Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Put Rove's Speech in Context of McCarthyism
Rove's instantly famous speech last week to the New York state Conservative Party should be read in light of this history and not be written off as a cheap, one-time partisan attack. On the contrary, the address by Rove, President Bush's most important adviser, provides the outlines of a sophisticated strategy aimed at making liberals and Democrats all look soft on terrorism.
Here are the key passages: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to submit a petition. ... Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: We will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: We must understand our enemies."
Liberals and Democrats were enraged by Rove because virtually every officeholding liberal and Democrat closed ranks behind President Bush on 9/11. They endorsed the use of force against the terrorists and, when the time came, strongly backed the war in Afghanistan.
But Rove knows how to play this game. The only evidence he adduces for his therapy charge is a petition in which the current executive director of MoveOn.org called for "moderation and restraint" in the wake of 9/11. Rove then slides smoothly from the attack on MoveOn to attacks on Michael Moore and Howard Dean. Finally, Rove tosses in an assault on Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., for his statement that an FBI report on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay might remind Americans of the practices of Nazi and Communist dictatorships.
In the ensuing controversy, Rove's defenders cleverly sought to pretend that there was nothing partisan about Rove's speech. "Karl didn't say 'the Democratic Party,' " insisted Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman. "He said 'liberals.' " It must have been purely accidental that one of the "liberals" mentioned was the Democratic national chairman and another was the Senate Democratic whip. It must also have been accidental that both of them, like most other liberals, supported the war in Afghanistan, not therapy. At the time, Durbin called the war "essential."
On Friday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan narrowed the Rove attack even more. McClellan found it "puzzling" that Democrats were "coming to the defense of liberal organizations like MoveOn.org and people like Michael Moore," when, in fact, Democrats were coming to their own defense. McClellan also ignored what Mehlman had conceded the day before -- and what the text of Rove's remarks plainly shows: that Rove was attacking liberals generally, not just these two targets.
That's how guilt-by-association works. Make a charge and then -- once your attack is out there -- pretend that your words have been misinterpreted. Split your opponents. Put them on the defensive. Force them to say things like: "No, we're not soft on terrorism," or, "I'm not that kind of liberal." Once this happens, the attacker has already won.
Respectable opinion treats Rove's speech as just another partisan flap. It's much more. It's the reincarnation of a style of politics that turns political opponents into traitors or dupes who are soft on the nation's enemies. Welcome back to the '50s.
US Faces Prison Ship Allegations
The United Nations says it has learned of serious allegations that the US is secretly detaining terrorism suspects, notably on American military ships.
The special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said the claims were rumours at this stage, but urged the US to co-operate with an investigation.
He said the UN wants lists of the places of detention and those held.
The comments come five days after the UN accused the US of stalling on their requests to visit Guantanamo Bay.
Investigators have been asking to visit the jail in Cuba to carry out checks into allegations of human rights abuse.
The UN said for over a year there had been no response to its requests, and it would begin an inquiry into alleged abuses with or without US co-operation.
Washington had yet to grant their request, Mr Nowak said.
He told the BBC there were a number of allegations from reliable sources that the US was holding terrorist suspects in secret places of detention, including vessels abroad.
He said that according to the reports, the ships were believed to be in the Indian Ocean.
Mr Nowak said the charges of secret detention camps were very serious, amounting to enforced disappearances.
Dangerous Incompetence
On July 2, 2003, with evidence mounting that U.S. troop strength in Iraq was inadequate, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House, "There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, Bring 'em on."
It was an immature display of street-corner machismo that appalled people familiar with the agonizing ordeals of combat. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying: "I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander - let alone the commander in chief - invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
The American death toll in Iraq at that point was about 200, but it was clear that a vicious opposition was developing. Mr. Bush had no coherent strategy for defeating the insurgency then, and now - more than 1,500 additional deaths later - he still doesn't.
The incompetence at the highest levels of government in Washington has undermined the U.S. troops who have fought honorably and bravely in Iraq, which is why the troops are now stuck in a murderous quagmire. If a Democratic administration had conducted a war this incompetently, the Republicans in Congress would be dusting off their impeachment manuals.
The administration seems to have learned nothing in the past two years. Dick Cheney, who told us the troops would be "greeted as liberators," now assures us that the insurgency is in its last throes. And the president, who never listened to warnings that he was going to war with too few troops, still refuses to acknowledge that there are not enough U.S. forces deployed to pacify Iraq.
The Times's Richard A. Oppel Jr. wrote an article recently about a tragically common occurrence in Iraq: U.S. forces fight to free cities and towns from the grip of insurgents, and then leave. With insufficient forces left behind to secure the liberated areas, the insurgents return.
"We have a finite number of troops," said Maj. Chris Kennedy of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. "But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country."
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
President Bush's Speech About Iraq
We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks. We had hoped that he would seize the moment to tell the nation how he will define victory, and to give Americans a specific sense of how he intends to reach that goal - beyond repeating the same wishful scenario that he has been describing since the invasion.
Sadly, Mr. Bush wasted his opportunity last night, giving a speech that only answered questions no one was asking. He told the nation, again and again, that a stable and democratic Iraq would be worth American sacrifices, while the nation was wondering whether American sacrifices could actually produce a stable and democratic Iraq.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Iraq insurgency could last a decade, admits Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld said: "We're not going to win against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going to win against the insurgency. That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
Mr Rumsfeld confirmed that US officials were taking part in talks with insurgent leaders in Iraq. Asked about a report of two such meetings in yesterday's Sunday Times, he told Fox News: "Well, the first thing I would say about the meetings is they go on all the time."
He added that Iraq had a sovereign government which could choose its own relationships with different groups of insurgents. "We facilitate those from time to time," Mr Rumsfeld said.
... Mr Rumsfeld made it clear that the talks had been with Iraqi insurgents rather than foreign fighters led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian extremist.
Credible Reports of Torture at Guantánamo--Bush Administration Declines Human Rights Experts Access
Four U.N. human rights experts said Thursday that they will investigate all aspects of detention at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where some 500 prisoners are being held without charges, despite the U.S. government's failure to respond to repeated requests to allow a visit there.
The investigators said they had received no reply from Washington to the request they made over a year ago to be permitted to visit Guantánamo, where the George W. Bush administration has held foreign terror suspects with alleged ties to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban since early 2002.
These men, who the U.S. government describes as "enemy combatants", are not recognized as prisoners of war, have been informed of no charges, and have no right to a legal defense.
The request to be allowed to visit was based on "information from reliable sources of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights," said the U.N. specialists.
Despite the lack of cooperation from U.S. authorities, the investigators said they would carry out a joint investigation into "all issues around Guantánamo Bay detention facilities," by studying reports and evidence from credible sources, including declassified U.S. documents.
The results of the inquiry will be presented at the next session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, slated for March and April 2006.
U.S. Misuses Material Witness Law
The Bush administration has misused a federal law to detain at least 70 terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, two advocacy groups contend.
Administration officials defend the detentions by pointing out that judges approved material witness warrants.
The material witness law, enacted in 1984, allows the arrest and detention of witnesses who might flee before testifying in criminal cases.
Only 28 of the suspects were eventually charged with a crime, according to the
American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and most of those charges were not related to terrorism.
... The government has apologized to 13 people for their detention under the law. One in that group is Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield. The
FBI arrested Mayfield in connection with the train bombings in Madrid, Spain, in 2004 after wrongly matching his fingerprint to one found on a shopping bag in Spain.
Twenty-three people were held two months or more without being charged, the report said.
"They threw witnesses in a black hole where they didn't have access to the basis for their arrest, weren't provided with lawyers, weren't allowed to talk to family members and were held in complete secrecy with no concrete end to their detention," said Anjana Malhotra, the report's author.
The Justice Department has refused to say how often it has used the law in terrorism investigations.
U.S. Secretly Met With Insurgents
U.S. officials recently met secretly with Iraqi insurgent commanders at a summer villa north of Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the bloodshed, a British newspaper reported Sunday.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, asked about the report, suggested that meetings between Iraqi officials and insurgents ``go on all the time'' and said ``we facilitate those from time to time.''
The insurgent commanders ``apparently came face to face'' with four American officials during meetings on June 3 and June 13 at a summer villa near Balad, about 25 miles north of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, The Sunday Times newspaper in London said.
The report, which quoted unidentified Iraqis whose groups were purportedly involved in the meetings, said the insurgents at the first meeting included the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, which claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Iraq and an attack that killed 22 people in the dining hall of a U.S. base at Mosul last Christmas.
Two others were Mohammed's Army and the Islamic Army in Iraq, which in August reportedly killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, the newspaper said.
One American at the talks introduced himself as a Pentagon representative and declared himself ready to ``find ways of stopping the bloodshed on both sides and to listen to demands and grievances,'' The Sunday Times said.
The official indicated that the results of the talks would be relayed to his superiors in Washington, the newspaper said.
For Months, Agriculture Department Delayed Announcing Result of Mad Cow Test
Although the Agriculture Department confirmed Friday that a cow that died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease. The result was never publicly disclosed.
The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow.
Indeed, the lengthy delay occurred despite the intense national interest in the disease and the fact that many countries have banned shipments of beef from the United States because of what they consider to be lax testing policies.
Until Friday, it was not public knowledge that an "experimental" test had been performed last November by an Agriculture Department laboratory on the brain of a cow suspected of having mad cow disease, and that the test had come up positive.
For seven months, all that was known was that a test on the same cow done at the same laboratory at roughly the same time had come up negative. The negative result was obtained using a test that the Agriculture Department refers to as its "gold standard."
The explanation that the department gave late Friday, when the positive test result came to light, was that there was no bad intention or cover-up, and that the test in question was only experimental.
"The laboratory folks just never mentioned it to anyone higher up," said Ed Loyd, an Agriculture Department spokesman. "They didn't know if it was valid or not, so they didn't report it."
... The nation's mad cow testing system is now infuriating both ranchers and consumers. Consumer lobbyists say the flawed results show once again that 15 years of testing has been dangerously inadequate. And now the beef lobby, which has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Agriculture Department, is complaining that the testing system is dangerously unpredictable.
Jim McAdams, president of the 25,000-member National Cattlemen's Beef Association, has complained that unexpected testing creates "great anxiety within our industry," and leads to "significant losses."
Thirty-six countries have shut their doors to American beef, virtually wiping out a $3 billion export market, which Australia happily moved into.
A Glide Path to Ruin
The biggest risk we Americans face to our way of life and our place in the world probably doesn't come from Al Qaeda or the Iraq war.
Rather, the biggest risk may come from this administration's fiscal recklessness and the way this is putting us in hock to China.
"I think the greatest threat to our future is our fiscal irresponsibility," warns David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States. Mr. Walker, an accountant by training, asserts that last year may have been the most fiscally reckless in the history of our Republic. Aside from the budget deficit, Congress enacted the prescription drug benefit - possibly an $8 trillion obligation - without figuring out how to pay for it.
Mr. Walker, America's watchdog in chief and head of the Government Accountability Office, is no Bush-basher. He started out his career as a conservative Democrat, then became a moderate Republican and has been an independent since 1997.
Now he's running around with his hair on fire, shrieking about America's finances. Well, as much as any accountant ever shrieks.
I asked Mr. Walker about Paul Volcker's warning that within five years we face a 75 percent chance of a serious financial crisis.
"If we don't get serious soon," Mr. Walker replied, "it's not a question of whether it'll come, but when and how serious."
The Armstrong Williams NewsHour
The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense. If you liked the fake government news videos that ended up on local stations - or thrilled to the "journalism" of Armstrong Williams and other columnists who were covertly paid to promote administration policies - you'll love the brave new world this crowd envisions for public TV and radio.
There's only one obstacle standing in the way of the coup. Like Richard Nixon, another president who tried to subvert public broadcasting in his war to silence critical news media, our current president may be letting hubris get the best of him. His minions are giving any investigative reporters left in Washington a fresh incentive to follow the money.
That money is not the $100 million that the House still threatens to hack out of public broadcasting's various budgets. Like the theoretical demise of Big Bird, this funding tug-of-war is a smoke screen that deflects attention from the real story. Look instead at the seemingly paltry $14,170 that, as Stephen Labaton of The New York Times reported on June 16, found its way to a mysterious recipient in Indiana named Fred Mann. Mr. Labaton learned that in 2004 Kenneth Tomlinson, the Karl Rove pal who is chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, clandestinely paid this sum to Mr. Mann to monitor his PBS bête noire, Bill Moyers's "Now."
Now, why would Mr. Tomlinson pay for information that any half-sentient viewer could track with TiVo? Why would he hire someone in Indiana? Why would he keep this contract a secret from his own board? Why, when a reporter exposed his secret, would he try to cover it up by falsely maintaining in a letter to an inquiring member of the Senate, Byron Dorgan, that another CPB executive had "approved and signed" the Mann contract when he had signed it himself? If there's a news story that can be likened to the "third-rate burglary," the canary in the coal mine that invited greater scrutiny of the Nixon administration's darkest ambitions, this strange little sideshow could be it.
After Mr. Labaton's first report, Senator Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, called Mr. Tomlinson demanding to see the "product" Mr. Mann had provided for his $14,170 payday. Mr. Tomlinson sent the senator some 50 pages of "raw data." Sifting through those pages when we spoke by phone last week, Mr. Dorgan said it wasn't merely Mr. Moyers's show that was monitored but also the programs of Tavis Smiley and NPR's Diane Rehm.
Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and "anti-administration" was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies.
"It's pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it's pro or anti the president," Senator Dorgan said. "It's unbelievable."
Not from this gang. Mr. Mann was hardly chosen by chance to assemble what smells like the rough draft of a blacklist. He long worked for a right-wing outfit called the National Journalism Center, whose director, M. Stanton Evans, is writing his own Ann Coulteresque book to ameliorate the reputation of Joe McCarthy. What we don't know is whether the 50 pages handed over to Senator Dorgan is all there is to it, or how many other "monitors" may be out there compiling potential blacklists or Nixonian enemies lists on the taxpayers' dime.
Italian judge orders arrest of 13 Central Intelligence Agency people
The extraordinary decision by an Italian judge to order the arrest of 13 people linked to the Central Intelligence Agency on charges of kidnapping a terrorism suspect here dramatizes a growing rift between American counterterrorism officials and their counterparts in Europe.
European counterterrorism officials have pursued a policy of building criminal cases against terrorism suspects through surveillance, wire-taps, detective work and the criminal justice system. The United States, however, has frequently used other means since Sept. 11, 2001, including renditions - abducting terror suspects from foreign countries and transporting them for questioning to third countries, some of which are known to use torture.
Those two approaches seem to have collided in the case of an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, or Abu Omar, who led a militant mosque in Milan.
By early 2003, the Italian secret police were aggressively pursuing a criminal terrorism case against Mr. Nasr, with the help of American intelligence officials. Italian investigators said they had told the Americans they had strong evidence that he was trying to build a terror recruitment network, possibly aimed for Iraq if the United States went forward with plans to topple Saddam Hussein.
On Feb. 17, 2003, Mr. Nasr disappeared.
When the Italians began investigating, they said, they were startled to find evidence that some of the C.I.A. officers who had been helping them investigate Mr. Nasr were involved in his abduction.
"We do feel quite betrayed that this operation was carried out in our city," a senior Italian investigator said. "We supplied them information about Abu Omar, and then they used that information against us, undermining an entire operation against his terrorist network."
He and other senior Italian officials in Milan's police and prosecutor's office were angry enough to answer detailed questions about the case, but insisted on anonymity because the investigation is continuing.
"This whole investigation has been very difficult because we've been using the same methods we used against organized crime to trace the activities of people we considered to be our friends and colleagues," the senior Italian investigator said. "It has been quite a troubling affair."
The Italian warrants - requested by Milanese prosecutors after two years of investigations - accuse 13 people identified as American C.I.A. officers and operatives of illegally abducting Mr. Nasr from a Milan street and flying him to Egypt for questioning. The whereabouts of the 13 are unknown, but the charges are criminal. If convicted, they face a maximum penalty of 10 years and 8 months in prison.
The C.I.A. has declined to comment, and officials at the American consulate in Milan and the American Embassy in Rome have also declined to talk about the case.
The Italian police and prosecutors said the C.I.A.'s top official at the United States consulate in Milan, a man accused in the arrest warrant of coordinating Mr. Nasr's abduction, had been in close contact with them as they pursued intensive investigations into Al Qaeda and other Islamic militant networks in Europe.
Italian investigators said they were surprised when they discovered that he had placed a cellphone call to one of their own police officers not long after Mr. Nasr disappeared, but made no mention of what had happened, they said. The frustration expressed by the Italians echoes similar sentiments among some counterterrorism officials in other European countries.
In addition to their objections to the American rendition policy, European counterterrorism officials also partly blame a lack of access to terrorism suspects and information held by the United States for their failure to convict a number of their own high-profile terrorism suspects.
"The American system is of little use to us," a senior Italian counterterrorism investigator said. "It's a one-way street. We give them what we have, but we are given no useful information that can help us prosecute people."
Bush's Credibility Takes a Direct Hit From Friendly Fire
Rumsfeld said the insurgency could conceivably "go on for four, eight, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever…. We don't know. It is going to be a problem for the people of Iraq."
Historian Robert Dallek, a biographer of President Lyndon B. Johnson and an outspoken critic of Bush, said: "Analogies are imperfect, and I hate to press this one, but this is so much like Vietnam. It has echoes of the Vietnam experience when senators like [Arkansas Democrat J. William] Fulbright began to hammer Johnson on our aims and goals and credibility….
"It's a cumulative process. It takes time. We're not at the full-blown stage on this yet. But it's heading in that direction."
... Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), another supporter, complained that although the
Pentagon claimed it had trained 170,000 Iraqi security forces, it refused to say how many were ready for military operations — "the key element to success," McCain said.
... "Senators are hearing from back home: If things are going so well, why do we hear every morning that 30 people have been killed in Baghdad?" said a top Republican advisor who refused to be identified.
... Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor to President Carter, said: "This war has been conducted with tactical and strategic incompetence…. The president should provide the American people with a plan describing the key elements of a successful strategy in Iraq."
Saturday, June 25, 2005
The War President
The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.
And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn't. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.
Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they're wrong: it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.
Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.
On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.
We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.
Cheney Says Guantanamo Prisoners Well Fed
The Bush administration has faced allegations of inmate abuse at the jail and of unjustly detaining suspects. Amnesty International recently compared it to Soviet-era gulags, and Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress have questioned whether it should remain open.
President Bush ...last week and publicly challenged reporters to go to Guantanamo and see for themselves that detainees were being treated humanely there.
... "They're very well treated down there. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want," Cheney said in a CNN interview.
... The approximately 520 remaining detainees are "terrorists. They're bomb-makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of al-Qaida and the Taliban," Cheney said. "If you let them out, they'll go back to trying to kill Americans."
Bush Trying to Win Over Americans on Iraq
"Two years later, America finds itself more isolated than ever before, the object of unprecedented international mistrust," [Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration] said. "As a result, we are not as safe as we should be here at home."
He said the war has turned Iraq into a training ground for terrorists and noted that
Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has not been captured. "The violence in Iraq continues at increasing rates and American casualties continue to mount," Brzezinski said.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Iraq Creating New Breed of Jihadists, says CIA
The war in Iraq is creating a new breed of Islamic jihadists who could go on to destabilize other countries, according to a CIA report.
The CIA believes Iraq to be potentially worse than Afghanistan, which produced thousands of jihadists in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the recruits to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida had fought in Afghanistan.
The sobering caution came as a senior British anti-terrorism source warned that those trained in terror techniques in Iraq could use their newly-acquired skills in Britain at the end of the war.
The CIA report, completed last month, remains classified. But a CIA source yesterday confirmed that its broad conclusions, disclosed by the New York Times yesterday, were accurate.
The concern expressed in the CIA report contrasts with the optimism of US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when he welcomed the prospect of Iraq as a magnet for jihadists.
The Foreign Office and British security services are skeptical about the CIA assessment that the insurgency could spill into other countries. Security sources said that there was only a "trickle" of recruits from Britain joining the insurgency in Iraq.
If there was to be a spill-over, Saudi Arabia is potentially vulnerable because many of the Arab fighters in Iraq originate from there. Jamal Khashoggi, media adviser to the Saudi ambassador in London, said yesterday he agreed in part with the US assessment.
"It will be worse than Afghanistan," he said. "We are talking about a very brutal type, a very weird version of Islam in Iraq. It is very scary."
U.S. Doctors Linked to POW 'Torture'Medical records compiled by doctors caring for prisoners at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay are being tapped to design more effective interrogation techniques, says an explosive new report.
Dr Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks, report's authors
Doctors, nurses and medics caring for the approximately 600 prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are required to provide health information to military and CIA interrogators, according to the report in the respected New England Journal of Medicine.
"Since late 2003, psychiatrists and psychologists (at Guantanamo) have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives," it states.
Such tactics are considered torture by many authorities, the authors note.
Medical personnel belonging to the U.S. military's Southern Command have also been told to volunteer to interrogators information they believe may be valuable, the report adds.
The report was published ahead of schedule last night on the journal's website "because of current public interest in this topic," the journal says.
The report's authors — Dr. Gregg Bloche, a physician who is also a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, and Jonathan Marks, a London lawyer who is currently a fellow in bioethics at Georgetown's law center— say that while Guantanamo veterans are ordered not to discuss what goes on there, making it difficult to know how, exactly, military intelligence personnel have used medical information for interrogation, they've been able to assemble part of the picture.
They suggest that interrogators at the camp, set up in 2001 to detain prisoners captured in Afghanistan and later Iraq, have had access to prisoners' medical records since early 2003.
... William Winkenwerder, U.S. assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said in a memo made public in May that Guantanamo prisoners' medical records are considered private — as are American citizens'.
However, "this claim, our inquiry has determined, is sharply at odds with orders given to military medical personnel and with actual practice at Guantanamo," the authors write.
Using medical records to devise interrogation protocols crosses an ethical line, said Peter Singer, director of the University of Toronto's Joint Center for Bioethics.
U.S. Image Abroad Still Sinking
Two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Washington's image in Europe, Canada and much of the Islamic world remains broadly negative, according to the latest in a series of surveys of public opinion in 16 countries sponsored by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (PGAP).
While some of the hostility, particularly in Muslim countries immediately after the 2003 invasion, has abated somewhat, the overall opinion of the U.S. public voiced by the citizens of Washington's traditional allies and in the Islamic world has continued to fall over the past two years, according to the survey and accompanying analysis.
On specific issues relating to Iraq and Bush's ''war on terrorism,'' strong pluralities or majorities in all 16 countries except India and the U.S. said that the world was more dangerous without former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Out of the 14 countries where the question was asked, only in Poland did a plurality of respondents say that Bush's re-election inclined to them think of the U.S. more favorably. Twenty-one percent of Polish respondents said they thought better of the U.S. as a result of Bush's re-election; 18 percent said it made them think of the U.S. More negatively.
In all other countries -- Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Jordan, India -- pluralities or majorities said Bush's re-election made them feel worse about the U.S. by margins that ranged from three to one to as more than five to one (Turkey).
Only in India, was the margin less -- 35 percent of respondents there said it made them feel worse about the U.S.; 28 percent said it made them feel better.
Remarkably, 11 of the 16 countries, including Washington's traditional European allies, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Jordan, and Indonesia, all rated China more favorably than the U.S.
The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.
Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.
British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.
But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.
The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.
In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.
The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old news.
The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.
Another Year of Living Misery in Baghdad
... with the temperature exceeding 100 degrees, as it has every day for weeks, people voiced anger at the prospect of spending their third summer since the U.S.-led invasion with only intermittent electricity. Those with generators will be able to power air conditioners and other appliances; the rest will simply bake.
"So many problems are happening in the city," said Mohammed Sarhan, 50, a grocer in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora. "Where do I start -- water, electricity, security, unemployment or health?"
"This is not a life," Sarhan added. "This is hell."
A gathering of representatives from more than 80 countries and organizations in Brussels on Wednesday was marked by statements of support for Iraq and announcements of programs to assist the country's nearly five-month-old interim government. The conference had been billed in large part as that government's debut on the world stage and an opportunity for its leaders to lay out their plans to rebuild the country.
In Baghdad, however, the government's performance was repeatedly cited in interviews as one of the many disappointing aspects of a year that began with promise. Elections on Jan. 30 drew large numbers of voters to the polls despite the threat of insurgent violence. But formal installation of a government and formation of a committee to write Iraq's next constitution were delayed for months, and efforts to bring more Sunni Muslim Arabs into the process after they boycotted the elections continue to sputter.
"We sacrificed our souls and went out to vote. What did we get? Simply nothing," said Karima Sadoun, 56, as she stopped to buy vegetables at a shop in the eastern Baghdad district of Ghadir.
In another eastern neighborhood, Bashar Hanna, 30, said: "We need action, not speeches. . . . Iraqis now are like a car stuck in the mud. Whenever this car wants to get out of the mud, it sticks more in the crater it created."
While the on-again, off-again power supply is not new to Baghdad, it is no less maddening than in past summers, residents said. Statistics for May and June are not yet available, but the amount of electricity generated in the capital decreased steadily through February, March and April even as nationwide supplies rose, according to State Department figures. Baghdad's daily average of 854 megawatts in April was scarcely more than a third of the city's estimated prewar output of 2,500 megawatts a day.
Sarhan, the grocer, said the power shortages were affecting sales. "Not too many people come and buy from me, because they don't have electricity," he said. "They don't have a place to keep what they buy."
"The lack of electricity has destroyed our lives," said Waleed Najeeb, 48, who owns a supermarket in Dora. "It has affected us psychologically and practically. I don't sleep well, and because of that, the way I treat people has changed."
On top of that, the three-day water shortage "turned everything in Baghdad upside down," Najeeb said. "I would go home tired from work and have to stop at the nearest water pipe and bring some water to my family for drinking and washing."
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel
The war has reached a tipping point - not in Iraq, but in the US. Every announcement of a "turning point" heightens the rising tide of public disillusionment. Every reference to September 11 strains the administration's credibility. Every revelation of how "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" for war, as in the Downing Street memo, shatters even Republicans' previously implacable faith.
On June 21, a Gallup poll reported that Bush's approval rating was collapsing along with support for the war. Only 39% of Americans support it. "The decline in support for the war is found among Republicans and independents, with little change among Democrats." (Since March, Republican support has fallen 11 points to 70%.)
"They're starting to talk numbers again," Pat Lang remarked to me about the return of body counts. Lang is the former chief at the Defence Intelligence Agency for the Middle East, south Asia and counter-terrorism. "They were determined not to do that. But they can't provide a measurement to tell themselves they're doing well. As you know, it means nothing."
Lang, who served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, observes: "For almost all of the war, Vietnam was a better situation than Iraq. During the conduct of the war the security situation was far better than this." The Iraqi elections are "irrelevant to the outcome of the war because the people who voted were the people who stood to gain".
Iran is the long-term winner. "Iran intends to pull the Shia state of Iraq into its orbit. You can be sure that Iranian revolutionary guards are honeycombed throughout Iraq's intelligence to make sure things don't get out of hand." About the "euphoria" after the election, especially echoed by the press corps, Lang simply says: "Laughable, comical, pathetic."
Bush's Iraq syndrome is a reinvention of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam syndrome. In December 1967, Walt Rostow, LBJ's national security adviser, famously declared about the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese: "Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain ... I see light at the end of the tunnel." The official invitation to the New Year's Eve party at the US embassy in Saigon read: "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel." The Tet offensive struck a month later.
"Even when what happened was really more positive than it seemed to be - the Tet offensive in 1968 was a military disaster for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army - no one believed it because there was no light at the end of tunnel," Harry McPherson, who was President Johnson's counsel in the White House, told me. For a modern instance, McPherson cited the statement this week by Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska: "The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."
Bush's light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vision can only accelerate the cycle of disillusionment. His instinctive triumphalism inevitably has a counter-productive effect. His refusal to insist on responsibility for blunders - indeed, rewarding and honouring their perpetrators - enshrines impunity and hubris.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Gitmo Appalling
Cheney advanced the masterful thesis that the camp had to be kept open because it held "bad guys." Rumsfeld claimed it must stay open because taxpayers had invested $100 million US to build it and spend $90 million annually to run it.
The Senate majority leader, Republican Bill Frist, added, "to cut and run because of image problems is the wrong thing to do." Brilliant, Bill. In an earlier time, you might have advised: "Mein Fuhrer, ignore all that stupid criticism of our concentration camps. Stand firm!"
Fortunately, decent Americans find the Guantanamo gulag an outrageous violation of everything the nation stands for. Former president Jimmy Carter, who has become the country's conscience in a time of growing totalitarian impulses, demanded it be closed, as have a growing number of legislators, including the Republican party's most courageous senator, Chuck Hagel.
Americans are being told that all Guantanamo inmates are mad-dog terrorists. Not true. Many were rounded up in Afghanistan by local warlords offered $10,000 or more per head by the U.S. for "terrorist" captives.
Some are Pakistanis who were visiting Afghanistan for religious or family matters. Some had joined Taliban forces to fight the Russian-backed Afghan Communist Party known as the Northern Alliance -- not against the U.S. Others were jihadis preparing to fight Uzbekistan's brutal communist regime or to oppose Indian occupation of Kashmir. Only a handful of real anti-U.S. al-Qaida members are there.
ABC News revealed the U.S. Navy's general counsel, Alberto Mora, warned in 2003 that interrogation methods used against Muslim prisoners might expose senior officials to "liability and criminal prosecution."
Sen. John McCain, himself a former POW, is right to call for speedy trials of Guantanamo's inmates and an end to their indefinite jailing. But the past three years have shown that people charged with terrorism are unlikely to get fair trials in post-9/11 America. A military defence lawyer told Congress this week his superiors warned that if he represented a prisoner at Gitmo, "only a guilty plea would be accepted" -- shades of the U.S.S.R. Guantanamo violates the Geneva Conventions, international and U.S. law. There are reports that in the rest of the secret U.S. gulags in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Diego Garcia, even worse crimes are being committed against those suspected of anti-U.S. activities.
If true, this is a criminal enterprise, and those involved should be prosecuted -- starting at the top.
... Guantanamo, just 150 km from Miami, is not a problem of image. It is an arrant violation of every American value. It's worthy of KGB. Close this disgrace now.
Fiddling as the Planet Burns
Last week, Philip Cooney, a White House staffer, was exposed by the New York Times for revising reports on global warming so that they cast doubt on the link between greenhouse gases and rising temperatures. Mr Cooney, who has no scientific training whatsoever, resigned and took a job with Exxon Mobil, which is, incidentally, the company that produces twice the CO2 emissions of Norway and is currently facing a consumer boycott in Europe.
... Bush remains a delinquent simpleton in such matters. In the second draft of the G8 communiqué, the phrase 'our world is warming' has been placed in square brackets, which means that the statement is disputed by the US and is likely to be excluded from the final document. American officials also pressed negotiators to delete sections which tie global warming to human activity and emphasize the risk to economies.
James Connaughton who heads the US organization which, without a trace of irony, is called the Council on Environmental Quality, sought to reassure journalists with this statement: 'It's very important to view [the deletions] in context, which overall is one of strong consensus about a shared commitment to practical action.' How is the likely deletion of 'we know that the increase [of the earth's temperature] is due in large part to human activity' a commitment to practical action?
US policy seems to be simply one of cynical prevarication; at the very least, Bush and the oil companies are hopelessly behind the times. Jeffrey Immelt, head of General Electric, the largest company in America, gave a far-sighted speech to the George Washington Business School last month and, though he did not attack Bush's policy, he made a very strong case for mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions. Immelt is not the kind of guy to follow some whimsical scientific fad. He is a hard-nosed businessman; his advisers have told him about the problems ahead as well as the opportunities, and he has acted. As a result, GE is doubling its investment in energy and environmental technologies.
The penny has dropped with big business. In New York, a syndicate of two dozen institutional investors managing $3 trillion in assets recently asked American companies to confront urgently the risks of global warming. Even the oil industry outside America has got the message. Lord Oxburgh, non-executive chairman of Shell, said in a speech at the Hay-on-Wye Festival: 'We have 45 years, and if we start now, not in 10 or 15 years' time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. But we've got to start now. We have no time to lose.'
Governments will follow these men because they are in thrall to corporate power. Even the proudly retrograde US government will eventually fall in line, though almost certainly not under Bush. In all this, there is a telling lesson. It is that national governments generally lag behind sensible opinion and are rather slower to act than smaller units of government. If you look locally in the US, enlightened individuals are acting.
Bush Says US is in Iraq Because of 9/11 Attacks on US
President George W. Bush defended the war in Iraq, telling Americans the United States was forced into war because of the September 11 terror strikes.
Bush also resisted calls for him to set a timetable for the return of thousands of US troops deployed in Iraq, saying Iraqis must be able to defend their own country before US soldiers can be pulled out.
"We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.
Bush began a public relations offensive to defend the war as his approval rating has dropped well below 50 percent with Americans expressing skepticism about the invasion.
British Bombing Raids Were Illegal, Says Foreign Office
A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice.
The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.
The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurize the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was.
The decision to provoke the Iraqis emerged in leaked minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and his most senior advisers — the so-called Downing Street memo published by The Sunday Times shortly before the general election.
Democratic congressmen claimed last week the evidence it contains is grounds for impeaching President George Bush.
Those at the meeting on July 23, 2002, included Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defense secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The minutes quote Hoon as saying that the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.
Ministry of Defense figures for bombs dropped by the RAF on southern Iraq, obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Commons written answers, show the RAF was as active in the bombing as the Americans and that the “spikes” began in May 2002.
However, the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July meeting, made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.
The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defenses, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorized military action. The war finally started in March 2003.
This weekend the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Goodhart, vice-president of the International Commission of Jurists and a world authority on international law, said the intensified raids were illegal if they were meant to pressurize the regime.
He said UN Resolution 688, used by the allies to justify allied patrols over the no-fly zones, was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which deals with all matters authorizing military force.
“Putting pressure on Iraq is not something that would be a lawful activity,” said Goodhart, who is also the Liberal Democrat shadow Lord Chancellor.
The Foreign Office advice noted that the Americans had “on occasion” claimed that the allied aircraft were there to enforce compliance with resolutions 688 and 687, which ordered Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction.
“This view is not consistent with resolution 687, which does not deal with the repression of the Iraqi civilian population, or with resolution 688, which was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and does not contain any provision for enforcement,” it said.
Elizabeth Wilmshurst, one of the Foreign Office lawyers who wrote the report, resigned in March 2003 in protest at the decision to go to war without a UN resolution specifically authorizing military force.
Further intensification of the bombing, known in the Pentagon as the Blue Plan, began at the end of August, 2002, following a meeting of the US National Security Council at the White House that month.
General Tommy Franks, the allied commander, recalled in his autobiography, American Soldier, that during this meeting he rejected a call from Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to cut the bombing patrols because he wanted to use them to make Iraq’s defenses “as weak as possible”.
The allied commander specifically used the term “spikes of activity” in his book. The upgrade to a full air war was also illegal, said Goodhart. “If, as Franks seems to suggest, the purpose was to soften up Iraq for a future invasion or even to intimidate Iraq, the coalition forces were acting without lawful authority,” he said.
Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorize military action until October 11 2002.
The air war had already begun six weeks earlier and the spikes of activity had been underway for five months.
New US Move to Spoil Climate Accord
The documents show that Washington officials:
* Removed all reference to the fact that climate change is a 'serious threat to human health and to ecosystems';
* Deleted any suggestion that global warming has already started;
* Expunged any suggestion that human activity was to blame for climate change.
Among the sentences removed was the following: 'Unless urgent action is taken, there will be a growing risk of adverse effects on economic development, human health and the natural environment, and of irreversible long-term changes to our climate and oceans.'
Another section erased by the White House adds: 'Our world is warming. Climate change is a serious threat that has the potential to affect every part of the globe. And we know that ... mankind's activities are contributing to this warming. This is an issue we must address urgently.' The government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, has dismissed the leaking of draft communiques on the grounds that 'there is everything to play for at Gleneagles.' However, there is no doubt that many UK officials have become exasperated by the Bush administration's refusal to accept the basic principle that climate change is happening now and is due to man's activities.
Earlier this month, the senior science academies of the G8 nations, including the US National Academy of Science, issued a statement saying that evidence of climate change was clear enough to compel their leaders to take action. 'There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring,' they said.
It is now clear that this advice has been completely ignored by Bush and his advisers. 'Every year, it (local air pollution) causes millions of premature deaths, and suffering to millions more through respiratory disease,' reads another statement removed by Washington.
Top Guns Shoot Blanks
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."
The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.
... Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq...
JOHN C. DANFORTH: Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers
People of faith have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to bring their values to bear in politics. Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.
Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.
But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.
When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.
When we see an opportunity to save our neighbors' lives through stem cell research, we believe that it is our duty to pursue that research, and to oppose legislation that would impede us from doing so.
We think that efforts to haul references of God into the public square, into schools and courthouses, are far more apt to divide Americans than to advance faith.
Following a Lord who reached out in compassion to all human beings, we oppose amending the Constitution in a way that would humiliate homosexuals.
For us, living the Love Commandment may be at odds with efforts to encapsulate Christianity in a political agenda. We strongly support the separation of church and state, both because that principle is essential to holding together a diverse country, and because the policies of the state always fall short of the demands of faith. Aware that even our most passionate ventures into politics are efforts to carry the treasure of religion in the earthen vessel of government, we proceed in a spirit of humility lacking in our conservative colleagues.
In the decade since I left the Senate, American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. I do not think it is a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two. To assert that I am on God's side and you are not, that I know God's will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God's kingdom is certain to produce hostility.
THE MOUNTING PROTESTS
Last week a conservative dissenter submitted an analysis to his colleagues...
"The second goal has been to bring such order to Iraq as is required to effect the self-government the voters had endorsed. This objective has failed."
The failure, it is argued, cannot be redeemed by prospects that remain illusory. There isn't freedom of civil action in Iraq. There are areas in which order is routinely exercised, but there are no areas where Iraqis can assume safety from insurgent disruption.
... "No developments in the first half year of 2005 warrant confidence that these goals are being met, or even that they are predictable. The blame for this cannot responsibly be assigned to any one delinquent body. The United States military has performed with courage and perseverance. The Iraqis have never submitted to the insurgents, by whom they are nevertheless frequently overcome."
The critic persuasively argues that no commitment by the United States can be interpreted as extending beyond a reasonable allocation of the nation's resources. ... "As major military operations are measured," we are reminded, "our losses in Iraq are statistically exiguous, but they are nonetheless inordinate. The disposition to bear the cost and pain of human losses is necessarily measured by coordinate purposes and achievements. Our desire that the new Iraq, uninterrupted by insurgency, should proceed as a free and independent state is less than a commitment to which we are prepared to make sacrifices without measure."
The critic concludes: "The moment comes in every military venture, short of national self-defense, when responsible thought is given to the correlation of ends and means. ... A respect for the power of the United States is engendered by our success in engagements in which we take part. A point is reached when tenacity conveys not steadfastness of purpose but misapplication of pride. It can't reasonably be disputed that if in the year ahead the situation in Iraq continues about as it has done in the past year, we will have suffered more than another 500 soldiers killed. Where there had been skepticism about our venture, there will then be contempt.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Memos Show British Concern Over Iraq Plans
On March 25 Straw wrote a memo to Blair, saying he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law.
"If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq," Straw wrote. "In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL (Osama bin Laden) and al-Qaida."
He also questioned stability in a post-Saddam Iraq: "We have also to answer the big question — what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything."
British Secret Documents On the Net:
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
War Criticism and Concerns Both Growing
"It is concerning that our public isn't as supportive as perhaps they once were," said Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the Pentagon's Joint Staff. "We'd like, I believe, to try to reverse those figures and start the trend back the other direction. Because it's extremely important to the soldier and the Marine, the airman and the sailor over there, to know that their country's behind them."
Conway alluded to the precedent of Vietnam, in which plummeting public support for the war was blamed for undercutting the U.S. effort.
A Gallup poll this week found that about 6 in 10 Americans advocated a partial or full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. This month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that 41% of Americans approved of how Bush was handling Iraq, the president's worst grade to date.
Insurgent attacks have claimed the lives of hundreds of Iraqi civilians in recent weeks. Eighty-eight U.S. troops died in May and 45 were killed in the first half of June, the highest level since 126 troops were slain in January, before the Iraqi election. As of Thursday, at least 1,713 U.S. troops had been killed since the start of the war.
Drawing a parallel with Vietnam, Conway recounted the story of a Marine colonel negotiating the U.S. withdrawal with his Vietnamese counterpart in 1975.
"And the Marine said to him, 'We beat you every time on the battlefield,' " Conway said. "And the Vietnamese colonel said, 'That is true, but it's also irrelevant.'
Bush's Budgetary "Compassion"
Commenting on Africa’s plight Mr. Blair said Africa’s poverty is: “the fundamental moral challenge of our time.” Mr. Blair hopes to develop a Marshall Plan for Africa. Mr. Bush won’t help out. According to the New York Time when asked about Mr. Blair’s proposal he responded: “It doesn’t fit our budgetary process.” Compassion often doesn’t. [... During the meeting Mr. Bush promised to release $674 million in aid. What he didn’t point out but the media did, was that it was money that had already been appropriated by Congress. Mr. Bush promised no new money at that meeting.]
US Pressure Weakening Proposed G-8 Curb on Global Warming
US pressure is weakening a proposal to curb world greenhouse gas emissions and reduce global warming that is to be discussed next week at the Group of Eight summit next month in Scotland, he Washington Post said.
Negotiators in the past month have agreed to delete language in the summit's final statement that details the mechanism of global warming, sets ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions and stricter environmental standards in World Bank-funded power projects, according to documents obtained by the newspaper.
One of the world's biggest contributors to global warming, the United States has striven to edit US government and international reports on the threat of climate change in support of its contention that mandatory carbon dioxide cuts are unnecessary.
... The Washington Post gave an example of US-instigated changes in the G8 final statement on the environment: a section initially cited "increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes to ecosystems."
It added: "Inertia in the climate system means that further warming is inevitable. Unless urgent action is taken, there will be a growing risk of adverse effects on economic development, human health and the natural environment, and of irreversible long-term changes to our climate and oceans."
Instead, the daily said, US negotiators substituted a sentence that reads, "Climate change is a serious long term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the globe."
US Lied to Britain Over Use of Napalm in Iraq War
American officials lied to British ministers over the use of "internationally reviled" napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.
Yesterday's disclosure led to calls by MPs for a full statement to the Commons and opened ministers to allegations that they held back the facts until after the general election.
Despite persistent rumors of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defense minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.
But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."
British Documents Portray Determined US March to War
the British memos seem almost prophetic.
"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," Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6 spy service, told Blair and his top advisers after talks in Washington, according to the first memo to be leaked. It was dated July 23, 2002.
"US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al (Qaida) is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts reported earlier in his March 2002 letter to Straw.
In his own letter to Blair three days later, Straw also seemed to question the scale of the threat. "In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.
All of the documents leaked thus far - by persons unknown - date before Bush's August 2002 decision to take his case against Saddam to the United Nations, as recommended by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.
While Bush continues to assert that he tried diplomacy, things looked different in the spring and summer of 2002, at least as seen through the prism of the British government.
Blair's advisers found a deep distrust of the United Nations in Washington.
The National Security Council, led by Rice, "has no patience with the U.N. route," according to Dearlove's report to Blair and his advisers at the July 23, 2002, meeting.
In yet another memo, Christopher Meyer, then Blair's ambassador to Washington, said he met with Wolfowitz on March 17, 2002, and discussed how to build support for military action. "I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors," Meyer reported to London.
The two governments discussed ways to craft an ultimatum to Saddam on U.N. weapons inspectors that he would be sure to reject, providing an excuse for war and a path to building international support.
Said Mann: "Going to the U.N. was always a box to be checked and a necessity for winning the support of the British government."
Conservatives have failed
The conservative long-term objective is to demolish the two-party system and have conservative philosophy dominate the country.
They are determined to have their philosophy and religious beliefs dominate the judiciary and when they are opposed, they form aggressive groups who attack the opposition until they prevail.
Conservatives have given us a war with no end in sight, a budget deficit totally out of control and a set of their own moral values that are not debatable. To a growing number of Americans they have failed.
White House Twists Land Study on Grazing To Suit Their Policy
The Bush administration altered critical portions of a scientific analysis of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on public lands before announcing Thursday that it would relax regulations limiting grazing on those lands, according to scientists involved in the study.
A government biologist and a hydrologist, who both retired this year from the
Bureau of Land Management, said their conclusions that the proposed new rules might adversely affect water quality and wildlife, including endangered species, were excised and replaced with language justifying less stringent regulations favored by cattle ranchers.
Grazing regulations, which affect 160 million acres of public land in the Western U.S., set the conditions under which ranchers may use that land, and guide government managers in determining how many cattle may graze, where and for how long without harming natural resources.
The original draft of the environmental analysis warned that the new rules would have a "significant adverse impact" on wildlife, but that phrase was removed. The bureau now concludes that the grazing regulations are "beneficial to animals."
Eliminated from the final draft was another conclusion that read: "The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general."
Also removed was language saying how a number of the rule changes could adversely affect endangered species.
"This is a whitewash. They took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees," said Erick Campbell, a former BLM state biologist in Nevada and a 30-year bureau employee who retired this year. He was the author of sections of the report pertaining to the effect on wildlife and threatened and endangered species.
"They rewrote everything," Campbell said in an interview this week. "It's a crime."
... The new rules, published Friday by the BLM, a division of the Department of Interior, ensures ranchers expanded access to public land and requires federal land managers to conduct protracted studies before taking action to limit that access.
The rules reverse a long-standing agency policy that gave BLM experts the authority to quickly determine whether livestock grazing was inflicting damage.
The regulations also eliminate the agency's obligation to seek public input on some grazing decisions. Public comment will be allowed but not required.
In recent years, concerns about the condition of much Western grazing land has been heightened by drought, which has denuded pastures in the most arid areas, causing bureau managers to close some pastures and prompting ranchers to sell their herds.
The new rules mark a departure from grazing regulations adopted in 1995 under
President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Those regulations reflected the view of range scientists that a legacy of overgrazing in the West had degraded scarce water resources, damaged native plant communities and imperiled wildlife.
Babbitt ordered the bureau to establish standards that spelled out when public lands were open for grazing, and for the first time required range specialists to assess each pasture to ensure it held enough vegetation to support wildlife and livestock. It was the first time in about 50 years that the federal government had tried sweeping overhauls of how Western ranchers operated on public lands.
By 1994, studies from scientists at the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture convinced government land managers that livestock grazing was the most pervasive threat to plant and animals in the arid West.
Friday, June 17, 2005
Cheney Halucinating?
At the end of May vice- president Dick Cheney assured the country that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes".
His timing was unfortunate. In the first two weeks of June 47 Americans were killed in Iraq, compared to 42 in the whole of June last year, bringing the overall American death toll to 1,713.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Iraq: The Exception Is the Rule
Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq War, it seems to me, with the recent story in the Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru called "Building Iraq's Army: Mission Improbable." Shadid and Fainaru did something that is rarely done: spend several days with a unit of Iraq's new, American-trained forces. (The typical treatment of the topic consists of a few interviews with American officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation of how long it will take to complete the job.) The Post story starts with the lyrics of a song the soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company, were singing out of earshot of their American overseers. It was a ballad to Saddam Hussein, and it ran:
We have lived in humiliation since you left
We had hoped to spend our life with you
The American press often discusses the political makeup of the insurgency, but no one until now has suggested that some of the very forces being trained by the United States might be longing for the return of Saddam. To the extent that this is the case -- or that these forces are otherwise opposed to the occupation -- the United States, far from improving "security," is now training the future resistance to itself. Indeed, the soldiers of Charlie Company told Shadid and Fainaru that seventeen of them had quit in recent days. They added that every one of them planned to do the same as soon as possible. Their reasons were simple. They were bitter at the United States. "Look at the homes of the Iraqis," one soldier remarked. "The people have been destroyed." When asked by whom, he answered, "Them" -- and pointed to the Americans leading the patrol. The Iraqis had enlisted in the new army only for the salary -- $340 per month, an enviable sum in today's ruined Iraq. But the money had come at the price of self-respect. The new recruits had been bought off and hated themselves for it. One said that after they had all quit, "We'll live by God, but we'll have our respect."
... the fundamental error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind in ideology backed by violence. The classic example is Stalin's Russia, under which decades of misrule were rationalized as a "stage" on the way to the radiant future of true communism. As for the miserable present, it was amusingly called "actually existing communism." The future, when it came, of course was not communism at all but the disintegration of the whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned out to lead nowhere.
Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing" horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car-bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which our President has promised an "end to tyranny." (It's apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)
But a moment comes -- perhaps it is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is merely reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru's -- when the fantasy dissolves, and then one is left face to face with the factual truth. All the "exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that happens with respect to Iraq, America's grotesque misadventure there -- born of lies, sustained by lies and productive of more lies every day it continues -- will be brought to a close.
White House launches second day of attacks on Democrats
"I think the American people reject those who simply say no and stand in the way of getting things done," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
The tough talk came as Bush prepared to play host to many members of Congress from both parties on Wednesday night at a picnic on the White House South Lawn.
The rhetoric suggested a level of frustration by the president at his struggle to advance his second-term agenda.
So far he has been unable to gain traction in Congress over his proposals to overhaul
Social Security and has had ongoing struggles over energy legislation and the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement, among other items.
On Social Security in particular, Bush has called on Democrats to offer their own proposals instead of simply attacking his, but the tactic has largely not worked.
Iraq Driving Bush Now
"White House officials acknowledged yesterday that the public's gloomy mood about the Iraq war is forcing President Bush to take a more assertive and public role to reassure nervous Americans and Republican lawmakers about the White House plan for victory.
"Bush had hoped the successful January elections in Iraq would boost the popularity of the conflict and allow him to distance himself from it. But his aides have concluded that recent events in Iraq have contributed to an erosion in support for the president -- and that he needs to shift strategies. Bush's new approach will be mostly rhetorical, however, as the White House does not plan any changes to the policy or time frame for bringing home the 140,000 U.S. troops, as some lawmakers are demanding.
" 'The president takes seriously his responsibility as commander in chief to continue to educate the American people about the conduct of the war and our strategy for victory,' said Dan Bartlett, a senior adviser. As part of the new focus, Bush will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari at the White House for the first time next week and dedicate several speeches to the war, including a major address on the first anniversary of Iraq's sovereignty this month, White House officials said.
"Bush, who had hoped to spend this summer focusing on Social Security, is instead being forced to defend his economic record and war policies in the face of growing uneasiness among the public and Republicans in Congress. His poll numbers on his handling of Iraq have dropped to all-time lows, as numerous lawmakers, including some Republicans, have accused him of not offering honest assessments about the strength of the insurgency and the slow pace of training battle-ready Iraqi forces."
Lawyers Fought U.S. Move to Curb Tobacco Penalty
WASHINGTON, June 15 - Senior Justice Department officials overrode the objections of career lawyers running the government's tobacco racketeering trial and ordered them to reduce the penalties sought at the close of the nine-month trial by $120 billion, internal documents and interviews show.
The trial team argued that the move would be seen as politically motivated and legally groundless.
"We do not want politics to be perceived as the underlying motivation, and that is certainly a risk if we make adjustments in our remedies presentation that are not based on evidence," the two top lawyers for the trial team, Sharon Y. Eubanks and Stephen D. Brody, wrote in a memorandum on May 30 to Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The two lawyers said the lower penalty recommendation ordered by Mr. McCallum would weaken the department's position in any possible settlement with the industry and "create an incentive for defendants to engage in future misconduct by making the misconduct profitable."
At the close of a major trial that dozens of Justice Department lawyers spent more than five years preparing, the department stunned a federal courtroom last week by reducing the penalties sought against the industry, from $130 billion to $10 billion, over accusations of fraud and racketeering.
... The newly disclosed documents make clear that the decision was made after weeks of tumult in the department and accusations from lawyers on the tobacco team that Mr. McCallum and other political appointees had effectively undermined their case. Mr. McCallum, No. 3 at the department, is a close friend of President Bush from their days as Skull & Bones members at Yale, and he was also a partner at an Atlanta law firm, Alston & Bird, that has done legal work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, part of Reynolds American, a defendant in the case.
"Everyone is asking, 'Why now?' " said a Justice Department employee involved in the case who insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation. "Why would you throw the case down the toilet at the very last hour, after five years?"
Ultimately, Mr. McCallum overruled the objections from the trial team, and the documents and interviews suggest that his senior aides took the unusual step of writing parts of the closing argument that Ms. Eubanks delivered last week in federal court in seeking the reduction in penalties.
Officials who insisted on anonymity said the change on the penalties provoked such strong objections from the trial team that some lawyers threatened to quit. Department officials have now proposed that a lower-level lawyer who has outlined the reasons for reduced penalties take over crucial parts of the remainder of the trial.
... In saying the decision was politically motivated, critics have pointed not only to Mr. McCallum's role at a law firm tied to the industry, a role that a Justice Department ethics office ruled did not prevent him from overseeing the case, but also to the industry's political contributions to the Republican Party. The industry gave $2.7 million to Republicans last year and $938,000 to Democrats.
In their seven-page memorandum, Ms. Eubanks and Mr. Brody offered a point-by-point rebuttal to what they characterized as Mr. McCallum's "watered down approach." They said the higher penalty, as outlined by a health expert last month, was in keeping with the appellate court's "forward looking" approach and would help millions of people quit smoking in the next 25 years.
The trial team lawyers also suggested that resistance to the $130 billion plan by senior Justice Department officials grew out of "sticker shock" over the costs that the industry would pay for the stop-smoking program.
The lawyers also expressed some frustration that Mr. McCallum had already reached a preliminary decision to reduce the proposed penalty "without reviewing the evidence that supports our factual and legal arguments." They said "it is regrettable that no one would even review" their rationale "and tell us where it went wrong."
The memorandum also questioned the handling of some government witnesses who were asked to alter their written testimony to reflect the department's concerns.
One witness, Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in an interview Wednesday that Ms. Eubanks called him last month, hours before his final written testimony was due to be filed, and told him that Mr. McCallum and other senior officials wanted him to eliminate part of the testimony. The part the department wanted to omit, Mr. Myers said, centered on antismoking steps that he believed were wrongly omitted from the tobacco settlement in 1997, including limits on advertising.
"Eubanks was the good trouper, and she didn't let on at all what she thought of the request" to omit part of his testimony, Mr. Myers said. "But I said: 'No, I won't change it. It is what it is.' "
In the end, the only change he agreed to was an additional line that he did not know the steps the department would seek in the current case. Mr. Myers said he remained troubled by the case.
"To have the lawyers work on a case this long," he said, "and then just have the department basically throw it out seems despicable to me."
Monday, June 13, 2005
USA is losing patience on Iraq "We have reached a tipping point," says Ronald Spector, a military historian at George Washington University. "Even some of those who thought it was a great idea to get rid of Saddam (Hussein) are saying, 'I want our troops home.' "
The pattern of public opinion on Iraq — strong support for the first two years that then erodes — is reminiscent of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, he says.
White House spokesman David Almacy, asked about the poll, said it was "vital" for U.S. peace and security that "we complete the mission by training Iraqis to provide for their own security, and then our troops can return home with the honor they have earned."
Bush's approval-disapproval rating was 47%-49%, a tick worse than it was two weeks earlier but in the same range it has been for a year.
The poll is consistent with other recent surveys that show growing concern about the war. In an ABC News-Washington Post poll last week, two-thirds said the U.S. military was bogged down in Iraq, and nearly three-quarters called the casualty level unacceptable.
Officers: Military can't end insurgency
... this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week, echoing other senior officers. "It's going to be settled in the political process."
Gen. George W. Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, called the military's efforts "the Pillsbury Doughboy idea" - pressing the insurgency in one area only causes it to rise elsewhere.
"Like in Baghdad," Casey said last week. "We push in Baghdad - they're down to about less than a car bomb a day in Baghdad over the last week - but in north-center [Iraq]... they've gone up. The political process will be the decisive element."
The recognition that a military solution is not in the offing has led U.S. and Iraqi officials to signal they are willing to negotiate with insurgent groups or their intermediaries.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
What Did Bush Decide and When Did He Decide It?
The Downing Street Memo reported that in a July 23, 2002 meeting between Prime Minister Blair and his war cabinet, attendees of the meeting discussed the fact that President Bush had already made up his mind to attack Iraq. According to the minutes of the meeting:
“There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action.”
Yet, as the record below proves, President Bush claimed over and over after July 23rd until the war began that he had not made up his mind.
Bush: “Of course, I haven’t made up my mind we’re going to war with Iraq.” [10/1/02]
Bush:“Hopefully, we can do this peacefully – don’t get me wrong. And if the world were to collectively come together to do so, and to put pressure on Saddam Hussein and convince him to disarm, there’s a chance he may decide to do that. And war is not my first choice, don’t – it’s my last choice.” [11/7/02]
Bush: “This is our attempt to work with the world community to create peace. And the best way for peace is for Mr. Saddam Hussein to disarm. It’s up to him to make his decision.” [12/4/02]
Bush: “You said we’re headed to war in Iraq – I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide, not you. I hope this can be done peacefully.” [12/31/02]
Bush: “First of all, you know, I’m hopeful we won’t have to go war, and let’s leave it at that.” [1/2/03]
Bush: “But Saddam Hussein is – he’s treated the demands of the world as a joke up to now, and it was his choice to make. He’s the person who gets to decide war and peace.” [2/7/03]
Bush:“I’ve not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully.” [3/6/03]
Bush: “I want to remind you that it’s his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It’s Saddam’s choice. He’s the person that can make the choice of war and peace.” [3/6/03]
Bush: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force.” [3/8/03]
Bush: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it.” [3/17/03]
Posted by Think Progress Team June 7th, 2005 3:30 pm
