while frequently supporting them. The photos that CBS and The New Yorker have already published are sufficiently inflammatory.

Within the last week, the US Office of the Solicitor General argued before the Supreme Court that the Executive Branch can be trusted, on faith not to violate the Geneva conventions. Up is down, stop is go. The world has stopped making sense.

UPDATE:

The photos are controversial as to source. They've been widely discredited in The Mirror because of the uniforms involved. I'm not enough of a connoisseur to judge if they are posed. The uniform issue I can speak to: both the Brits and us deployed both the woodland and desert uniforms into Iraq. You can see the former in some of the photos included in the Hersh set. Our troops were under-equipped when deployed, and the wrong uniform was the least of the issues.

The larger issue is that if these aren't the real photos, the real ones are waiting in the wings. None of this invalidates that larger point. We are stuck in a sink of moral depravity so big that we'll be lucky to work our way out of it in a generation

Disillusionment

Conservatives Restive About Bush Policies
Fresh Initiatives Sought On Iraq, Domestic Issues

By Dana Milbank and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01

After three years of sweeping actions in both foreign and domestic affairs, the Bush administration is facing complaints from the conservative intelligentsia that it has lost its ability to produce fresh policies.

The centerpiece of President Bush's foreign policy -- the effort to transform Iraq into a peaceful democracy -- has been undermined by a deadly insurrection and broadcast photos of brutality by U.S. prison guards. On the domestic side, conservatives and former administration officials say the White House policy apparatus is moribund, with policies driven by political expediency or ideological pressure rather than by facts and expertise.

Conservatives have become unusually restive. Last Tuesday, columnist George F. Will sharply criticized the administration's Iraq policy, writing: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts." Two days earlier, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative supporter of the Iraq war, wrote: "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now."

The complaints about Bush's Iraq policy are relatively new, but they are in some ways similar to long-standing criticism about Bush's domestic policies. In a book released earlier this year, former Bush Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill described Bush as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" and said policymakers put politics before sound policy judgments.

Echoing a criticism leveled by former Bush aide John J. DiIulio Jr., who famously described "Mayberry Machiavellis" running the White House, O'Neill said "the biggest difference" between his time in government in the 1970s and in the Bush administration "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], [Bush communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics."

Michael Franc, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, said the criticism by O'Neill, Will and Kagan has a common thread: a concern that the administration is "using an old playbook" and not coming up with bold enough ideas, whether the subject is entitlement reform or pacifying Iraq. Conservative intellectuals "are saying, 'Don't do things half way,' " he said.

"It's the exhaustion of power," said a veteran of conservative think tanks who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Ideology has confronted reality, and ideology has bent. On the domestic side, it has bent in terms of the expansion of the government embodied in the Medicare prescription-drug law. On the foreign policy side, it has bent because of what has transpired in the last few weeks in Fallujah."

A Bush spokesman quarreled with that notion, saying there has been no let-up in Bush's policymaking. "We are marching ahead," said the spokesman, Trent Duffy, pointing to Bush's plans for community-college-based job training, space exploration and modernizing health records. "He's continuing to push the policies that have made the country better and stronger."

This is disingenuous. The issue isn't whether the policies are fresh. The issue is "do the policies work? On Iraq, the budget and trade deficits, the economy, unemployment, they manifestly don't. That's the issue.

Running the Numbers

Poll shows majority want UK troops to pull out
By Nigel Morris

10 May 2004

Independent/MOP poll
Should British troops pull out of Iraq by 30th June?
55 per cent: YES
28 per cent: NO
17 per cent: DON'T KNOW

Voters support the withdrawal of all British troops from Iraq by the end of next month by a majority of two to one, a poll for The Independent reveals today.

With ministers considering sending more soldiers to Iraq to quell the insurrection against Allied forces, the survey reflects growing public discontent about government policy on the war and occupation.

The poll comes at a turbulent time for the Government, rocked by allegations over the mistreatment of Iraqi captives. Yesterday, in a further embarrassment for Britain and America, it emerged that their ambassadors to Switzerland had been summoned by the Swiss government to demand respect for international law in the treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

Acting as the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare, the Swiss Foreign Minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, said she felt "abhorrence and rage" over the disclosures of prisoner abuse.

She told the SonntagsBlick weekly: "It violates international humanitarian law. I am very concerned. These are occurrences that we cannot keep silent about."

Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, faces an uncomfortable Commons appearance today when he makes a statement on Iraq. It is bound to be dominated by challenges about the alleged abuse of prisoners of war and suggestions that the Government was alerted to human rights concerns about their treatment as long as a year ago.

His appearance comes after a torrid weekend for the British forces patrolling Basra in southern Iraq. Calm was restored to the city last night after violence left at least two Iraqis dead and seven British troops injured.

Poll: Americans split on worthiness of war
Majority of respondents say Iraq is going badly

Monday, May 10, 2004 Posted: 9:25 AM EDT (1325 GMT)
(CNN) -- A Gallup Poll released Friday shows Americans almost evenly split on the question of whether it was worth going to war in Iraq, with a majority feeling the situation there is going badly.

In a January survey, 61 percent said they approved of the Bush policy and 36 percent disapproved.

Bread and Circuses

First Trial Set to Begin May 19 in Abuse in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: May 10, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 9 — A 24-year-old military policeman from Pennsylvania will be court-martialed here on May 19, the first American soldier to face trial in the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, military officials said Sunday. In an extraordinary gesture to address outrage over the abuse scandal, the military is permitting broad public access to the trial and will invite the Arab news media.

The policeman, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who American officials contend took some of the photographs of Iraqi prisoners that captured the abuse as it unfolded, is one of seven American soldiers to face criminal charges and the first to receive a trial date. There were indications that Specialist Sivits had reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in exchange for leniency at sentencing.

The decision to allow a wide level of public access to Specialist Sivits's court-martial appears to reflect a conclusion by American commanders that the abuse and the photographs have severely damaged the credibility of the United States enterprise in Iraq and the country's reputation in the Middle East. While American courts-martial are not usually conducted in secret, it is unusual for the military justice authorities to make them easily accessible to the public.

"It is our endeavor and it is our desire to make the upcoming courts-martial as available as possible," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy chief of operations, said at a briefing here. "We try to make these types of proceedings as transparent as possible. It is not our intention to hide anything."

Six of the seven American soldiers facing trial are believed to still be in Iraq, and General Kimmitt said they would probably be tried here. Any sentences meted out would probably be served in the United States, he said.

In anticipation of intense interest from around the world, General Kimmitt said military officials might hold the trial in Baghdad's convention center, a spacious building with several auditoriums, in the heavily fortified area known as the Green Zone.

Military officials declined to comment in detail about the case, but the speed with which Specialist Sivits's trial was announced, and the type of proceedings he faced, suggested that he had reached a deal with prosecutors that could include testifying against his comrades.

Specialist Sivits, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company from Maryland, is charged with maltreatment of detainees, conspiracy to maltreat and dereliction of duty.

Under a proceeding known as a special court-martial, the maximum penalties he could receive would be one year of confinement, a reduction in grade, a forfeiture of pay for 12 months and a fine. He could also be discharged from the Army for bad conduct.

But military law experts said prosecutors could have tried Specialist Sivits in a general court-martial, where he could have faced stiffer penalties. In a general court-martial, Specialist Sivits could have faced a slightly longer term of confinement and a dishonorable discharge, a more severe form of expulsion than that for bad conduct.

Criminal defense attorney Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft comments:

Shades of the Roman Colliseum and gladiators? The first court martial trial of a U.S. soldier charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners will be that of Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., who served as part of the now infamous 372nd Military Police Company. The trial will take place May 19 at the Baghdad Convention Center and will be open to the public and the media.

Sounds to us like this young man is being fed to the lions. We're not in any sense condoning his actions, whatever they might have been...we assume the Government chose his case first because it was the easiest for them to prove....but we do object to him being held out as a sacrificial lamb to show the world the U.S. will punish these offenders to the fullest extent possible if at the same time it precludes an investigation and airing of the higher-ups along the chain of command.

Questions Without Answers

The scorching new Sy Hersh article is on the link. This isn't going away.

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq “was not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.”) In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that “there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. “What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6”—full colonel—“with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements,” Rowell said. “He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment.” At the time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. “Ryder was a man in a no-win situation,” Rowell said. “As provost marshal, if he’d turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm’s way—because he’s also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive.”

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. “He’s not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,” a retired Army major general said of Taguba. “He’s the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.”

Gen. Taguba was re-assigned last Friday. Intel Dump's Phil Carter finds this benign. I rather suspect it is the end of a career.

Most of the left blogosphere has noted that Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown and Root have been directed to turn off the email to the troops in theater for the next 90 days. You are free to speculate on why.

Pressing the Flesh

As Insurgency Grew, So Did Prison Abuse
Needing Intelligence, U.S. Pressed Detainees

By Scott Wilson and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01

Second of three articles

BAGHDAD, May 9 -- In the fall of 2003, U.S. officials watched anxiously as a potent guerrilla resistance rose across broad swaths of northern and central Iraq. Insurgents assassinated diplomats, detonated car bombs and mounted daily hit-and-run strikes on U.S. soldiers. Fearful of reprisals, Iraqis shrank from collaborating with an occupation authority that appeared powerless to reverse the tide of violence and lawlessness.

Less than two weeks after 1,000 pounds of explosives demolished U.N. headquarters here on Aug. 19, driving the organization from Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was warden of the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists. Miller's mission in Iraq signaled new zeal to organize an intelligence network that could hit back at the insurgents, but through unorthodox means.

"He came up there and told me he was going to 'Gitmoize' the detention operation," turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq. "But the difference is, in Guantanamo Bay there isn't a war going on outside the wall."

The worsening war outside the walls of the U.S. prison system in Iraq had a direct bearing on the abuses that occurred inside the facilities, according to Iraqi and American sources. Through the summer and fall of 2003, when detainees at Abu Ghraib prison suffered mistreatment now notorious throughout the world, the security situation in Iraq and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners ran parallel courses, both downward.

U.S. officials were under mounting pressure to collect wartime intelligence but were hobbled by a shortage of troops, the failure to build an effective informant network and a surprisingly skilled insurgency. In response, they turned to the prison system. Today, as outrage spreads over images of abused prisoners, the practices inside the prisons have the potential of strengthening the insurgency that they were designed to defeat.

Interviews with U.S. officials, former prisoners and Iraqis who have supported the occupation, along with findings outlined in the Army's internal investigation of prison abuses, make clear that there was a connection between changes in conditions inside the prisons and the struggle to control an increasingly hostile country.

Last fall, U.S. military leaders cast about for ways to generate more information on the insurgency after focusing their early intelligence efforts on the hunt for Saddam Hussein, his top lieutenants and the weapons of mass destruction that were the Bush administration's rationale for going to war.

The urgency of the problem prompted U.S. officials to accept a new intelligence service they once opposed because of its similarity to Hussein's. It also led to more widespread detentions of Iraqis. The strategy was reflected in the rising number of Iraqis arrested for questioning across the country in the late fall. At Abu Ghraib alone, the number of prisoners rose from 5,800 in September to 8,000 five months later, when Karpinski received an official admonishment.

The harsh treatment of prisoners was seen by some of the perpetrators as consistent with Miller's recommendation for "setting conditions" for interrogations by military intelligence officers. Although abuses of prisoners have been denounced as aberrations, former detainees describe humiliation, pain and discomfort as commonplace.

The treatment could also be traced to other outside pressures on the American jailers. Pre-interrogation punishment at Abu Ghraib was dispensed by reservists embittered by their prolonged stay in Iraq and plagued by frequent attacks from outside the prison walls, according to the Army investigation conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.

"Psychological factors, such as the difference in culture, the soldiers' quality of life, the real presence of mortal danger over an extended time period, and the failure of commanders to recognize these pressures contributed to the perversive atmosphere that existed at Abu Ghraib," Taguba wrote.
....
As the prisons filled up and the frequency of rioting and escapes increased, U.S. troops turned to force to keep order, particularly at Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper. Sanchez, the commanding general, dispatched Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder to study the situation.

In a Nov. 5 report, Ryder recommended that military police and military intelligence should operate independently, as Army regulations require. He also said "security detainees," the term for those alleged to pose a threat to U.S. forces, should be put under the watch of one brigade.

But two weeks later, Abu Ghraib's military police units were placed under the military intelligence command. Taguba suggested in the report that Miller favored the move by recommending that "the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the detainees."

In a news conference here Saturday, Miller said, "There was no recommendation ever by this team -- the team that I had here in August and September -- that recommended that the MPs become actively involved in interrogation, in the interrogation booth."

The prison system's new "Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," issued Oct. 12, came in the wake of Miller's recommendations. According to the Taguba report, the "numerous photos and videos portraying detainee abuse by Military Police personnel" were dated soon after the policy was adopted, sometime between October and December.

As the new policies took hold, the Abu Ghraib compound was suffering the effects of the war outside its walls.

"We were being fired on at Abu Ghraib every single night, with mortars, RPGs and small-arms fire," Karpinski said. "

U.S. military commanders changed tactics again in an attempt to corral the widening insurgency. In late November, U.S. forces began using 2,000-pound bombs and precision-guided missiles for the first time since the war ended.

U.S. officers described the effort as an attempt to intimidate the guerrillas, and it marked a shift back to large-scale tactics Sanchez had suspended two months earlier. U.S. generals said the large strikes were made possible by a major improvement in their ability to wage war: better intelligence.

Since then, uprisings in the Shiite south and the area north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle have inflamed much of the country. The evidence of abuse inside Abu Ghraib has shaken public opinion in Iraq to the point where it may be more difficult than ever to secure cooperation against the insurgency. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, acknowledged last week that winning over Iraqis before the planned handover of some sovereign powers next month had been made considerably harder by the photos.

Last week, denunciations and threats rang out from mosques across Iraq during Friday prayers. Powerful clerics ridiculed the U.S. occupation authority's central justification for the war -- that it would bring justice to a country suffering under dictatorship -- and warned or reprisals if those who carried out the torture were not tried by an independent court.

"Saddam didn't claim that he was for freedom and equality," Moqtada Sadr, the rebellious Shiite cleric now commanding a thousands-strong anti-U.S. militia, told hundreds of worshippers in the southern city of Kufa. "I call for humanitarian organizations to change this prison into a humanitarian establishment, and to try the criminals in honest courts as soon as possible. Otherwise, we'll do the necessary actions in ways that you don't expect."

The photos associated with this Post story are hard to see, but not worse than we've already seen. I'm not sure if Wilson and Chan are clear that what they are doing is documenting failure. This is one of those "he said, he said" stories in which the truth gets obscured.

Dis-united Methodists

Because there has been so much momentous secular news this week, I haven't been following the business of the United Methodist General Convention, but Dwight at A Religious Liberal Blog has. He brings some distressing news, not unexpected but certainly unwelcome:

Well the Methodist convention will be winding down in the next few days and a number of significant votes have been taken. Adding it all together I think it'd be a correct to say that the denomination is slouching towards fundamentalism.

And the space to be a liberal protestant in this country shrank dramatically over this week.

Those of you who belong to other Main Line denominations are aware that similar struggles are taking place at the level of your national bodies, and I'm afraid the trend lines are similar.

Privateers

What Are Those Contractors Doing in Iraq?

By Deborah Avant
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page B01

The alleged U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, and the suggestion that contract employees may have been among those responsible, has cast a spotlight on the military's extraordinary reliance on civilian contractors to perform even the most sensitive jobs. Consider this: During the first Gulf War, U.S. forces employed one civilian contractor in Iraq for every 60 active-duty personnel. At the start of the current Iraq war, that figure was about one in 10.

Contractors, in Iraq and elsewhere, are doing a lot more than building and maintaining camps, preparing food and doing laundry for troops. They support M1 tanks and Apache helicopters on the battlefield; they train American forces, Army ROTC units and even foreign militaries under contract to the United States. And they have flooded into Iraq to provide the military with security and crime prevention services. Having closely followed this explosion of military contracting since the end of the Cold War, I thought I knew the extent of it. But I have to admit that I did not know the government was also outsourcing the interrogation of military prisoners.

The information was far from secret. Indeed, CACI International, a defense firm based in Arlington whose employees were implicated in an Army investigation in February and in a subsequent report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, had advertised on its Web site for interrogators in Iraq. Thousands of such contracts are issued by a long list of offices within the Pentagon, and even by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, to a wide range of companies for innocuous-sounding services. (The prisoner interrogators were hired under an "intelligence services" category.) This illustrates some of the difficulties in tracking what has become a vast web of military contracting.

When the United States deploys its military forces, the process is easily understood: Active or reserve officers, who report up the chain of command to the president according to rules set by Congress and governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, go overseas. The media cover deployments and the public is informed. But there are no standard procedures for deploying private security workers under military contracts, which makes it far more difficult to gather information about who they are, what they're doing and for whom. They are not part of the military command; they are not covered by the code of military justice.

The events of the last few days illustrate those differences well. When reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib surfaced, it was clear that the 800th Military Police Brigade (which includes the 372nd Military Police Company, home to many of the accused) was in charge of the prison; prisoner interrogations were run by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. But Taguba's report also mentions four civilian contractors, all of whom were assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Two of those civilians, Steven Stephanowicz and John Israel, were "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses" at Abu Ghraib, the report says. A third contractor, Adel Nakhla, is named as a translator -- and a suspect. A fourth, Torin Nelson, was said to be a witness. Both Nakhla and Nelson are listed as employees of Titan Corp., a security contractor based in San Diego.

This is, to me, one of the central scandals to come out of the Iraq mess.

Nightmare Scenario

Threat of 'Dirty Bomb' Growing, Officials Say
Radioactive material is common and often not secured. Al Qaeda is said to be planning an attack.

By Douglas Frantz, Times Staff Writer

VIENNA — Concerns are growing that Al Qaeda or a related group could detonate a "dirty bomb" that would spew radioactive fallout across an American or European city, according to intelligence analysts, diplomats and independent nuclear experts.

Although safeguards protecting nuclear weapons and their components have improved, experts said the radioactive materials that wrap around conventional explosives to create a contaminating bomb remained available worldwide — and were often stored in non-secure locations.

Detonating a dirty bomb would not cause the death and devastation wrought by a nuclear weapon, but officials and counter-terrorism experts predicted that it would result in some fatalities, radiation sickness, mass panic and enormous economic damage.

Intelligence agencies have reported no reliable, specific threats involving dirty bombs or nuclear weapons, but senior U.S. and European officials and outside experts said several factors had heightened fears in recent weeks.

They said concerns were focused on three Al Qaeda operatives who led experiments involving dirty bombs and chemical weapons and on widely held suspicions that a special wing of the terrorist network was planning a spectacular attack.

They also said that chatter justifying the use of nuclear weapons against the U.S. had increased on radical Islamic websites as the occupation of Iraq stretches into its second year.

One focus of anxiety is the Athens Olympic Games in August. Recent security exercises there concentrated on mock attacks involving a dirty bomb, a chemical explosion and a hijacked jetliner.

Another potential target is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit scheduled for June in Istanbul, Turkey, which will be attended by President Bush. The threat was underlined by Turkey's disclosure Monday that it had arrested members of a group linked to Al Qaeda who reportedly planned to bomb the summit.

The threat of attack is great enough that a senior European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it is "not a matter of if there is a nuclear-related attack by Al Qaeda, but when it occurs."

The warning echoed remarks made last June by Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5. She said renegade scientists have aided Al Qaeda's efforts to develop chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, sometimes referred to as CBRN.

This is keeping me awake nights.

Numbers Game

A Proven Formula for How Many Troops We Need

By Stephen Budiansky
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page B04

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the U.S. Army had more than 1.6 million men within the borders of the defeated Nazi state. Overnight they became occupation troops: Their orders were to spread out over every square mile of German territory and demonstrate without a doubt that they were in charge. U.S. troops secured every road junction, bridge, border post, government building, factory, bank, warehouse; anything of the slightest conceivable importance had a guard of GIs around it, and so did a good many things of little or no importance, too.

Army plans called for an occupation force of some 400,000 in the American zone for the first 18 months -- or one U.S. soldier for every 40 Germans.

When NATO forces went into Kosovo in 1999, they followed the same proven formula: 50,000 troops for a population of 2 million, one soldier for every 40 inhabitants. A recent Rand Corp. study by military analyst James Quinlivan concluded that the bare minimum ratio to provide security for the inhabitants of an occupied territory, let alone deal with an active insurgency, is one to 50.

In Iraq today, coalition forces number about 160,000, or one for every 160 Iraqis. (Even adding in an estimated 20,000 civilian security contractors working in Iraq, that still translates to one for every 140 Iraqis.) In response to the unremitting attacks and continuing instability, U.S. commanders have now canceled plans to cut troop strength by some 20,000 this year. It is a significant about-face, and one that has unquestionably put a severe strain on both regular and reserve units whose deployments have been extended well beyond what they had originally been told.

But it is still a drop in the bucket compared with what's needed. "U.S. Troop Levels in Iraq to Remain High," read a headline in The Washington Post this past week. Yet these levels are "high" relative only to the fantastically optimistic plans that the Defense Department had doggedly clung to as recently as a month ago.

The real tragedy of the current chaos in Iraq is that many military experts, historians and Army officials warned long before combat began that the projected number of postwar troops was utterly unrealistic. Army planners said they needed an initial occupation force of 250,000, which would still be half the number that the historically proven formula called for. Had they been listened to, and a robust force moved in at the start to establish firm control of the country and disarm the militias of political factions, it is possible that a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces could have followed, as civilian institutions began to function and life returned to normal in Iraq.

But those who called for a large force were not merely ignored; they were actually scorned. Both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were furious when then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress that an initial force of several hundred thousand would be needed in postwar Iraq.

As many critics have since pointed out, Rumsfeld was apparently determined to make Iraq a showcase for the concepts of military "transformation" that he has championed -- the idea that given the vastly increased effectiveness of precision air power today, it is possible to fight with much smaller armies than was ever the case in the past.
....
The effectiveness of modern American air power has now made victory as certain as it has ever been in the history of warfare; it has rendered the nightmare prospect of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of battlefield deaths a bad memory from the seemingly distant past.

But it has made it no easier to deal with the consequences of victory. In Iraq, the Pentagon's real miscalculation was not that it believed that a ground force of such small size could defeat a well-armed enemy: It was to believe that the Iraqi people would so welcome us as liberators that no "occupation" would even be necessary.

The advocates of transformation are right in saying that we don't need huge World War II-style armies to win wars today. But we certainly need far more men and women on the ground than the current U.S. military can supply on its own, especially when we assume the burden of security and nation-building in a country whose government we have defeated on the battlefield.

No Bail Out

via Juan Cole:

NATO Balking at Iraq Mission
Amid rising violence and public opposition to the occupation, allies want to delay a major commitment until after the U.S. election.

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's hopes for a major NATO military presence in Iraq this year appear doomed, interviews with allied defense officials and diplomats show.

The Western military alliance had expected to announce at a June summit that it would accept a role in the country, perhaps by leading the international division now patrolling south-central Iraq. But amid continuing bloodshed and strong public opposition to the occupation in many nations, allies want to delay any major commitment until after the U.S. presidential election in November, officials say.

The clear shift in NATO's stance deals another blow to U.S. efforts to spread the military burden as it grapples with a deadly insurgency in Iraq, fury in the region over its endorsement of Israeli plans for Palestinian territories and the unfolding abuse scandal at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison.

The Pentagon's announcement last week that it intends to keep 135,000 U.S. troops in the country was a sign that the administration does not expect to be able to shift more of the burden to other nations anytime soon.

One U.S. hope had rested with NATO. Within the alliance, there seemed to be "a sense of inevitability about the mission" as recently as a few weeks ago, said one NATO official. "But it's just not there anymore…. Any enthusiasm there was has drained away."

Compounding the allies' wariness is the fact that some countries with troops already in Iraq are unhappy with the U.S. war strategy. Some British leaders and officials of other countries in the occupying coalition have felt that the Americans have been too quick to resort to overwhelming force against insurgents, according to NATO and European defense officials. Some countries also have complained that the U.S. military has been slow to consult with coalition partners on planned moves, including some that have put coalition troops under fire, the officials said.

Although the friction does not amount to a major rupture, said one European defense official, "it's hard to talk other people into joining a mission when those who are there already aren't 100% happy."

U.S. officials have been courting NATO as a potential partner in Iraq since launching the war last March. Some U.S. lawmakers, as well as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, continue to push the administration to draw in NATO, hoping a partnership with the well-equipped 26-nation alliance would give the effort enhanced military capability and international legitimacy.

Kerry called on President Bush this month to work harder on the necessary diplomacy "to share the burden and make progress" in Iraq. He said NATO member nations must be treated with respect and said their involvement and other steps to internationalize the reconstruction could be "the last chance to get it right."

But there have been indications of the administration's awareness of potential problems. Bush said at a news conference last month that the administration was "exploring a more formal role for NATO," but national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said afterward that the involvement of the alliance would have to come "in the right time."

In the final analysis, this may be the factor that turns the public against the war. There will be no cavalry in white hats riding in to save the day. Americans aren't used to that, it is part of the national myth.

Wrongness

Dissension Grows In Senior Ranks On War Strategy
U.S. May Be Winning Battles in Iraq, Losing the War, Some Officers Say

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01

Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq.

Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading, and being voiced publicly for the first time.

Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are."

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday.

"I lost my brother in Vietnam," added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in."

The emergence of sharp differences over U.S. strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won a war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of sovereignty June 30.

Inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally argue that the U.S. military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for less, but they generally agree on revising the stated U.S. goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public.

Some officers say the place to begin restructuring U.S. policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed said a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him.

A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not."

Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice."

Like several other officers interviewed for this report, this general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Also, some say they believe that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki after he said early in 2003 that the administration was underestimating the number of U.S. troops that would be required to occupy postwar Iraq.
....
Commanders on the ground in Iraq seconded that cautiously optimistic view.

"I am sure that the view from Washington is much worse than it appears on the ground here in Baqubah," said Army Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, commander of a 1st Infantry Division brigade based in that city about 40 miles north of Baghdad. "I do not think that we are losing, but we will lose if we are not careful." He said he is especially worried about maintaining political and economic progress in the provinces after the turnover of power.

Army Lt. Col. John Kem, a battalion commander in Baghdad, said that the events of the past two months -- first the eruption of a Shiite insurgency, followed by the detainee abuse scandal -- "certainly made things harder," but he said he doubted they would have much effect on the long-term future of Iraq.

But some say that behind those official positions lies deep concern.

One Pentagon consultant said that officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put on a happy face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration's Iraq policy, he said, "It's 'Dead Man Walking.' "

The worried generals and colonels are simply beginning to say what experts outside the military have been saying for weeks.

In mid-April, even before the prison detainee scandal, Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, wrote in the New York Review of Books that "patience with foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy." The New York Review of Books is not widely read in the U.S. military, but the article, titled "How to Get Out of Iraq," was carried online and began circulating among some military intellectuals.
....
n addition to trimming the U.S. troop presence, a young Army general said, the United States also should curtail its ambitions in Iraq. "That strategic objective, of a free, democratic, de-Baathified Iraq, is grandiose and unattainable," he said. "It's just a matter of time before we revise downward . . . and abandon these ridiculous objectives."

Instead, he predicted that if the Bush administration wins reelection, it simply will settle for a stable Iraq, probably run by former Iraqi generals. This is more or less, he said, what the Marines Corps did in Fallujah -- which he described as a glimpse of future U.S. policy.

Wolfowitz sharply rejected that conclusion about Fallujah. "Let's be clear, Fallujah has always been an outlier since the liberation of Baghdad," he said in the interview. "It's where the trouble began. . . . It really isn't a model for anything for the rest of the country."

But a senior military intelligence officer experienced in Middle Eastern affairs said he thinks the administration needs to rethink its approach to Iraq and to the region. "The idea that Iraq can be miraculously and quickly turned into a shining example of democracy that will 'transform' the Middle East requires way too much fairy dust and cultural arrogance to believe," he said.

Finally, some are calling for the United States to stop fighting separatist trends among Iraq's three major groups, the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds, and instead embrace them. "The best hope for holding Iraq together -- and thereby avoiding civil war -- is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to the extent possible, the system each wants," Galbraith wrote last month.

Even if adjustments in troop presence and goals help the United States prevail, it will not happen soon, several of those interviewed said. The United States is likely to be fighting in Iraq for at least another five years, said an Army officer who served there. "We'll be taking casualties," he warned, during that entire time.

Ain't gonna happen. The generals are thinking strategically rather than politically. Troop force and size remains wrong. This is about as winnable as Algeria with the strategy and current tactics being used. The generals are using Kosovo as a model. Wrong model. This is an occupation, not a peace-keeping exercise.

The dissension in the ranks is not new, but is growing more heated with the body count. The real dissension is over mission, and has been since the demand to come up with a war plan was forwarded to the Pentagon.

Wake Up Call

via Suburban Guerrilla:

AP president proposes media lobby to fight government secrecy

LINDA DEUTSCH

Associated Press

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Denouncing increased official secrecy, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley unveiled a plan Friday for a media advocacy center to lobby in Washington for open government.

"The powerful have to be watched, and we are the watchers," Curley said, "and you don't need to have your notebook snatched by a policeman to know that keeping an eye on government activities has lately gotten a lot harder."

At every level of government, records are being sealed and requests for information denied, and courts are imposing gag orders and sealing documents, Curley said, speaking in the Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture series.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the news media remained largely silent on important issues, including secret arrests of suspects of Middle Eastern descent and closed deportation hearings, he said.

"That was an extraordinary time for the country," he said. "It's entirely understandable - and reasonable - that the press and public were willing to step back for a time and give the government room to address an unknown and frightening threat."

But Curley warned that a continued relaxation of vigilance by news organizations "could become a dangerous habit if we allow it to take hold, dangerous for us and the society in which we play such a critical role."

"The government is pushing hard for secrecy," he said. "We must push back equally hard for openness. I think it's time to consider establishment of a focused lobbying effort in Washington."

Curley acknowledged his advocacy proposal is potentially controversial.

"I know that some in the journalism community would strongly disapprove of a project of this kind," he said. "They believe the role of journalists is to remain strictly impartial, and that express backing for even the best intended legislation would compromise that role. I respectfully disagree."

Curley said he was reminded of a story about a man who was "so broadminded that he wouldn't take his own side in a fight."

"A fight is what this is," he said. "A fight is what our system of government intends and expects it to be."

Curley cited recent intrusions on information-gathering. They ranged from an AP reporter's digital recording being erased by a U.S. marshal at a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to a confrontation between a sheriff's deputy and a freelance photographer on assignment for the AP outside a Michael Jackson grand jury hearing. The photographer deleted digital images after being ordered to do so by the deputy.

"The point I want to make with these brief examples is an elemental one: The government's power is overwhelming. Its agents are armed and authorized to use force if they have to," Curley said.
....
News executives reacted favorably to Curley's proposal.

"It's extremely important that as journalists we continue to push for more access," said Maria De Varenne, editor and vice president of news at The (Riverside) Press-Enterprise. "The Press-Enterprise has a long tradition of going to court to support access, and we will certainly support Mr. Curley in this initiative."

Andy Alexander, chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, also was enthusiastic.

"Tom Curley should be applauded for sounding the alarm. We face a growing crisis of unchecked secrecy at all levels of government," said Alexander, Washington bureau chief of Cox Newspapers.

Alexander said he suspects there will be heated debate among journalists about whether news media should become involved in advocacy. But he said journalists can shed light on the problem of secrecy by writing about it.

"When citizens learn the extent to which officials are keeping them in the dark about the workings of their own government, they will likely rise up against this terrible trend toward secrecy," he said.

The lobbying plan also was welcomed by Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the reporters committee, which was consulted by the AP about the idea.

"I think the media as an entity, media organizations, people representing the public's right to know, have not been very well organized for the last 20 years when it comes to influencing government leaders," Dalglish said.

Journalists have a natural reluctance to get involved in the political process, but it's completely appropriate for journalism organizations to be involved in an open-government initiative, she said.

Stuart Wilk, vice president/associate editor of The Dallas Morning News and president of the Associated Press Managing Editors association, said he will ask the APME to endorse the initiative.

"I think that journalists will overwhelmingly agree with Tom that the public is rapidly losing access to public information," Wilk said in a statement. "Whatever the motives of the government, the effect has been to reduce public access and therefore public scrutiny of government officials and activities."

Awaking from slumber. Curley misses the point that he's been part of the Wurlitzer since early in the Clinton administration, but at least he understands there is a problem. Let's see what he does with Nedra Pickler.

Price of Arrogance

The Empire Strikes Out
By BEN MACINTYRE

LONDON — This week the world learned that the United States Army has been investigating more than 30 claims of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002. So far, officials have found a catalog of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of American captors. This horrible scandal represents the most serious crisis for the coalition since the war on terrorism began. Occupation inevitably creates resentment; but humiliation fosters outright rebellion, and winning back the moral high ground after this calamity is far more important than reasserting control in Falluja or in the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.

Military domination is fatally undermined when occupiers, even if only a tiny minority of them, misuse their power to demean the conquered. The perils of such behavior resonate throughout history. As America finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in Central Asia and Iraq, it need only look at the experience of its coalition partner, Britain, in Afghanistan to learn about the hubris and transience of empire.
....
Over the centuries, successive foreign armies have tried to pacify Afghanistan — Macedonian, Mogul, Persian, British, Russian and Soviet — only to discover that this deeply divided land has a way of uniting furiously against any invader that does not tread with the utmost care. As America is discovering, with much of the Islamic world united in outrage over the images of Iraqi captives being abused by servicemen and women, maintaining the peace is a far more delicate and demanding task than winning the war.

No one knew this better than Josiah Harlan. While many of his contemporaries were exploring the Wild West, Harlan had headed for the rather wilder East. Eccentric, cantankerous, ambitious and ludicrously brave, he plunged into the unmapped wilds of Afghanistan in 1827, determined to make himself a king.

General Harlan was no stranger to hubris. Over the ensuing years he parlayed with princes and potentates, led an army across the Hindu Kush mounted on an elephant, and was appointed commander in chief of the Afghan Army by Dost Muhammad Khan, the mighty emir of Kabul. Finally, by striking a pact with native chiefs high in the Hindu Kush, General Harlan became prince of Ghor, a potentate in his own right.

But his reign was short-lived. By 1839, the British, in a decision with eerie modern echoes, opted to remove Dost Muhammad and replace him with a more pliable puppet. The emir was a threat to stability, London declared, an unpredictable autocrat ruling a rogue state. A vast army was assembled in British India, and marched on Kabul: Dost Muhammad's bodyguards melted away, and the ousted ruler took to the hills. When they entered the city, the British found General Harlan calmly having breakfast. The American introduced himself as "a free and enlightened citizen of the greatest and most glorious country in the world."

The British settled in, importing foxhounds, cricket bats, amateur theatricals and all the appurtenances of empire. After an easy victory, it was assumed that the Afghans were docile. The invaders rode roughshod over the local culture, treating the Afghans with disdain, oblivious to the growing rumble of discontent. General Harlan was outraged at such arrogance: "I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes."

What would he have made of his own country's forays into Afghanistan and Iraq nearly two centuries later? In some respects he might have approved. He believed strongly in using military force to bring civilization to the benighted of the earth. He was no friend to tyrants and religious fanatics: he would have been equally revolted by the extremism of the Taliban and the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

Yet he was also insistent that the imperial impulse brought with it heavy responsibilities, an obligation to treat indigenous cultures with respect, to work within local power structures. He saw the British occupation through the eyes of an Afghan, but his response was that of an American; instead of bringing enlightenment, he believed, the British had imposed their own heavy-handed tyranny, and would pay the price in anger and bloodshed. Today, 165 years later, it is America's turn to stand accused of brutal occupation, as the grim and graphic secrets of Abu Ghraib prison are revealed.

Josiah Harlan warned the British of the growing danger, but his words went unheeded. The occupying British swiftly bundled this interfering American out of Kabul, and carried on with their imperial tea party, alternately abusing and offending Afghans.

"Vainglorious and arrogant, the invaders plunged headlong towards destruction," General Harlan wrote in an angry anti-British polemic, as he headed home to America, and obscurity. Within two years the entire British garrison, 15,000 men, women and children, soldiers, families and camp followers, was massacred by Afghan tribesmen in the passes of Kabul, leaving a single wounded survivor, Dr. William Brydon, to stagger into Jalalabad with news of the worst disaster in British imperial history.

Nemesis always follows hubris.

Moral Theology

Following yesterday's media event,Teresa Nielsen Hayden offers food for examination of conscience before you go to confession this afternoon:

And now, a list: The Nine Ways of Being an Accessory to Another’s Sin.

Anybody feel like keeping score?

Reality Intrudes

Rumsfeld apologizes to abused Iraqis
Defense secretary warns that worse photos, videos are yet to come

“There are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence towards prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane," he said. “... It’s going to get a good deal more terrible, I’m afraid.”

Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

While we're screwing around with whether or not John Kerry tossed ribbons or medals, while we take polls about whether or not Rumsfeld should resign or not, the photos from Abu Ghraib are tacked up on the walls of those who are, this minute, planning to bomb our cities. Those attacks are being prepared right now and we are doing nothing to prevent them. Nothing.

Orcinus calls it:

9/11 should have driven that home. In the wake of the disaster, the media -- newspapers, TV, radio, the Internet -- needed to do some serious soul searching about its own role in the disaster. And it should have begun reforming its practices, particularly in the way it covers both international news and domestic politics.

But the press doesn't deal with those issues. Instead, we get peanut butter.

Pot=Kettle

Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.
....
In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave, being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Johnson.

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in Washington State and Colorado and now a prison consultant based near Seattle, said, "In some jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison culture that tolerates violence, and it's been there a long time."

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr. Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay is very low. "Retention in these states is a big problem and so unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or captains in a few months," he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq, where the Americans tried to start a new prison system with undertrained military police officers from Army reserve units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Monica Goodling, did not return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

The Black Birds

I'll argue with you that we ever had any moral high ground for an illegal war that shouldn't have been fought in the first place.

U.S. Faces Lasting Damage Abroad
Moral High Ground Lost, Experts Say

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A26

The United States faces the prospect of a severe and enduring backlash not just in the Middle East but also among strategic allies, putting in question the Bush administration's ability to make serious headway on a range of foreign policy goals for the rest of this presidential term, according to U.S. officials and foreign policy experts.

The White House damage-control campaign, including the long-awaited apology from President Bush yesterday, is likely to have only limited, if any, success in the near term, administration officials said yesterday.

The White House is so gloomy about the repercussions that senior adviser Karl Rove suggested this week that the consequences of the graphic photographs documenting the U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees are so enormous that it will take decades for the United States to recover, according to a Bush adviser.

"It's a blinding glimpse of the obvious to say we're in a hole," conceded Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. He said the backlash in Europe is even greater than in the 22-nation Arab world.

"For many of our European friends, what they saw on those horrible pictures is tantamount to torture, and there are very strong views about that," he said yesterday on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" show. "In the Arab world, there is general dismay and disgust, but in some places we were not real popular to start with. So I think I'm actually seeing a European reaction quite strong -- quite a bit stronger."

In public and private communications, European officials have become critical or disdainful of the United States. France's foreign ministry said in a statement that the abuse is "totally unacceptable" and, if confirmed, "constitute clear and unacceptable violations of international conventions."

The issue for Arabs and other allies extends beyond the treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, which is seen as a metaphor for a stubborn and often defiant U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration.

Washington first justified military intervention to oust Saddam Hussein, without U.N. support, by asserting that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a real and imminent threat -- but then found none.

The administration has since shifted gears, arguing that its primary goal has instead been to create a democracy that would inspire Arabs and the wider Islamic world -- only to delay for several months acknowledgement or action on the chronic abuse of Iraqi detainees, analysts note.

As a result, the United States has lost the moral high ground in Iraq, putting its credibility on the line. Now, its broader goals for the region -- including an ambitious project to promote democracy, set to be unveiled by Bush at three international summits next month -- are in jeopardy, foreign policy and Middle East analysts say.

"The mask of civility has fallen. It used to be that Americans just don't do that. Now you hear Arabs say, 'Don't lecture us about democracy and respect for human rights,' " said Raghida Dergham, senior diplomatic correspondent for the London-based al Hayat newspaper. "No quick fix is going to reverse the current antagonism toward American policies."

The pictures -- and the global reaction -- will also complicate efforts by U.S. institutions, including private humanitarian and human rights groups, to promote greater respect for democratic reforms, added Mark Schneider, vice president of International Crisis Group.

Bush's attempt to invoke historic U.S. values to counter the international fallout is unlikely to ameliorate the foreign backlash. "Bush's moral confidence in the ultimate goodness of American culture and justice will not convince people who are hopping mad today, and who are chronically cynical about the words of politicians and leaders," said Ellen Laipson, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council and now president of the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank.

The tragic irony, Arab and foreign policy analysts note, is that the third justification for the intervention in Iraq was the war on terrorism -- which they say the pictures of the abuse of Iraqi detainees will instead fuel.

"If you want recruitment tools, these are the best anyone could imagine. They are a big blow and a stimulant to spur people to act against the United States. The real kicker for terrorism is indignity and humiliation, and that's what these pictures are about," said Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

What do I think? This country has never been serious about the way it wants to be seen in the world's eyes. We have continually and habitually taken part in third world wars, propped up dictators like Saddam when we thought it was in our tactical interest, overthrown others when the winds shifted. The torture tactics of Abu Ghraib are something we perfected in other wars.

If the crows have come home to roost now, all I can say is that they are our crows, ones we've known for a long time.

Whose Job Is It, Anyway?

We failed. And I'm not sure it is Rummy's job to take the fall

If Donald Rumsfeld went to Congress yesterday to explain why he should remain secretary of defense, he failed. His daylong testimony in the House and Senate has confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld fatally bungled the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

But the hearings highlighted broader issues.

Mr. Rumsfeld, the military brass and some of the lawmakers badly missed the point by talking endlessly about a few bad apples in one military unit. The despicable acts shown in those famous photos — and in videos that are being held back by the military but may still produce another round of global humiliation — were uniquely outrageous and inexcusable criminal acts. But behind them lies a detention system that treats all prisoners as terrorists regardless of their supposed offenses, and makes brutal interrogations all too common.

The hearings also gave Americans a chilling new reminder of the mess the Bush administration, particularly Mr. Rumsfeld, has made of the Iraq occupation. With their perfect sense of certainty that they were right and everyone else wrong, Mr. Rumsfeld and his colleagues never planned adequately for the occupation. They were unprepared to handle the 43,000-plus Iraqi prisoners they ultimately took or the armed insurgents they faced — even though disorder and resistance were widely predicted.

The destructive stress created by the administration's lack of preparation was distressingly evident yesterday, when the hearings revealed that the members of the Army Reserve military police detachment stationed at Abu Ghraib had been sent to Iraq without being trained as ordinary prison guards, much less for the nightmarish duty they would face. Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon witnesses said those untrained part-time soldiers had been put under the supervision of military intelligence officers who farmed out interrogation work to private contractors. That inexplicable chain of shifted responsibility violated not just any sort of common sense, but also military rules.

Although the Army's own report said the guards had been told by intelligence officers and their consultants to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation by depriving them of sleep and subjecting them to pain and humiliation, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "cannot conceive" that they thought their actions were condoned or encouraged. When he insisted that the normal rules for handling prisoners were in effect, several senators reminded him that he had said in January 2002 that suspected terrorists were not covered by the Geneva Convention.

Mr. Rumsfeld told the senators that his remarks about ignoring the international rules on the treatment of prisoners applied only to people captured in Afghanistan, not Iraq. That was a fine distinction some of the minimally prepared guards at Abu Ghraib may not have grasped, particularly since they were never instructed on the rules of the Geneva Convention. Like most Americans, however, they had heard their commander in chief paint the war in Iraq as an antiterrorism campaign.

Mr. Rumsfeld's belated apology yesterday was nice to hear. But the secretary spent a lot of time dodging responsibility. When he was chided for not telling the public, Congress or even the president about Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld claimed that the Army had provided all the disclosure necessary last January with its inadequate press release announcing the criminal investigations. But when he was pressed on why he had not kept track of the case, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the astonishing argument that he could not have been expected to find this one case among the pile of 3,000 courts-martial initiated in the last year.

There is no similarly astonishing brief for the rest of us, half of whom support an administration which is demonstrably war criminals, and then don't give another thought to it.

We get the government we deserve. If we are humiliated by the photos we saw this week, we earned our humiliation. We put these assholes in charge. What we are going to do about it is what consumes me next.

Now, What?

An Inadequate Response

Saturday, May 8, 2004; Page A18

SECRETARY OF Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld read a statement yesterday to Congress taking responsibility for the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, and he was right to do so. But Mr. Rumsfeld did not accept the fundamental nature of the problem, much less commit himself to correcting it. In testimony before Senate and House committees, the defense secretary and his deputies continued to portray the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as isolated acts by individuals. They defended, or refused to acknowledge, the policy decisions that made the abuses more likely. They pledged that those connected to the repugnant acts documented in published photographs -- and others yet to be released -- would be punished. But they offered no assurance that their unacceptable system of detention in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere would be fixed.

Much congressional questioning focused on process: on the timing of the Pentagon's response to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, on Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to adequately inform Congress or the president. There was discussion of whether the secretary should resign; he and President Bush clearly intend to avoid that. We believe that Mr. Rumsfeld bears much of the responsibility for creating the legal and political climate in which the prison abuses occurred and that his failure to respond to previous reports of abuses or appeals for reforms made possible the catastrophe of Abu Ghraib. But whether or not he remains in office, the most important task before the administration and Congress should be to reform the system of prisoner detention so that it fully conforms to the Geneva Conventions and other international standards of human rights. That will require changes in procedures, the formulation of clear standards and rigorous outside oversight.

Mr. Rumsfeld's testimony yesterday offered no support for such basic change. He repeatedly defended the procedures created two years ago to extract intelligence from prisoners even though these have led to documented abuses in several overseas prison facilities. At one point he suggested that he was not aware of the decision that laid the foundation for the Abu Ghraib crimes -- a determination that military prison guards should "set the conditions" for intelligence interrogations, in violation of Army regulations -- even though that policy was developed by a major general and previously implemented at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld dodged questions about whether guards had been told by intelligence officers and civilian contractors how to treat prisoners, even though an official investigation has already determined that that is what occurred.

Mr. Rumsfeld claimed that guards at Abu Ghraib had been instructed to follow the Geneva Conventions, but the investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba has documented that no such instructions were given. The Third Geneva Convention says that prisoners of war "may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind" as a way to make them answer questions. That rule has been systematically violated at U.S. detention facilities abroad -- in part because the Pentagon has designated many prisoners as illegal combatants not eligible for Geneva protections. In fact, the interrogation system developed at Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon cannot be legally applied to anyone considered a prisoner of war.

The Pentagon leadership would like to limit the scandal, and the scrutiny, to a handful of soldiers at one prison during two months of last year. But investigations by the International Committee of the Red Cross and independent human rights groups have demonstrated that abuses occurred elsewhere. The Army now has admitted that at least 25 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have died in U.S. custody. These are the signs not of isolated acts but of a broken system, one that is leading to criminal abuses. If Mr. Rumsfeld and President Bush are unwilling to fix it, Congress must step in.

Right question, wrong solution. At least for these times. The right solution is you writing to your congesscritter and demanding impeachment.

Ah, yes, that is the right solution

Fight the Man

Soldiers for the Truth is Col. David Hackworth's shop. Hack's politics and mine rarely match up, but he's a thorn in the side of the Pentagon and can be counted on to represent the "grunts" fairly. Two of his guest editors tell the truth today: Iraq is lost regardless of the garbage we heard out of Rummy and the Joint Cheifs today.

Yes, I was glued to the tube this afternoon. My mood oscillated dangerously between rage and grief. I went from tears to incandescent rage without any mediation. I tried everything, from prayer to chanting to calm down. Nothing worked

This place is where I try to tell the truth, as I hope I can find it, and share it with the world. It isn't much, but it is what I can do to try to make the world a better place. If this place has value for you, please share the news with your friends and let's work together to take back our country, restore our democracy and sanity to this nation.

Guest Column: Iraq’s ‘WMD’ FactoryBy William S. Lind

What Tagabu’s report shows us in unrelenting candor is that the critics were right: the U.S. military is in danger of coming apart at the seams. A scandal such as Abu Ghraib is merely how it plays out.

The Red Queen Said....

via Cursor--today is the last day of their May fundraiser. Go give 'em a hand.

Nuclear waste changes sought at Hanford and other sites
New proposal would allow Energy Dept. to skip cleanup of the most lethal material

By CHARLES POPE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

WASHINGTON -- A South Carolina senator, working in concert with senior Energy Department officials, has quietly proposed changing federal law to allow lethal waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and other nuclear weapons plants to remain in underground tanks rather than being removed and sent to a more secure disposal site.

The proposal from Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., is included in the defense authorization bill. It was heavily shaped -- if not written -- by the Energy Department. Jill Lea Sigal, a deputy assistant energy secretary, is listed as "author" on the document Graham's office submitted with the legislative language.

The Energy Department did not return several phone calls seeking comment on the policy and Sigal's involvement. The department has actively been pursuing the change since 2002, saying that it needs the power to reclassify waste to accelerate cleanup and direct money to deal with the most dangerous waste. Each time, however, either Congress or the courts have blocked the department, including a federal court ruling last year that prohibited the Energy Department from reclassifying waste.

What the department is trying to do now through legislation amounts to the same thing, critics say.

Whoever wrote the provision, all sides agree it would have profound effects on future cleanup at the Energy Department's highly contaminated weapons plants. An aide to Graham said his measure would accelerate cleanup by removing ambiguity about which waste needs to be removed. The Energy Department has argued that it should be allowed to leave some residual waste in the tanks because the cost of removing it would far outweigh the benefits. Cement would be added to the sludge to stabilize it and prevent it from leeching into water tables. At Hanford, that could leave more than 35 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge and salt cake in the ground.
....
The Hanford nuclear weapons complex is among the most contaminated places on Earth, with large amounts of radioactive, chemical and mixed waste that were byproducts of 50 years of nuclear weapons production. Cleanup costs are estimated at more than $50 billion.

The Energy Department has been struggling for decades to make progress and in 2002 it changed gears, proposing to make cleanup both faster and cheaper by leaving some of the waste behind. The danger, critics say, is that giving the department the authority to reclassify waste would allow it to declare a site fully cleaned without removing some of the most dangerous waste. Washington state has opposed the change in court and in Congress.

"Trying to rename high-level nuclear waste doesn't change the fact that it is still a dangerous, toxic, radioactive sludge that needs to be cleaned up," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "The DOE is just trying to circumvent what the courts have already decided, which is that they can't reclassify it and the DOE needs to clean it up."

Are we safer? Don't think so.

While Rummy Speaks

Americans express worry, Bush support drops in poll

By Randy Lilleston, USATODAY.com

WASHINGTON — Americans are more dissatisfied with the nation's direction than at any time in more than eight years and President Bush's job approval rating has sunk into a tie for his worst-ever showing, according to a new Gallup Poll.

The poll, released Thursday, indicates 62% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country. That is the highest dissatisfaction number since early January 1996 — shortly after the federal government shut down briefly when Congress failed to reach a budget agreement. Thirty-six percent of those surveyed were satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S.

A Gallup survey in early April indicated 57% of Americans were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country and 41% were satisfied. The job dissatisfaction numbers have been on the rise since early this year.

The survey comes as Bush deals with a growing controversy over reports of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners. In interviews Wednesday with two Arab television networks, Bush promised a full investigation of the reports.

"People in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent. They must also understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know," the president told the Al-Hurra network.

In the survey, 49% of Americans said they approved of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 48% said they disapproved. The approval number ties the lowest figure Bush has reached in his president, and the disapproval number ties the highest figure.

Bush's job approval rating has moved in a narrow range of between 53% and 49% since mid-January. His highest rating — 90% — was reached just after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The poll also indicated that Democrat John Kerry, Bush's chief rival in the 2004 presidential election, has moved into a statistical tie with the president for public support. In a two-way race, Kerry drew 49% of the support of likely voters and Bush drew 48% — within the poll's margin of error of 4 percentage points. In a three-way race with independent Ralph Nader, both Kerry and Bush drew 47%, with Nader receiving 3%.

It is the first time since early March — when the president began a massive advertising campaign — that Bush has not led the race, according to the poll. In mid-April, 50% of likely voters favored Bush, 44% favored Kerry and 4% favored Nader.

They're Coming

The spiritual director and I took advantage of a truly spectacular spring day to have our monthly meeting in her back yard yesterday. The azaleas are in bloom and the heat and humidity of a typical Washington summer remained in abayence, at least for a day. About halfway through our session, both of us realized that this was probably the last time we'd be able to meet comfortably in the out of doors this summer.

Get ready: First cicada discovered in Indiana

Is this any way to treat a pacesetter? This lucky devil, now pinned for all eternity, is believed to be the first of 5 billion cicadas to emerge. The fully grown adult was found April 29 in Bloomington, Ind., by Indiana University media relations specialist David Bricker.

In Cincinnati, says Dr. Gene Kritsky, professor of biology at the College of Mount St. Joseph, several people have found them while digging in their gardens, but they wouldn’t be fully emerged adults while still underground. Another family reported to Channel 19 news that it already had four of them in a jar.

According to Kritsky, we’re still on track for a May 14 emergence, give or take five days each way – which means it could happen as early as Sunday.

Much more here.

The Long Descent

Oversight

The System Was Lacking

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A33

"The system worked."

That's what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told NBC's Matt Lauer this week of the response to those despicable acts of abuse committed in our names in the most notorious of Saddam Hussein's prisons. It all came out, and all is well because the Defense Department investigated itself.

Oh, yes, and we cannot call it torture. "My impression," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon this week, "is that what has been charged so far is abuse, which is different from torture. Just a minute, I don't know if the, it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore, I'm not going to address the 'torture' word."

So we have come to this: The secretary of defense cannot address the "t" word because it all depends on what the meaning of "torture" is.

And then there is Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On CBS News's "Face the Nation" last Sunday, host Bob Schieffer asked Myers why he had not seen a report on these horrific events that was completed in March.

"It's just working its way up, up the chain," Myers replied. Up the chain? Myers is the man who leads all of our men and women in uniform, people who share our values and face grave risks. He hears about an event that violates everything our country espouses, is guaranteed to embarrass us before the entire world and deepens the danger for our troops in the field. In the now popular phrase, Myers's hair should have been on fire. Apparently it wasn't.

If Rumsfeld really thinks "the system worked" and if Myers really just sat by as the chain of command operated in its desultory way, neither is suited to lead the brave people defending our country.

But dumping Rumsfeld and Myers is not enough. Ultimately the buck stops with President Bush. No, I don't think for an instant that Bush knew anything about this. That's the problem. Reports of prisoner abuse have been around since the war in Afghanistan and the opening of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The president needs to explain why he wasn't more curious about what was happening, and whether his management style delegates so much authority that the White House could be caught so unprepared for this catastrophe. Are we dealing here with a culture of unaccountability?

The temptation will be to blame a small group of people and charge them with brutality. Yes, individuals should be held accountable for what they do. But a democracy cannot content itself with pushing blame downward. These crimes are seen around the world as acts supported by our government. By extension that means all of us.

Those soldiers and private contractors humiliating Iraqi prisoners were operating within a set of assumptions about what they were and were not supposed to do. Did they get nods and winks that anything was okay as long as it produced results? Or were they told they needed to live up to the president's public promise that prisoners would be treated fairly? Let's assume the second is the truth. Why didn't this view get communicated all the way down that chain of command?

And would Bush be making his statements of sorrow to the Arab media if our country's free media had not exposed what happened? Or was the administration hoping all this could be covered up? Republican Sen. John McCain was horrified that Congress had been told nothing about these abuses. "Congress should have been notified of this situation a long time ago," McCain said. If the administration wasn't trying to cover up, why didn't it tell Congress of the abuses? It owes not only Congress but also the country far more than it has given by way of an explanation.

Which will be offered in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee at 11:45 this morning, C-Span 1 on my cable system. See you there.

The Law in its Majesty

More: And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

One Nation

A President Beyond the Law
By ANTHONY LEWIS

Published: May 7, 2004

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

The question tears at all of us, regardless of party or ideology: How could American men and women treat Iraqi prisoners with such cruelty — and laugh at their humiliation? We are told that there was a failure of military leadership. Officers in the field were lax. Pentagon officials didn't care. So the worst in human nature was allowed to flourish.

But something much more profound underlies this terrible episode. It is a culture of low regard for the law, of respecting the law only when it is convenient.

Again and again, over these last years, President Bush has made clear his view that law must bend to what he regards as necessity. National security as he defines it trumps our commitments to international law. The Constitution must yield to novel infringements on American freedom.

One clear example is the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Third Geneva Convention requires that any dispute about a prisoner's status be decided by a "competent tribunal." American forces provided many such tribunals for prisoners taken in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But Mr. Bush has refused to comply with the Geneva Convention. He decided that all the Guantánamo prisoners were "unlawful combatants" — that is, not regular soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like.

The Supreme Court is now considering whether the prisoners can use American courts to challenge their designation as unlawful. The administration's brief could not be blunter in its argument that the president is the law on this issue: "The president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has conclusively determined that the Guantánamo detainees . . . are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention."

The violation of the Geneva Convention and that refusal to let the courts consider the issue have cost the United States dearly in the world legal community — the judges and lawyers in societies that, historically, have looked to the United States as the exemplar of a country committed to law. Lord Steyn, a judge on Britain's highest court, condemned the administration's position on Guantánamo in an address last fall — pointing out that American courts would refuse even to hear claims of torture from prisoners. At the time, the idea of torture at Guantánamo seemed far-fetched to me. After the disclosures of the last 10 days, can we be sure?

Instead of a country committed to law, the United States is now seen as a country that proclaims high legal ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself. That view has been worsened by the Bush administration's determination that Americans not be subject to the new International Criminal Court, which is supposed to punish genocide and war crimes.

Fear of terrorism — a quite understandable fear after 9/11 — has led to harsh departures from normal legal practice at home. Aliens swept off the streets by the Justice Department as possible terrorists after 9/11 were subjected to physical abuse and humiliation by prison guards, the department's inspector general found. Attorney General John Ashcroft did not apologize — a posture that sent a message.

Inside the United States, the most radical departure from law as we have known it is President Bush's claim that he can designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" — and thereupon detain that person in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial, without a right to counsel. Again, the president's lawyers have argued determinedly that he must have the last word, with little or no scrutiny from lawyers and judges.

There was a stunning moment in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists "have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States."

In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago.

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."

Tony Lewis is on point and isn't this just the trouble with this Administration? Each and everyone is a law unto himself. Rummy abandoned the Geneva Conventions for his gulag of private prisons. Ashcroft abandoned the Constitution for his Patriot Act version of America.

This is a cabinet of privateers, pursuing private visions of this country that we never voted for. This is not how a democracy is supposed to work.

Evolution

The Oil Crunch
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 7, 2004

Before the start of the Iraq war his media empire did so much to promote, Rupert Murdoch explained the payoff: "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." Crude oil prices in New York rose to almost $40 a barrel yesterday, a 13-year high.

Those who expected big economic benefits from the war were, of course, utterly wrong about how things would go in Iraq. But the disastrous occupation is only part of the reason that oil is getting more expensive; the other, which will last even if we somehow find a way out of the quagmire, is the intensifying competition for a limited world oil supply.

Thanks to the mess in Iraq — including a continuing campaign of sabotage against oil pipelines — oil exports have yet to recover to their prewar level, let alone supply the millions of extra barrels each day the optimists imagined. And the fallout from the war has spooked the markets, which now fear terrorist attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, and are starting to worry about radicalization throughout the Middle East. (It has been interesting to watch people who lauded George Bush's leadership in the war on terror come to the belated realization that Mr. Bush has given Osama bin Laden exactly what he wanted.)

Even if things had gone well, however, Iraq couldn't have given us cheap oil for more than a couple of years at most, because the United States and other advanced countries are now competing for oil with the surging economies of Asia.

Oil is a resource in finite supply; no major oil fields have been found since 1976, and experts suspect that there are no more to find. Some analysts argue that world production is already at or near its peak, although most say that technological progress, which allows the further exploitation of known sources like the Canadian tar sands, will allow output to rise for another decade or two. But the date of the physical peak in production isn't the really crucial question.

The question, instead, is when the trend in oil prices will turn decisively upward. That upward turn is inevitable as a growing world economy confronts a resource in limited supply. But when will it happen? Maybe it already has.

I know, of course, that such predictions have been made before, during the energy crisis of the 1970's. But the end of that crisis has been widely misunderstood: prices went down not because the world found new sources of oil, but because it found ways to make do with less.

During the 1980's, oil consumption dropped around the world as the delayed effects of the energy crisis led to the use of more fuel-efficient cars, better insulation in homes and so on. Although economic growth led to a gradual recovery, as late as 1993 world oil consumption was only slightly higher than it had been in 1979. In the United States, oil consumption didn't regain its 1979 level until 1997.

Since then, however, world demand has grown rapidly: the daily world consumption of oil is 12 million barrels higher than it was a decade ago, roughly equal to the combined production of Saudi Arabia and Iran. It turns out that America's love affair with gas guzzlers, shortsighted as it is, is not the main culprit: the big increases in demand have come from booming developing countries. China, in particular, still consumes only 8 percent of the world's oil — but it accounted for 37 percent of the growth in world oil consumption over the last four years.

The collision between rapidly growing world demand and a limited world supply is the reason why the oil market is so vulnerable to jitters. Maybe we'll get through this bad patch, and oil will fall back toward $30 a barrel. But if that happens, it will be only a temporary respite.

In a way it's ironic. Lately we've been hearing a lot about competition from Chinese manufacturing and Indian call centers. But a different kind of competition — the scramble for oil and other resources — poses a much bigger threat to our prosperity.

So what should we be doing? Here's a hint: We can neither drill nor conquer our way out of the problem. Whatever we do, oil prices are going up. What we have to do is adapt.

Darwin, Origin of the Species, Adapt or die.

Out of Control

Powell aides go public on rift with Bush

Chief of staff says secretary of state is fed up with apologising for the administration and is disdainful of 'ideological' hawks

Gary Younge in New York
Thursday May 6, 2004
The Guardian

Colin Powell's key aide has described US sanctions policy against countries such as Pakistan and Cuba as "the dumbest policy on the face of the Earth".

In an article in GQ magazine Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff of the United States secretary of state, bemoans Mr Powell's firefighting role in President George Bush's cabinet.

"He has spent as much time doing damage control and, shall we say, apologising around the world for some less-than-graceful actions as he has anything else."

The article, which includes an interview with Mr Powell, is most illuminating for the comments made by his close friends and colleagues who are explicit about his distrust and disdain for the hawks in the administration.

Mr Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, remarks on his boss's anguish at the damage to his credibility following his speech to the United Nations last year making the case for war and insisting there were weapons of mass destruction. "It's a source of great distress for the secretary," he said.

Meanwhile his mentor from the National War College, Harlan Ullman, describes the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as a "jerk".

He said: "This is, in many ways, the most ideological administration Powell's ever had to work for. Not only is it very ideological, but they have a vision. And I think Powell is inherently uncomfortable with grand visions like that."

Their candour suggests that the internecine battles within the administration are becoming increasingly bitter and open, particularly those between the departments of defence and the state. "None of Powell's friends had made any pretence of speculating about or guessing at his feelings," wrote the journalist, Wil Hylton. "They spoke for him openly and on the record."

Mr Wilkerson even makes jibes at the war record of Mr Bush's inner circle, comparing their desire for military conflict with their reluctance to serve as young men: "I make no bones about it. I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die."

He then goes on to name former neo-conservative adviser, Richard Perle. He said: "Thank God [he] tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semi-official person in this administration."

With the public rebuke of Rummy, and Powell and his aides going off the reservation, I'd say the wheels are starting to come off.

Rummy's Rules

Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility

Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A34

THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that is reasonably consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated.

In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists from communicating with confederates abroad. But if the United States was to resort to that exceptional practice, Mr. Rumsfeld should have established procedures to ensure that it did so without violating international conventions against torture and that only suspects who truly needed such extraordinary handling were treated that way. Outside controls or independent reviews could have provided such safeguards. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld allowed detainees to be indiscriminately designated as beyond the law -- and made humane treatment dependent on the goodwill of U.S. personnel.

Much of what has happened at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay is shrouded in secrecy. But according to an official Army report, a system was established at the camp under which military guards were expected to "set the conditions" for intelligence investigations. The report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba says the system was later introduced at military facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, even though it violates Army regulations forbidding guards to participate in interrogations.

The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility.

The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.

Yeah, Bushco really takes this seriously. Sure.

This is the Culture War

What about the other secret U.S. prisons?

Reed Brody IHT

We must all, like President George W. Bush, share a "deep disgust" at the pictures of U.S. military personnel subjecting Iraqi detainees to humiliating treatment. The problem, however, is that this does not appear to be an isolated incident.
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Across the world, the United States is holding detainees in offshore and foreign prisons where allegations of mistreatment cannot be monitored. It has also been accused of sending terror suspects to countries where information has been beaten out of them.
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The classic case, of course, has been Guantánamo, Cuba, which the Bush administration deliberately chose as a detention facility for more than 700 detainees from 44 countries in an attempt to put them beyond the reach of the U.S. courts - and of any courts, for that matter. The U.S. government has argued that U.S. courts would not have jurisdiction over these detainees even if it they were being tortured or summarily executed.
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But Guantánamo may not be the worst problem; indeed, it may even be a diversion from more extreme situations. Perhaps out of concern that Guantánamo will eventually be monitored by the U.S. courts, the Bush administration does not hold its most sensitive and high-profile detainees there. Terrorism suspects like Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed are detained instead in undisclosed locations outside the United States, with no access to Red Cross or other visits.
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In Iraq, we now have pictures of American soldiers degrading captives. The brazenness with which the soldiers conducted themselves, snapping photographs and flashing the "thumbs-up" sign as they abused prisoners, suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from their superiors. Indeed, there are now reports that their higher-ups in military intelligence urged such behavior to create better conditions for interrogation.
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This is all the more disturbing because the United States has failed to provide clear information on its treatment of 10,000 civilians held in Iraq - and has provided no information at all for at least 200 so-called "high security detainees."
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In Afghanistan, the United States is also holding civilians in a legal black hole at a number of off-limits detention facilities - with no tribunals, no legal counsel and no family visits.
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Human Rights Watch has presented compelling evidence that there, too, U.S. personnel have committed inhumane and degrading acts against detainees. Released detainees have said that U.S. forces severely beat them, doused them with cold water and subjected them to freezing temperatures. Three people have died in U.S. custody there, and two of the deaths were ruled homicides by U.S. military doctors who performed autopsies. The Department of Defense has yet to explain adequately the circumstances of any of these deaths.
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And then there are the so-called "renditions" of suspects to countries where they are tortured. In one case, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian in transit from a family vacation through John F. Kennedy airport in New York, was detained by U.S officials and sent, against his wishes, to Syria, a country where torture is systematic. There, Arar was interrogated and, he alleges, tortured repeatedly during a 10-month confinement in an underground dungeon before returning to Canada.
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The Bush administration has still not answered charges leveled in The Washington Post which, citing numerous unnamed U.S. officials, described the rendition of captured Al Qaeda suspects from U.S. custody to other countries, such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, where they were tortured or mistreated. These countries, like Syria, are ones where the United States itself has criticized the practice of torture.
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The sordid photos from Iraq and reports that the behavior was actually encouraged confirm that systematic changes in the U.S. treatment of prisoners are needed immediately. The United States must finally investigate and publicly report on allegations of abuse by its forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as persistent accounts that suspects sent to other countries have been tortured.

Maybe now we can start taking a look at the way we treat ALL prisoners, including the ones in our domestic jails and prisons, which countenance routine rape and abuse.

Mr. Culture-of-Life-and-Freedom Bush sits on top of system which is so wholly abusive of life that the rest of the world winces at our hypocrisy. And half of the public still supports this upraised digit in the face of the world.

Albums

The Photos as travelogue.

New Prison Images Emerge
Graphic Photos May Be More Evidence of Abuse

By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A01

The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women's underwear covers his head and face.

The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" that were inflicted on detainees.

This group of photographs, taken from the summer of 2003 through the winter, ranges widely, from mundane images of everyday military life to pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers. The new pictures appear to show American soldiers abusing prisoners, many of whom wear ID bands, but The Post could not eliminate the possibility that some of them were staged.

The photographs were taken by several digital cameras and loaded onto compact discs, which circulated among soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md. The pictures were among those seized by military investigators probing conditions at the prison, a source close to the unit said.

The investigation has led to charges being filed against six soldiers from the 372nd. "The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence," Taguba's report states.

For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets.

Bill Lawson, whose nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is one of the soldiers charged in the incident, said that Frederick sent home pictures from Iraq on a few occasions. They were "just ordinary photos, like a tourist would take" and nothing showing prisoner abuse, he said.

"I would say that's something that's very common that's going on in Iraq because it's so convenient and easy to do," Lawson said of troops sending pictures home. He added that his nephew also mailed videocassettes "of him talking into a camcorder to [his wife] when he was going on his rounds."

But in the case of prisoner abuse, the ubiquity of digital cameras has created a far more combustible international scandal that would have been sparked only by the release of Taguba's searing written report. Since the "60 Minutes II" broadcast, pictures of abuse have been posted on the Internet and shown on television stations worldwide.

The photographs have been condemned by U.S. military commanders, President Bush and leaders around the world. They have sparked particularly strong indignation in the Middle East, where many people see them as reinforcing the notion "that the situation in Iraq is one of occupation," said Shibley Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.

The impact is heightened by religion and culture. Arabs "are even more offended when the issue has to do with nudity and sexuality," he said. "The bottom line here is these are pictures of utter humiliation."

It is unclear who took the photographs, or why.

Here is one of the most disturbing ideas from this scandal: why would anyone want to have these images follow them home and share them with family and friends?

Here Comes the Boss

whoopsie

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world, and that one of the dangers of basing a campaign on national security and foreign policy is that events can be beyond the president's control.

Despite the behind-the-scenes criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush insisted that the defense secretary still had his full support. "Of course I've got confidence in the secretary of defense," Mr. Bush said in an interview with Al Hurra, an Arab television network.

Republicans noted a strong public relations aspect to the disclosures about the Oval Office scolding, which made Mr. Rumsfeld the scapegoat in the scandal.

On Monday, Mr. Bush is scheduled to make a rare visit to the Pentagon, where he will meet with Mr. Rumsfeld on the defense secretary's turf, receive a briefing on Iraq and make a public statement.

White House officials said that the visit had been planned before the abuse scandal erupted, but they acknowledged that its timing was opportune for Mr. Bush to make a public show of support for Mr. Rumsfeld after the messy events of Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Rumsfeld faced increasingly restive Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were angry that the defense secretary told them nothing about the photographs, which showed Iraqis stripped of their clothes, piled on top of one another and in positions that appeared to simulate sexual acts, when he briefed them last Wednesday, the same day that "60 Minutes II" broadcast its story.

"No member of the Senate had any clue," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. "This is entirely unacceptable. I think it's a total washout as far as communications, and it has to be rectified."

Democrats were even more caustic. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, stopped just short of calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, saying that if the blame went all the way to Mr. Rumsfeld's office, he should step down. "This is a disaster of significant proportions," Mr. Biden said. "It calls for accountability and quickly."

It was unclear Wednesday from interviews with Pentagon officials exactly how much Mr. Rumsfeld knew about the scandal and when.

Pentagon officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld was first notified about the pictures in mid-January, after a soldier turned them over to Army officials, prompting the opening of an investigation. A senior Pentagon official said that Mr. Rumsfeld was told of the allegations of abuse and given a general description of the photographs.

Within weeks, the Pentagon official said, Mr. Rumsfeld told the president about the case. But it is not clear, the official said, whether Mr. Rumsfeld mentioned the photographs or their basic content to Mr. Bush at that point.

Mr. Bush first mentioned the abuse scandal publicly last Friday in the Rose Garden, when he said he shared "deep disgust" about the photographs. That evening, he went to a party at Mr. Rumsfeld's house in the Kalorama section of Washington, where it is not known whether he and his defense secretary talked about the pictures.

Well, that's pretty much the same thing I said to the Old Friend on the way to dinner to'other night. That it is going to take the world a generation to get over this and in the short term we are always going to be the bad guys. Americans aren't good at being bad guys, "The Sopranos" not withstanding, and expect some really spectacular misjudgements out of the White House in response.

But, then, expecting spectacular misjudgements out of the White House is playing to the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Heart of Darkness

Rumsfeld Chastised by President for His Handling of Iraq Scandal
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: May 6, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 5 — President Bush on Wednesday chastised his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, for Mr. Rumsfeld's handling of a scandal over the American abuse of Iraqis held at a notorious prison in Baghdad, White House officials said.

The disclosures by the White House officials, under authorization from Mr. Bush, were an extraordinary display of finger-pointing in an administration led by a man who puts a high premium on order and loyalty. The officials said the president had expressed his displeasure to Mr. Rumsfeld in an Oval Office meeting because of Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to tell Mr. Bush about photographs of the abuse, which have enraged the Arab world.

In his interviews on Wednesday with Arab television networks, Mr. Bush said that he learned the graphic details of the abuse case only when they were broadcast last Wednesday on the CBS program "60 Minutes II." It was then, one White House official said, that Mr. Bush also saw the photographs documenting the abuse. "When you see the pictures," the official said, "it takes on a proportion of gravity that would require a much more extreme response than the way it was being handled."

Another White House official said, "The president was not satisfied or happy about the way he was informed about the pictures, and he did talk to Secretary Rumsfeld about it."

The disclosure of the dressing-down of the combative Mr. Rumsfeld was the first time that Mr. Bush has allowed his displeasure with a senior member of his administration to be made public. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Bush's inner circle that have deepened with the violence and political chaos in American-occupied Iraq.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who has often been at odds with Mr. Rumsfeld, went so far on Tuesday night as to talk about the prison abuse scandal in the context of the My Lai massacre of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children by American troops, a historical reference that was not in the White House talking points that sought to stem the damage from the scandal.

Mr. Powell, in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," brought up My Lai without prompting, saying that he served in Vietnam "after My Lai happened" and that "in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they're still to be deplored."

The scandal comes at a particularly difficult time for the White House, which is struggling for an orderly transfer of power to the Iraqis on June 30 and also engaged in a tight and expensive presidential re-election campaign against Senator John Kerry.

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world, and that one of the dangers of basing a campaign on national security and foreign policy is that events can be beyond the president's control.

Despite the behind-the-scenes criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush insisted that the defense secretary still had his full support. "Of course I've got confidence in the secretary of defense," Mr. Bush said in an interview with Al Hurra, an Arab television network.

Republicans noted a strong public relations aspect to the disclosures about the Oval Office scolding, which made Mr. Rumsfeld the scapegoat in the scandal.

On Monday, Mr. Bush is scheduled to make a rare visit to the Pentagon, where he will meet with Mr. Rumsfeld on the defense secretary's turf, receive a briefing on Iraq and make a public statement.

White House officials said that the visit had been planned before the abuse scandal erupted, but they acknowledged that its timing was opportune for Mr. Bush to make a public show of support for Mr. Rumsfeld after the messy events of Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Rumsfeld faced increasingly restive Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were angry that the defense secretary told them nothing about the photographs, which showed Iraqis stripped of their clothes, piled on top of one another and in positions that appeared to simulate sexual acts, when he briefed them last Wednesday, the same day that "60 Minutes II" broadcast its story.

In a more normal world, one would have expected the "holy shct" moment to have happened a little earlier, but it is happening.

The next two days will be interesting. If the media allow Bush to get through his visit to Arlington and Rummy's visit to the Armed Services Committee to get a pass, I'll think this mess is done. But the media like sexy photos, and I don't think they are going to let this go while they can still extract some ratings.

Trip to the Hill

Gunning for Rummy?

The Senate Intelligence Committee gets briefed this morning on the Abu Ghraib scandal by a group of senior Pentagon officials. That briefing is behind closed doors.

The fallout from that failure to keep Congress fully informed and the sinking realization that the damage done by those images may be irreparable is having serious repercussions on Capitol Hill. Democrats stopped just a hair short of calling on Rumsfeld to resign.

CNN just reported that Rummy will testify before the Senate Armed Service Committee on Friday morning. Must-see TV.

Punk'd on Reality

Administration, outside experts see different Iraqs

WASHINGTON — Few administration insiders rival Douglas Feith as a passionate believer in America's ability to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy and a protégé of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, has played a lead role in what has turned out to be overly optimistic postwar planning.

To describe Feith as a controversial figure veers close to understatement. Bob Woodward, in his authoritative new book Plan of Attack, recounts that Gen. Tommy Franks described Feith to colleagues as "the (big-time expletive deleted) stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

This context helps explain the anticipation that surrounded Feith's speech Tuesday morning at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Iraq, a year after President Bush declared the end of major combat. AEI, Washington's pre-eminent right-of-center think tank, serves as the intellectual home of leading neo-conservative theorists who advocate an assertive U.S. military role in the Middle East. Feith, in fact, joked in his opening remarks about appearing at the epicenter of what critics call "the neo-con cabal."

In his speech, Feith described postwar civilian life in glowing terms, stressing that "economically, Iraq is recovering" and that "health care spending is 30 times greater than its prewar levels." He contended that "more than half the Iraqi people are active in civic affairs," a claim that would be hard to make about America.

In Feith's view, the glass in Iraq is not just half-full, but brimming with success. This rosy picture provoked the predictable Washington skepticism. During the question period, Feith was asked what went wrong with the planning for the occupation of Iraq. His answer spoke volumes about his reluctance to admit error. "It's a very complex subject to evaluate the quality of the planning," he said. "Some of it was very good, some of it was a lot less good. I think it's something best left to the historians to sort out rather than asking people in the middle of everything to step back and evaluate their own work."

In fairness, it may be unrealistic to expect too much candor from public officials. But what was revealing about the AEI conference was the chasm between Feith's upbeat assessments and the critical comments of an earlier panel of non-governmental experts.

Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert at AEI, faulted the Pentagon for not thinking broadly about the aftermath of ousting Saddam Hussein. "President Bush asked for regime change," Donnelly said, "but what he got was a plan for regime removal."

Steven Metz, a faculty member at the U.S. Army War College, criticized the American commitment in Iraq for being predicated on untested theories. Despite the administration's assertions, Metz said, there is no guarantee that the United States can impose democracy on Iraq or that the geopolitical benefits from such a democracy would be worth the cost. Metz stressed that Iraqis are not necessarily beguiled by abstractions such as democracy. He said their outlook is based on the pragmatic question: "Who is likely to be here in five years and have a gun?"

In a nutshell, this explains the fantasy sold to Bushco.

Systematic Infection

Guard commander disciplined for nude photos of female soldiers

Wednesday, May 5, 2004

(05-05) 00:15 PDT WALNUT CREEK, Calif. (AP) --

A former National Guard commander is accused of taking naked pictures of female U.S. soldiers while they showered last year at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a newspaper reported.

Capt. Leo V. Merck, 32, of Fremont, Calif., faces a court martial, the Contra Costa Times reported in Wednesday editions.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the center of a scandal involving photographs of U.S. Army soldiers subjecting naked Iraqi prisoners to humiliating treatment.

Three female soldiers from the 870th Military Police Company from Pittsburg, Calif., filed the accusations against Merck in November, National Guard officials told the paper Tuesday.

Spc. Myrna Hernandez, 26, of Antioch, Calif. told the newspaper that she was showering on Nov. 12 at the same time as two other female soldiers when she saw Merck on his hands and knees taking pictures with a digital camera.

"It was very tough for me going through that ...," she said. "I want people to know what he did was wrong, and not something people can just brush off and kick him out."

The women turned Merck in the next day. Hernandez said the pictures were among the many inappropriate photos found on Merck's government computer.

Lt. Michael Drayton took over the unit and said that Merck faced a court martial in Kuwait. The women, who are back in the United States, won't need to go back to testify because Drayton said prosecutors had enough evidence.

Add the unresolved rape crisis at the Air Force Academy and looks to me like we have a culture of abuse problem throughout the military.

Face of the Nation

A Wretched New Picture Of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page C01

But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain with us for years, perhaps decades. An Army investigative report reveals that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of flesh, as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front of their captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts; threatened prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them; and turned dogs upon them.

There are now images of men in the Muslim world looking at these images. On the streets of Cairo, men pore over a newspaper. An icon appears on the front page: a hooded man, in a rug-like poncho, standing with his arms out like Christ, wires attached to the hands. He is faceless. This is now the image of the war. In this country, perhaps it will have some competition from the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled. Everywhere else, everywhere America is hated (and that's a very large part of this globe), the hooded, wired, faceless man of Abu Ghraib is this war's new mascot.

The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a good deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost control of the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have pronounced themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday.

Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us.

But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours.

And more. Perhaps this is just a little cancer that crept into the culture of the people running Abu Ghraib prison. But stand back. Look at the history. Open up to the hard facts of human nature, the lessons of the past, the warning signs of future abuses.

These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.

Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few bad seeds. First of all, they exist. Soldiers who allow themselves to be photographed humiliating prisoners clearly don't believe this behavior is unpalatable. Second, the soldiers didn't just reach into a grab bag of things they thought would humiliate young Iraqi men. They chose sexual humiliation, which may recall to outsiders the rape scandal at the Air Force Academy, Tailhook and past killings of gay sailors and soldiers.

Is it an accident that these images feel so very much like the kind of home made porn that is traded every day on the Internet? That they capture exactly the quality and feel of the casual sexual decadence that so much of the world deplores in us?

Is it an accident that the man in the hood, arms held out as if on a cross, looks so uncannily like something out of the Spanish Inquisition? That they have the feel of history in them, a long, buried, ugly history of religious aggression and discrimination?

This is the point which is not grasped by President Bunnypants, Rummy and, indeed, the jabbering nitwits on cable TV: that image will define the American face in the Arab world, and much of the rest of the world, for a generation. It is the face of the brute, the rapist, the bully. The behavior of the current administration is that of the narcissist who does what he wishes, completely incapable of empathy, much less larger virtues like compassion. The rest of the world has noticed. The only question now is how long it will take the rest of the planet to forgive us, if it ever will.

Photo Op

Accountability at Issue in Abuse of Prisoners
With public outrage growing, lawmakers and others are asking where responsibility will settle and whether higher-ups will be punished.

By Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writer

As the scale of the abuse at Abu Ghraib and the broader deficiencies of management have come to light, questions go beyond who is to blame for the actions. Enraged Arabs and uncomfortable Americans alike have asked how those who should have known about the abuses are being punished — and in some cases whether they will be punished at all.

Criminal charges have been filed against six relatively low-ranking military police officers who are Army reservists, according to people familiar with the charges. The six are accused of being directly involved in the abuses in a high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib. As many as three of the six cases have been referred for military trial, and others are in various stages of preliminary hearings, officials said.

In addition to the criminal cases, six others — all military police — have been given letters of reprimand, which in the competitive ranks of the military usually preclude promotion.

The highest-ranking officer to be implicated is a brigadier — or one-star — general, Janis Karpinski. As commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Karpinski was responsible for all military prisons in Iraq. She was reprimanded and removed from command.

The Army could have filed criminal charges against Karpinski for dereliction of duty, but commanders chose not to.

Although Karpinski was removed from her command, others who received letters of reprimand have not been. The Pentagon's decision to hand out reprimands does not legally preclude the filing of criminal charges later, but it almost always does in practice.

"They chose administrative punishments. That means they are saying that this is basically a failure of management — it's not the same as criminal behavior, except among those who were actually humiliating and photographing those prisoners," said Allen Weiner, a professor of international law and diplomacy at Stanford University law school.

"The question then becomes, is that appropriate? It's hard to imagine anything more damaging to U.S. objectives in Iraq than this set of images," Weiner said. "I would assume that you would want to pursue criminal prosecution at the highest level to try to counter that."

As knowledge of the abuses grows, pressure on the military to move beyond routine punishment also grows.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the prison abuses "the single most damaging act to our interests in the region in the last decade," and suggested that limiting punishment to those directly involved may not be sufficient.

"Accountability is essential," Biden said. "So the question for me is what did Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon know, when did they know it and what did they do about it? If the answers are unsatisfactory, resignations should be sought."

Bush was told of the prison abuses as early as last winter, presumably because administration and military officials considered the episode serious and wide-reaching. Yet, it was not until photographs of the abuse appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes II" last week that the extent of the intimidation and sexual humiliation became clear. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Tuesday that Bush had not seen the photos before they were aired.

"This is not something you can bury on the back burner," said Scott Silliman, a professor at Duke University School of Law and retired Air Force colonel. "My guess is that word has gone out from the third floor of the Pentagon [where Rumsfeld's office is located] to say we want this thing thoroughly investigated now because we don't want to be embarrassed again."

But even as Rumsfeld and senior military officials pledge to move vigorously to bring those responsible to justice, military legal experts say that in terms of further criminal prosecution, the Pentagon's hands may be tied.

Under international laws of war, if a superior military officer knew or should have known that his subordinates were committing war crimes and did nothing to stop them, then the superior officer is as guilty as the people who committed the crimes.

This LATimes story cuts to the chase: what did Rummy and the Joint Chiefs know and when did they know it.

Bushco jumped the shark this week. But it took dirty pictures to get the media's attention. It isn't like there hasn't been a history of scandal and abuse with this admin, but until there were dirty pictures, no one in the media paid attention.

Accountability

Probes of Detainee Deaths Reported
Bush to Appear On Arab TV; Rice Apologizes

By Bradley Graham and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page A01

Two Iraqi prisoners were killed by U.S. soldiers last year, and 20 other detainee deaths and assaults remain under criminal investigation in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of a total of 35 cases probed since December 2002 for possible misconduct by U.S. troops in those two countries, Army officials reported yesterday.

The tally emerged on a day U.S. military officials, struggling to contain growing outrage over the handling of detainees, insisted they had been quick to respond to allegations of abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. But Gen. George Casey, the Army's vice chief of staff, acknowledged that the actions there of military guards and interrogators had amounted to "a complete breakdown in discipline."

Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, publicly apologized to the Arab world for the mistreatment, and White House officials said President Bush would appear on Arab television in an effort to counter the damage.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered public assurances that those responsible for the misconduct would be held accountable and announced a further widening of Pentagon investigations into the military's treatment of detainees. He said he had ordered the Navy to look into operations at two prisons outside Iraq and Afghanistan holding terrorist suspects -- the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the naval brig at Charleston, S.C.

At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld appeared on the defensive as he was peppered with questions about why he and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had taken days to read an internal Army investigation of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison. Pentagon leaders also faced a sharp rebuke from Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress, who accused them of not having been forthcoming earlier about the problems at the prison.

"We need to know why we weren't told what went on," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after a closed-door briefing by Army officials to the Armed Services Committee.

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) complained that when Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials came to Capitol Hill last week -- hours before CBS's "60 Minutes II" first aired photographs of Iraqi prisoners being physically abused and sexually humiliated -- they neglected to mention the coming disclosure.

"Why were we not told in a classified briefing why this happened, and that it happened at all?" he asked. "That is inexcusable; it's an outrage."

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) agreed when asked whether he also was concerned that the administration had not alerted Congress before the CBS program. "If we're going to be part and a partner in this war on terror, then we ought to be completely briefed, not just briefed on things they want us to hear," he said.

But while condemnation of the reported abuses came from both sides of the political aisle, members split along party lines over the question of whether Congress should conduct special hearings into the allegations. Several Democrats urged such a move, but Republicans DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee opposed the idea, saying regular congressional committees could provide sufficient oversight.

"I'm sure that our committees are going to be asking the right questions," DeLay said. "But a full-fledged congressional investigation -- that's like saying we need an investigation every time there's police brutality on the street."

Human Rights Watch, a leading human rights organization, called yesterday for a broad public investigation of all detention centers around the world run by the U.S. military and CIA. The CIA operates an unknown number of small prisons for suspected terrorists overseas.

"The brazenness with which the U.S. soldiers involved conducted themselves suggests they thought they had nothing to hide from their superiors," they wrote in a letter to Rice. A probe of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison "does not nearly go far enough to reverse the extraordinary harm these abuses have caused."

I saw Rummy's presser yesterday. He actually looked scared. Finally, he understands he is out of his dept. I find it revealing that Rice is sent out to give the official apology. Let the black girl do it.

Just for sport, here's GQ's interview with Colin Powell. I caught the end of his act on Larry King last night, which I consider light duty, but Powell is clearly tired of it all.

The NYT says the problems are extensive.

WASHINGTON, May 4 — In the last 16 months, the Army has conducted more than 30 criminal investigations into misconduct by American captors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 10 cases of suspicious death, 10 cases of abuse, and two deaths already determined to have been criminal homicides, the Army's vice chief of staff said Tuesday.

To date, the most severe penalties in any of the cases were less-than-honorable discharges for five Army soldiers, military officials said. No one has been sentenced to prison, they said.

The disclosure of the investigations, by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army's second-highest ranking general, was the strongest indication to date of a wider pattern of abuse at American prisons beyond the horrific descriptions and photographs that have emerged recently of acts of humiliation, sexual and otherwise, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in November.

At the Pentagon on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld condemned the abuses at Abu Ghraib as "totally unacceptable and un-American," but sought to minimize the significance of incidents elsewhere and insisted that the military had acted swiftly in cases in which misconduct was alleged. "The system works," he said.

But on Capitol Hill, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee expressed anger after a briefing in which they were told of the details and potential scope of the misconduct for the first time.

The Senate Intelligence Committee said it would hold a closed session on Wednesday to determine whether American intelligence officers from the military or other agencies were involved.

The Bush administration dispatched top officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to contain the fallout over the widening story of abuse at the prisons, which Mr. Powell said had "stunned every American." Administration officials have acknowledged that the episode had caused enormous damage to the American image around the world.

To date, only Army military police officers assigned to Abu Ghraib prison have been disciplined in abuses committed in November in a secure cellblock. But a March 9 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba said two military intelligence officers and two private contractors who oversaw interrogations may have been "either directly or indirectly responsible."

In a more normal world, some heads, Rummy's among them, would roll. Since we are living in Bushworld, I doubt we'll see that.

The Dirt

The Taguba Report courtesy of The Agonist.

Rebuked

Former diplomats attack Bush

White House accused of sacrificing credibility with Arab world in US protest that mirrors assault on Blair

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday May 4, 2004
The Guardian

Fifty-three former US diplomats today accuse the White House of sacrificing America's credibility in the Arab world - and the safety of its diplomats and soldiers - because of the Bush administration's support for the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

The strongly worded rebuke, which paid tribute to last week's broadside from more than 50 former British diplomats against the government's policy in Iraq, marked a rare public display of dissent for state department personnel.

Its central charge that the Bush administration is unfairly tilted towards Mr Sharon arrives at a time when Washington's strategy in the Middle East is in tatters. George Bush has invested heavily in Mr Sharon's proposal for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and gone a step further by endorsing a continued Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.

The overwhelming rejection of the proposal by Likud voters on Sunday was seen in Washington yesterday as a direct snub to Mr Bush. But the White House reaffirmed its support for Mr Sharon.

Yesterday he said he would modify his disengagement plan but gave no details, while earlier members of his government said the setback was temporary, and the withdrawal from Gaza would go ahead. "There is no doubt disengagement is inevitable and unstoppable," the deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said. "The alternative is more murder, terrorism and attacks without any wise answer for what 7,500 Jewish [settlers] are doing among 1.2 million Palestinians [in Gaza]."

Mr Sharon's troubles are due for further scrutiny at a meeting in New York today of the sponsors of the peace road map - the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations. But there is no doubt the rebuff from Likud will be seen as an embarrassment to Washington, one that is further deepened by the critique from an assembly of US government personnel with decades of experience.
....
The letter, which was initiated by a former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, was endorsed mainly by those who had served for years in Arab countries. Supporters include the former ambassadors to India, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt. The petition was also endorsed by two recent rebels against the Bush administration policy: John Brady Kiesling, who resigned last year in protest against the war, and Greg Thielmann, an intelligence analyst who accused Washington of distorting information on Iraqi weapons programmes.

The last time American diplomatic professionals used this tactic was during Viet Nam. This is strong stuff.

It's Still the Economy

via Suburban Guerilla

U.S. job cuts rise 6.1 percent in April - report
Reuters, 05.04.04, 10:00 AM ET

NEW YORK, May 4 (Reuters) - Layoffs in the United States rose 6.1 percent last month, after falling to their lowest level in nine months in March, a report said on Tuesday, signaling the April payrolls report due Friday may not be as strong as in March.

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said employers announced 72,184 job cuts in April, up from the 68,034 in March, but still down 51 percent from April 2003.

The Challenger report lends weight to bond market expectations that the April jobs report due at the end of the week is likely to come in weaker than last month.

"Companies wait until the last minute to hire. They only hire if there is no other choice," John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told Reuters. Hiring employees is expensive, and companies wait until they are sure the employees will be needed, he added.

Wall Street economists forecast that the economy added 173,000 jobs in April, compared with an eye-popping 308,000 in March.

A decline in the number of jobs added to the economy in April could be a blow to consumer and business confidence, Christmas said.

Despite the uptick in April, layoff announcements are generally falling. The April number was down 51 percent from the April 2003 figure of 146,399.

Human Resources

47,000 More GIs Tapped for Year in Iraq

ROBERT BURNS
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - U.S. military commanders in Iraq have decided they need to keep an expanded force in Iraq beyond June and will send 10,000 active-duty Army and Marine Corps troops for one-year tours, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced Tuesday.

Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference that he approved the 10,000 at the request of Gen. John Abizaid, top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. Rumsfeld said other deployments would be considered in coming days.

In addition, the Army planned to announce that about 37,000 National Guard and Reserve troops are getting called to active duty to support three National Guard combat brigades that will be sent to Iraq late this year or early in 2005, defense officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

There are now about 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The number was to have fallen to about 115,000 this spring, but the latest change of plans would leave the total at about 125,000 to 128,000 after June. That could still change, depending on the security situation between now and June.

About 5,000 Marines and a contingent of about 5,000 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, N.Y., will go this summer to relieve the 1st Armored Division and the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, whose soldiers were due to come home in April but were extended until June.
....
Details about the 37,000 National Guard and Reserve troops who are being alerted for Iraq duty were not immediately available. They will provide support for the three National Guard combat brigades that were notified earlier this year that they will be going to Iraq for one-year tours late this year or early in 2005. A large proportion of the 37,000 are Army Reserve, one official said.

Stars and Stripes,
Tuesday, May 4, 2004

We fulfill mission requirements with people who have not been home on rest and recuperation leave because only 40 percent of the company was allowed to go home during our last year. These soldiers are enduring strife at home because of the continued deployment and have little idea of when they’ll finally go home themselves. They survive with what they would have carried on the plane ride home – two check bags and a carry-on, because everything else has already been shipped. They have not received mail in two months because of redeployment and still have no mailing address because they lack certainty in where they will be next week. In spite of it all, we will be there.

Now we’re being asked to provide people to help other units. We are soldiers and will continue to do our duty if required. The nonflying soldiers of the unit remaining in limbo will probably enjoy something to keep them busy and keep their minds off of their own troubles. We want to help, so what can we do for our fellow soldiers?

It seems that we are to be utilized to process soldiers who are going home on rest and recuperation leave. We will facilitate the joyous relief of those soldiers away from their families and in harm’s way. Again, this is a noble effort for the men and women of the 57th Med. But these very soldiers who will put the smiles on those faces will probably not have seen their own families in more than a year and will not even be receiving pictures of those family members in the mail. But we will not falter in our service.

I cry as I write this for the families that endure, for those that will not, for those families that have lost loved ones already in spite of our best efforts, and for my own brothers and sisters in the 57th of whom I am so proud. We will not give up. But who will save us when we can no longer save ourselves?

Stuart Byrd
Chief Warrant Officer 2
Camp Udairi, Kuwait

Awakening

via Electrolite:

The Midnight Fathers

Something within you has become harder and colder this week. You've glimpsed the bestiality and the decadence, in the system's nerves like a venereal disease. It's sick, and there is something sexual in its sickness, something warped beyond therapy. The oiled skin of a gladiator, the lusty roar of the arena. A line from Cornford, whom you haven't read for years, slides beneath the surface of your mind. 'The painted boy in the praetorian's bed.' Camphor and pincers, piss and blood. You're in this rotting system, you're part of it. You pay the soldiers. Civis Romanus sum.

There are more of you than you know. You're in deep in the system, in its fouled blood, in its creaking bones, in its edgy nerves. In its schools and universities, its bureaucracies and businesses, its studios and offices, its factories and homes. You're under its skin. The midnight fathers. The summer of love mothers. Thousands of you, tens of thousands, in Britain alone. You have the numbers. You know the drill.

Revulsion

Thanks, Juan Cole:

Iraq Abuse May Undermine U.S. 'War on Terror'
Mon May 3, 2004 03:20 PM ET

By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers feeds Arab and Muslim fears that the "war on terror" is part of a broad effort to humiliate them and plays into the hands of extremists like al Qaeda, analysts say.

While experts say the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" are not necessarily related, the maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners will hurt efforts to rein in global terrorism and blurs the distinction for many who already question U.S. motives, credibility and respect for human rights.

"Those Americans who mistreated the prisoners may not have realized it, but they acted in the direct interests of al Qaeda, the insurgents, and the enemies of the U.S.," said Tony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has held various positions in government.

"These negative images validate all other negative images and interact with them," he said in a statement, citing "careless U.S. rhetoric about Arabs and Islam," failures to stabilize Iraq, continued Israeli-Palestinian violence and fears the United States is out to dominate the Middle East.

Photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, shown on television and in the press last week, triggered outrage across the globe. Some reports also cite incidents of physical abuse. Searing wartime images have often served to galvanize public opposition, as did the famous Vietnam era picture of a young girl, fleeing naked from the battle zone. It is, however, too soon to tell whether the Iraq abuse photographs will have a similar impact.

Yahya Alshawkani, Yemen's deputy chief of mission in Washington, said the images could undermine his and other governments' efforts to convince restive populations that the U.S.-led "war on terror" is legitimate and in their interest.

"This certainly won't be helpful to each country's campaign against terrorism," he said. "The damage has been done."

Many Arabs and Muslims are wary of Washington's "war on terror" and believe it is empty rhetoric designed to impose U.S. foreign policy goals abroad at their expense.

Former human rights minister told Bremer about Iraq detainee abuse

Mon May 3,12:31 PM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Former Iraqi human rights minister Abdel Basset Turki said US overseer Paul Bremer knew in November that Iraqi prisoners were being abused in US detention centres.

"In November I talked to Mr Bremer about human rights violations in general and in jails in particular. He listened but there was no answer. At the first meeting, I asked to be allowed to visit the security prisoners, but I failed," Turki told AFP on Monday.

"I told him the news. He didn't take care about the information I gave him." The coalition had no immediate comment about Turki's meeting with Bremer.

The minister, whose resignation was formally accepted by the coalition on Sunday, said he told Bremer about his meetings with former detainees.

"The prisoners I spoke to, they told me about how Iraqi prisoners were left in the sun on US bases for hours, prevented to pray and wash and left for two days on a chair and kicked at Abu Gharib," he said.

That was a reference to the largest prison in the country, located outside Baghdad, where a US Army enquiry found guards humiliated detainees, forced them to strip naked and perform mock fellatio and other sexual activities.

Since January, 17 people have been implicated in the scandal, including the general who ran the prison system in Iraq (news - web sites). Pictures of the abuse obtained by media outlets last week have caused outrage around the world.

But Turki said he had not been aware of the activities uncovered in the US Army probe when he met Bremer.

That enquiry was initiated after a US soldier in the prison stepped forward and informed the army's Criminal Investigation Division some time after November 1.

The top US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, then ordered a full criminal and administrative investigation that led to the suspension of 17 soldiers and officers.

A third investigation is now examining whether intelligence officers or civilian contractors encouraged the abuse to weaken prisoners ahead of interrorgations.

Turki said he had also raised concerns about prisoner abuse to the International Committee of the Red Cross, but they refused to share information with him.

Turki resigned from his post on April 8 in anger over the US military offensives on Najaf and Fallujah and it was officially accepted Sunday by the coalition, the human rights ministry said Monday.

The US-dominated CPA has cited human rights as a motivating factor in the invasion last spring to oust the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).

The coalition demanded human rights protections be inserted into the transitional law that is expected to govern Iraq until a permanent constitution is drafted by the end of 2005.

But the scenes of intense street fighting when US forces assaulted Fallujah on April 5, in a hunt for insurgents who brutally murdered four US contractors, triggered revulsion among pro-coalition Iraqis.

Swift Boats and Fast Talk

Smear Boat Veterans for Bush
The "Swift boat" veterans attacking John Kerry's war record are led by veteran right-wing operatives using the same vicious techniques they used against John McCain four years ago.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason

....

Behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are veteran corporate media consultant and Texas Republican activist Merrie Spaeth, who is listed as the group's media contact; eternal Kerry antagonist and Dallas attorney John E. O'Neill, law partner of Spaeth's late husband, Tex Lezar; and retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, a cigar-chomping former Vietnam commander once described as "the classic body-count guy" who "wanted hooches destroyed and people killed."

Spaeth told Salon that O'Neill first approached her last winter to discuss his "concerns about Sen. Kerry." O'Neill has been assailing Kerry since 1971, when the former Navy officer was selected for the role by Charles Colson, Richard Nixon's dirty-tricks aide. Spaeth heard O'Neill out, but told him, she says, that he "sounded like a crazed extremist" and should "button his lip" and avoid speaking with the press. But since Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, Spaeth has changed her mind and decided to donate her public relations services on a "pro bono" basis to O'Neill's latest anti-Kerry effort. "About three weeks ago, four weeks ago," she said, the group's leaders "met in my office for about 12 hours" to prepare for their Washington debut.

Although not as well known as Karen Hughes, Spaeth is among the most experienced and best connected Republican communications executives. During the Reagan administration she served as director of the White House Office of Media Liaison, where she specialized in promoting "news" items that boosted President Reagan to TV stations around the country. While living in Washington she met and married Lezar, a Reagan Justice Department lawyer who ran for lieutenant governor of Texas in 1994 with George W. Bush, then the party's candidate for governor. (Lezar lost; Bush won.)

Through Lezar, who died of a heart attack last January, she met O'Neill, his law partner in Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson, a Dallas firm. (It also includes Margaret Wilson, the former counsel to Gov. Bush who followed him to Washington, where she served for a time as a deputy counsel in the Department of Commerce.)

Spaeth's partisanship runs still deeper, as does her history of handling difficult P.R. cases for Republicans. In 1998, for example, she coached Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, to prepare him for his testimony urging the impeachment of President Clinton before the House Judiciary Committee. She even reviewed videotapes of his previous television appearances to give him pointers about his delivery and demeanor. The man responsible for arranging her advice to Starr was another old friend of her late husband's, Theodore Olson, who was counsel to the right-wing American Spectator when it acted as a front for the dirty-tricks campaign against Clinton known as the Arkansas Project; he is now the solicitor general in the Bush Justice Department. (Olson also happens to be the godfather of Spaeth's daughter.)

In 2000, Spaeth participated in the most subterranean episode of the Republican primary contest when a shadowy group billed as "Republicans for Clean Air" produced television ads falsely attacking the environmental record of Sen. John McCain in California, New York and Ohio. While the identity of those funding the supposedly "independent" ads was carefully hidden, reporters soon learned that Republicans for Clean Air was simply Sam Wyly -- a big Bush contributor and beneficiary of Bush administration decisions in Texas -- and his brother, Charles, another Bush "Pioneer" contributor. (One of the Wyly family's private capital funds, Maverick Capital of Dallas, had been awarded a state contract to invest $90 million for the University of Texas endowment.)

When the secret emerged, spokeswoman Spaeth caught the flak for the Wylys, an experience she recalled to me as "horrible" and "awful." Her job was to assure reporters that there had been no illegal coordination between the Bush campaign and the Wyly brothers in arranging the McCain-trashing message. Not everyone believed her explanation, including the Arizona senator.

The veteran group's founder, Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, first gained notoriety in Vietnam as a strutting, cigar-chewing Navy captain. But it was O'Neill, by now a familiar figure on the Kerry-bashing circuit, who came to Spaeth for assistance.

Until now, Hoffmann has been best known as the commanding officer whose obsession with body counts and "scorekeeping" may have provoked the February 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at Thanh Phong by a unit led by Bob Kerrey -- the Medal of Honor winner who lost a leg in Nam, became a U.S. senator from Nebraska and now sits on the 9/11 commission.

After journalist Gregory Vistica exposed the Thanh Phong massacre and the surrounding circumstances in the New York Times magazine three years ago, conservative columnist Christopher Caldwell took particular note of the cameo role played by Kerrey's C.O., who had warned his men not to return from missions without enough kills. "One of the myths due to die as a result of Vistica's article is that which holds the war could have been won sensibly and cleanly if the 'suits' back in Washington had merely left the military men to their own devices," Caldwell wrote. "In this light, one of the great merits of Vistica's article is its portrait of the Kurtz-like psychopath who commanded Kerrey's Navy task force, Capt. Roy Hoffmann."

Arguments about the war in Vietnam seem destined to continue forever. For now, however, the lingering bitterness and ambiguity of those days provide smear material against an antiwar war hero with five medals on behalf of a privileged Guardsman with a dubious duty record. The president's Texas allies -- whose animus against his Democratic challenger dates back to the Nixon era -- are now deploying the same techniques and personnel they used to attack McCain's integrity four years ago. Bush's "independent" supporters would apparently rather talk about the Vietnam quagmire than about his deadly incompetence in Iraq.

Group Says Kerry Released Edited Version of Military Records

By Brian Faler
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A04

A group of Vietnam veterans will release a letter today criticizing Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry's efforts to run as a "war hero" while releasing "only carefully screened portions" of his military records.

"You now seek to clad yourself in the very medals that you disdainfully threw away in the early years of your political career," the group wrote. "In the process, we believe you continue a deception as to your own conduct through such tactics as the disclosure of only carefully screened portions of your military records."

The group consists of veterans who, like Kerry, served on "swift boats" during the conflict. The letter will be released at an event sponsored by the Dallas-based Spaeth Communications Inc. -- whose founder, Merrie Spaeth, is mentioned on the Bush White House Web site as a "prominent" alumni of its fellows program.

The veterans organization demanded that Kerry authorize the Navy to release his complete military records. Kerry's campaign recently released a large number of the Democrat's military and health records that offered glowing assessments of his tour of duty. The Massachusetts senator spent 4 1/2 months in Vietnam, during which he received Bronze and Silver stars, along with three Purple Hearts.

Michael Meehan, a Kerry campaign spokesman, dismissed the group's criticism, noting that Kerry had received some of the Navy's highest commendations for his service in Vietnam. He added that Kerry has released most of his records and more than has President Bush.

Boy, the other side are really working their tails off, aren't they?

This Is The Story to Follow

Battlefield of Dreams
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 4, 2004

....

Much has been written about the damage done by foreign policy ideologues who ignored the realities of Iraq, imagining that they could use the country to prove the truth of their military and political doctrines. Less has been said about how dreams of making Iraq a showpiece for free trade, supply-side tax policy and privatization — dreams that were equally oblivious to the country's realities — undermined the chances for a successful transition to democracy.

A number of people, including Jay Garner, the first U.S. administrator of Iraq, think that the Bush administration shunned early elections, which might have given legitimacy to a transitional government, so it could impose economic policies that no elected Iraqi government would have approved. Indeed, over the past year the Coalition Provisional Authority has slashed tariffs, flattened taxes and thrown Iraqi industry wide open to foreign investors — reinforcing the sense of many Iraqis that we came as occupiers, not liberators.

But it's the reliance on private contractors to carry out tasks usually performed by government workers that has really come back to haunt us.

Conservatives make a fetish out of privatization of government functions; after the 2002 elections, George Bush announced plans to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs. At home, wary of a public backlash, he has moved slowly on that goal. But in Iraq, where there is little public or Congressional oversight, the administration has privatized everything in sight.

For example, the Pentagon has a well-established procurement office for gasoline. In Iraq, however, that job was subcontracted to Halliburton. The U.S. government has many experts in economic development and reform. But in Iraq, economic planning has been subcontracted — after a highly questionable bidding procedure — to BearingPoint, a consulting firm with close ties to Jeb Bush.

What's truly shocking in Iraq, however, is the privatization of purely military functions.

For more than a decade, many noncritical jobs formerly done by soldiers have been handed to private contractors. When four Blackwater employees were killed and mutilated in Falluja, however, marking the start of a wider insurgency, it became clear that in Iraq the U.S. has extended privatization to core military functions. It's one thing to have civilians drive trucks and serve food; it's quite different to employ them as personal bodyguards to U.S. officials, as guards for U.S. government installations and — the latest revelation — as interrogators in Iraqi prisons.

According to reports in a number of newspapers, employees from two private contractors, CACI International and Titan, act as interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to Sewell Chan of The Washington Post, these contractors are "at the center of the probe" into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. And that abuse, according to the senior defense analyst at Jane's, has "almost certainly destroyed much of what support the coalition had among the more moderate section of the Iraqi population."

We don't yet know for sure that private contractors were at fault. But why put civilians, who cannot be court-martialed and hence aren't fully accountable, in that role? And why privatize key military functions?

I don't think it's simply a practical matter. Although there are several thousand armed civilians working for the occupation, their numbers aren't large enough to make a significant dent in the troop shortage. I suspect that the purpose is to set a precedent.

You may ask whether our leaders' drive to privatize reflects a sincere conservative ideology, or a desire to enrich their friends. Probably both. But before Iraq, privatization that rewarded campaign contributors was a politically smart move, even if it was a net loss for the taxpayers.

In Iraq, however, reality does matter. And thanks to the ideologues who dictated our policy over the past year, reality looks pretty grim.

Dreyfuss Report

Cut And Run, Now
Pressure is building, in London and Washington, to cut and run, and it's the right thing to do. Are you listening, John Kerry?

Last week, conservative General William Odom—former head of the supersecret National Security Agency—became the first important former top military man to endorse the idea that the United States has bungled Iraq and needs to get out. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Odom said: "We have failed." He urged that U.S. forces be pulled out "from that shattered country as rapidly as possible.. The issue is how high a price we're going to pay—less by getting out sooner, or more by getting out later."

Pity that John Kerry is, so far blind to the catastrophe in Iraq. His speeches and wishy-washy policy on Iraq have left him totally unable to capture America's anger over Iraq. Since calling for the UN to take over for the United States in Iraq, Kerry has tacked this way and that, calling for more U.S. troops and pledging to stand firm, whatever that means. It's clear that Kerry doesn't have the backbone to stand up to President Bush on Iraq, the single biggest issue of 2004. Will he get a spine transplant anytime soon? I doubt it. Ralph Nader is campaigning hard for the anti-war vote. He may get mine.

For Our Toolbox

Letter from David Brock, Founder of Media Matters for America

Dear Friends,

David Brock

Ugly Americans

SEYMOUR HERSH: What I do have evidence of is that there were three investigations, each by a major general of the Army, ordered beginning in the fall of -- last fall. Clearly somebody at a higher level understood there were generic problems.

BLITZER: Seymour Hersh, he's got a powerful piece in The New Yorker. Thanks very much.

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

Read it and ask yourself some questions about what it means to be an empire.

Confronting the Shadow

The Nightmare at Abu Ghraib

Published: May 3, 2004

The American military made a strange and ill-starred decision when it chose to incarcerate Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, the prison that had become a byword for torture under Saddam Hussein and a symbol of everything the invasion of Iraq was supposed to end. As United States officials have known for months, some of the American soldiers brought their own version of sadism to the site. Now that the rest of the world knows as well, the Bush administration will have to do more than denounce the scandal as the work of a few bad apples.

Last week, CBS News broadcast pictures of a handful of smirking soldiers, male and female, abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners. While the news — and the pictures — rocketed around the globe, the military revealed that most of the guards in the pictures were already under arrest and that Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the Army Reserve, who ran the military prisons in Iraq, had been admonished and suspended from command in January. Now, months later, the military says it is investigating the allegations.

But it is far from clear that the American brass has done everything it needs to do. Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared on CBS yesterday to offer assurances that "we took very quick action to investigate that situation." But General Myers said he had not yet read a corrosive internal report on the military prison system written in February. "It's working its way to me," he told Bob Schieffer of CBS.

That report, prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, was described by Seymour Hersh in this week's New Yorker. He quoted General Taguba as saying the military police and intelligence officials had committed "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses," including sodomizing a prisoner "with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."

The theory that these horrific acts were committed by a few renegade soldiers has been undercut by charges that the men and women shown in the pictures were actually working at the direction of military intelligence officers. General Karpinski told The Times that military intelligence controlled the cellblock where the abuses occurred and seemed eager to portray herself and the guards under her command — all reservists — as scapegoats. "We're disposable," she said. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame?" If intelligence officers were involved — as one of the guards under arrest has also alleged — it may be part of a pattern that goes far beyond a single prison. Mr. Hersh wrote that a second investigation, by Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, found indications that the military police had been working to soften up prisoners for interrogation by intelligence officials starting during the Afghan war.

Any investigation must move beyond military intelligence to deal with the role of civilian contractors, who have assumed many security duties in Iraq. And if all this were not devastating enough, the British Ministry of Defense opened an inquiry into charges of prisoner abuse by British troops in Basra. Over the weekend The Daily Mirror in London published photographs that seemed to show an Iraqi prisoner being beaten with rifle butts and urinated on. The Mirror reported that the man's limp body was eventually tossed from the back of a moving vehicle, his ultimate fate unknown.

Terrorists like Osama bin Laden have always intended to use their violence to prod the United States and its allies into demonstrating that their worst anti-American propaganda was true. Abu Ghraib was an enormous victory for them, and it is unlikely that any response by the Bush administration will wipe its stain from the minds of Arabs. The invasion of Iraq, which has already begun to seem like a bad dream in so many ways, cannot get much more nightmarish than this.

U.S. Official: Abuse Allegations Are 'a Big Deal'
Charges Involving Army-Run Prison in Iraq Seen as Setback for Military; Britain Launches Inquiry

By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 3, 2004; Page A16

BAGHDAD, May 2 -- The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledged Sunday that allegations that Iraqi prisoners were abused at a detention facility run by the Army have set back efforts to cultivate a positive image for the U.S. military in the region.

"Where a handful of people can sully the reputation of hundreds of thousands of people that are over there trying to give a better life to 50 million people, it's a big deal, because we take this very seriously," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers said on CBS's "Face the Nation," referring to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Myers added: "There are a lot of Iraqis that have daily contact with our forces, and they get to know the character and the compassion of our forces. And so they probably understand this is an aberration. Not that it won't be used against the United States of America. It certainly will."

Last week, CBS broadcast images showing Iraqis stripped naked, hooded and being otherwise tormented, allegedly by their U.S. captors.

The British military has also begun an investigation into abuses, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Sunday, after the Daily Mirror newspaper published photographs Saturday that purportedly showed British troops kicking, stomping and urinating on a hooded Iraqi detainee in the southern city of Basra.

"These allegations are being taken extremely seriously," Straw said, according to the Reuters news service. "The allegations are terrible."

Human rights advocates criticized the alleged abuses by U.S. soldiers at the prison in Abu Ghraib, a suburb of the capital.

"We had heard reports about torture, but we didn't know that it rose to this level of brutality," said Salim Mandelawi, a lawyer who directs the Human Rights Organization in Iraq, founded in 1960. "These are inhuman actions that are taken only to humiliate people."

An analyst said fallout from the reports of abuse allegations could be devastating for U.S. policy in Iraq.

"The public relations damage is profound and permanent," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "The release of these pictures may be the point at which the United States lost Iraq."

Three separate investigations have been launched since the abuses were uncovered in January. Criminal charges have been filed against six soldiers and could be filed against four others. Administrative penalties have been recommended against seven officers.

American exceptionalism? A nation "called by God?" I don't think so. This is a nation which has never grappled with its "dark side."

Undiplomatic

'Modern-Day Slavery' Prompts Rescue Efforts
Groups Target Abuse of Foreign Maids, Nannies

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 3, 2004; Page A01

Alexandra Santacruz pressed up to the kitchen window on a recent spring night and peered anxiously down the street. She had done everything she could to get ready, tying her belongings neatly into four plastic bags and hiding them in the trash bin outside the Falls Church townhouse.

Just past 8 p.m., two hours after Santacruz began her vigil, a maroon van eased to a stop in front. Its passengers stepped out to begin their work: They were there to rescue her. The 24-year-old was desperate to leave her job as a live-in nanny, but her employers had threatened to call police if she did.

Two lawyers from CASA of Maryland, a workers' rights group, knocked on the door and confronted her stunned employer. They had become practiced at this exchange, now a common part of their jobs, and they were prepared for the accusations and denials that followed.

In minutes, Santacruz bounded out of the house, an enormous stuffed dog in her arms. "Estoy feliz!" she shouted. "I'm so happy."

For nearly two years, she had worked 80-hour weeks cooking, cleaning and baby-sitting for an Ecuadoran official of the Organization of American States. For that, her attorneys said, she was paid little more than $2 an hour. She had worked for the same family in Ecuador, but since arriving, she said, her employer had taken her passport, she had no money and she was afraid that if she left, she would lose her visa and police would come for her.

Stories like hers are increasing among the thousands of women who are recruited every year from impoverished countries as live-in domestic help, according to law enforcement officials and advocacy groups. Now, a growing number of organizations are reaching out to mistreated domestic workers, helping them leave their employers and providing emergency housing and legal advice.

In cases like Santacruz's, the workers suffer years of exploitation. In others, they are victims of trafficking, forced to become modern-day slaves.

A 14-year-old Cameroonian girl was enslaved for three years in Silver Spring by a couple from her country. The two never paid her, and the husband sexually abused her. A Bangladeshi maid for a Bahraini diplomat in New York who was never paid or allowed to leave the apartment was ultimately rescued by police, according to her lawsuit. An Indian maid for a diplomat in Potomac said she was mentally and physically abused and was paid $100 for 4,500 hours of work over 11 months.

Washington and New York are major destinations for such workers, given their large immigrant populations and because they are home to international organizations, whose foreign officials can bring in domestic servants on special visas. In many cases, the workers are hidden from public view, essentially locked behind closed doors.

"People can't conceive of the fact that modern-day slavery exists here in our own back yards, in the shadow of the nation's Capitol," said Joy Zarembka, executive director of Break the Chain Campaign, an area nonprofit group that focuses solely on domestic workers.

A 2004 CIA report estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are recruited or transported into the United States each year through fraud or coercion for sexual exploitation or forced labor. But pinpointing the number is impossible because no federal or state agency tracks the cases.

CASA of Maryland and Break the Chain estimate that they receive a total of 45 to 50 new domestic worker cases in the Washington area each year.

Those who work for diplomats or officials of international organizations face the added threat of losing their visas if they leave their jobs.

"It's a really draconian choice," said Carol Pier, the author of a 2001 Human Rights Watch report on domestic workers. "Living in an exploitative situation or leaving your employer to seek justice and losing your legal immigration status."

This is Washington's dirty little secret. I've been waiting to see this on the front page of the Post for 10 years. I've known about it for 20 years. Wage slavery in the Third World has been a fact of life in the international community here for as long as I've been here. It's time for this to be over.

Uses of the Blogosphere

Billmon has a spectacular catch, courtesy of a reader who found the on-line diary of one of the interrogators at Abu Gharaib:

The diary is a fascinating read - not least because it documents the fact that as of last Sunday, one of the private contractors identified in the Army's own internal investigation of the torture scandal was still at Abu Ghraib, and may still have been supervising or conducting interrogations.

I'm going to post this now, then update later with some more excerpts from Joe Ryan's prison diary. It's fascinating stuff, but I want to get the news about Stefanowicz out there as quickly as possible.

Empire or Republic?

Grand Designs
How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire

By Corey Robin

Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B01

Sept. 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to articulate, without embarrassment, the vision of imperial American power that they have been harboring for years. Unlike empires past, this one will be guided by a benevolent goal -- worldwide improvement -- and therefore will not generate the backlash previous empires have generated. As Rice told the New Yorker's Lemann, "Theoretically . . . when you have a great power like the United States it would not be long before you had other great powers rising to challenge it. And I think what you're seeing is that there's at least a predilection this time to move to productive and cooperative relations with the United States, rather than to try to balance the United States." Thus, imperial America will no longer have to "wait on events while dangers gather," as Bush put it in his 2002 State of the Union address. It will now "shape the environment." The goal is one Cheney outlined in the early 1990s: that no other power ever arise to challenge American preeminence.

For the Kristol-Buckley model conservatives, this is a heady moment, when their ambivalence -- not about capitalism per se, but about the culture of capitalism, the elevation of buying and selling above political virtues such as heroism and struggle -- may finally be resolved. No longer hamstrung by the numbing politics of affluence, they believe they can count on the public to respond to calls of sacrifice and destiny. With danger and security the watchwords of the day, the country will be newly sanctified. The American empire, they hope, will allow America to have its market without being deadened by it.

Though it is still too soon to make any definitive assessment, mounting evidence suggests that the American empire is encountering obstacles at home and abroad. Violence against the United States might not prove to be a problem, at least not in the short term; after all, other empires have weathered it for a time.

But the administration's vision is compelling only so long as it is successful. Because the neoconservatives' premise is that the United States can govern events -- and determine the outcome of history -- their vision cannot sustain the suggestion that events lie beyond their control. Ironically, insofar as the Bush administration avoids conflicts in which it might fail, say between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it forgoes the very logic of imperialism that it seeks to avow. As former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger has observed about the Middle East, Bush realizes "that simply to insert himself into this mess without any possibility of achieving any success is, in and of itself, dangerous because it would demonstrate that, in fact, we don't have any ability right now to control or affect events." This Catch-22 is no mere problem of logic or consistency; it betrays the essential fragility of the imperial position.

On the domestic front, there is little evidence that the political and cultural renewal imagined by many commentators is taking place. Even the slightest imposition is rejected in Congress even in this time of war. In March 2002, for example, 62 senators, including 19 Democrats, rejected higher fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, which would have reduced dependence upon Persian Gulf oil. Missouri Sen. Christopher Bond (R) declared, "I don't want to tell a mom in my home state that she should not get an SUV because Congress decided that would be a bad choice."

The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?"

The Bush administration initially looked for things for people to do -- not because there was much to be done, but because it feared that the ardor of ordinary Americans would grow cold. The best the administration came up with were Web sites and toll-free numbers that enterprising citizens could contact if they wanted to help the war effort. But the numbers were for groups such as Freedom Corps, enabling volunteers to become rural health workers, or Citizen Corps, which bolstered household emergency preparedness and expanded Neighborhood Watch groups. Now, with the war in Iraq going awry, the administration talks less about active involvement from ordinary Americans, happy to settle for their tacit support instead.

We thus face a dangerous situation. On the one hand we have neoconservative elites whose vision of American power is recklessly utopian. On the other hand we have a domestic population that shows little interest in any far-flung empire. The political order projected by Bush and his supporters in the media and academia is just that: a projection, which can only last so long as the United States is able to put down, with minimum casualties, challenges to its power. We may well be entering one of those Machiavellian moments discussed by historian J. G. A. Pocock a quarter-century ago, when a republic opts for the frisson of empire, and is forced to confront the fragility and finitude of all political forms, including its own.

Read that last sentence a couple of times.

In "The Sorrows of Empire," Chalmers Johnson, acclaimed author of "Blowback," details why a Neo-Con vision of empire, if not halted, will undo civil democracy as we know it.

"We have a strong civil society," Johnson writes, "that could, in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, much like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of its endemic corruption. Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits patiently for her meeting with us."

Felony Investigation

Pressure mounts on Cheney over smears against diplomat and 'outing' of CIA wife
Row that began with 'IoS' interview deepens as Vice-President's officials are accused of serious felony
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

02 May 2004

Vice-President Dick Cheney was under mounting pressure last night after he and his senior officials were accused of smearing a former ambassador and outing his wife as an undercover CIA officer in a deliberate act of revenge hatched inside the White House.

In a row which began with off-the-record comments he made to The Independent on Sunday last year, a former diplomat, Joe Wilson, said Mr Cheney oversaw a group of neo-conservatives who decided to try to damage his reputation. Because of Mr Wilson, the White House was forced to admit that a key claim in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - that Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons - should not have been made.

The controversy over what happened next could prove to be the most damaging yet to engulf the Bush administration. A criminal inquiry is investigating the unveiling in the press of Mr Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent - a serious felony under US law. If one of Mr Cheney's senior officials were charged, the damage would be huge.

Should the Vice-President be personally implicated - which Mr Wilson believes he is - the outcome would be devastating for both Mr Cheney and Mr Bush as they campaign for re-election.

Mr Wilson has made his allegations in a newly published book, The Politics of Truth, subtitled "Inside the lies that led to war and betrayed my wife's CIA identity". In it he writes: "I am told ... that the Office of the Vice-President - either the Vice-President himself or more likely his chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby - chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to do a work-up on me. As I understand it, this meant they were going to take a close look at who I was and what my agenda might be."

The former diplomat has claimed elsewhere that it was also at this meeting that the issue of his wife's identity and her role as a covert CIA operative was discussed. Mr Wilson said he believed it was very unlikely that Mr Cheney was not aware of this.

In an exclusive interview in his office in Washington, just a quarter of a mile from Mr Cheney's, he said: "I find it difficult to believe that a chief of staff would be undertaking something like this without - at a minimum - the Vice-President's knowledge." Mr Wilson stopped short of asking for Mr Cheney's resignation, but said: "If he [did not know] about it, he should be saying so. The leak took place at the nexus of national security, policy and politics."

His struggle with the White House dates to a mission in early 2002, at the request of Mr Cheney's office. He was sent to the west African state of Niger, where he was once ambassador, to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium to develop nuclear weapons. The claims were based on a document obtained by Italian intelligence services, which had passed the information to Washington.

Going South

A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an army in disgrace, a policy in tatters and the real prospect of defeat
Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary Iraqis. In Baghdad Patrick Cockburn sees the battle for hearts and minds comprehensively lost

02 May 2004

Wisps of grey smoke were still rising from the wreckage of four Humvees caught by the blast of a bomb which had just killed two US soldiers and wounded another five. It seemed they had been caught in a trap.

When the soldiers smashed their way into an old brick house in the Waziriya district of Baghdad last week, they were raiding what they had been told was an insurgent bomb factory, only for it to erupt as they came through the door. The reaction of local people, as soon as the surviving American soldiers had departed, was to start a spontaneous street party.

A small boy climbed on top of a blackened and smouldering Humvee and triumphantly waved a white flag with an Islamic slogan hastily written on it. Some other young men were showing with fascinated pride a blood-soaked US uniform. Another group had found an abandoned military helmet, and had derisively placed it on the head of an elderly carthorse.

A year after President George Bush famously declared "major combat" in Iraq over, how is it that so many Iraqis now have such a visceral hatred of Americans? One reason is that the photographs of brutality and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by British and American troops, which have so shocked the rest of the world and angered Arab countries, have come as little surprise to Iraqis. For months it has been clear to them that the occupation is very brutal; for weeks they have been watching pictures of the dead and injured in Fallujah on al-Jazeera satellite television which CNN did not broadcast.

Iraqis, who are cynical about their rulers, may also suspect that real as well as simulated torture is going on in Abu Ghraib prison, where US intelligence calls the shots. They may suspect that, as under Saddam Hussein, the humiliation and ill-treatment were quite deliberately inflicted to soften up prisoners before they were interrogated. More graphic pictures of real torture are said to have been taken as well those shown on US television last week.

Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis knew that he had ruined their lives through his disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait, and were glad to be rid of him. Even the supposed beneficiaries of his rule, the Sunni Arabs of cities such as Tikrit and Fallujah, could not see why they were so much poorer than the people of other oil states such as Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

The Unthinkable

Calculating the Politics of Catastrophe
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: May 2, 2004

WASHINGTON — It is the nightmarish, unpredictable event that both the Bush and Kerry campaigns obsess about in private, yet rarely discuss in public. How would another terror attack before the presidential election, even one that proves a pale shadow of Sept. 11, affect the way voters view the president or his challenger?

It is an unanswerable question, of course, which naturally makes it ripe for endless Washington dinner-party talk. It is probably too speculative for serious polling. Yet that does not mean the planning has not started. Mr. Bush has begun to talk about the possibility in public, perhaps to brace the country for the worst, perhaps to begin the political inoculation if domestic defenses fail.

Asked at a newspaper editors' convention here 10 days ago about surveys showing that two-thirds of Americans believe terror will strike the United States in the near future, he said: ''Well, I can understand why they think they're going to get hit again. They saw what happened in Madrid.'' And on Thursday, emerging from his interview with the 9/11 commission, he was asked whether he could now assure Americans that no Al Qaeda members were plotting in the United States.

''No, I can't say that,'' he responded tersely. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, talks of ''chatter'' about a strike against America, perhaps around the political conventions this summer, that terrorists hope would influence the election.

This public discussion about a possible terror strike, large or small, has become far more than just another yellow alert for the nation to be on its toes at shopping malls, airports and train stations. It has quietly become part of the election-year landscape, put alongside strategists' calculations about how the unemployment rate, or the Dow, or Iraq might affect a close election.

It has also led to a kind of macabre game theory, in which security experts and political operatives - two classes of people who typically do not interact much in Washington - are calculating what the political fallout of an attack might be. The answers depend on what kind of attack, and when it happens. But if thinking about the less-than-unthinkable was an undercurrent before the Madrid bombings, it has become a subject of intense strategizing ever since.
....
Now the possibility of an election-year strike has become part of the political anthropology of Washington. Perhaps that is the inevitable result in a city where disaster planning is a growth industry, and where the newest bureaucratic behemoth is the Department of Homeland Security, with its war room command center tucked into a quiet residential neighborhood in northwest Washington, away from the presumed blast zone of the White House and the Mall.

There is no sign out front, and minivans with children speed past the gate on their way to the baseball field nearby. But almost everyone who travels in the political and security worlds here knows where it is, as surely as they know that if motorcades full of officials head for the department's command post, the effect on the election is anyone's guess.

Might as well put it out there. Yes, I think about it. My family has an evacuation plan.

Dry Days

Drought Settles In, Lake Shrinks and West's Worries Grow
By KIRK JOHNSON and DEAN E. MURPHY

Published: May 2, 2004

PAGE, Ariz. — At five years and counting, the drought that has parched much of the West is getting much harder to shrug off as a blip.

Those who worry most about the future of the West — politicians, scientists, business leaders, city planners and environmentalists — are increasingly realizing that a world of eternally blue skies and meager mountain snowpacks may not be a passing phenomenon but rather the return of a harsh climatic norm.

Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the development of the modern urbanized West — one of the biggest growth spurts in the nation's history — may have been based on a colossal miscalculation.

That shift is shaking many assumptions about how the West is run. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the states that depend on the Colorado River, are preparing for the possibility of water shortages for the first time since the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930's to control the river's flow. The top water official of the Bush administration, Bennett W. Raley, said recently that the federal government might step in if the states could not decide among themselves how to cope with dwindling supplies, a threat that riled local officials but underscored the growing urgency.

This is a long and important article, one in a series of quite extensive reports on environmental problems which the Times has featured in recent months.

While this issue has received some attention in the minds of Westerners, it points to a larger truth. Naturalist Barry Lopez is on Book TV right now, telling us that the hydrologists point to a world-wide water crisis within the next 25 years. Thoughtless development, population pressure and pollution are among the causes.

Neocons Embrace Kerry

LOU DOBBS: Well, my next guest says Senator Kerry should promise to add another 100,000 soldiers to the U.S. Army because there are not simply enough troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and to engage fully in the global war on radical Islamist terror.

DOBBS: Max, good of you to be here. We appreciate it. Max Boot.

Max Boot on his own politics:

I suppose that makes George W. Bush a neocon. If it's good enough for the president, it's good enough for me.

Why They Hate Us

Arabs inflamed by Iraq photos
Fri 30 April, 2004 20:20

By Samia Nakhoul

DUBAI (Reuters) - Photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners has inflamed Arab sentiment, sparking rage, hatred and a grim comparison that U.S. liberators were no better than ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

"They keep asking why we hate them? Why we detest them? Maybe they should look well in the mirror and then they will hate themselves," said Khadija Mousa from Syria. "What I saw is very very humiliating. The Americans are showing their true image."

"The liberators are worse than the dictators. This is the straw that broke the camel's back for America," said Abdel-Bari Atwan on Friday, editor of the Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi.

The CBS News programme "60 Minutes II" on Wednesday broadcast photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison late last year showing U.S. troops abusing some Iraqis held at what was once a notorious centre of torture and executions under Saddam.

The pictures showed U.S. troops smiling, posing, laughing or giving the thumbs-up sign as naked, male prisoners were stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts with one another.

The U.S. military has brought criminal charges against six soldiers relating to accusations of abuses from November and December 2003 on some 20 detainees, including indecent acts with another person, maltreatment, battery, dereliction of duty and aggravated assault.

"This will increase the hatred of America, not just in Iraq but abroad. Even those who sympathised with the Americans before will stop. It is not just a picture of torture, it is degrading. It touches on morals and religion."

"Abu Ghraib prison was used for torture in Saddam's time. People will ask now what's the difference between Saddam and Bush. Nothing!," added Saudi commentator Dawoud al-Shiryan.

The pictures drew world condemnation by America's staunchest allies, including Britain. U.S. President George W. Bush said he "shared a deep disgust". U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "deeply disturbed".

"DEEP CONTEMPT"

Jamal Khashokggi, media advisor to Saudi Arabia's ambassador in London, said U.S. officials responsible for policy in Iraq should be held responsible for such acts which he said reflected "deep contempt" for Arabs.

The publicity could not have been worse for Muslims with the sexual humiliation depicted in the photos particularly shocking.

"That really, really is the worst atrocity," Atwan said. "It affects the honour and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them."

"What it does is inflame the feelings of the masses about coalition forces...and it gives more reason for hatred of American policy in Iraq," said Egyptian Ahmed Sherif, 49.

Arab satellite televisions, seen by millions of Arabs and Muslims, began their news bulletins with the pictures, which they said showed the "savagery" of U.S. troops.

"The pictures reflect the brutality of occupation and the absence of values and ethics which Americans said they came to Iraq to promote. They have shown the world how much malice and hatred they carry against Arabs," added Ali Mohsen Obadi.

Arabs said the photos would only fuel growing animosity and attacks against the United States by Muslims, already angered by its occupation of Iraq and its "unlimited support" of Israel.

"I was saddened. This was not just the humiliation of those poor Iraqis. I felt humiliated too and so all Muslims and their leaders should feel," said Palestinian Mahmoud Shaker, 20.

Driver Hatem Ali, 30, said: "Americans are racists and cowards, that's what I understood from these pictures."

Most Arabs said Washington's credibility as the world's leader of democracy and human rights was exposed.

"These soldiers are being touted as the saviours of the Iraqi people and America claims to be the moral leader of the world, but they have been caught with their pants down, they have been exposed, the whole world sees them as they really are," said Mahmoud Walid, a 28-year-old Egyptian writer.

Correcting the Record

Wolfowitz miscalculates military deaths in Iraq

Los Angeles Times

"It's approximately 500, of which -- I can get the exact numbers -- approximately 350 are combat deaths," said Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war.

According to the Pentagon, 724 U.S. troops had died in Iraq as of Thursday morning. Of those, 522 were combat deaths. That figure does not include U.S. civilian casualties.

"He misspoke," Wolfowitz spokesman Charley Cooper said later. "We're correcting the record."

Wolfowitz provided the erroneous figures while being questioned by Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, during a hearing by the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations.

I'm going to allow all of my horror and fury of the last couple of days to erupt here. This is a deputy secretary and a neocon, for whom the small matter of US deaths is of no attention. A man who cannot get the little matter of US troop deaths ought not be in charge of those deaths.

Wolfowitz and his war planners have demonstrated their incompetence. There is no reason why this idiots should be in office. I have no idea why half of the American public puts up with them. If I did any of my jobs this badly, I'd be summarily axed.

Iraqization

Falluja Choices Exhausted, U.S. Turns to Iraqi Officer

By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: May 1, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 30 — The hastily improvised plan to send a small Iraqi force into Falluja, led by a former general in Saddam Hussein's army, is a last-ditch effort to avert a violent and politically charged urban battle, senior Pentagon officials and American commanders said Friday.

Privately, senior military officers expressed skepticism that dispatching an untested 900-man Iraqi battalion into Falluja would pacify the embattled city of nearly 300,000 people.

But the move is an important shift to a tactic that these same officers have urged for months: the immediate reconstitution of Iraqi forces under a seasoned Iraqi commander.

"What we have there is an opportunity and not necessarily an agreement," said Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East. "The opportunity is to build an Iraqi security force from former elements of the army that will work under the command of coalition forces."

But General Abizaid, mindful of the disastrous performance of many American-trained Iraqi security forces earlier this month, cautioned that the new recruits would not "necessarily calm down the situation in Falluja tonight or over the next several days."

"It's a step by step process," he added.

Nonetheless, the tenuous plan represents a possible face-saving alternative to two onerous options the American marines confronted: a prolonged assault on the city that would leave hundreds if not thousands of civilians dead, or the continuation of a seemingly endless series of shaky cease-fires that have exposed marines to guerrilla attacks and emboldened the insurgents the longer they stood up to the superior force.

"We are doing what we can to find the least violent possible outcome to the situation in Falluja," said a senior administration official. "We've done that for three weeks, and the troops are responding only when attacked."

But this official noted that, so far, none of the interventions by Falluja civic leaders, tribal sheiks and former military officers have resolved the standoff, and he warned that military action might ultimately be needed.

On Capitol Hill, the military's plan drew tentative support from some who have criticized the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

"We have to give the deal a chance to work," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "If it doesn't, then we may well have to use force, but that should be our last option. We don't want to generate more Fallujas."

It was just a week ago that Marine Corps commanders were on the brink of ordering an all-out offensive against what they estimated were 2,000 foreign fighters, former Hussein loyalists and other insurgents. But with pressure building from United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and his envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, to avoid a violent confrontation, the commanders began looking for a way out.

"It's hard to get the pendulum set just right," said one senior Defense Department official.

Yes, the final equation has to be Iraqi. Is this genius or bankruptcy? Too early to tell