Gulf War Stories the Media Loved --
Except They Aren't True

"Even though a story can be incredibly preposterous in the Western mind, it can resonate deeply in other parts of the world," Todd Levanthal, a U.S. Information Agency specialist on disinformation, told the New York Times (9/16/90). "The key is predisposition to believe, not the crudity of the charge." While the point of the article was to portray Arabs as conspiratorial and irrational, the U.S. media's acceptance of crude charges about the official enemy demonstrates that a "Western mind" is no barrier to a "predisposition to believe."

Most U.S. news outlets uncritically accepted the story that 300 premature babies died when Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were sent to Iraq as loot. Alexander Cockburn (The Nation, 2/4/91), an exception, cited Kuwaiti medical personnel who went into exile after the invasion, who said that babies were still in incubators at Kuwait's Maternity Hospital in September, and that empty incubators had not been taken.

After the end of Iraqi occupation, the New York Times (2/28/91) offered this two-sentence retraction, buried five-sixths of the way through an article: "Some of the atrocities that had been reported, such as the killing of infants in the main hospitals shortly after the invasion, are untrue or have been exaggerated, Kuwaitis said. Hospital officials, for instance, said that stories circulated about the killing of 300 children were incorrect."

A "Captain Karim," ostensibly a former bodyguard of Saddam Hussein, was featured on 60 Minutes (1/20/91), as well as prominent TV outlets in Europe, making sensational charges about Saddam, e.g., "He become very happy when he see anyone in the acid bath." But as reported by Doug Ireland in the Village Voice (2/12/91), an investigation by French intelligence could find no evidence that Karim ever worked for Saddam, and labeled him a "mythomaniac" who had frequent contacts in Paris with Saudi military and intelligence officers.

Indulging in wishful thinking, Time's "Grapevine" page (2/11/91) asked "Is Saddam Cracking Up?" The piece claimed that Saddam was blinking very rapidly during his CNN interview the previous week: 40 times a minute, vs. 20-25 during an interview in June. Time consulted John Molloy, who trains salespeople to handle stress, who said, "When salesmen start blinking, they're usually in trouble. The guy looks like he's falling apart."

To put Saddam's blinking in perspective, Greenpeace's Peter Dykstra did a little research of his own: George Bush's eyes, he found, flickered at a Saddam-like 34 to 38 blinks per minute, while Michael Dukakis' showed a positively psychotic 74 b.p.m. Among the most reassuring eyes found by Greenpeace were Dan Quayle's, blinking a sane 20 times per minute.

The New York Times' editorial page (1/14/91) reported that "Baghdad Betty," an Iraqi government propaganda broadcaster, had told U.S. troops: "G.I., you should be home.... While you're away, movie stars are taking your women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend. Tom Selleck is kissing your lady.... Bart Simpson is making love to your wife."

When George Bush called Iraqi radio "ridiculous," the editorial said, "he couldn't know how right he was." But the joke was on the Times: The story it gleefully reported as fact was actually a joke Johnny Carson told on the Tonight Show (8/22/90). On Jan. 31 1990, Carson said that his joke had been "reported as a fact on CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Garrick Utley's Year-End Wrap-Up [on NBC], and in this issue of Time magazine [1/21/91]." In Carson's original joke, it's dad Homer Simpson instead of Bart -- a slightly more plausible scenario, since Bart is eight years old.

In war, some facts less factual

MOSCOW – When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.
Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.

The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week.

But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action.

"My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be skeptical about it."

Liberalism's Patriotic Vision

With the massacres of a year ago came righteous outrage, bewilderment and a thirst for interpretations: What could such colossal violence mean? What did mass murder require of us? Who were we now? We needed a story.

The White House declared that the terrorists hated our freedoms; after an interlude of coalition building, the administration resumed its America-love-it-or-leave-it attitude. Members of Congress became sullen cheerleaders, cowed by the White House's willingess to question their loyalty. Patriotism seemed to function not as a spur to come to the aid of the country, but as a silencer.

Absolutists dominated the field — and eerily converged in their penchant for going it alone. The terrorists took it upon themselves to act in the name of all of Islam and all Muslims, to settle all accounts and slaughter all enemies. There could be no appeal or dissent; they expected their allies to be as silent as their enemies. They openly yearned to restore the eighth-century caliphate: a purist theocracy and an empire if ever there was one.

Squandering much support from around the world, President Bush soon showed he was ready to go it alone, keeping even Congress at arm's length. He was not content with self-defense. Countries that were not with us were against us. We were launched upon a permanent war against anyone he declared we were at war against; the administration reserved the right to break treaties and to undertake pre-emptive war.

The American left, too, had its version of unilateralism. Responsibility for the attacks had, somehow, to lie with American imperialism, because all responsibility has to lie with American imperialism — a perfect echo of the right's idea that all good powers are and should be somehow American. Intellectuals and activists on the far left could not be troubled much with compassion or defense. Disconnected from Americans who reasonably felt their patriotic selves attacked, they were uncomprehending. Knowing little about Al Qaeda, they filed it under Anti-Imperialism, and American attacks on the Taliban under Vietnam Quagmire. For them, not flying the flag became an urgent cause. In their go-it-alone attitude, they weirdly paralleled the blustering right-wing approach to the world.

Long before Sept. 11, this naysaying left had seceded. When Ralph Nader's Greens equated a Bush presidency with a Gore presidency, they took leave of any practical connection to America. Rightly demanding profound reforms but deluded about their popularity, they withheld their energy from the Democrats and squandered alliances that would have promoted their ideals. They acted as though their cause had to be lonely to be good.

Many liberals and social democrats saw through this hollow negativity and posed necessary questions. What was a war against terrorism? To what did it bind the nation? War against whom, and for how long? Why should American foreign policy be held hostage to oil? How should strong and privileged America belong in the world? Was the United States to be a one-nation tribunal of "regime change" wherever it detected evil spinning on an axis?

Some good answers float in the air now. They have not yet found political support, but they could. As the Bush administration paints itself into a corner, we could be headed toward a new liberal moment. Liberals need to step up their promotion of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and elsewhere, helping to stifle terrorism. Even conservatives no longer smirk about nation building or foreign aid.

Likewise, mainstream economists like Joseph Stiglitz (once chief economist of the World Bank) and Jeffrey Sachs (former free-market shock therapist) campaign to convince rich countries to give more development aid.

Liberals should affirm that American power, working within coalitions, can advance democratic values, as in Bosnia and Kosovo — but they should oppose this administration's push toward war in Iraq, which is unlikely to work out that way. Against oil-based myopia, there are murmurs (they should be clamors) that we should phase out the oil dependency that overheats the earth and binds us to tyrants.

On the domestic front, corporate chiefs have lost their new-economy charm — and the Bush administration's earlier efforts on their behalf have lost whatever political purchase they had. With the bursting of the stock market bubble, deregulation no longer looks like a cure-all.

Whom do Americans admire now? Whom do we trust? Americans did not take much reminding that when skyscrapers were on fire, they needed firefighters and police officers, not Arthur Andersen accountants. Yet we confront an administration whose policies reflect the idea that sacrifice — financial and otherwise — is meant for people who wear blue collars.

A reform bloc in Congress, bolstered in November, could start renewing the country. But we need much more than legislation. One year after, surely many Americans are primed for a patriotism of action, not of pledges. The era that began Sept. 11 would be a superb time to crack the jingoists' claim to a monopoly of patriotic virtue. Instead of letting minions of corporate power run away with the flag (while banking their tax credits offshore), we need to remake the tools of our public life — our schools, social services and transportation. Post-Vietnam liberals have an opening now, freed of our 60's flag anxiety and our reflexive negativity, to embrace a liberal patriotism that is unapologetic and uncowed. It's time for the patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays or self-congratulation. It's time to close the gap between the nation we love and the justice we also love.


Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, is author of "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives." He is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

Anti-US feeling under scrutiny

The US State Department is due to host a conference on why there is so much anti-American sentiment in the world.

Twenty leading academics from the US and around the world will address members of the US Government on Thursday as part of a sustained campaign by the government to improve its global image.

There is a genuine sense of confusion amongst many people here in the US about why there should be so much anti-American feeling worldwide.

The belief, particularly on the right of US politics, is that the American dream is something most of the world would aspire to if they were only free to do so.

That has led to a sustained attempt by the Bush administration to promote American ideals and values around the world.

Certainly US President George W Bush has displayed a rare talent for alienating world opinion, right from his early decision to reject the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

And many outside the US would argue that it is American policies themselves that are at fault, not their presentation, however much money and effort is spent on it.

Homeland Security Name an Issue

W A S H I N G T O N, Sept. 5 — The name of the Department of Homeland Security is meant to evoke images of safety even family, hearth, comfort. It gives some people a knot in the stomach.

An uncommon word to begin with, "homeland" became an everyday word after the Sept. 11 attacks and was institutionalized when President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security.

Jeff Neberman, who teaches European history at Boise State University, says it's "right out of Nazi Germany." The German word "heimat" means "homeland" and was used by the Nazis. Others dispute a direct Nazi link and note various cultures have used the word, too.

"Homeland" has "obviously grated on quite a number of people," said Todd Gitlin, who teaches culture and sociology at Columbia University. "It feels like an import even if you're not aware that its origins are German."

Leslie Savan, who wrote a book about advertising and popular culture, said "homeland" makes her think not only of Germany, but also of Russia and South Africa's former apartheid government.

"It's been one of those words that's supposed to sound cozy and warm," she said. "But because it sounds cozy and warm it has been used by totalitarian governments."

Bush wants Congress to turn the homeland security office into a full-fledged Cabinet agency called the Department of Homeland Security, a matter the Senate took up this week. The House has passed its version of Bush's plan to merge all or parts of 22 agencies into a 170,000-employee department focused on preventing terrorism.

Bush Expands Government Secrecy, Arouses Critics

WASHINGTON - As part of its "war on terrorism," the Bush administration has vastly expanded government secrecy, removing information from the public domain, limiting its disclosures to Congress and allowing law enforcement agencies to operate in the shadows.

Its policies are beginning to stir growing criticism from the courts, Congress and even from some conservatives.

"For whatever reason, this administration has gone way way too far in its pursuit of secrecy in some particularly worrying ways," said Mark Tapscott, head of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Administration officials, from the president down, have justified their policy on the needs of fighting terrorism.

"We can't have leaks of classified information. It's not in our nation's interest," Bush said last October.

But the policy goes beyond classified information. A March 19 memorandum from White House Chief of Staff Andy Card urged government agencies to more aggressively protect "sensitive but unclassified" information.

Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration was expanding secrecy. It moved to hold up the release of presidential papers from former President Ronald Reagan and insisted on keeping secret members of an energy policy task force chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Last week, the White House said it would keep secret 4,000 pages related to presidential pardons granted by former President Bill Clinton in the final days of his administration. It said all presidents had the right to discuss and decide on pardons in private.

'MORE SECRETIVE THAN NIXON'

"This administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don't believe the American people or Congress have any right to information," said last week Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is suing the administration to force it to reveal the members of the energy task force.

THE MAN CHASING ENRON

On the morning of January 22nd, a lawyer named Bill Lerach got out of his van in front of the Houston federal courthouse and presented a cardboard box full of shredded documents to the cameras of a waiting press corps. At the time, the implosion of Enron was still leading the news, and Lerach had filed a lawsuit against the company on behalf of its aggrieved shareholders. "It's a smoking howitzer," Lerach told reporters that day. "It doesn't get any worse than this. Call the cops. Something has to be done here." The pictures of Lerach and the documents, which Enron employees purportedly had shredded, became an indelible image of the collapse of the energy-trading firm. "I thought I was going to be run over by the media," Lerach recalled months later. "Never underestimate the power of a physical exhibit."

Lerach, who has spent the last few decades suing corporate executives for lying to, cheating, and otherwise defrauding their shareholders, is probably the leading class-action lawyer in the country. He regards the Enron lawsuit as the most important case of his career. "This case sums up everything I've been saying about these companies for years," he told me happily. "I was right for ten years, and no one cared. In case after case, we pleaded that the analysts for the investment banks were corrupted. We pleaded that the accountants were corrupted by their consulting fees. These judges were incredulous. They threw us out. They said professionals would never behave that way. Well, we saw how they behaved, didn't we?"

For the past year or so, Lerach has shadowed the procession of corporate disasters. On August 20th, for example, his firm sued Martha Stewart, alleging that she dumped stock in her own company when she learned that she was going to be investigated for insider trading in shares of the biotech firm ImClone. To be sure, Lerach has lost a few of these cases, but even some of the defeats make him look farsighted. In November of 2000, he sued WorldCom; a federal judge in Mississippi dismissed the case last March—shortly before the company collapsed in an accounting scandal. In December of 1999, Lerach sued Tyco International, and a judge in New Hampshire turned him away last February—not long before that conglomerate had its own accounting scandal. But Lerach's goal is less about muckraking and more about the money to be made in his line of work. Even his public unveiling of the shredded documents in Houston revealed his multiple agendas. Lerach wanted to use the documents against Enron, but he also wanted to persuade the judge to designate his law firm's client the lead plaintiff in the case, and in that way earn tens of millions of dollars in legal fees.

How low can we go?

I have read a lot of flabbergasting articles about Sept. 11 and its aftermath in the past 11 months, but one paragraph in the paper last week brought the bar to its lowest.
A poll by Knight Ridder "indicated that most Americans are gung-ho for the global war on terrorism and a solid 67 percent favor taking it to Iraq."

Nope. Close, but that's not the paragraph.

It was this one: "The poll results reflect some confusion about the war on terrorism, a conflict with shifting boundaries and elusive enemies. Nearly one-third of Americans view the entire Muslim world as the enemy, even though several Muslim countries support the U.S. war effort."

The question this presents is: What?

Well, what do you expect in a country where it sometimes appears government is using a Marx Brothers movie script as a template.

Where it sometimes appears Homeland Security should be renamed "Homeland Paranoia."

Where the economic policy resembles in sincerity and record-keeping a Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker telethon.

Where the media seem to spend more money printing fast-fading flags and producing flag-waving promotions than on researching and reporting the actual degradation of rights, even the dissolution of rights, among citizens.

Doesn't it seem as if the government is wasting billions and billions of dollars on unnecessary or unworkable "security" - an exercise that reminds me of a raccoon attracted to anything that sparkles? Doesn't it seem as if we are botching chance after chance to prove to the world that the United States, in the face of a potential threat, can still assure equal justice under the law

Isn't it odd that government leadership is so rabidly intent on invading Iraq that it appears more attention is being paid to overthrowing a nation's psyche (our own) by zealous public relations than accumulating any solid evidence such an invasion is necessary?

Shouldn't we be a little worried when airport security has turned into an exercise in how best to amass eyebrow scissors and nail files, and detain and humiliate non-white travelers?

We wait and wait for someone in charge to ask: Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?

Church leaders speak against 'wicked' war

BRITAIN’S two most senior churchmen have launched separate impassioned initiatives aimed at preventing war against Iraq.
In an article in The Times today the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, writes that a war would have grave consequences, possibly setting the Arab world against the West. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, has also raised his concerns in a private letter to the Prime Minister.

Their interventions are the latest in a number by bishops opposed to action against Iraq — and their comments are increasingly irritating the Government and its advisers. One official said that remarks from some senior clerics suggested they regarded Saddam Hussein as liberal-minded.

Tony Blair himself has been careful to refrain from comment on the criticism other than to say: “You have to decide what the greatest risk is and what the morally right thing to do is." The Prime Minister has promised to publish evidence to support his conviction that Iraq poses a grave and imminent threat. However, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor writes that unless the evidence is both persuasive and incontrovertible, concerns in this country and abroad are unlikely to be allayed.

Even with such evidence, important questions remained to be addressed, including the effect on international law and how well it would be respected in future if military action were not endorsed by the UN.

Pre-Emptive Strike on Iraq: Count NATO Out

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States would not be able to involve NATO in a pre-emptive strike on Iraq because offensive action runs contrary to the founding principles of the North Atlantic alliance, officials said.

NATO invoked its Article V mutual defense clause for the first time the day after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, but it was sidelined from the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that followed.

An official at the 19-nation alliance said that although Article V is still "activated," Washington would have to prove a link between the hijacked airliner attacks and Baghdad for it to be used as a mandate for NATO strikes on Iraq.

"Article V was adopted for a very specific incident," said the official, who asked not to be named. "I don't think you can automatically presume that the situation we're talking about here (an attack on Iraq) would fit in this context."

But could Article V be re-invoked for strikes on Iraq?

"There is no chance," said the official. "We're talking pre-emptive action here and that's not part of NATO's doctrine."

Israeli spies accused of posing as Canadians

Federal officials are investigating claims that Israeli agents posed as Canadians during a spy operation in Gaza that reportedly used sexual blackmail to collect intelligence used to assassinate a Palestinian militant leader.

Canada's ambassador to Tel Aviv has asked Israel for an explanation of the incident and has been told it did not happen, but officials are concerned Israeli agents may be breaking their promise not to work undercover as Canadians.

Akram Zatmeh, 22, claims he supplied information to agents posing as Canadians that helped Israel pinpoint the whereabouts of a senior Hamas leader. The leader was later assassinated by Israeli forces in a July 23 missile attack that also killed 14 others, including nine children.

The informant claimed he was recruited by three agents who said they were Canadians and took him to the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv before coercing him with promises of travel to Canada and threats to distribute fake photos showing him in sexual encounters.

In a similar incident in 1997, Canada recalled its ambassador to Israel after undercover Mossad agents were caught using falsified Canadian passports during an assassination attempt on a Palestinian militant leader. Israel apologized at the time and promised not to do it again.

PROPAGANDA WARS

As the War Party revs up its propaganda machine – the War Street Journal, the New York Post, Andrew "Bareback" Sullivan – we are awash in such a flood of b*llsh*t that the stench, let alone the sheer quantity, is enough to induce spasms of retching. In these dark days, the job of any truth-seeker is akin to cleaning the Augean Stables on a daily basis, and, heck, I'm no Hercules, but here goes….

My all-time favorite wartime fib is the one told by the lawyers for unnamed "victims of 9/11" who are suing the Saudis – and now the Iraqis – for $1 trillion in damages. The New York Post, which infamously ran the front-page headline "BUSH KNEW" after news of some vague pre-9/11 warning came out, has apparently decided to make this into a series: "IRAQ KNEW" screams the Post headline:

"A $1 trillion lawsuit, filed here yesterday, claims Iraq knew that Osama bin Laden was targeting New York prior to Sept. 11 – and that Saddam Hussein encouraged terrorists because he wanted revenge for losing the Gulf War…. Court documents filed in the suit say Saddam knew at least six weeks before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the presumed attempt to hit the White House, that bin Laden was plotting to strike high-profile U.S. targets."

The Saudis, and a long list of Middle Eastern countries, are being targeted by the War Party's legal division on the grounds that a murky conspiracy of Saudi princes, Middle Eastern intelligence agencies, oil interests, and others financed a terrorist plot against the U.S. There was no mention of the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, or the Knights of Malta – this latter, I hear, was a fun buncha guyz – but we'll just have to see what the discovery process reveals. This is going to be fun…

Ah, but the fun has already begun with the "evidence" put out there by Kreindler and Kreindler, a law firm that specializes in litigating airline disasters – and is now determined to cause and cash in on a looming foreign policy disaster for the United States. The whole phony suit is based on an off-the-cuff remark by an Iraqi newspaper columnist, one Naeem Abd Muhalhal, who supposedly wrote, on July 21, 2001, that Bin Laden was contemplating "seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert, about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House." The plaintiffs also claim Muhalhal had inside information when he wrote that Bin Laden was "insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting," which allegedly means the twice-bombed WTC. An unnamed "associate" of Muhalhal's avers that his former friend is indeed an Iraqi intelligence agent, and the clincher is that this oracular columnist was singled out by Saddam himself for special praise.

Arab League vows support for Iraq in military confrontation with U.S.

CAIRO The foreign ministers of 20 Arab nations jointly pledged Thursday to support Iraq in its showdown with the United States, warning that American threats against Saddam Hussein's regime were threats to the entire Arab world.

Handing a diplomatic triumph to Baghdad at the conclusion of a two-day Arab League meeting here, the ministers issued a resolution declaring their "total rejection of the threat of aggression on Arab nations, in particular Iraq, reaffirming that these threats to the security and safety of any Arab country are considered a threat to Arab national security."

The ministers' stance is the latest and strongest sign of opposition among Arab nations to any U.S. military action aimed at toppling Saddam. The support of at least some Arab countries, particularly those that share land borders with Iraq, is regarded by many military analysts as crucial to a U.S. ground invasion.

Foreign Minister Naji Sabri of Iraq lauded the Arab ministers' resolution as he left the closed-door meeting. Arab nations, he said, voiced a "total rejection of the aggressive intentions of the United States."

Although some Arab governments have urged Baghdad to permit UN weapons inspectors to return in an effort to defuse the crisis, the ministers' statement Thursday did not specifically mention the inspectors. Taking a more deferential tone, the council of ministers instead said it "welcomes the initiatives by Iraq to forge a dialogue with the United Nations."

The ministers also echoed Baghdad's recent call for a "comprehensive settlement" of all of its disputes with the United Nations, calling for an end to UN trade sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Iraq, which insists that its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have already been destroyed, has flip-flopped on whether it will allow weapons inspectors back into the country. After dismissing the idea, senior Iraqi officials said earlier this week that they would be willing to consider the return of inspectors if sanctions were lifted at the same time.

The UN Security Council, which imposed the sanctions after the Gulf War, has insisted that its inspectors verify that Iraq has stopped building weapons of mass destruction and has destroyed its stockpiles before the sanctions can be lifted. Iraq contends that it has ceased its biological and chemical weapons programs, but it has nonetheless forbidden UN inspectors from entering the country since 1998.

The Arab League's secretary general, Amr Moussa, said a military strike against Iraq would "open the gates of hell" in the Middle East. Western and Arab military analysts predict that Iraq may seek to respond to any U.S. attack by launching missiles at Israel in an effort to spark a wider conflict in the region.

Despite their pledge of support for Iraq's stance, the foreign ministers did not discuss whether they would lend military assistance to Iraq if it were attacked. A spokesman for the group said the issue was "too hypothetical."

Armed troops should back inspectors

The weapons inspector who oversaw the destruction of much of President Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons called yesterday for an armed force of 50,000 men to back up the United Nations experts.

Rolf Ekeus, chief UN inspector from 1991 to 1997, said "coercive inspections" could offer President Saddam a credible alternative to being overthrown by a US military intervention. "Iraq may well accept, if this is an alternative to an invasion," said Mr Ekeus, who now chairs the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. "The prospect of a military invasion may concentrate Saddam's mind."

The proposals are part of a report to be released today by an influential US think-tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr Ekeus said he was initially sceptical but is now one of the report's authors. His doubts evaporated after "hard-nosed feasibility discussions" with the retired air force general Charles Boyd, a former deputy commander of US forces in Europe, he said.

The UN arms experts were systematically stymied by Iraq during years of monitoring weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s. But the threat of military strikes alone was able to persuade the Iraqis to end some tense stand-offs. The inspectors have been barred from Iraq since they pulled out in December 1998, hours before the US and Britain launched Operation Desert Fox.

The new plan calls for the UN Security Council to set up a "powerful, multinational military force" to back the inspections. The force would be composed of air cavalry with at least four brigade-sized units stationed in Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

"This is a simple and viable idea," Mr

Using Terror as a Pretext

PARIS -- Several Western democracies have become "predators of digital freedoms," using the fight against terrorism to increase surveillance on the Internet, an international media-rights group said Thursday.

Reporters Without Borders criticized not only authoritarian states such as China that tightly police Internet use, but also Western governments including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Denmark and the European Parliament.

"A year after the tragic events in New York and Washington, the Internet can be included on the list of 'collateral damage,'" the Paris-based group said in a report. "Cyber liberty has been undermined and fundamental digital freedoms have been amputated."

The report accused China, Vietnam and other countries hostile to dissent of using the international counterterrorism campaign "to strengthen their police mechanisms and legal frameworks relating to the Web and to increase pressure on cyber dissidents."

Among cases cited was that of Li Dawei, a former policeman sentenced in July to 11 years in prison on charges of using the Internet to subvert the Chinese government.

But even among Western democracies, "many countries have adopted laws, measures and actions that are poised to put the Internet under the tutelage of security services," Reporters Without Borders said.

100 jets join attack on Iraq

About 100 American and British aircraft took part in an attack on Iraq's major western air defence installation yesterday in the biggest single operation over the country for four years.


Click to enlarge
The raid appeared to be a prelude to the type of special forces operations that would have to begin weeks before a possible American-led war. It was launched two days before a war summit between President George W Bush and Tony Blair in America.

The Prime Minister promised that Britain would be alongside the Americans "when the shooting starts".

The raid seemed designed to destroy air defences to allow easy access for special forces helicopters to fly into Iraq via Jordan or Saudi Arabia to hunt down Scud missiles before a possible war within the next few months.

Although only 12 aircraft dropped precision-guided bombs on to the H3 airfield, 240 miles west of Baghdad and close to Jordan, many support aircraft took part.

The strikes were carried out by nine American F15 Strike Eagles and three RAF Tornado GR4 ground attack aircraft flying from Kuwait.

At least seven types of aircraft took part. Fighter cover was provided by US F-16 Fighting Falcons and RAF Tornado F3s from Saudi Arabia. RAF VC10 tanker aircraft flying from Bahrain were among the support aircraft.

These also included EA6b Prowlers, which send out signals to confuse enemy radar, and E3a Awacs aircraft that co-ordinate operations and carry out reconnaissance of any response.

RAF Tornados also took part in the reconnaissance. American central command refused to go into detail about the number of aircraft involved in the raid.

It said: "Coalition strikes in the no-fly zones are executed as a self-defence measure in response to Iraqi hostile threats and acts against coalition forces and their aircraft."

The Pentagon said that the raid was launched in "response to recent Iraqi hostile acts against coalition aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone".

Iraq had made 130 attempts to shoot down coalition aircraft this year.

The Ministry of Defence in London refused to confirm that RAF aircraft had taken part, but defence sources said that Tornado ground attack and reconnaissance aircraft played a key role. The attack on what the American central command described as an "air defence command and control facility" was the first time that a target in western Iraq had been attacked during the patrols of the southern no-fly zone.

Until yesterday, all strikes had been against air defence sites in the south, around Basra, Amara, Nassairya and Baghdad.

President's approval rating drops to 60 percent in new poll

President Bush ( news - web sites)'s job approval has dropped to 60 percent in a new poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. His approval is in the mid 60s in several other recent polls.



Bush's approval was at 80 percent in January in this poll, but his numbers have dropped as the numbers showed more of a partisan divide.

_Bush's approval among Republicans has dropped from 95 percent to 83 percent. It has dropped from 69 percent to 39 percent among Democrats and from 79 percent to 65 percent among independents.

_In September 1998, then-President Clinton ( news - web sites) had a job approval of 61 percent as he faced increasing pressure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton's support, like Bush's, was similarly partisan, with 88 percent of Democrats, 32 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of independents approving.

The Pew poll of 1,001 adults taken Aug. 14-25 has an error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The real goal is the seizure of Saudi oil

I keep listening to the words coming from the Bush administration about Iraq and I become increasingly alarmed. There seems to be such confusion, but through it all a grim determination that they are, at some point, going to launch a military attack. The response of the British government seems equally confused, but I just hope that the determination to ultimately attack Iraq does not form the bedrock of their policy. It is hard now to see how George Bush can withdraw his bellicose words and also save face, but I hope that that is possible. Otherwise I fear greatly for the Middle East, but also for the rest of the world.
What is most chilling is that the hawks in the Bush administration must know the risks involved. They must be aware of the anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East. They must be aware of the fear in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that a war against Iraq could unleash revolutions, disposing of pro-western governments, and replacing them with populist anti-American Islamist fundamentalist regimes. We should all remember the Islamist revolution in Iran. The Shah was backed by the Americans, but he couldn't stand against the will of the people. And it is because I am sure that they fully understand the consequences of their actions, that I am most afraid. I am drawn to the conclusion that they must want to create such mayhem.

The many words that are uttered about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, which are never substantiated with any hard evidence, seem to mean very little. Even if Saddam had such weapons, why would he wish to use them? He knows that if he moves to seize the oilfields in neighbouring countries the full might of the western world will be ranged against him. He knows that if he attacks Israel the same fate awaits him. Comparisons with Hitler are silly - Hitler thought he could win; Saddam knows he cannot. Even if he has nuclear weapons he cannot win a war against America. The United States can easily contain him. They do not need to try and force him to irrationality.

But that is what Bush seems to want to do. Why is he so determined to take the risk? The key country in the Middle East, as far as the Americans are concerned, is Saudi Arabia: the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, the country that has been prepared to calm the oil markets, producing more when prices are too high and less when there is a glut. The Saudi royal family has been rewarded with best friend status by the west for its cooperation. There has been little concern that the government is undemocratic and breaches human rights, nor that it is in the grip of an extreme form of Islam. With American support it has been believed that the regime can be protected and will do what is necessary to secure a supply of oil to the west at reasonably stable prices.

Bush's Conspiracy to Riot

More than three decades apart, two political riots influenced the outcome of U.S. presidential elections. In 1968, protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago hurt Democrat Hubert Humphrey and helped Republican Richard Nixon eke out a victory. On Nov. 22, 2000, the so-called “Brooks Brothers Riot” of Republican activists helped stop a vote recount in Miami -- and showed how far George W. Bush’s supporters were ready to go to put their man in the White House.

But the government reaction to the two events was dramatically different. The clashes between police and Vietnam War protesters in 1968 led the Nixon administration to charge seven anti-war radicals with “conspiring to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot.” The defendants, who became known as the Chicago Seven, were later acquitted of conspiracy charges, in part, because the protests were loosely organized and because solid documentary evidence was lacking.

After the Miami “Brooks Brothers Riot” – named after the protesters’ preppie clothing – no government action was taken beyond the police rescuing several Democrats who were surrounded and roughed up by the rioters. While no legal charges were filed against the Republicans, newly released documents show that at least a half dozen of the publicly identified rioters were paid by Bush’s recount committee.

The payments to the Republican activists are documented in hundreds of pages of Bush committee records – released grudgingly to the Internal Revenue Service last month, 19 months after the 36-day recount battle ended. Overall, the records provide a road map of how the Bush recount team brought its operatives across state lines to stop then-Vice President Al Gore’s recount efforts.

The records show that the Bush committee spent a total of $13.8 million to frustrate the recount of Florida’s votes and secure the state's crucial electoral votes for Bush. By contrast, the Gore recount operation spent $3.2 million, about one quarter of the Bush total. Bush spent more just on lawyers – $4.4 million – than Gore did on his entire effort.

Attacks spark chaos in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 5 — In what appeared to be a day of coordinated attacks on Afghanistan’s fragile government, President Hamid Karzai survived an assassination attempt Thursday by an Afghan security guard. A car bomb that exploded in the heart of the Afghan capital reportedly killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens.

THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT on Karzai occurred when the guard fired at his car as it was leaving the governor’s mansion in Kandahar, witnesses said. Karzai was in the southern Afghan city attending the wedding celebration of his brother.
Karzai’s American bodyguards opened fire in response to the shooting, and three people were killed, including one who was wearing an Afghan military uniform.
The governor of Kandahar, Gul Agha Sherzai, was injured, but it was unclear if he was hit by gunfire from the assailant or by shots fired afterward.
“I was just outside the gate when I heard the gunshots,” said Sherzai’s security chief, Dur Mohammed. “The Americans opened fire on three people and they were killed.”
After the attack, Karzai returned to the governor’s guesthouse, where he is staying. “As he arrived here he assured people that he was fine,” said BBC reporter Lyse Doucet, who witnessed the attack.
Sherzai was being treated at the hospital at the U.S. air base in Kandahar, said Capt. Christa D’Andrea, a U.S. spokesman at Bagram air base, the U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, Karzai replaced his Afghan guards with an American special forces contingent after reports of an assassination plot planned by his own security detail.
Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah said there was “no doubt” Karzai was the target of an assassination attempt.
The incident occurred shortly after the car bombing in the Afghan capital, Kabul, 300 miles to the northeast. Although it was not immediately clear whether the incidents were related, the violence came less than a week before the Sept. 11 anniversary, raising questions about whether Osama bin Laden’s terror network or a disaffected Afghan group was responsible.

Killing Deliberately 'By Mistake'

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (IAP): As more than a million Palestinian boys and girls returned to school after the summer recess, the Israeli army restarted the murderous killing of Palestinian civilians, including school children.

The latest spate of wanton killings began around midnight on 28 September with a massacre of an entire family at the Sheikh Ejlin village just south of Gaza City.

There, an Israeli tank fired several “dart shells” at a peaceable Bedouin encampment where several fruit pickers were asleep.

The deadly artillery flechetes, each packed with some 3,000 inch-long arrows, killed four members of the same family, a mother, her two sons, and their cousin.

Ruwaida al Hajeen, 55, her sons, Ashraf, 22, and Nihad, 17, and 20-year-old Muhammed al Hajeen, died instantly as thousands of the deadly arrows pierced all parts of their bodies. Eight other people were injured, including a 3-year-old child, who sustained a serious wound.

“We were sleeping in our homes when suddenly, we heard a bomb, Israeli tanks were invading the area, firing and shelling in all directions, and then I saw the al-Hajeen’s encampment on fire,” said Ismael Shamallakh, a neighbor whose house was also damaged.

The 120 mm shell is fired from a tank and can be set to explode in the air at a specific distance and releases its load of darts in all directions, often causing instant death.

Int'l Criminal Court Gets Started

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The governing body of the International Criminal Court held its first meeting Tuesday, ignoring a U.S. campaign to undermine its jurisdiction and exempt Americans from prosecution.

There was loud applause when U.N. Undersecretary-General for legal affairs Hans Corell pounded the gavel to launch the Assembly of States Parties, made up of the 76 nations that ratified the treaty creating the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. It plans to be fully operational by next year.

At the opening meeting, the assembly elected Prince Zeid bin Raad, Jordan's envoy to the United Nations ( news - web sites) and a cousin of King Abdullah II, as its president. Sierra Leone's deputy U.N. Ambassador Allieu Kanu and Uruguay's U.N. Ambassador Felipe Paolillo were elected as vice presidents.

Representatives of dozens of nations that support the court, but haven't ratified the treaty, were in the U.N. conference room as observers. Many of the more than two dozen countries that haven't signed or ratified were also there to watch. But the seat for the United States was conspicuously empty.

"We see the dawn of a new age in the pursuit of justice," Corell said. "Impunity for those who commit the most heinous crimes will be curtailed."

The court is the culmination of a campaign that began with the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials for World War II's German and Japanese war criminals. It has jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity that take place after July 1.

The Troubling New Face of America

Fundamental changes are taking place in the historical policies of the United States with regard to human rights, our role in the community of nations and the Middle East peace process -- largely without definitive debates (except, at times, within the administration). Some new approaches have understandably evolved from quick and well-advised reactions by President Bush to the tragedy of Sept. 11, but others seem to be developing from a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.

Formerly admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights, our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life. We have ignored or condoned abuses in nations that support our anti-terrorism effort, while detaining American citizens as "enemy combatants," incarcerating them secretly and indefinitely without their being charged with any crime or having the right to legal counsel. This policy has been condemned by the federal courts, but the Justice Department seems adamant, and the issue is still in doubt. Several hundred captured Taliban soldiers remain imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay under the same circumstances, with the defense secretary declaring that they would not be released even if they were someday tried and found to be innocent. These actions are similar to those of abusive regimes that historically have been condemned by American presidents.

Hypocrisy now!

09.03.02 - AUSTIN, Texas -- Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?

When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein, the evildoer "prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists."

So if Saddam is "the world's worst leader," how come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he to could afford to build weapons of mass destruction?

In 1998, the United Nations passed a resolution allowing Iraq to buy spare parts for its oilfields, but other sanctions remained in place, and the United States has consistently pressured the U.N. to stop exports of medicine and other needed supplies on the grounds they could have "dual use." As the former Secretary of Defense under Bush the Elder, Cheney was in particularly vulnerable position on the hypocrisy of doing business with Iraq. (Although in 1991, after the Gulf War, Cheney told a group of oil industry executives he was emphatically against trying to topple Hussein.)

Using two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser, Halliburton helped rebuild Saddam's war-damaged oil fields. The combined value of these contracts for parts and equipment was greater than that of any other American company doing business with Iraq -- companies including Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount, General Electric. They acted through foreign subsidiaries or associated companies in France, Belgium, Germany, India, Switzerland, Bahrain, Egypt and the Netherlands.

US Navy ships heavy armour to Gulf-shipping sources

LONDON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy has booked a large ship to carry tanks and heavy armour to the Middle East Gulf this month as the Pentagon presses home a case for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, shipping sources said on Wednesday.

The U.S. Military Sealift Command chartered a U.S. flagged general cargo ship to sail from the southeast U.S. coast to an unspecified port in the Middle East Gulf for discharge in late September, they said.

This is the third shipment of arms and military hardware in a month using commercial shipping, which military analysts say shows the U.S. Navy has probably exhausted the capacity of its own fleet and resorted to the open market.

The formal tender document, seen by Reuters, shows the ship will carry 67 seperate pieces of "track general cargo, containerised cargo and rolling stock" measuring 56,000 square feet (5,202 sq metres), slightly larger than a soccer pitch.

Military experts say the dimensions and weight of the pieces specified in the document almost exactly match those of the standard U.S. Abrams battle tank.

"This ship can easily carry tanks," a shipping industry source familiar with the U.S. military tendering process.

Military analysts say that the movement of heavy armour from the U.S. southeast coast to the Gulf mirrors similar movements ahead of the 1991 Gulf War and is key signal that the superpower is building up fire power in the region ahead of a military strike.

When Silence Isn't Golden

Nelson Mandela, whose struggle against white supremacy in South Africa inspired people all over the world, says he was rebuffed in an attempt to call George W. Bush, whose life of entitlement stands in marked contrast to Mandela’s personal sacrifice.

Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who spent more than two decades in prison, said Bush was not available when the former South African president called to discuss the Bush administration’s threats to mount a unilateral invasion of Iraq. Unable to reach Bush, who has spent the last month on vacation and raising money for Republican candidates, Mandela said he spoke with Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, about his son’s behavior. Mandela says the younger Bush “is introducing chaos in international affairs.” [AP, Sept. 3, 2002]

Blowing off Mandela is just the latest example of George W. Bush’s unwillingness – or inability – to engage the rest of the world in a discussion about his administration’s international agenda. Rather than hearing out the near unanimity of opposition to his go-it-alone foreign policy or articulating a defense of his doctrine of unilateral invasions, Bush has chosen to avoid spirited debate and to duck unscripted questions.

In his recent stage-managed public appearances, Bush has repeated shopworn applause lines about hunting down terrorists and punishing corrupt corporate executives. He avoids news conferences with reporters and shuns traditional state dinners that involve diplomatic chitchat with world leaders. Instead of the strain of these conversations with foreigners, Bush opts for informal meals and small talk with old friends before turning in at an early hour.

BROWN TO WARN OF SKY-HIGH FIGHT BILL

GORDON Brown is to warn of the devastating cost of a war on Iraq at a special Cabinet meeting this month.

The Chancellor, said by friends to be deeply sceptical about military action to topple Saddam, will sound the alarm about the impact on the British and world economies.

It will be the first time for nearly two months that the Cabinet has sat down to debate Iraq.

Mr Brown is concerned Britain's contribution will dwarf the £2.5billion cost of the Gulf War and will drain the emergency Civil Contingency Fund.

In the 1991 Gulf War a huge chunk of the cost was repaid by Saudi Arabia and the grateful government of Kuwait after Saddam was kicked out of their country.

But Treasury analysts know there will be no pay- back this time and the £2.1billion contingency fund could be severely depleted.

Tony Blair is expected to call the Cabinet meeting before Labour's annual party conference later this month.

A new report due out today will predict £600,000million would be wiped off the world's wealth if Iraq is attacked and countries such as Saudi Arabia, which has the biggest oil reserves in the world, are destablised.

Respected London-based financial analysts Tenon said the price of oil could soar to as high as £40 a barrel, double its current level.

It would choke the recovery of the US economy after September 11 and trigger a domino effect around the globe. A Government source said: "It could be the most expensive war we've ever known."

Heading for Trouble

Country music's most popular song this summer is a defiantly nationalistic tune by Toby Keith, in which he warns potential adversaries that if they mess with us, "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." Last week the Chinese government showed us its way. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had brought a conciliatory gesture from the Bush administration, agreeing to recognize a separatist group in China's Xinjiang province as a terrorist entity. This diplomatic contortion was so appeasing that the Economist magazine labeled its logic "astonishing." And yet the day after Armitage left, the Chinese government sent its own political signal by "test-firing" a DF-4 missile, which has a range of more than 4,000 miles and was designed to attack U.S. military bases on Guam.

The implied disrespect of this incident did not occur in a vacuum, either militarily or diplomatically. As our country remains obsessed with Saddam Hussein, other nations have begun positioning themselves for an American war with Iraq and, most important, for its aftermath. China, which has pursued a strategic axis with key Islamic nations for nearly 20 years, received the Iraqi foreign minister just after Armitage's departure, condemning in advance an American attack on that country. Russia has been assiduously courting -- both diplomatically and economically -- all three nations identified by President Bush as the "axis of evil." Iran -- the number one state sponsor of international terrorism, according to our own State Department -- has conducted at least four flight tests of the nuclear-capable Shahab-3 missile, whose range of 800 miles is enough to hit U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, Turkey and Central Asia.

Bush resorts to rogue tactics

AMERICA LONG ago lost the war of world public opinion on Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of babies dying and millions of civilians suffering under economic sanctions saw to that, notwithstanding the argument that it's all Saddam Hussein's fault.

So botched has the American policy on Iraq been that, as hard as it is to admit, this two-bit dictator has outwitted not one but two presidents of the United States, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

With the rising buzz about a war against Iraq, American credibility is taking a beating, as Washington keeps shifting the reasons for "regime change" in Baghdad:
Saddam's supposed buildup of biological, chemical and, especially, nuclear weapons.
His unproven links to terrorists.
His proven dodging of United Nations weapons inspectors.
The failure of the inspectors to reach conclusions more acceptable to Washington.
The danger Saddam poses his own people (even if America has never cared for them), and to nations, including — the two latest additions — the United States, a la the Sept. 11 terrorists, and Iran (which he did attack once but with full American complicity, and which the U.S. itself now brands as evil). Any combination of all the above.

The American case for war has been so imprecise and propagandistic that it has convinced no allies in the Middle East, bar Israel, or Europe. Britain's Tony Blair faces a caucus revolt should he ignore majority public opinion and join the war. Canada, too, has begged off.

There is growing opposition within Republican ranks, and audible grumbling in the Pentagon.

Yet the Bush administration is plowing ahead, leaving itself no exit strategy out of its rhetorical bombast. It is hard to see how it can now not go to war.

History will look back and say, jeeminy yow!

SO THIS IS interesting, living in a nation governed by an oligarchy of men whose supreme self-confidence seems to be based entirely on self-delusion and, perhaps, morally questionable behavior in their previous jobs.

They will do "the right thing," and they have an absolute monopoly on being able to discern and define "the right thing." Unlike the rest of us poor mortals, they know no doubt. Compared with the star chamber that runs our country now, the Inquisition was positively wishy-washy.

One thing they will not be is "swayed." God forbid they should be "swayed." They have swayed themselves so many times in the past 12 months it makes an observer dizzy, but we're not supposed to notice that.

Was it only 11 months ago that we were going to free Afghanistan from the grip of the Taliban and restore that nation to peace and prosperity? Taliban out of power, check; peace and prosperity, not really. Uneasy truce and grinding poverty would be closer to the mark. Here's a fact: Not a kilometer of new road has been built by anyone in Afghanistan since Sept. 12, 2001.

Stocks Continue Tailspin Amid Uncertainty Over Economy

Stocks plunged today as new data showed that the manufacturing sector is still very weak, heightening, once again, investor concerns about the outlook for an already sluggish economic recovery.

In the early afternoon, the three major indexes were down more than 3 percent, led lower by sharp drops in Citigroup, down 8.4 percent; General Motors, off 4.5 percent; Exxon Mobil, down 5.2 percent; General Electric, off 4.3 percent; Microsoft, down 3.2 percent, and Intel, off 4 percent.

The fall of the market on the first trading day in September, comes after the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite index finished August in the red, with both declining for the fifth consecutive month.

But as stocks fell, the bond market rallied and interest rates fell sharply, which could be good news. Lower interest rates make borrowing cheaper and could allow many homeowners to refinance their mortgages, giving them extra cash to spend. In early afternoon trading, the yield on the Treasury's 10-year note ( news - web sites) was at 3.9 percent. Except for a brief intraday trading dip below 4 percent in mid-August, the yield has not been this low since the early 1960's.

Ex-EPA Head Criticizes Bush Air Plan

WASHINGTON (AP) - New proposals to ease air pollution requirements on power plants will produce dirtier air and harm the public's health, the woman who headed the Environmental Protection Agency ( news - web sites) during the Clinton administration said Tuesday.



Former EPA Administrator Carol Browner accused the Bush administration of misleading lawmakers by suggesting that the agency during her tenure sought a similar easing of requirements on power plants in 1996 and again in 1998.

While the EPA looked at possible changes in the clean air rules, known as "new source review," Browner said at a Senate hearing, "we didn't support the changes. ... We didn't adopt them."

In a letter last week to Sen. John Edwards ( news, bio, voting record), D-N.C., who held Tuesday's hearing, Christie Whitman, the current EPA administrator, suggested many of the proposed changes now being pursued were proposed first by Browner in 1996. The head of the EPA's air pollution control office reiterated the claim at Tuesday's hearing.

"Taking (public) comments on ideas should not be taken as support," Browner insisted. She said such changes were later dropped because she determined they would harm air quality.

Jeffrey Holmstead, chief of the EPA's air office, said he was caught off guard by Browner's testimony. "I quite frankly was surprised and I'm not sure what to make of it," he said.

Rumsfeld: Don't Forget Who's Boss

WASHINGTON - One might have expected Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to be too busy for such matters. After all, there's a global war on terrorism under way.
Even so, he wanted himself understood by Tommy Franks:

There is, Rumsfeld stressed, only one commander in chief.

That already might have been obvious to many. No lesser authority than the U.S. Constitution establishes that the president is the ultimate boss.

But aides say that wasn't enough for Rumsfeld, troubled with Franks' title: ``Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command.''

Henceforth, Rumsfeld let it be known, Franks and other generals in the chain of command just below him and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff would have new titles.

The dozen-plus generals at the top of the unified armed forces - all called commanders in chief, or CINCS (as in ``sinks'') - would become known as ``combatant commanders.''

Problem is, not everybody has saluted on this one. Despite Rumsfeld's use of the term, it hasn't caught on with the media, public, troops - or the top brass.

Irritated, according to aides, Rumsfeld sent in a second wave, in the form of a terse yet urgent memo this summer.

FEC Fights Questioning From GOP

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Federal Election Commission ( news - web sites) is fighting a GOP attempt to question it for a case challenging the new campaign finance law.



The commission has asked a federal court in Washington to free it from having to answer the Republican National Committee ( news - web sites)'s questions, which range from the identities of anyone with evidence that political parties are skirting campaign contribution limits to proof that spending by state and local party committees is corrupting federal candidates.

The commission contends the RNC's queries are overly broad, try to force the FEC to reveal its strategy to defend the law, and can be addressed in part by reviewing public documents the commission has released. The FEC filed a motion late last week asking the court to step in.

Meanwhile, the FEC has joined the Justice Department ( news - web sites) and lawmakers in asking the court to force the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee to hand over fund-raising documents. Neither congressional committee is suing to try to overturn the law.

The law, taking effect Nov. 6, will bar the national party committees from raising the unlimited contributions known as "soft money" from unions, corporations and others, and will restrict political advertising as elections approach.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Pauley III in New York ordered the co-author of a study on political ads to answer questions from lawyers for Sen. Mitch McConnell ( news, bio, voting record), R-Ky., one of those suing to try to strike down the law on First Amendment grounds.

Large Explosion Rocks Kabul Market

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - A powerful car bomb rocked a busy market area in the center of the Afghan capital Thursday, and a police spokesman said 30 people had been killed or wounded.

Emergency vehicles and armored personnel carriers from the international peacekeeping force rushed to the scene in a crowded market area near the Ministry of Information.

Witnesses said a smaller explosion had drawn crowds to the area when the car bomb exploded in front of a building containing shops selling televisions and satellite dishes — all forbidden during hardline Taliban rule. The second floor of the building housed a small hotel.

"This bomb was inside a taxi," said police spokesman Dul Aqa. "It was a very, very strong explosion. We can't say exactly who was behind it but we know the last bombs were al-Qaida and (former Prime Minister) Gulbuddin (Hekmatyar)."

U.S. faces bigger issues than hitting Iraq-Japan Times

In America, a military attack against Iraq to remove President Saddam Hussein from power seems to be a foregone conclusion. U.S. newspaper reports have been rife with various battle plans proposed by the generals.

However, U.S. President George W. Bush's single-minded pursuit of victory against the "terrorists" who perpetrated the infamous Sept. 11 attacks has its dangers. It would be particularly risky if top priority is given to attacking Iraq while more urgent problems, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the recovery of U.S. economic vigor and the precarious state of Latin American economies, are put aside. Bush would be better advised to spend the rest of this year attending to these more urgent issues.

The world is more interdependent than Americans are prepared to accept. Any immediate attack would undermine innumerable delicate balances that exist among divergent forces and interests in the world. It is good, therefore, that the decision to go ahead seems to have temporarily been postponed until some time next year. Taking advantage of this respite, it would be worthwhile to tell our American friends how the average Japanese views a prospective U.S. military strike against Hussein.

First, most Japanese are not convinced that Iraq is providing direct support to the al-Qaeda terrorist group. So far, the Japanese government seems to be giving Bush the benefit of the doubt. But when the attack comes and begins to directly affect Japan -- for example, in the form of a U.S. request for Japanese financial or military support -- crucial differences in opinion between Japan and America will come to the fore. In Japan, war on Iraq will not be considered in the same light as the Persian Gulf War. The Japanese government will find itself unable to persuade the nation to support unilateral American action against Iraq.

Second, even if Hussein is removed one way or another, the postwar rebuilding of a peaceful Iraq will not be easy. Many Japanese are reminded of what the Americans did to Japan during the Occupation after Japan's defeat in 1945. A considerable number of Japanese, both young and old, still resent the systematic demolition of old Japanese values and the planting of American systems under the Occupation.

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Clearing up the election that won't die

Soon, Florida voters will have their first opportunity since the disputed 2000 presidential election to express their judgment about the performance of public officials who were responsible for administering the state's election laws before and during the election fiasco.

When the election controversy was unfolding, many rumors and accusations circulated about official wrongdoing, but time and information were insufficient, then, to assess their validity. Now, however, much more is known about what happened. Listed below are typical questions about the election, along with my best judgment on the answers.

Question: Who actually received the most votes in Florida's 2000 presidential election?
Answer: Al Gore. State election officials ultimately declared George W. Bush the winner by a margin of 537 votes, but during and after the election dispute, questions remained about the uncounted ballots of 175,010 voters, ballots that had been rejected by error-prone tabulating machines employed in many Florida counties. Confusion and conflict, much of it generated by partisan intrigue, prevented these ballots from being counted during the election controversy. However, in 2001 every uncounted ballot was carefully examined in a scientific study by the University of Chicago, which concluded that when all the votes were counted, more votes had been cast for Gore than for Bush.

Q: Why did some earlier post-election studies say just the opposite, that is, that Bush had actually won after all?

A: They did not really say this. They reported, instead, that Bush might have kept his lead if the manual recounts of machine-rejected ballots had been completed along the lines either requested by Gore or initially mandated by the Florida Supreme Court. In these recount scenarios, not all of the machine-rejected ballots would have been included. However, just before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the judge overseeing the final statewide recount was preparing to announce that the recount would cover all of the previously uncounted ballots.

Bush runs out of credit

America floats on an ocean of credit. After a couple of months' good behaviour, you get overwhelmed by junk mail and calls from organisations desperate to lend you money. It is common for families to run themselves up to the maximum on a stack of different cards. It is easy to assume it will last for ever. Then comes the reckoning.
Now the government has been seduced in just the same way. A year ago, sympathy for the United States was close to unanimous across the planet. The murderous attacks raised the country's moral credit rating sky-high. But it was not limitless. And the Bush administration dissipated it all on a spending spree of ideological indulgences and hubris.

Leave aside the question of whether its Iraq policy - whatever it actually is this morning - might possibly be right. What is indisputable is that the US government has wrecked, possibly beyond repair, its hopes of persuading any other country to that effect by simple, arrogant incompetence. It is terrifying to watch. It could be the next bestseller: How to Lose Friends and Influence No One, by George W Bush.

Crony Capitalism

It's one thing to imagine how Wall Street works. It's another to see the actual numbers. Even scandal-weary investors couldn't help but be stunned last week upon learning that Salomon Smith Barney allowed Bernard Ebbers, WorldCom's former chief executive, to help himself to nearly one million hot initial public offering shares during the recent bubble, for a personal gain of more than $11 million.

This does not look good for Citigroup, which acquired Salomon Smith Barney in 1998 and provided the I.P.O. allocation numbers to the House Financial Services Committee. The panel is investigating what role conflicts of interest on Wall Street may have played in recent corporate scandals.

During the late-90's dot-com mania, I.P.O. shares often saw their value more than double on the first day of trading. The House panel now wants to determine whether Salomon made the shares available to executives of big corporate clients at the original offering price, even after the first-day jump in value, providing them with a guaranteed windfall.

Favored access to these offerings was just one more way in which some executives enriched themselves while running their companies into the ground. Scott Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, who was indicted last week for allegedly orchestrating the largest accounting fraud in history, also appeared on Salomon's I.P.O. distribution lists.

The underwriters for these offerings have traditionally doled out a limited pool of shares to top brokerage clients. Salomon maintains that Mr. Ebbers was a deserving client solely on the basis of his personal brokerage account. The firm insists that its generous distribution of shares had nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Ebbers was chief executive of a company that brought in tens of millions of dollars in investment-banking fees to Salomon. Establishing that the I.P.O. shares were allocated in exchange for investment-banking business could elevate these dealings from the unseemly to the illegal.

t's one thing to imagine how Wall Street works. It's another to see the actual numbers. Even scandal-weary investors couldn't help but be stunned last week upon learning that Salomon Smith Barney allowed Bernard Ebbers, WorldCom's former chief executive, to help himself to nearly one million hot initial public offering shares during the recent bubble, for a personal gain of more than $11 million.

This does not look good for Citigroup, which acquired Salomon Smith Barney in 1998 and provided the I.P.O. allocation numbers to the House Financial Services Committee. The panel is investigating what role conflicts of interest on Wall Street may have played in recent corporate scandals.

During the late-90's dot-com mania, I.P.O. shares often saw their value more than double on the first day of trading. The House panel now wants to determine whether Salomon made the shares available to executives of big corporate clients at the original offering price, even after the first-day jump in value, providing them with a guaranteed windfall.

Favored access to these offerings was just one more way in which some executives enriched themselves while running their companies into the ground. Scott Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, who was indicted last week for allegedly orchestrating the largest accounting fraud in history, also appeared on Salomon's I.P.O. distribution lists.

The underwriters for these offerings have traditionally doled out a limited pool of shares to top brokerage clients. Salomon maintains that Mr. Ebbers was a deserving client solely on the basis of his personal brokerage account. The firm insists that its generous distribution of shares had nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Ebbers was chief executive of a company that brought in tens of millions of dollars in investment-banking fees to Salomon. Establishing that the I.P.O. shares were allocated in exchange for investment-banking business could elevate these dealings from the unseemly to the illegal.

Argentina's 'dirty war' hounding Kissinger

WASHINGTON - For all his renown as one of the world's leading voices on international affairs, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's twilight years are not passing so easily. At age 79, his legacy is the subject of scrutiny, protests, international legal disputes and even a federal lawsuit.

Now, there are even more questions, thanks to the release by the State Department earlier this month of 4,667 official U.S. documents relating to the ''dirty war'' in Argentina from 1976 until 1983 in which military death squads killed thousands of suspected leftists.

The new batch of declassified cables has revived debate that surged last year with publication of The Trial of Henry Kissinger, a polemical book by British writer Christopher Hitchens, who suggested that the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize laureate should be tried for war crimes.

The newly released documents reveal that Argentine military officers believed they had the green light from Washington -- and perhaps Kissinger -- to carry out the brutal campaign.

The hounding of Henry Kissinger is the result not only of declassified U.S. documents but also global trends empowering judges to reach across frontiers, a desire by aggrieved relatives to seek justice, and perhaps a dose of publicity-seeking by his many ideological opponents. And it has forced Kissinger to watch his step abroad out of concern that a judge might order his arrest:

• In mid-March, Kissinger canceled a trip to Brazil amid reports a judge might detain him.

• In April, protesters taunted him outside London's Royal Albert Hall.

• A month later, police arrived at his Paris hotel to serve him with questions from a French judge. Chile's Supreme Court, meanwhile, also wants answers from Kissinger about a 1973 coup.

''His movements are somewhat restricted because of the legal actions being taken against him,'' said Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Chickenhawks Crow for War

WASHINGTON -- We are being dragged toward war with Iraq by such chickenhawks. The loudest voices demanding war are those of men who once upon a time quietly skipped out on the fun in Vietnam.

Men like Dick Cheney, who famously explained, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

Cheney received draft deferments as a college student until he got married in 1964; marriage removed him from the draft. But the next year, the government announced married men would be drafted, unless they were also fathers. Nine months and two days after that announcement, the Cheneys had their first child.

A list of chickenhawks -- including many who are eager for war with Iraq, yet who had "other priorities" when Vietnam came a-calling -- has been compiled by Steven Fowle, a Vietnam veteran who edits The New Hampshire Gazette. (It's at www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html).

It starts with the president himself. George W. Bush waited out the war from a post with light duties in the Texas Air National Guard. And, apparently, even that cushy deal was too onerous: There's an unexplained one-year gap, from May 1972 to May 1973, in Bush's service record. That year he was supposed to have reported for duty at the Alabama Air National Guard, but apparently never showed. Bush's reply is that he was honorably discharged and is proud of his service -- but also that he can't recall the specifics.

Specifics are also in short supply for Defense Department Iraq hawks like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle; for White House adviser Karl Rove; for professional blabbers George Will, William Kristol, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan; for Republican congressional leaders Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay; and for many others -- right down to Rambo himself, Sylvester Stallone.

Commanders Want Elite Units Freed From Qaeda Hunt

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 — Commanders in the American military's most elite Special Operations unit are contending that their troops should be freed from the fruitless hunt in Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden, military and intelligence officials say.

Some senior officers in the Joint Special Operations Command have concluded that Mr. bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, was probably killed in the American bombing raid at Tora Bora last December, officials said. They concluded that he died in a bombing raid on one of several caves that had been a target because American intelligence officials believed they housed Qaeda leaders.

Yet the Special Operations leaders lack hard forensic evidence that would prove Mr. bin Laden is dead, and acknowledge their conclusions are deductive, drawn partly from the lack of recent confirmed sightings or radio intercepts indicating he is still alive, officials say.

Other military and intelligence officials have sharply disagreed with their assessment, and the analysis by some commanders of the Joint Special Operations Command does not represent a consensus of all Special Operations forces leaders, military officials said.

The analysis concerning Mr. bin Laden's fate plays into a deepening debate under way among Special Operations leaders about how best to use the military's super-secret counterterrorism forces.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is pushing for an expanded use of Special Operations forces units beyond Afghanistan to kill or capture terrorists. As a result, Special Operations leaders are trying to determine whether the hunt for the elusive Qaeda leader is still the best use of the limited resources of the most elite units.

Dallas ousts private schools firm, says it performs no better than school districts

DALLAS - Dallas trustees have decided to end their contract with Edison schools early, saying the private company is not educating children better than the school district and doesn't justify the additional cost.


The New York-based company is in the third year of a five-year contract with the district and operates seven Dallas elementary schools. District officials said they expect Edison to run the schools until the end of this school year.

Trustee Ron Price said he had supported giving Edison a try but now thinks the experiment should end.

"They got four Cs and three Ds on their report card. That is not a good report card," he said.

America's Failed Frontier

It's time for us to acknowledge one of America's greatest mistakes, a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains.

The plains, which have overtaken places like Appalachia to become by far the poorest part of the country, represent a monumental failure in American history. To understand more I came here to Loup County, officially the poorest county in the United States, with a per capita income of $6,600 (New York County, or Manhattan, is the nation's richest, at $90,900).

In fairness, Loup doesn't look poor, and it's so rich in warmth, community spirit and old-fashioned friendliness that it's just about impossible for a stranger to pay for a meal here. The tiny school, the only one in the county, has student lockers with no locks; and outside, students' cars are not only unlocked, but the keys are left in the ignition.

Yet Stewart Switzer, a 17-year-old senior, says that if he could go back in a time capsule and talk to his great-great-grandpa when he was settling here a century ago, his message would be: Don't stop here. Keep on going.

It might have been sage advice. Loup County's population peaked at 2,188 in 1910, but now it's down to 600. It lost its only grocery store in August, and with people fleeing, an average house in Taylor, the county seat (population 180), goes for just $6,000.

As my colleague Timothy Egan noted in a brilliant article about the Great Plains in The Times last year, more than 60 percent of the counties in the region lost population in the last decade. In North Dakota, 47 of 53 counties lost population, and at this rate it'll eventually have to merge again with South Dakota to create a single state of Dakota.

This vast region in the middle of America, more than five times the size of California, now meets the 19th-century definition of frontier, with six or fewer people per square mile. Instead of the frontier closing, as Frederick Jackson Turner declared a century ago, it is expanding, and we may look back on large-scale settlement of the Plains as a fluke, a temporary domination now receding again.

Our Crushing Personal Debt

As usual, the Labor Day weekend has found politicians of both parties bragging about their devotion to working families. The emphasis is not misplaced, but the substance of their speeches is often suspect.

Here, for example, is a startling statement you are not likely to hear from anyone seeking office: "For the typical household, rising debt, not a rising stock market, was the big story of the 1990s. Household debt grew much more rapidly than household income in the last decade."

I did not know that, and my hunch is that you may not have been aware of it either. It is one of the thousands of facts embedded in a volume called "The State of Working America," a biennial report by three economists at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

The institute is a labor-funded think tank, and that sponsorship is reflected in some of the analysis. But Lawrence Mishel, its president, and co-authors Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey buttress their arguments with data from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Board and other establishment sources. And their emphasis on middle-class families is a welcome respite from all the stories about the ruin of corporate executives and the damage to people's 401(k) plans.

So much has been written about this becoming "a nation of stockholders" that the Dow Jones average has turned into the most popular index of Americans' well-being. It is important, but, as this study reminds us, jobs and wages and income are a lot more vital to most people than the state of their stock portfolios.

That is why the economic slump of 2001 and the slow-growth economy of 2002 are the central facts of life on this Labor Day. The main point of this analysis is that the hard-won, and often minimal, gains from the full-employment years of the 1990s are being jeopardized -- and in some instances reversed -- by the current stagnation.

When US turned a blind eye to poison gas

When it comes to demonising Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular imagination in America better than the statement that 'he gassed his own people'. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by Iraq's military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.
As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out.

Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula.

That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago. 'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'

Secrecy Is Our Enemy

You want an American hero? A real hero?

I nominate Judge Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Judge Keith wrote an opinion, handed down last Monday by a three-judge panel in Cincinnati, that clarified and reaffirmed some crucially important democratic principles that have been in danger of being discarded since the terrorist attacks last Sept. 11.

The opinion was a reflection of true patriotism, a 21st-century echo of a pair of comments made by John Adams nearly two centuries ago. "Liberty," said Adams, "cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people."

And in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1816, Adams said, "Power must never be trusted without a check."

Last Monday's opinion declared that it was unlawful for the Bush administration to conduct deportation hearings in secret whenever the government asserted that the people involved might be linked to terrorism.

The Justice Department has conducted hundreds of such hearings, out of sight of the press and the public. In some instances the fact that the hearings were being held was kept secret.

The administration argued that opening up the hearings would compromise its fight against terrorism. Judge Keith, and the two concurring judges in the unanimous ruling, took the position that excessive secrecy compromised the very principles of free and open government that the fight against terror is meant to protect.

The opinion was forceful and frequently eloquent.

"Democracies die behind closed doors," wrote Judge Keith.