Just Shut It Down
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 26 May 2005
Shut it down. Just shut it down.
I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantánamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.
If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press.
It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-blowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base." Google the words "Guantánamo Bay and Australia" and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio report that begins: "New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims."
Just another day of the world talking about Guantánamo Bay.

Torture and 'War on Terror'
by Alex Chadwick and Emily Bazelon
Slate and NPR's Day to Day, 26 May 2005
Listen to Day to Day
View Slate's Interactive Primer on American Interrogation Techniques
Alex Chadwick talks to Slate legal affairs writer Emily Bazelon about how the so-called "war on terror" may be influencing national policy on torture. Slate has published an extensive collection of data and documents on the events leading up to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the U.S. government's response to numerous allegations of prisoner abuse.

Judge Rules Group Tied to DeLay Violated Election Law
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 26 May 2005
A Texas judge ruled on Thursday that the treasurer of a political action committee formed by United States Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, broke campaign finance laws as the group propelled the party into power in the Texas House in 2002.
The judgment awarded nearly $200,000 to five Democrats who were ousted by Republican candidates backed by Texans for a Republican Majority, the political committee founded by Mr. DeLay to help win control of the Legislature.
Mr. DeLay was not named in the case, and he has maintained that he did not play a role in how the group's money was raised and spent.
But the decision was a symbolic victory for Mr. DeLay's critics, lending credence to accusations that his allies used illegal campaign finance tactics to win a Republican majority in the state for the first time in 130 years.
The judgment also reignited passions on both sides of the mounting controversy over Mr. DeLay, whose ties to a powerful Washington lobbyist under investigation and several indicted political operatives have drawn negative attention for months. While Democrats said the decision was a first step toward the eventual downfall of Mr. DeLay, a legal adviser to the congressman dismissed it as a ruling on a technical matter that made no reference to his client.
...In a letter to lawyers summarizing his decision, the judge, Joseph H. Hart of District Court, concluded that Bill Ceverha, treasurer of the committee, had failed to report $532,333 in corporate donations that were spent on campaign activities rather than for administrative purposes.
Under Texas law, as under federal law, corporate campaign donations are forbidden. Companies may help pay the administrative costs of certain political groups, but they cannot make contributions that help finance the campaigns themselves, as Judge Hart said companies did in the case.
The corporate contributions "were not, in fact, 'to finance the administration' of Trmpac and should have been reported," Judge Hart wrote, using the acronym for the political action committee. "I find that all of the expenditures by Trmpac were made 'in connection with a campaign for an elective office' and fit within the statutory definition of 'campaign expenditure.' "
Mr. Ceverha will have to pay $196,660 to the plaintiffs as a result of the ruling. A lawyer for Mr. Ceverha called the decision wrong and promised to appeal.
"Our client was exercising his constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of association," Terry L. Scarborough, a lawyer for Mr. Ceverha, said in a statement. "These are the most fundamental constitutional rights that we, as citizens, enjoy and cherish."
Legal scholars were skeptical that Mr. Ceverha would be able to appeal on First Amendment grounds successfully because of a United States Supreme Court decision in 2003 that upheld the legality of banning corporate campaign donations.
But his appeal is only a small part of the legal landscape involving the Texas political committee. The ruling Thursday came in a lawsuit in which the Democratic candidates claim the committee used illegal corporate donations to finance Republican candidates in their districts. Much of the lawsuit has been postponed pending the outcome of a related criminal trial in Austin, and at least two other civil cases involving campaign finance law and the political action committee are under way.
Lawyers for the Democratic plaintiffs said they were confident the decision would lay the groundwork for the criminal and civil cases. The criminal case, being pursued by Ronnie Earle, the Travis County district attorney, has led to the indictment of three close DeLay associates.
"This was an important first step," said Cris Feldman, a lawyer for the Democratic plaintiffs. "It sheds light on the illegal acts of Texans for a Republican Majority."

26 May 2005

Eight U.S. Soldiers Killed Over Two Days in Iraq
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
and TERENCE NEILAN
NYT, 24 May 2005
Eight American soldiers were killed in attacks by insurgents over the past the two days, the military said today, as a renewed wave of violence continued. Four soldiers died in two separate attacks in central Baghdad today, and another four were killed south of the capital on Monday.

The Harvest of Messianic Foreign Policy: Anti-U.S. Radical Islam
Ivan Eland
The Independent Institute, 23 May 2005
An interventionist U.S. foreign policy, fueled by the Bush administration’s messianic zeal to make the world more democratic, has contributed to a dramatic rise in radical political Islam around the world. In fact, the current administration’s campaign is even more ambitious than Woodrow Wilson’s naïve policy of “making the world safe for democracy.” Provided that the Bush administration is actually sincere about its rhetoric (which is questionable given its mild criticism of despotic allies, such as the governments of Egypt and Uzbekistan, which have recently cracked down on dissidents or simply shot them en masse), both the Wilson and Bush policies derive from a virulent strain of American “exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is special among the nations of the world.

Rights Group Denounces U.S. Guantanamo Detention Camp
USA Today, 25 May 2005
Amnesty International castigated the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as a failure Wednesday, calling it "the gulag of our time." The rebuke was the human rights group's harshest yet of American detention policies.

U.S. Stocks Fall as Oil Soars
Reuters via MyWay.com, 25 May 2005
U.S. stocks declined on Wednesday after oil prices popped above $51 a barrel on data showing an unexpected drop in crude stockpiles last week, spurring worries about the economy's health.

Senate Debates Bolton's Nomination
AP via CBS News, 25 May 2005
"In these dangerous times, we cannot afford to put at risk our nation's ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective ambassador to the United Nations."
Sen. George Voinovich
Sen. George Voinovich wrote to all 99 other senators urging them to reject John Bolton's nomination. The Senate began debate Wednesday on John Bolton's nomination to be United Nations ambassador, and Republicans say they are confident he will be confirmed before lawmakers leave Washington for the Memorial Day weekend. ..."In these dangerous times, we cannot afford to put at risk our nation's ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective ambassador to the United Nations," Voinovich wrote to all 99 other senators. "I worry that Mr. Bolton could make it more difficult for us to achieve the important U.N. reforms needed to restore the strength of the institution."

Senate Democrats Wary on Social Security
On eve of hearings, Baucus says party fears ‘bait-and-switch’
MSNBC.com, 24 May 2005
Democrats won’t begin negotiating an overhaul of Social Security as long as President Bush insists on private investment accounts because they don’t want to get caught in a “bait and switch,” says the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Dems Wary of New FBI Powers in Proposed Patriot Act Expansion
AP via USA Today, 25 May 2005
Democratic senators expressed skepticism of new powers the Bush administration is seeking in federal terrorism investigations, including authority to read the outside of mailed envelopes and to subpoena records without judicial approval.

Arctic Leaders Appeal Over Global Warming
By CONSTANT BRAND
AP, 24 May 2005
Vice-President of the Russian Association of Indigenous People's of the North Larisa Abrutina,...
Indigenous leaders from Arctic regions around the world called on the European Union on Tuesday to do more to fight global warming and to consider giving aid to their peoples. In their first visit to EU headquarters, three leaders representing the eight-nation Arctic Council met with officials at the European Commission and several EU lawmakers to push their campaign, warning their way of life was at risk. ...A recent study undertaken by the Arctic Council said the effects of global warming on the world's polar region were getting worse and could open up the risk of flooding and erosion as the polar ice contracts. Created in 1996, the Arctic Council comprises Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.

Nuclear Option May Still Be Invoked, Frist Says
By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com, 24 May 2005
The nuclear option is gone for the moment but not forgotten, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Tuesday morning on the floor of the U.S. Senate. But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said the nuclear option is "gone for our lifetime," and he bristled at Frist's "threat" to bring it back. Frist and Reid spoke one day after fourteen senators signed a "memorandum of understanding" that allows three of President Bush's most controversial judicial nominees to receive an up-or-down vote; and leaves the judicial filibuster intact for the time being, although it's supposed to be used only in "extraordinary circumstances." ...The 14 Senators who signed the deal that avoids a final decision on judicial filibusters include seven Democrats and seven Republicans. Republicans first: John McCain (Ariz.), John Warner (Va.), Mike DeWine (Ohio), Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (Maine), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Lincoln Chafee (R.I.). The Democrats are Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ken Salazar (Colo.), Robert Byrd (W.V.), Joseph Lieberman (Conn.) and Daniel Inouye (Hawaii).

Anti-Military Recruiting Campaigns Heats up At Seattle Schools
DemocracyNow!, 25 May 2005
On Monday, four US military recruiting offices in Seattle were shut down when students blocked the entrances to protest recruitment practices and to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile the Parent Teacher Student Association at one school has passed a resolution recommending that military recruiters be barred from the campus.

Fox Freudian Slip
Asman asked Lott why a compromise was needed when "we" had the votes for the nuclear option.
MediaMatters, 25 May 2005
Responding to Sen. Trent Lott's (R-MS) suggestion that Senate Republicans had the necessary votes to invoke the so-called nuclear option and that such a step was necessary, Fox News anchor David Asman asked Lott why Republican senators had compromised on the issue. Why compromise, Asman asked, "if we should have done it and if we had the votes to do it." Asman clarified that it was "you guys in the Republican party" who had the votes.

25 May 2005

G.O.P. Senator Issues Letter Urging Vote Against Bolton
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 25 May 2005
The Ohio Republican whose opposition to John R. Bolton nearly stalled his nomination in committee circulated a letter on Tuesday urging colleagues to vote against Mr. Bolton when his name reaches the Senate floor, possibly this week. The renewed opposition from the senator, George V. Voinovich, was addressed to all his colleagues, but it was aimed particularly at fellow Republicans in a chamber in which the party holds a 55-to-44 majority. At least five Republicans would have to join Mr. Voinovich in opposing Mr. Bolton's nomination as United Nations ambassador in order to defeat it. In the letter, Mr. Voinovich said that while he had been "hesitant to push my views on my colleagues" during his six years in the Senate, he felt "compelled to share my deep concerns" about the nomination."In these dangerous times, we cannot afford to put at risk our nation's ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective ambassador to the United Nations," Mr. Voinovich wrote. He urged colleagues to "put aside our partisan agenda and let our consciences and our shared commitment to our nation's best interests guide us."

CIA Operative Testifies He Saw SEAL Beating Iraqi Prisoner
By Tony Perry
LA Times, 25 May 2005
Testifying behind a curtain to protect his identity, a CIA operative told a court-martial Tuesday that he saw a Navy SEAL "pummeling" a defenseless prisoner in Iraq. The operative said he saw the SEAL on the back of a prisoner, hitting him. He reported the October 2003 incident to the CIA's senior officer on the scene, who warned a Navy commander that such conduct was unacceptable, the operative said.
Tuesday was the second day of the trial of Lt. Andrew K. Ledford, who is accused of allowing his SEALs to brutalize prisoners, including one who later died.
The CIA operative testified he and his superiors would never tolerate abuse of prisoners.
His testimony differed markedly from that of a former SEAL, an enlisted man.
Earlier Tuesday, former Petty Officer Dan Cerrillo testified under immunity that he was the SEAL beating the prisoner and pushing his face into the sand. But Cerrillo, who served under Ledford in Foxtrot Platoon, said he was acting on the orders of "those people we're not supposed to talk about" — one of the euphemisms witnesses and attorneys use to avoid mentioning the CIA. (Other phrases include "the agency," "another governmental agency" and "security personnel.")

The Pope has Minimized Priests' Crimes While Wagging a Finger at Gays
Robert Scheer
LA Times, 24 May 2005
One of the most sexually repressed institutions in human history has been caught with its pants down yet again but still insists on wagging its disapproving finger at the rest of us. Last week, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange released more than 10,000 pages of letters, handwritten notes and other documents from the personnel files of 15 priests and teachers as part of its $100-million settlement of another in a numbing series of class-action sexual abuse lawsuits against the Catholic Church. Despite the horrific drumbeat of child molestation revelations, however, sensible Catholics hoping for a more transparent and less sexually repressed church shouldn't hold their breath. The new pope is not only a longtime leader of vicious church attacks on "evil" gays, he also has shamefully blamed the molestation scandal on the media.
"In the church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower," said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — in 2002 when he was the head man of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. There is nothing holy about shooting the messenger.
The leader of the world's largest religious denomination apparently doesn't understand the essential truth of the molestation scandal: It was the church's breathtakingly systematic cover-up over many decades that so horrified followers and outsiders alike.
When it comes to matters of poverty, immigration and peace, the Catholic Church is a major source of enlightenment. It is a serious loss to have the church's work in those areas undermined by its Dark Ages attitude on sex. And, as is so often the case with the most severely judgmental and repressed, this stance is rife with moral hypocrisy.

Senators Broke Bread Before Impasse Was Broken
Friendly chitchat between Nelson and Lott put the wheels in motion for a rigorous, painstaking deal that averted a showdown.
By Mary Curtius
LA Times, 25 May 2005
An informal dinner conversation in March between two senators — one a Southern Republican, the other a Midwestern Democrat — was the impetus for the deal that averted a Senate showdown over judicial nominees.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) had invited Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to his Capitol Hill home. And as they chatted about the Republican threat to end judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules, the two found they agreed that such a move would cause grave harm to the institution. But what to do?
Initially, the pair just "talked in the hallways" of the Senate, Nelson said. Then they began quietly feeling out their colleagues to see who else might be interested in finding a way to avoid a confrontation. Their partnership, however, came to an abrupt end after the Hill, a newspaper that focuses on Congress, reported their efforts early this month. Outraged conservatives jammed Lott's office switchboard, protesting his involvement.
Lott abandoned his efforts.

Bush's Approval Rating on Crucial Issues Hits a Low
By Susan Page
USA TODAY, 22 May 2005
President Bush's approval ratings for handling the economy, Iraq and Social Security have fallen to the lowest levels of his White House tenure, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday. Satisfaction with congressional Republicans also has sagged. By 47%-36%, those polled say the country would be better off if Democrats controlled Congress. That's the best showing for Democrats since the GOP won control of both houses of Congress in 1994. Americans express more concern about the price of gas than they do about the high-profile dispute over Democrats' filibuster of Bush's judicial nominations, the survey shows. And they are holding Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, responsible for their unease about the economy and Iraq. "If people are not happy with the way things are going, the people in charge get the heat," says Andrew Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research Center. A Pew poll released Thursday showed similar trends.

24 May 2005

Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories: How The U.S. Press Has Sanitized The War in Iraq
DemocracyNow!, 24 May 2005
Images of thousands of dead U.S. soldiers helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War, but now photo-journalists are even banned from military funerals at Arlington national cemetery. A report this weekend in the Los Angeles Times documented the extremely rare publication of photos of American casualties in six major newspapers during a sixth month period. Readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post never saw a single picture of a dead serviceman or servicewoman in their morning papers.
SEE ALSO:
Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories
U.S. newspapers and magazines print few photos of American dead and wounded, a Times review finds. The reasons are many -- access, logistics, ethics -- but the result is an obscured view of the cost of war.
By James Rainey
LA Times, 22 May 2005

Inquiry Into Dismissal of an Air Force Chaplain
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
NYT, 24 May 2005
The Department of Defense inspector general's office is looking into accusations that a chaplain at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs was dismissed from her administrative job and given orders to transfer to a base in Japan because she had criticized the religious proselytizing of academy cadets. An Air Force spokeswoman said Monday that the service had asked the inspector general to investigate the case of the chaplain, Capt. MeLinda Morton, who went public this month with her criticisms of the religious climate at the academy.
The announcement came on the day a task force was to finish a preliminary report on an inquiry into complaints that some officers permitted harassment and inappropriate proselytizing at the academy. The report will not be released for several weeks, Jennifer Stephens, an Air Force spokeswoman, said. On Monday, Captain Morton and two other prominent critics of the academy wrote to 46 Congressional Democrats who had demanded an inquiry and said the task force had failed to do a thorough investigation. They said that Captain Morton was given only a cursory interview, and that the two other critics, Mikey Weinstein and Prof. Kristen Leslie of the Yale Divinity School, had not been interviewed at all. Mr. Weinstein says he has been collecting complaints about religious intimidation at the academy for over a year, and Ms. Leslie spent a week there last summer assessing the chaplaincy's pastoral program at the invitation of the academy. Ms. Stephens said a task force member did "contact" Mr. Weinstein, but he said he was only told to stop denigrating the task force.
...Captain Morton said Monday that she was not pleased that the inspector general was investigating her case because, she said, the Air Force was treating her dismissal as a personnel matter, not as evidence of a broader constitutional problem.

Syria Stops Cooperating With U.S. Forces and C.I.A.
By DOUGLAS JEHL and THOM SHANKER
NYT, 24 May 2005
Syria has halted military and intelligence cooperation with the United States, its ambassador to Washington said in an interview, in a sign of growing strains between the two nations over the insurgency in Iraq.
The ambassador, Imad Moustapha, said in the interview on Friday at the Syrian Embassy here that his country had, in the last 10 days, "severed all links" with the United States military and Central Intelligence Agency because of what he called unjust American allegations. The Bush administration has complained bitterly that Syria is not doing enough to halt the flow of men and money to the insurgency in Iraq. Mr. Moustapha said he believed that the Bush administration had decided "to escalate the situation with Syria" despite steps the Syrians have taken against the insurgents in Iraq, and despite the withdrawal in recent weeks of Syrian troops from Lebanon, in response to international demands. He said American complaints had been renewed since February, when a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, who was once the widely feared head of Iraq's two most powerful security agencies, was handed over to the Iraqi authorities after being captured in Syria along with several lieutenants. The renewal of complaints caused Syria to abandon the idea of providing further help, he said. "We thought, why should we continue to cooperate?" he said.

Car Bombings in Iraq Kill 33, With Shiites as Targets
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT. 24 May 2005
Insurgents carried out three major car bomb attacks against Iraqi Shiites on Monday, killing at least 33 and wounding 120 in what appeared to be the latest in a wave of violence intended to exploit the sectarian divisions that have tormented the country. All told, attacks across Iraq killed at least 43 people, including Waiel al-Rubaie, a senior aide in Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's administration, and his driver, who were shot to death in the Mansour district of Baghdad. The American military said three American soldiers were also killed in the northern city of Mosul on Sunday. Insurgents have long sought to play on the deeply ingrained fears and prejudices between Sunni Arabs, a minority that once ruled the country, and the Shiites and Kurds who now dominate the government.

23 May 2005

U.S. Border Security at a Crossroads
Technology Problems Limit Effectiveness of US-VISIT Program to Screen Foreigners
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Scott Higham
Washington Post, 23 May 2005
Second of two articles
[First Article--
Contracting Rush For Security Led To Waste, Abuse
The government's internal audits have repeatedly questioned the cost and effectiveness of the equipment and security systems bought from corporations that received a torrent of money under loosened regulations, limited oversight and tight congressional deadlines.]
The race to tighten the nation's borders began just after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Authorities learned that hijackers had lived illegally in the country, renting apartments, taking flying lessons and moving around freely. Congress demanded changes in border controls and tight deadlines for building a computer network that would screen foreign visitors as they seek to enter or leave the country by scanning their fingerprints and matching them against databases of suspected terrorists.Pressing to meet that goal, the Homeland Security Department last year awarded one of the most ambitious technology contracts in the war on terror -- a 10-year deal estimated at up to $10 billion -- to the global consulting firm Accenture. In return, the company and its subcontractors promised to create a "virtual border" that would electronically screen millions of foreign travelers.
Documents and interviews with people familiar with the program, called US-VISIT, show that government officials are betting on speculative technology while neglecting basic procedures to ensure that taxpayers get full value from government contractors.

The Rumsfeld Stain
How does Donald Rumsfeld survive as defense secretary?
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 23 May 2005
Much of what has happened to the military on his watch has been catastrophic. In Iraq, more than 1,600 American troops have died and many thousands have been maimed in a war that Mr. Rumsfeld mishandled from the beginning and still has no idea how to win. The generals are telling us now that the U.S. is likely to be bogged down in Iraq for years, and there are whispers circulating about the possibility of "defeat."
Potential recruits are staying away from the armed forces in droves. Most Americans want no part of the administration's hapless venture in Iraq. A woman in Connecticut with two college-age sons said to me recently: "My boys should die in Baghdad? For what?" Parents from coast to coast are going out of their way to dissuade their children from joining the military. Recruiters, desperate and in many cases emotionally distraught after repeatedly missing their monthly goals, began abandoning admission standards and signing up individuals who were physically, mentally or morally unfit for service.
The abuses became so widespread that the Army suspended recruiting on Friday so recruiters could spend the day being retrained in the legal and ethical standards they are supposed to maintain. The Army is going through its toughest year for recruiting since the nation went to an all-volunteer military in 1973. The military spent decades rebuilding its reputation and regaining the respect of the vast majority of the American people after the debacle in Vietnam. Under Mr. Rumsfeld, that hard-won achievement is being reversed. He invaded Iraq with too few troops, and too many of them were poorly trained and inadequately equipped. The stories about American troops dying on the battlefield because of a lack of protective armor have now been widely told. The insurgency in Iraq appeared to take Mr. Rumsfeld completely by surprise. He expected to win the war in a walk. Or, perhaps, a strut. Now the military is in a fix. Many of the troops have served multiple tours in Iraq and are weary. The insurgency remains strong, and the Iraq military has proved to be a disappointing ally.

21-22 May 2005

Class Matters:
On a Christian Mission to the Top
NYT, 22 May 2005
The growing power and influence of evangelical Christians is manifest everywhere these days, from the best-seller lists to the White House, but in fact their share of the general population has not changed much in half a century. Most pollsters agree that people who identify themselves as white evangelical Christians make up about a quarter of the population, just as they have for decades.
What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. In the process they have overturned the old social pecking order in which "Episcopalian," for example, was a code word for upper class, and "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" shorthand for lower.
Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical C.E.O.'s pray together on monthly conference calls, evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street and deep-pocketed evangelical donors gather at golf courses for conferences restricted to those who give more than $200,000 annually to Christian causes.
Their growing wealth and education help explain the new influence of evangelicals in American culture and politics. Their buying power fuels the booming market for Christian books, music and films. Their rising income has paid for construction of vast mega-churches in suburbs across the country. Their charitable contributions finance dozens of mission agencies, religious broadcasters and international service groups.

Don't Miss 60 Minutes Tonight
Josh Marshal
Talking Points Memo, 22 May 2005
If you're going to be anywhere near a TV on Sunday evening, don't miss 60 Minutes. They have a segment they're running about the millions of dollars the federal government is spending to convince children and adolescents that condoms aren't very effective at preventing STDs or pregnancy. You may be familiar with the general topic. But the interviews with Bush administration officials and those they're funding will really take your breath away.

Nuclear Chicken
Kevin Drum
Political Animal in the Washington Monthly, 21 May 2005
In a wonderful display of analytical obtuseness, Juan Non-Volokh argues today that there's obstruction and then there's obstruction. Blocking judges via judicial filibusters, he says, is a quite different thing from blocking judges via traditional blue slips or through the majority exercising its legitimate control of the Senate calendar.
Quite so. The part he misses is that regardless of what you think of blue slips, Republicans were delighted to use them when Bill Clinton was the one nominating judges, but then suddenly reversed course and ended the blue slip tradition as soon as their own guy was in office. Ditto for "Rule IV," another way that the minority had long been allowed to influence judicial nominations until the Republican party decided to do away with it last year. And ditto again for "up or down votes on all judges," a decidedly newfound rallying cry among Republicans. You can find more details on this tawdry and cynical manipulation of the rules here and here.
The judicial filibuster is indeed an obstruction of last resort. But I'll repeat a deal I've suggested several times over the past couple of years, most recently in January: return all the other rules to the state they were in when Bill Clinton was president and Democrats would probably be willing to forego use of the filibuster. Republicans have no one but themselves to blame for the current game of nuclear chicken they find themselves in.

Shocking...
Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse
By TIM GOLDEN
NYT, 22 May 2005
Despite autopsy findings of homicide and statements by soldiers that two prisoners died after being struck by guards at an American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, Army investigators initially recommended closing the case without bringing any criminal charges, documents and interviews show. Within days after the two deaths in December 2002, military coroners determined that both had been caused by "blunt force trauma" to the legs. Soon after, soldiers and others at Bagram told the investigators that military guards had repeatedly struck both men in the thighs while they were shackled and that one had also been mistreated by military interrogators. Nonetheless, agents of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command reported to their superiors that they could not clearly determine who was responsible for the detainees' injuries, military officials said. Military lawyers at Bagram took the same position, according to confidential documents from the investigation obtained by The New York Times. "I could never see any criminal intent on the part of the M.P.'s to cause the detainee to die," one of the lawyers, Maj. Jeff A. Bovarnick, later told investigators, referring to one of the deaths. "We believed the M.P.'s story, that this was the most combative detainee ever."

It's All Newsweek's Fault
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 22 May 2005
IN the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Fareed Zakaria wrote a 6,791-word cover story for Newsweek titled "Why Do They Hate Us?" Think how much effort he could have saved if he'd waited a few years. As we learned last week, the question of why they hate us can now be answered in just one word: Newsweek.
"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.
That's how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it's going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.

'Bolton-Style' Below the Border
U.S. Proposal in the O.A.S. Draws Fire as an Attack on Venezuela
By JOEL BRINKLEY
NYT, 22 May 2005
An American proposal to create a committee at the Organization of American States that would monitor the quality of democracy and the exercise of power in Latin America is facing a hostile reception from many countries in part because it is being viewed as a thinly veiled effort to attack Venezuela.
Roger F. Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and a principal architect of the proposal, said in an interview this week that he was "not surprised they are seeing this in the context of Venezuela," but he added, "I am determined that it not be regarded as some kind of effort to isolate Venezuela."
Last month, however, he and other administration officials made several statements tying the effort directly to their concern about Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's populist, anti-American president. Mr. Chávez has curtailed some press freedoms and judicial independence while forming close ties with Cuba, an alliance that, more than anything else, infuriates some Bush administration officials.
The relationship between the United States and Mr. Chávez, which was already tense, deteriorated in 2002, after the United States tacitly backed a coup that briefly toppled him. The animosity has deepened since then, which is one reason many Latin American envoys remain skeptical of the reasoning Washington offers for its proposal. "This explanation is going to be impossible to sell to any adult human being," said Rodolfo Hugo Gil, the Argentine ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Scientists Warn on Space Weaponization
by Nick Wadhams
AP via CommonDreams, 20 May 2005
A scientists' group on Thursday warned the United States against weaponizing space, saying the move would be prohibitively expensive and could set off a new arms race. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group that opposes weapons in space, said the United Nations should consider drafting a treaty that would prohibit interfering with unarmed satellites, taking away any justification for putting weapons in space to protect them. "The United States has a huge lead in the space field — it can afford to try out the multilateral approach," said Jonathan Dean, a former U.S. ambassador and an adviser on global security issues.
The Union's demand comes as the administration of President Bush is reviewing the U.S. space policy doctrine. Some scientists worry that the review will set out a more aggressive policy that could lead to the greater militarization of space.
On Wednesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that the policy review was not considering the weaponization of space. But he said new threats to U.S. satellites have emerged in the years since the U.S. space doctrine was last reviewed in 1996, and those satellites must be protected. "There are changes that have occurred over the last eight or nine years, and there are countries that have taken an interest in space, McClellan said. "And they have looked at things that could — or technologies that could — threaten our space systems. And so you obviously need to take that into account when you're updating the policy."

Media Expert Expounds Myths of News Coverage
Jeff Cohen also called for more citizen involvement in trying to reform the mainstream media outlets
by Meghann M. Cuniff
Oregon Daily Emerald via CommonDreams, 20 May 2005
Media conglomeration does not get the attention it deserves because the only outlets equipped to report on the issue are at the center of the issue, Cohen said. "Most censorship in our country is corporate," Cohen said. Other countries see their information and news outlets censored by the government, but in the United States, corporate control is such that corporations and the government are basically one and the same, Cohen said. "The owners of the media would rather have us be inactive citizens" than informed citizens, Cohen said. The rise of independent media is possible and is needed now more than ever before, Cohen said. Cohen outlined three action points citizens can take to try to fight independent journalism's downfall and the rise of corporate control of information. The first calls for involvement in activist organizations such as FAIR, the second proposes greater activism efforts to produce more independent media outlets and the third asks citizens to actively pursue policy reform at the national level concerning the need for media diversity and less conglomerated mainstream media. "It's so much easier to build independent media, promote it and distribute it than ever before," Cohen said, citing the decrease in equipment costs the past few years have brought. "Those of us who are information-rich have a duty to those of us that are information-poor."

U.S. Faces Questions Over 'Kidnappings' in Europe
By Mark Trevelyan
Reuters via CommonDreams, 20 May 2005
Pressure is growing on the United States to respond to allegations that its agents were involved in spiriting terrorist suspects out of three European countries and sending them to nations where they may have been tortured.
In Italy, a judge said this week that foreign intelligence officials "kidnapped" an Egyptian suspect in Milan two years ago and took him to a U.S. base from where he was flown home.
In Germany, a Munich prosecutor is preparing a batch of questions to U.S. authorities on the case of a Lebanese-born German who says he was arrested in Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003 and flown by U.S. agents to a jail in Afghanistan.
And in Sweden, a parliamentary ombudsman has criticised the security services over the expulsion of two Egyptian terrorism suspects who were handed over to U.S. agents and flown home aboard a U.S. government-leased plane in 2001.
Campaign group Human Rights Watch said there was credible evidence the pair had been tortured while being held incommunicado for five weeks after their return. One was later convicted in a "patently unfair" trial. "We know it's not right to send people back to torture. That's criminal. That's the one factor that ties all these cases together right now," Julia Hall of Human Rights Watch said in a telephone interview. "But whether they're kidnappings, whether they're abductions, whether they occur always with the collaboration of security services in the host country -- these are things that still have yet to be determined."

Blaming the Messenger
By Anne Applebaum
Washington Post, 18 May 2005
...But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else. And it was plausible precisely because interrogation techniques designed to be offensive to Muslims were used in Iraq and Guantanamo, as administration and military officials have also confirmed. For example:
· Dogs. Military interrogators deployed them specifically because they knew Muslims consider dogs unclean. In a memo signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in September 2003, and available online, the then-commander in Iraq actually approved using the technique to "exploit Arab fear of dogs."
· Nudity. We know (and the Muslim world knows) from the Abu Ghraib photographs that nudity has been used to humiliate Muslim men. More important, we know that nudity was also approved as an interrogation technique by Donald Rumsfeld himself. He signed off on a November 2002 policy memo, later revised but also available online, that specifically listed "removal of clothing" as a permissible, "category II" interrogation technique, along with "removal of facial hair," also a technique designed to offend Muslims who wear beards.
· Sexual harassment. The military's investigation of U.S. detention and interrogation practices, led by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, stated that at Guantanamo there were "two female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees' religious beliefs." Although the report said both had been reprimanded, there is no doubt, again, that the tactic was designed for men whose religion prohibits them from having contact with women other than their wives.
· Fake menstrual blood. When former detainees began claiming that they had been smeared with menstrual blood intended to make them "unclean" and therefore unable to pray, their lawyers initially dismissed the story as implausible. But the story has been confirmed by Army Sgt. Erik Saar, a former Guantanamo translator, who told the Associated Press that in a forthcoming book he will describe a female interrogator who smeared a prisoner with red ink, claimed it was menstrual blood and left, saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."
There is no question that these were tactics designed to offend, no question that they were put in place after 2001 and no question that many considered them justified. Since the Afghan invasion, public supporters of "exceptional" interrogation methods have argued that in the special, unusual case of the war on terrorism, we may have to suspend our fussy legality, ignore our high ideals and resort to some unpleasant tactics that our military had never used. Opponents of these methods, among them some of the military's own interrogation experts, have argued, on the contrary, that "special methods" are not only ineffective but counterproductive: They might actually inspire Muslim terrorists instead of helping to defeat them. They might also make it easier, say, for fanatics in Jalalabad to use two lines of a magazine article to incite riots.

Washington Retains Strong Ties With Uzbekistan Despite Notorious Human Rights Record
DemocracyNow!, 20 May 2005
Uzbek President Islam Karimov has rejected calls for an international inquiry into a bloody crackdown on protesters in the town of Andijan last week that left up to 750 dead. Washington has close links with Uzbekistan despite the country's notorious human rights record. We speak with a researcher with Human Rights Watch, the editorial director of Antiwar.com and we go to Andijan to get a report from the ground. [includes rush transcript]

Network Viewers Still in the Dark on "Smoking Gun Memo"
Print media continue to downplay story
Action Alert (5/20/05)
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 20 May 2005
Following FAIR's call for more mainstream coverage of the "smoking gun memo"—the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq—a steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news.

20 May 2005

Why do so many who support the Iraq War ignore the incredible level of stupidity in the way the war is being waged?

How to lose another guerrilla war...
Kaboom!
How to enrage Iraq's Sunnis.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 18 May 2005
The most dismaying thing I've read in a while is a Page One story in the May 17 Philadelphia Inquirer, by staff reporters Hannah Allam and Mohammed al Dulaimy, headlined, "Iraqis Lament a Call for Help." If you want to know why we're not winning in Iraq, and why we're not likely to win anytime soon (if ever), there is no more brutally illustrative tale.
The story concerns Operation Matador, last week's clash between U.S. forces and foreign jihadists in the desert villages of western Iraq. Officials have portrayed the operation as a grand success. Allam and Dulaimy depict it as a grave disaster.
For months, they report, Iraqi tribal leaders in the area had formed a vigilante group called the Hamza Forces to stave off the Islamic extremists streaming across the Syrian border. Outnumbered, at least three of the tribal chiefs asked the Iraqi defense ministry and the U.S. Marines for help.
Rather than respond in a coordinated fashion, U.S. forces blazed in with armored vehicles and helicopter gun ships and simply pummeled the place. Fasal al-Goud, a former governor of Anbar province and one of the sheiks who had asked for assistance, told the Inquirer, "The Americans were bombing whole villages, and saying they were only after the foreigners."
Villagers who returned after the fighting were stunned to find entire neighborhoods destroyed. Men who had stayed behind to help were found dead in shot-up houses. Over 100 jihadists were killed, but so were a lot of Iraqis fighting on the side of the Americans, to say nothing of several bystanders caught in the crossfire.
This story is depressing in two ways, beyond the obvious horror of needless death and destruction. First, a number of encouraging news stories have appeared recently—including a column in today's Washington Post—about a surge of creative, new thinking inside the U.S. military: a revival of counterinsurgency doctrines, training in small-arms tactics, instruction in Arab languages and culture, and so forth. Yet, at least in the short term, nothing seems to be changing. From Fallujah to Ramadi and now to the desert villages around Qaim, our commanders ultimately fall back on the big kaboom. Leveling towns, bombing every suspicious target in sight—this is not how hearts and minds are won or how persistent insurgencies are defeated.
Second and more disheartening still, U.S. officials have realized for some time now that a crucial strategic task in this war must be to separate Iraq's Sunni nationalists from the jihadist fighters in their midst. Most nationalists despise the U.S. occupation, but many also resent the jihadists, whose presence they tolerate either out of fear or as (in their bitter, dispossessed eyes) the lesser evil. The trick for American policymakers is, 1) to distinguish the nationalists from the jihadists (the passive abetters from the active enemy); 2) to drive a wedge between them; and 3) to kill and defeat the latter without alienating the former.
SEE ALSO:
Vicious Circle: The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq
Carl Conetta
Project on Defense Alternatives, 18 May 2005
The occupation of Iraq is today less about rolling back Iraqi military power, dislodging a tyrant, or building a stable democracy than it is about fighting an insurgency -- an insurgency that is now driven substantially by the occupation, its practices, and policies. We can take a first step toward understanding the insurgency by locating it within the broader field of popular Iraqi opposition to the occupation, which is widespread. Iraqi public opinion has been polled repeatedly since the beginning of the occupation by a variety of firms. Their findings leave no doubt about the main contours of Iraqi sentiment regarding the occupation:

• On balance, Iraqis oppose the US presence in Iraq, and those who strongly oppose it greatly outnumber those who strongly support it.1
  US troops in Iraq are viewed broadly as an occupying force, not peacekeepers or liberators.2
   
• On balance, Iraqis do not trust US troops, think they have behaved badly, and -- one way or another -- hold them responsible for much of the violence in the nation.3
   
• There is significant popular support for attacks on US forces, and this support probably grew larger during the course of 2004, at least among Sunni Arabs.4
   
• A majority of Iraqis want coalition forces to leave within a year or less. Formation of a permanent government early in 2006 is the "tipping point" after which a very large majority of Iraqis may desire immediate withdrawal.5

Although disconcerting, these results provide the most reliable view of Iraqi attitudes available. The fact that they have played little role in the public discourse on the Iraqi mission imperils US policy and contributes to the present impasse. (The footnotes for each of the summary propositions provide greater detail on the opinion survey questions from which they are drawn.)

A Divided Iraq
NYT, 20 May 2005
The Bush administration has finally awakened to the grave dangers Iraq's new government is courting by failing to reach out convincingly to credible representatives of the disaffected Sunni Arab minority. Washington's concern helped prompt Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's urgent mission to Baghdad earlier this week. Unless her pleas for greater inclusiveness are heeded, the new government will not be able to establish the nationwide legitimacy it needs to draw significant numbers of Sunnis away from the continuing insurgency.
The implications of that are clear. As senior American military commanders now acknowledge, Iraqi forces aren't militarily strong enough to prevail over the insurgency and will not be for a long time. If Baghdad continues to shun a serious political strategy to draw away Sunni support from the insurgents, large numbers of American troops will be stuck fighting a prolonged and bloody counterinsurgency war in much of northern and western Iraq.

An Architect of Bush Plan on Retirement Urges Retreat
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 20 May 2005
Robert C. Pozen, the business executive who developed the theory behind President Bush's plan to trim Social Security benefits in the future, urged the president on Thursday to drop his insistence on using part of workers' taxes to pay for individual investment accounts.
This was one of two blows during the day to Mr. Bush's policies on Social Security and retirement saving. In the House, Representative Bill Thomas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, disregarded the methods favored by the president to encourage workers to save for retirement - mostly tax incentives for the affluent - and offered completely different proposals of his own.
The president's Social Security and retirement measures have faced trouble in Congress all year, and the developments on Thursday raised further doubt about their prospects.
On the question of Mr. Pozen's new position, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said, "The president is committed to a voluntary personal account as part of a comprehensive Social Security modernization plan."
On Mr. Thomas's stance on retirement saving, Mr. Duffy said Mr. Bush "understands and welcomes the chairman's ideas."
Mr. Pozen, a member of Mr. Bush's advisory commission on Social Security in 2001, said at a forum at the Treasury Department that the president's approach to investment accounts would destroy the chances for a Social Security bill in Congress and would make it more difficult to resolve the long-term financial problems facing the system.

The Top 10 Filibuster Falsehoods
Media Matters
ADD TO THESE:
Republicans Use Bogus Interpretation of the Constitution To Change Senate Rules
Talking Points Memo

19 May 2005

Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington
John Michols
The Nation, 17 May 2005
...when Coleman started slandering foreign politicians, he exposed the dramatic vulnerability of his claims that the supposed scandal was much more than a blatant example of US corporations taking advantage of their powerful connections in Washington to undermine official US policy, harm the national interest and profit off the suffering of the poor.
The Senate investigation that Coleman sought regarding the Oil for Food program has already revealed that the Bush Administration failed to crack down on widespread abuse of the Oil for Food program by US energy companies, and that US oil purchases accounted for the majority of the kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein's regime in return for sales of inexpensive oil. Indeed, the report concludes, "The United States (government) was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales."
The member of Parliament tore through Coleman's flimsy "evidence," issuing an unequivocal denial that began, "Mr. Chairman, I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone been on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." He accused Coleman of being "remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice" and pointed out error after error in the report the senator had brandished against him.
For instance, Galloway noted that he had met Saddam twice -- not the "many" times alleged by the report. "As a matter of fact I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times that [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld met him," said the recently re-elected British parliamentarian. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns."
For good measure, Galloway used the forum Coleman had foolishly provided to deliver a blistering condemnation of Coleman's war.
"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies," Galloway informed the fool on Capitol Hill.
"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
"If the world had listened to [UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to [French] President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the antiwar movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth," argued Galloway.

Bashing Newsweek
By DAVID BROOKS
NYT, 19 May 2005
...And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.
SEE ALSO:
Newsweek Was Right
Ari Berman
The Nation, 18 May 2005
Contrary to White House spin, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo such as those described by Newsweek on 9 May 2005 are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States. Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram airbase prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Koran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it. One such incident (during which the Koran was thrown into a pile and stepped on) prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in March 2002.
SEE ALSO:
Isikoff Is Not the Enemy
David Corn
The Nation, 18 May 2005
Isikoff has been around a long time. I'm not going to defend what he did during the Monica madness. (He wrote a book on all that.) Nor am I going to make excuses for what happened with the Koran item. But there is much more to his career than these two chapters. He has produced a good share of standout journalism.

'Knowledge' is a power conservatives crave
Plan Would Broaden F.B.I.'s Terror Role
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 19 May 2005
The Bush administration and Senate Republican leaders are pushing a plan that would significantly expand the F.B.I.'s power to demand business records in terror investigations without obtaining approval from a judge, officials said on Wednesday. The proposal, which is likely to be considered next week in a closed session of the Senate intelligence committee, would allow federal investigators to subpoena records from businesses and other institutions without a judge's sign-off if they declared that the material was needed as part of a foreign intelligence investigation. The proposal, part of a broader plan to extend antiterrorism powers under the law known as the USA Patriot Act, was concluded in recent days by Republican leaders on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in consultation with the Bush administration, Congressional officials said. Administration and Congressional officials who support the idea said the proposal would give the F.B.I. a much-needed tool to track leads in terrorism and espionage investigations that would be quicker and less cumbersome than existing methods. ..."This is a dramatic expansion of the federal government's power," said Lisa Graves, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. "It's really a power grab by the administration for the F.B.I. to secretly demand medical records, tax records, gun purchase records and all sorts of other material if they deem it relevant to an intelligence investigation." ...With 16 provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the year, the Bush administration has made the permanent extension of the law one of its top legislation priorities. But critics are seeking to scale back provisions in the law that they say are vulnerable to abuse, and more than 380 governmental bodies, including seven states, have adopted formal resolutions voicing concerns about the broad reach of the law. One provision of the law that has generated perhaps more criticism than any other is Section 215, derided by critics as the "library records" provision. It allows the F.B.I. to go to a secret intelligence court to demand access to material from businesses and other institutions as part of intelligence investigations.

Baghdad 'Rose Parade' postponed another year
Generals Offer a Sober Outlook on Iraqi War
By JOHN F. BURNS
and ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 19 May 2005
American military commanders in Baghdad and Washington gave a sobering new assessment on Wednesday of the war in Iraq, adding to the mood of anxiety that prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come to Baghdad last weekend to consult with the new government. In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last "many years."
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, said in a briefing in Washington that one problem was the disappointing progress in developing Iraqi police units cohesive enough to mount an effective challenge to insurgents and allow American forces to begin stepping back from the fighting. General Abizaid, who speaks with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld regularly, was in Washington this week for a meeting of regional commanders. In Baghdad, a senior officer said Wednesday in a background briefing that the 21 car bombings in Baghdad so far this month almost matched the total of 25 in all of last year.
...The generals' remarks, emphasizing the insurgency's resilience but also American and Iraqi successes in disrupting them, suggested that American commanders may have seen an opportunity after Secretary Rice's trip to inject their own note of realism into public debate.

18 May 2005

"Think about it."
U.S. Presses Newsweek to 'Repair' Damage From Flawed Report
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 17 May 2005
The Bush administration kept up the pressure today on Newsweek magazine to do something beyond retracting an article asserting that investigators had confirmed the desecration of a Koran by American interrogators trying to unsettle Muslim detainees.
"There is lasting damage to our image because of this report," the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said at a news briefing. "And we would encourage Newsweek to do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done, particularly in the region."
The Bush administration was also making its own effort at damage control, sending cables to embassies, beginning last week, that instruct them to spread the word that the United States is respectful of the Koran and not hostile to the Muslim faith.
"There is a need to inform people, inform people what the facts are, inform people what our policy is," the State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said today. "Yesterday, we sent out another cable to our embassies giving the text of the Newsweek retraction, explaining further that our inquiries had shown nothing like this, and reiterating once more that there are policies in place, detailed policies in place, among the military for the guards in terms of the handling of the Koran, in terms of showing respect for the religious rights and practices of the detainees."
Mr. McClellan, who called Newsweek's retraction "a good first step" shortly after the magazine issued it on Monday, said today that journalists at the magazine could do even more "by talking about the way they got this wrong and pointing out what the policies and practices of the United States military are when it comes to the handling of the holy Koran."
When asked if he was trying to pressure the magazine, Mr. McClellan asserted that he was not. "It's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report," Mr. McClellan said.

Two Fronts in the War on Poverty
Bush promotes faith groups; others face uncertainty
MSNBC News, 17 May 2005
Bush has pushed for increased funding for faith-based groups while proposing deep cuts for many traditional anti-poverty programs. The result is that many small church- and community-based social service programs are slowly assuming the lead role in the war on poverty once held by long-established community development organizations. Administration officials say that faith-based groups are often less expensive and more effective in helping the needy, a contention that traditional service providers challenge.

Galloway Angrily Rebukes US Senators' Claims
Ireland On-Line, 17 May 2005
British anti-war MP George Galloway today angrily dismissed allegations by US senators that he profited from dealings with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Appearing in Washington before the Senate permanent sub-committee on investigations, he accused the chairman Norm Coleman of damaging his reputation around the world. “I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice,” he said. “I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever having written to me or telephoned me, without any contact with me whatsoever and you call that justice.”
SEE ALSO:
US 'Ignored Iraq Oil Smuggling'
The US turned a blind eye to the former Iraq regime's $8bn trade in smuggled oil,
a new US Senate report says.
BBC News, 17 May 2005
The report says the US was well aware of both the smuggling and the kickbacks Iraq solicited from players in the UN's oil-for-food programme. Published by Democrat minority members of a key committee, it follows charges levelled against several Russian politicians and UK MP George Galloway.

17 May 2005

Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land
America has failed to win the war. But has it lost it?
Ten US troops were killed in action across Iraq last week. The fighting is now sustained and ferocious. Patrick Cockburn, winner of the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, reports from the frontline of America's war on terror
Independent, 15 May 2005
"The battlefield is a great place for liars," Stonewall Jackson once said on viewing the aftermath of a battle in the American civil war. The great general meant that the confusion of battle is such that anybody can claim anything during a war and hope to get away with it. But even by the standards of other conflicts, Iraq has been particularly fertile in lies. Going by the claims of President George Bush, the war should long be over since his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on 1 May 2003. In fact most of the 1,600 US dead and 12,000 wounded have become casualties in the following two years.
...There is no doubt that the US has failed to win the war. Much of Iraq is a bloody no man's land. The army has not been able to secure the short highway to the airport, though it is the most important road in the country, linking the US civil headquarters in the Green Zone with its military HQ at Camp Victory. Ironically, the extent of US failure to control Iraq is masked by the fact that it is too dangerous for the foreign media to venture out of central Baghdad. Some have retreated to the supposed safety of the Green Zone. Mr Bush can claim that no news is good news, though in fact the precise opposite is true.

Secret Way to War: Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo
Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 16 May 2005
In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort.
By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line.
SEE ALSO:
Secret British Memo Shows Bush Tampered with Iraq Intelligence
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 12 May 2005
Here is the smoking gun:

"C [Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

...So the "justification" would have to be provided by "fixing" the intelligence around the policy. Bush was just going to make things up, since the realities did not actually justify his planned war! The British cabinet sat around and admitted to themselves that a) there was no justification for the war into which they were allowing themselves to be dragged and b) that the war would be gotten up through Goebbels-like techniques!

Rove Guided Career of Judicial Nominee in Filibuster Fight
By Neil A. Lewis
NYT, 16 May 2005
Justice Priscilla R. Owen of the Texas Supreme Court declined a chance to be the court's first female chief justice last year so she could remain one of President Bush's nominees to a federal appeals court, Texas lawyers and political figures said in recent interviews. The decision was one of three crucial moments in her judicial career in which she seemed to have been guided by the hand of Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political strategist. Justice Owen, along with Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court, is now at the center of the partisan battle in the Senate over changing the filibuster rules. Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, said Friday that the two state justices, whose confirmations have been blocked by Democrats, would be brought to the Senate floor as part of the fight over changing the rules. Justice Owen was, by all accounts, a respected but little-known lawyer in Houston in 1994 when she was first elected to the State Supreme Court with Mr. Rove's support and tutelage. Her experience up to then largely involved obscure legal cases involving pipelines and federal energy regulations.

Bill Moyers Blasts CPB Chairman Tomlinson
The Free Press via TruthOut, 15 May 2005
Veteran journalist calls for nationwide public hearings on future of public broadcasting in speech at the National Conference for Media Reform.
St. Louis - In a speech before 1,400 media activists, television journalist Bill Moyers lambasted Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), for hijacking public broadcasting to serve a partisan agenda.
"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House," Moyers told a packed room at the National Conference for Media Reform. "And that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing." Tomlinson, a staunch Republican, has launched a personal crusade aimed at "eliminating the perception of political bias" in PBS programs. He has covertly promoted right-wing programming and tried to install his political allies to CPB's board and executive offices. He even contracted an outside consultant to monitor Moyers' weekly PBS news program, "NOW with Bill Moyers," for signs of liberal bias.
"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," Moyers said. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."
SEE ALSO:
Bill Moyers Responds to CPB's Tomlinson Charges of Liberal Bias: "We Were Getting it Right, But Not Right Wing"
DemocracyNow!, 16 May 2005
Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.
SEE ALSO:
Speech at Conference Assails Right Wing
by Michael Sorkin
St. Louis Post-Dispatch via CommonDreams, 17 May 2005
Bill Moyers denounced on Sunday the right wing and top officials at the White House, saying they are trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media. He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers." And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases. Moyers spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. His reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s. He was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson and is a former newspaper publisher. Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable."
Full Text of Bill Moyers' speech to the National Conference on Media Reform:
Take Public Broadcasting Back
St. Louis, Missouri 5/15/2005

Senate Democrats Fault U.S. in Iraq Oil Scandal
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Reuters, 17 May 2005
The United States did not do enough to curb corruption by American companies involved in the United Nations' oil-for-food program in Iraq, say Democrats on a Senate committee investigating abuses in the program. A report by the Democrats released late Monday said the State Department and the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control had taken "virtually no steps" to ensure that American companies enforced sanctions against Iraq. "We have to look in the mirror at ourselves as well as pointing fingers at others," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The committee is to hold a hearing on Tuesday at which a member of the British Parliament, George Galloway, is to respond to allegations that Saddam Hussein gave him the rights to export 20 million barrels of oil under the oil-for-food program. Mr. Galloway has called the allegations "absurd." The report presented Monday indicates that American imports of Iraqi oil helped finance about 52 percent of clandestine deals carried out illegally under the oil-for-food program at the time when Iraq was under United Nations sanctions. The report looked at kickback allegations against a Texas company, Bayoil USA, which was indicted in the investigation of the $67 billion oil-for-food program. The program allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy civilian goods for its people living under United Nations sanctions.

16 May 2005

Staying What Course?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
nyt, 16 May 2005
Is there any point, now that November's election is behind us, in revisiting the history of the Iraq war? Yes: any path out of the quagmire will be blocked by people who call their opponents weak on national security, and portray themselves as tough guys who will keep America safe. So it's important to understand how the tough guys made America weak.
There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.
Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (You can read the whole thing at www.downingstreetmemo.com.)
...So what's the plan?
The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January's election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn't.
Yet it's very hard to discuss getting out. Even most of those who vehemently opposed the war say that we have to stay on in Iraq now that we're there.
In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we're there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people's patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.
But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker.
So we need to get beyond the clichés - please, no more "pottery barn principles" or "staying the course." I'm not advocating an immediate pullout, but we have to tell the Iraqi government that our stay is time-limited, and that it has to find a way to take care of itself. The point is that something has to give. We either need a much bigger army - which means a draft - or we need to find a way out of Iraq.
SEE ALSO:
How to End the War
By Naomi Klein
In These Times, 5 May 2005
Sadly, the Bush administration has done a better job of using the language of responsibility than we in the anti-war movement. The message that’s getting across is that we are saying “just leave,” while they are saying, “we can’t just leave, we have to stay and fix the problem we started.”
We can have a very detailed, responsible agenda and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We should be saying, “Let’s pull the troops out but let’s leave some hope behind.” We can’t be afraid to talk about reparations, to demand freedom from debt for Iraq, a total abandonment of Bremer’s illegal economic laws, full Iraqi control over the reconstruction budget—there are many more examples of concrete policy demands that we can and must put forth. When we articulate a more genuine definition of democracy than we are hearing from the Bush administration, we will bring some hope to Iraq. And we will bring closer to us many of the 58 percent who are opposed to the war but aren’t marching with us yet because they are afraid of cutting and running.

Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide
By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT
NYT, 15 May 2005
There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.
Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.
But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.
And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.
SEE ALSO:
Life at the Top in America Isn't Just Better, It's Longer
By JANNY SCOTT
NYT, 16 May 2005
Architect, utility worker, maid: heart attack is the great leveler, and in those first fearful moments, three New Yorkers with little in common faced a single, common threat. But in the months that followed, their experiences diverged. Social class - that elusive combination of income, education, occupation and wealth - played a powerful role in Mr. Miele's, Mr. Wilson's and Ms. Gora's struggles to recover.
Class informed everything from the circumstances of their heart attacks to the emergency care each received, the households they returned to and the jobs they hoped to resume. It shaped their understanding of their illness, the support they got from their families, their relationships with their doctors. It helped define their ability to change their lives and shaped their odds of getting better.
Class is a potent force in health and longevity in the United States. The more education and income people have, the less likely they are to have and die of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and many types of cancer. Upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and better than those at the bottom. And the gaps are widening, say people who have researched social factors in health.
As advances in medicine and disease prevention have increased life expectancy in the United States, the benefits have disproportionately gone to people with education, money, good jobs and connections. They are almost invariably in the best position to learn new information early, modify their behavior, take advantage of the latest treatments and have the cost covered by insurance.
Many risk factors for chronic diseases are now more common among the less educated than the better educated. Smoking has dropped sharply among the better educated, but not among the less. Physical inactivity is more than twice as common among high school dropouts as among college graduates. Lower-income women are more likely than other women to be overweight, though the pattern among men may be the opposite.
There may also be subtler differences. Some researchers now believe that the stress involved in so-called high-demand, low-control jobs further down the occupational scale is more harmful than the stress of professional jobs that come with greater autonomy and control. Others are studying the health impact of job insecurity, lack of support on the job, and employment that makes it difficult to balance work and family obligations.

Plenty of Harm, Lots of Fouls
NYT, 13 May 2005
The Senate committee hearings have also exhaustively documented Mr. Bolton's habit of trying to force intelligence analysts to conform to his ideological preconceptions and then trying to punish them when they refuse to comply. That Mr. Bolton did not succeed in taking revenge is no comfort - only a sign that he did not wield as much power as other officials who did manage to skew intelligence reports to suit an ideological agenda.
His Republican supporters want us to accept the "no harm, no foul" argument - a hollow theory in any case, but one that doesn't apply here. Mr. Bolton did cause harm. Several Bush administration officials testified that his assault on the intelligence analysts who disagreed with him had a serious chilling effect. Mr. Bolton was such a loose cannon that Colin Powell had his chief of staff keep an eye on him. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage eventually said Mr. Bolton could not testify in Congress or make a speech unless he had personally cleared it.
If North Korea tests a nuclear bomb on Mr. Bush's watch, no American will bear a larger share of responsibility than Mr. Bolton. His irresponsible public comments and advocacy of the disastrous policy of refusing to engage in serious bargaining with North Korea were major factors in scuttling efforts to stop that country's nuclear efforts.

14-15 May 2005

Support Our Troops...Christian Soldiers
Academy Critic Says She Was Fired because of Her Complaints about "Strident" Evangelizing
By Patrick O'Driscoll
USA TODAY, 11 May 2005
COLORADO SPRINGS — An Air Force Academy chaplain who co-wrote a report last year that criticized "strident" evangelizing of cadets by Christian officers said Wednesday that she was fired by the academy's head chaplain.
'This isn't about me and getting fired. It's about malfeasance in the chaplaincy here,' Melinda Morton said.
The chaplain, Capt. Melinda Morton, spoke out as a Pentagon task force began a three-day visit to the academy here to examine complaints of Christian religious bias on campus. It is to report back to the Pentagon by May 23.
Morton, a Lutheran minister and executive officer to the chief chaplain, Col. Michael Whittington, said in an interview that he dismissed her from that job last week. She said it happened after he pressured her to deny details of what happened at a religious service that was held during last summer's training for new cadets.
Whittington could not be reached for comment. Academy spokesman Johnny Whitaker said the head chaplain made no mention of the religion dispute in moving Morton aside. Whitaker said Whittington sent Morton an e-mail May 4 saying he was shifting her duties to another chaplain "to ensure a smooth and complete transition" for new leaders.
Morton, 48, a former missile launch officer who became a chaplain later in her career, remains an officer at the academy. But she said that after going public with her criticism, "I don't think that I have much future in the Air Force."
In a two-page memo last July, Morton and Yale Divinity School professor Kristen Leslie summarized the findings of a weeklong visit to cadet basic training. Academy officials had invited Leslie and six Yale graduate students to observe how the chaplains minister to the cadets.
The Yale team complimented the chaplains for "talent and enthusiasm" in serving new cadets during the grueling, six-week boot camp before their freshman year. But the memo also raised concerns about the "stridently evangelical themes" at a worship service attended by 600 new cadets.
Leslie reported that an academy chaplain urged cadets to pray for those who didn't attend, to try to convert them and "remind them of the consequences ... (that) those not 'born again will burn in the fires of hell.' "
SEE ALSO:
Air Force Chaplain Tells of Academy Proselytizing
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
NYT, 12 April 2005
For more than a year, the Air Force has been struggling to respond to accusations from some alumni, staff members and cadets that evangelical Christians in leadership positions at the academy were creating a discriminatory climate. ...Interviews with staff members and cadets must be approved by the public affairs office at the academy, and nearly all students and faculty members contacted independently this week said they were afraid to speak because it could harm their careers. The office denied requests for interviews with the academy's chief chaplain, Col. Michael Whittington, because he was being interviewed by investigators.
One staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity said on Wednesday: "There's certainly an impression that evangelicals here have that the leadership is kind of on their side. And there's a feeling among people who are atheists or people who are other varieties of Christian that the leadership does not really accept them." Captain Morton said she had decided to step forward without authorization from the public affairs office because: "It's the Constitution, not just a nice rule we can follow or not follow. We all raised our hands and said we'd follow it, and that includes the First Amendment, that includes not using your power to advance your religious agenda."
She added, "I realize this is the end of my Air Force career."

Muslims' Anti-American Protests Spread From Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
NYT, 14 May 2005
Thousands of Muslims, from Gaza to Pakistan to Indonesia, emerged from prayer services on Friday to join Afghans in rapidly spreading protests over the reported desecration of a Koran by American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In Afghanistan, at least 8 people were killed and more than 40 injured in clashes, bringing the death toll over four days of anti-American rioting to at least 16, with more than 100 injured. For the first time a policeman was killed in the violence. Three protesters were killed and 23 people wounded as the police grappled with a crowd of more than 1,500 in Baharak, in far northeastern Badakhstan, the police chief of the province, Gen. Shah Jehan Nuri, said in a telephone interview. Ten police officers and members of the border police, who are based in the town, were among the injured, he said. In three Pakistan cities, Peshawar, Quetta and Multan, hundreds of protesters led largely by religious parties burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans after Friday Prayer. The protests were peaceful, though, thanks in large part to the large numbers of police officers deployed outside mosques and official buildings. Hundreds of people gathered peacefully outside a mosque in Jakarta on Friday while a statement was read condemning the United States for the reported abuses. In Gaza, about 1,500 members of the radical Islamic group Hamas marched through the Jabaliya refugee camp as outrage spread over the reports, including a brief item in Newsweek, that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet in an effort to upset detainees.

Iraq Elections May Have Made Things Worse, Not Better
By Hannah Allam
KNIGHT RIDDER via Lexington Herald-Leader, 14 May 2005
Two weeks of intense insurgent violence have made it crystal clear that Iraq's parliamentary elections, hailed in late January as a triumph for democracy, haven't helped to heal the country's deep divisions. They may have made them worse.
The historic election sheared off a thin facade of wartime national unity and reinforced ethnic and sectarian tensions that have plagued Iraq for centuries. Iraqis immediately began playing the roles the election results delivered to them: victorious Shiite Muslim, assertive Kurd, disaffected Sunni Arab. Within those groups lies a mosaic of other splits, especially between secularists and Islamists vying for Iraq's soul. With little social cohesion, violence has soared, fueled by anger over foreign occupation and religious differences, while a semi-sovereign, disjointed government has taken over with little ability to control or appeal to groups behind the killings. ...When the ballots were collected, about 58 percent of eligible voters had made it to the polls. The majority Shiites and the Kurds were by far the biggest vote-getters. Sunnis were left with almost no political representation, renewed U.S. military offensives in their territories and a humiliating reversal of fortune. Insurgent leaders immediately seized on the Sunni disenfranchisement to stir up sectarian emotions.

The Mystery of the Insurgency
By JAMES BENNET
NYT, 15 May 2005
Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation. "Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers.""The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he said. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."
Steven Metz, of the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, said the insurgency could still be sorting itself out. Yet, he said, "It really is significant that even two years in there hasn't been anything like any kind of political ideology or political spokesman or political wing emerging. It really is a nihilistic insurgency."
He warned that this hydra-headed quality could make the insurgents hard to crush, even as the lack of unity makes it unlikely they will rule Iraq. "It makes it harder to eradicate the insurgency, but it also makes it more difficult for insurgents to gain their ultimate objective - if that is to control the country," he said.
That no one knows if that is the objective is, by historical standards, one of several remarkable, perplexing features of this fight. A clear cause - one with broad support - is usually taken for granted by experts as a prerequisite for successful insurgency.
But insurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle. Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role.
This incoherence is something new. "If you look at 20th-century insurgencies, they all tend to be fairly coherent in terms of their ideology," Dr. Metz said. "Most of the serious insurgencies, you could sit down and say, 'Here's what they want.' " In Iraq, insurgent groups appear to share a common immediate goal of ridding Iraq of an American presence, a goal that may find sympathy among Iraqis angry about poor electricity and water service and high unemployment.
...If the immediate objective of the insurgents is relatively limited - not to topple the government and drive the Americans out now but to pin them down and bleed them - that at least would have solid precedents. As the counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted in a paper for Rand last year, "For more than 30 years, a dedicated cadre of approximately 200 to 400 I.R.A. gunmen and bombers frustrated the maintenance of law and order in Northern Ireland, requiring the prolonged deployment of tens of thousands of British troops." Yet the I.R.A. is still far from its larger goal: to drive the British out.
Among Iraq's insurgents, the jihadists are one group that has suggested a sweeping goal. They want to establish a new caliphate - a religious regime with expansive boundaries. For them, the destruction and chaos in Iraq may represent creative forces, means of heightening the contrasts among sects, religions and whole civilizations. Searching for parallels, several experts compared the insurgents in Iraq to the violent anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That movement took root among the alienated and uprooted who could find no place in modern society.
Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to. "It clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said Dr. Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "And that more than anything else tells us how little we understand the region."

Rebuffing Bush, 132 Mayors Embrace Kyoto Rules
By ELI SANDERS
NYT, 14 May 2005
Unsettled by a series of dry winters in this normally wet city, Mayor Greg Nickels has begun a nationwide effort to do something the Bush administration will not: carry out the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Mr. Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other likeminded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration's policy. The mayors, from cities as liberal as Los Angeles and as conservative as Hurst, Tex., represent nearly 29 million citizens in 35 states, according to Mayor Nickels's office. They are pledging to have their cities meet what would have been a binding requirement for the nation had the Bush administration not rejected the Kyoto Protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012. On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brought New York City into the coalition, the latest Republican mayor to join.

F.B.I. Questions Journalists in Military Secrets Inquiry
By DAVID JOHNSTON
NYT, 14 May 2005
Federal agents have begun asking reporters about any conversations they had with a former Pentagon analyst who has been charged with illegally disclosing military secrets, senior government officials said on Friday. The interviews by the Federal Bureau of Investigation are starting with four reporters, among them at least one newspaper journalist and others whose work has been published on the Internet, the officials said. They would not identify any of the journalists and said the number could increase. The interviews represent the latest twist in a convoluted inquiry that appears to be evolving from a spy case into a broader investigation into the possible disclosure of classified information by the analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin.
Last week, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Franklin with disclosing highly classified defense information about potential attacks on American forces in Iraq. The affidavit that accompanied the charges hinted that journalists might fall under scrutiny in the case. It said Mr. Franklin "knowingly disclosed, without authorization, classified U.S. government information to a foreign official and members of the media."
In addition, the complaint charged Mr. Franklin with one count of passing the information to two Americans who were not identified in the government's papers. But government officials confirmed that the men were former staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group with close ties to the Bush administration. Neither of the men, Steven Rosen, formerly director of foreign policy issues, or Keith Weissman, formerly senior Middle East analyst, has been charged.

Start a War, No Money Down!
By MATT MILLER
NYT, 14 May 2005
Support for the Republicans' wartime fiscal policy may include such side effects as 50 million uninsured, crumbling roads and bridges, and swelling inequality. If you are concerned about any of these symptoms, please call Dr. Howard Dean.

A ‘Right-Wing Coup’ at PBS & the CPB?
A Roundtable Discussion on the Future of Public Broadcasting
DemocracyNow, 12 May 2005
On Wednesday, Reps. David Obey (D-WI) and John Dingell (D-MI) called for an investigation of the Corporation Public Broadcasting. This comes following accusations that the CPB has been largely taken over by conservatives who are influencing programming and hiring decisions. Obey requested that the Inspector General for the CPB, investigate whether the CPB is violating the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that prohibits interference by federal officials over the content and distribution of public programming, and forbids "political or other tests" from being used in CPB hiring decisions.
We speak with Obey as well as PBS host Tavis Smiley, PBS board member Norman Ornstein, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and media analyst Robert McChesney, who is organizing this weekend’s National Conference on Media Reform.

This is a severe crisis right now that public broadcasting face. And I think, you know, to put it in context, the United States has never had public broadcasting in the sense that most countries has had it, which has been a non-profit, non-commercial service for the entire population with a direct relationship to it. Here in the United States, our public broadcasting developed after the commercial interests had basically taken over the airwaves. And they got first claim to programming. When public broadcasting came along in the ‘60s, its job was to do the programs that those guys couldn't make any money off of, that they were being criticized for not doing. So they were put in a very difficult position. They weren’t allowed to do shows that developed a big audience. And then, ideologically they were put in the position they couldn’t do news programs that went outside the boundaries either or they would face political pressure in Washington. So if you understand the sort of way their hands were tied behind their back from the outset, what public broadcasting has accomplished in this country is actually fairly impressive, given the difficult sort of scenario they were put into. And they fought hard and I think some of the stations have done a terrific job in that context, but it's always been a difficult battle, because you never get political support, you’re getting political censorship, and you’re struggling for support with commercial underwriting, with trying to get listeners and viewers. But I think what we're seeing now, as Jeff points out, is that there's such a policing now of intellectual content in this country that this is a blatant attempt by the Bush administration to say, well, here's like any sort of dissident voices that we can get our hands on to quash, we have to, and I think that's the only way to interpret what Tomlinson is doing.         --ROBERT McCHESNEY

13 May 2005

"...just like pushing Jello around."
U.S. Offensive Intensifies at Syrian Border
AP via MyWay.com, 13 May 2005
American fighter jets flattened a suspected insurgent safe house near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Friday, as hundreds of U.S. troops searched remote desert villages house by house for followers of Iraq's most wanted militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. American forces have met little resistance since the first two days of Operation Matador, aimed at clearing a region believed to be a haven for foreign fighters slipping over the border from Syria, the military said in a statement Friday. American intelligence indicates the insurgents are either in hiding or have fled the region, U.S. Capt. Jeffrey Pool said in the statement. Villagers reached by telephone Friday said gunmen still roamed some areas and they continued to receive U.S. shelling.

China Says U.S. Impeded North Korea Arms Talks
By JOSEPH KAHN
NYT, 13 May 2005
A senior Chinese diplomat on Thursday accused the Bush administration of undermining efforts to revive negotiations with the North Korean government and said there was "no solid evidence" that North Korea was preparing to test a nuclear weapon. The comments by Yang Xiyu, a senior Foreign Ministry official and China's top official on the North Korean nuclear problem, were noteworthy because the Chinese authorities very rarely speak to journalists about the issue. The comments reflect growing frustration in Beijing with the Bush administration.
Even as the White House presses China to find a solution to the nuclear issue, Chinese officials say, it has hurled insults at North Korea and given its leaders excuses to stay away from the bargaining table.
"It is true that we do not yet have tangible achievements" in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Mr. Yang said in an interview. "But a basic reason for the unsuccessful effort lies in the lack of cooperation from the U.S. side."
SEE ALSO:
Blix: U.S. Not Committed to Nuke 'Bargain'
By CHARLES J. HANLEYAP
AP via MYWay.com, 10 May 2005
Washington isn't taking "the common bargain" of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as seriously as it once did, and that's dimming global support for the U.S. campaign to shut down the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector said. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, by questioning the value of treaties and international law, has also damaged the U.S. position, Hans Blix said. "There is a feeling the common edifice of the international community is being dismantled," the Swedish arms expert said. Blix, now chairman of the Swedish government-sponsored Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, spoke with reporters in the second week of a monthlong conference to review the 1970 nonproliferation treaty.

Attention: Deficit Disorder
By ROBERT E. RUBIN
NYT, 13 May 2005
THE United States has tremendous economic strengths but it also faces great challenges: the need to ensure national security; a newly competitive China and India; serious shortcomings in public education, basic research, infrastructure and other requisites for meeting that competition; and much else. An immediate and critical imperative is to redress fiscal imbalances.
Most pressing is the 10-year federal deficit, which most independent analysts project at $4.5 trillion to $5 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 are made permanent and that the alternative minimum tax is adjusted to avoid unintended effects on middle-income taxpayers. And while 10-year numbers can be highly unreliable, deficits are as likely to be higher as to be lower. Over the longer term, Social Security has a 75-year estimated deficit of $4 trillion, while the different components of Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, represent a fiscal problem of roughly $20 trillion.
Virtually all mainstream economists agree that, over time, sustained deficits crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, and reduce productivity and economic growth. But, far more dangerously, if markets here and abroad begin to fear long-term fiscal disarray and our related trade imbalances, those markets could then demand sharply higher interest rates for providing long-term debt capital and could put abrupt and sharp downward pressure on the dollar. These market effects, plus the adverse impact of continuing fiscal imbalances on business and consumer confidence, could seriously undermine our economy.

Always Low Wages. Always.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 13 May 2005
Last week Standard and Poor's, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to junk status. That is, it sees a significant risk that the companies won't be able to pay their debts.
Don't cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers.
Standard and Poor's downgraded GM and Ford sooner rather than later because it believes that the public is losing interest in S.U.V.'s. But the companies were vulnerable because they still pay decent wages and offer good benefits, in an age when taking care of employees has gone out of style. In particular, they are weighed down by health care costs for current and retired workers, which run to about $1,500 per vehicle at G.M. So the downgrade was a reminder of how far we have come from the days when hard-working Americans could count on a reasonable degree of economic security.

Nominee for U.N. Moves to Senate; No Endorsement
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 13 May 2005
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent the nomination of John R. Bolton to the full Senate without a recommendation for its approval, after Republicans fell short of the solid support among their members necessary to endorse him as ambassador to the United Nations.The highly unusual move was only the third time in 22 years that the committee has sent a nomination to the Senate without a favorable recommendation. But it moved one of the most contested of the White House's foreign policy appointments a step closer to approval, given the Republicans' majority in the Senate. The committee's chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar, had predicted that the panel would approve Mr. Bolton on a party-line vote. But Mr. Lugar was forced to embrace the fallback position after one Republican, Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, broke with the party and denounced Mr. Bolton in scathing terms as unsuited for the job, calling him "the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be." ...Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a statement saying she was "pleased" by the committee vote and calling on the Senate to "now move quickly to confirm him so that he can begin his work at the United Nations." Eric Ueland, chief of staff for the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, said the Bolton nomination would probably come to the full Senate after lawmakers resolved a dispute over confirmation votes for President Bush's judicial nominees, which is expected to be taken up next week. He said Republicans hoped that would leave time for a vote before the Memorial Day recess.
Later Thursday, however, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, placed a hold on the nomination, according to her spokesman, David Sandretti. He said she wanted to get State Department documents that Democrats have been seeking involving Mr. Bolton's dealings with American intelligence agencies over Syria. In rejecting the request several days ago, Ms. Rice said disclosure of the documents could have a chilling effect on debates within the administration.

Republican Moderates in Senate Sense Intensifying Pressures
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 13 May 2005
The unusual pact that permitted the nomination of John R. Bolton to go forward on Thursday without the support of a crucial Republican senator has exposed, in a very raw and public way, the extreme pressures facing Republican moderates in a Senate that is increasingly dominated by conservatives.
President Bush called the dissenting Republican, Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, on Wednesday, the day before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which Mr. Voinovich serves, was to take up the nomination, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said.
Karl Rove, the president's powerful political adviser, and Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff, also called to chat with Mr. Voinovich in recent weeks, Mr. McClellan said.
And Mr. Voinovich, who has steadfastly refused to answer questions about any discussions with the White House, is hardly the only Republican who is feeling the squeeze these days.
From the fight over Mr. Bolton to the looming blowup over the president's judicial nominees to the debate over the proposal to overhaul Social Security, Republican moderates are caught in the middle as never before. As they look to the near future, to a possible vacancy on the Supreme Court, they realize that the pressures will only intensify.

Over There
Why U.S. troops won't be coming home from Iraq anytime soon.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 10 May 2005
Read together, the two documents—the latest quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, just released today, and the State Department's "Iraq Weekly Status Report" dated May 4—suggest that the Iraqi leaders have a long way to go (by some measures, as long as they've ever had) before they can rebuild their country, secure order, stabilize their regime, and protect their borders without a large American military presence. The paradox that stumped the U.S. occupation forces two years ago, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, continues to stump them today. On the one hand, their efforts to provide security won't succeed until they restore essential services. On the other hand, they can't restore essential services until the country's key assets—especially its roads, oil pipelines, and electrical generators—are secure.

Protests Against U.S. Spread Across Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
NYT, 13 May 2005
Anti-American violence spread to 10 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and into Pakistan on Thursday as four more protesters died in a third day of demonstrations and clashes with the police. Hundreds of students took part in three separate demonstrations here in the capital, where they burned an American flag, and a provincial office of CARE International was ransacked in a continuation of the most widespread protests against the American presence since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago. In the most violent single incident, the police fired on hundreds of tribesmen from Khogiani, a district in eastern Afghanistan, who were trying to march in protest on Jalalabad, the town where four people died and 60 were wounded on Wednesday.