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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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."
.
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.
.
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.
Advertisement Advertisement

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."