Agency says Tehran hindered its probe
by George Jahn
Associated Press

VIENNA, Austria – Iranian construction of a previously secret uranium enrichment site is at an advanced stage, with high-tech equipment already in place at the fortified facility ahead of its 2011 startup, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report Monday.

The revelation of the existence of the underground plant known as Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, has heightened concerns of other possible undeclared Iranian facilities that are not subject to IAEA oversight and therefore could be used for military purposes.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the IAEA report “underscores that Iran still refuses to comply fully with its international nuclear obligations.”

The IAEA report offered no estimate of Fordo’s capabilities, but a senior international official familiar with the U.N. agency’s work in Iran said it appeared designed to produce about a ton of enriched uranium a year.

The official, as well as analysts, said that would be enough for a nuclear warhead but too little for Iran’s civilian reactors that have yet to come online, including the still unfinished plant at the southern port of Bushehr. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information he was citing was confidential.

“It won’t (even) be able to produce a reactor’s worth of fuel every 90 years, but it will be able to produce one bomb a year,” said Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Strategic Security Program of the Federation of American Scientists. “It does look strange.”

The IAEA also said production at Iran’s main enrichment site at Natanz – revealed by dissidents in 2002 and under IAEA monitoring – was stagnating at mid-2009 levels.

The report did not offer a reason. But the official suggested that experts who used to work at Natanz could be preoccupied with finishing the Fordo site.

As early as three years ago, Iran had said immediate plans for Natanz were to install about 8,000 enriching centrifuges, and Monday’s report suggested Tehran had reached that goal.

The IAEA summary said that as of Nov. 2, about 8,600 centrifuges had been set up, but only about 4,000 were enriching – or 600 fewer than in September. Still, the official said output had been steady since June with about 220 pounds of enriched uranium being produced a month.

The report said Natanz had churned out nearly 4,000 pounds of uranium by Nov. 2 – close to what experts consider to be needed for two nuclear weapons. But for use as warhead material it would have to enriched further – it is now low-enriched uranium suitable only for fueling nuclear plants.

Iran insists it only wants to enrich uranium to make fuel to power nuclear reactors for civilian purposes, but fears that it could at some point use the technology to make weapons has resulted in three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions meant to pressure Tehran into freezing the activity.

The restricted document, which was obtained by the Associated Press, also noted that “for well over a year,” Iran had stonewalled IAEA efforts to investigate allegations it actively worked on a nuclear weapons program.

Unless Tehran has a change of heart, the IAEA “will not be in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities.”

Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes.

By Evan Thomas and John Barry | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, “Let me pass you to General McChrystal.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: “Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?” Karnow’s reply was just as simple: “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place.”

Words of wisdom, but not all that useful to General McChrystal. Like it or not, he is already in Afghanistan, along with roughly 68,000 American and 35,000 European troops. McChrystal has been charged by President Obama with presenting a strategy for victory, generally defined as standing up the Afghan Army to beat back the Taliban and deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda. An avid reader of history, McChrystal has read Karnow’s book, but he has also read many others. One that he has read—and reread—is a 1999 book called A Better War, written by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. Sorley argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States could have won in Vietnam—if only the U.S. Congress hadn’t cut off military aid to South Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, the Sorley book is getting a lot of attention at the upper levels of the Pentagon and at McChrystal’s headquarters in Kabul. Told that NEWSWEEK was looking into the parallels between the Sorley book and General McChrystal’s situation in Afghanistan, a senior Marine general exclaimed, “You’re on to something there!” (Like other senior military officials contacted by NEWSWEEK, the general declined to be quoted praising a book that argues, though not in so many words, that the military was stabbed in the back by its civilian leaders.)

As he decides how to respond to McChrystal’s request for at least another 40,000 troops, President Obama has been reading some books, too. One that has caught the attention of some top advisers is Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein, recounting how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were not well advised on Vietnam. The very title of Goldstein’s book captures the conventional wisdom (at least at the center and left of the political spectrum) that Vietnam was a hopeless, unwinnable war.

But was it? The lessons of Vietnam are not necessarily the ones we glibly assume—chief among them that Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a quagmire, and that achieving some sort of victory is out of reach. Vietnam has become code for American hubris and inevitable military defeat. “What ifs” are always a risky exercise, but some good historians have suggested that there were two moments when victory—or at least a semblance of victory—was possible in America’s long war in Southeast Asia. The first came early, in 1965. Had Lyndon Johnson moved aggressively into Vietnam then—taking the war to the enemy and cutting off its supply routes into South Vietnam—the North Vietnamese might have backed off. The second fell five years later, when the military was finally having success with a new counterinsurgency strategy. Would more resources and more fighting later in the war have resulted in South Vietnam remaining independent of the communist North, leaving Vietnam divided in the manner of Korea? Some historians now say yes; many others still say no.

What makes the conversation about Sorley’s thesis especially interesting now, of course, is, as McChrystal asked Karnow, whether there is anything to be learned from Vietnam that would illuminate the way forward in Afghanistan. To be clear: there is no precise parallel to draw between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Every war is different. But the revisionists’ view of Vietnam does shed some light on the issues facing Obama about war leadership. The most surprising guidance Vietnam may have to offer is not that wars of this kind are unwinnable—which is clearly the common wisdom in America—but that they can produce victories if presidents resist the temptation to fight wars halfway or on the cheap. As President Eisenhower liked to say, if you fight, “you must fight to win.”

With their natural tendency to wage the last war, armies learn slowly. In World War II, American armed forces fought badly in Africa in 1942–43 and not so well in Italy in 1943–44 before getting it right in France and Germany in 1944–45. In Vietnam in 1965–67, the Americans pursued a misbegotten strategy of “search and destroy,” trying to fight an unconventional war with conventional forces that focused on “body counts” while the North Vietnamese more shrewdly infiltrated into towns and villages. Not until Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as U.S. commander in 1968 did the Americans smarten up and begin to fight a true counterinsurgency, focusing on protecting the population by a strategy of “clear and hold.” Instead of shoving aside the South Vietnamese Army, Abrams built up the local forces until they could stand and fight largely on their own—as they did in 1972, repulsing North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive with the aid of American airstrikes.

But by then, as Sorley laments in A Better War, it was too late. American public opinion had turned. In 1973, President Nixon and the North Vietnamese signed a peace treaty that allowed Hanoi to keep 150,000 troops in South Vietnam, just waiting on orders to march. In 1974, breaking Nixon’s promises of continued support to Saigon, the U.S. Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Without logistical support or air cover, the South Vietnamese Army collapsed in 1975 and the communists swept into Saigon. Sorley quotes one of General Abrams’s closest colleagues, Gen. Bruce Palmer, as saying that Abrams “died [of cancer in 1974] feeling that we could have won the war. He felt we were on top of it in 1971, then lost our way.” Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon who worked with Abrams to turn the war around, felt the same: “We eventually defeated ourselves,” Bunker said.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces have also been slow learners. Ever since the Civil War, the American way of war was to overwhelm the enemy with superior firepower. Against the better-led but materially weaker Confederate Army, a war of attrition finally brought results for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who had been made commander by President Lincoln only after much trial and error by the Union Army. In Iraq, the learning curve again stretched out for years. After Vietnam, the Army adopted an approach known as the Powell doctrine that called for overwhelming force and a quick exit strategy. Forgotten was how to fight a counterinsurgency. At the outset of the Iraq War, U.S. forces overwhelmed the pitiful Iraqi Army—but then got bogged down in a guerrilla struggle. At last realizing the futility of superior “kinetics”—roughly speaking, putting a lot of metal in the air—American forces belatedly adopted a counterinsurgency strategy. Using a new field manual—FM 3-24, written under the supervision of Gen. David Petraeus—U.S. forces began to focus on protecting civilians while ruthlessly targeting jihadist leaders. The so-called surge, along with a vigorous effort to negotiate with Sunni enemies and bring them over to our side, worked. It bought the shaky Iraqi government breathing room to establish itself in relative peace. Still marred by violence, Iraq is nowhere near the all-out civil war that had long been predicted.

Now, in Afghanistan, McChrystal is implementing a strategy that draws on the lessons of Iraq—and looks an awful lot like the “pacification” program adopted by General Abrams in Vietnam in 1968. By ratcheting back the heavy use (and overuse) of firepower, McChrystal has reduced civilian casualties, which alienate the locals and breed more jihadists. At the same time, U.S. Special Operations Forces use the intelligence gleaned from friendly civilians to find and kill Taliban leaders. That is precisely what the Phoenix Program was designed to do 40 years ago in Vietnam: target and assassinate Viet Cong leaders. McChrystal is focusing on recruiting and training Afghan Army and police so they can take over the job of securing Afghanistan as soon as possible. “Afghanization” of the war is much the same as “Vietnamization,” the strategy adopted—successfully, Sorley argues—before Congress voted an end to aid to the South.

If it was working in Vietnam, will it work in Afghanistan? Contacted by NEWSWEEK, even Sorley wouldn’t predict. He would say only that if Obama and his advisers are to study the lessons of Vietnam, they should at least be informed by the right ones. With smarter generals and a “population-centric strategy”—to use the counterinsurgency term now in vogue—the United States could have enabled South Vietnam to beat back the North.

Or so Sorley contends. Vietnam remains a toxic subject for historians, and Sorley’s book has inspired no shortage of critics. George Herring, a highly respected historian whose study of Vietnam, America’s Longest War, is a standard text, told NEWSWEEK that he is “rather appalled that Sorley’s book is being taken so seriously.” He acknowledges that the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were doing better by 1971, but notes that Hanoi wanted to prevail more than Saigon or Washington did—and was prepared to pay whatever price, in human terms, was necessary. “The war could not have been won at a price we were willing to pay,” he says. A more immediate observer, NEWSWEEK correspondent Ron Moreau, recalls patrolling with South Vietnamese infantry in 1973. The South Vietnamese troops, Moreau says, had become utterly dependent on U.S. air power. Without it, they were reluctant to venture forth against the enemy. Moreau, who now covers the war in Afghanistan for NEWSWEEK, sees the same rickety, corrupt power structure in Kabul that he recalls from Saigon and doubts that America can prop it up indefinitely.

America’s best chance to win in Vietnam may have come earlier in the war. In 1964–65, the top military leadership understood that to defeat the North, it was necessary to go all-out. As historian Mark Moyar points out in his groundbreaking work, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954–1965, that would have meant a massive bombing campaign, mining Hanoi’s port, and sending troops into Laos and Cambodia to cut off the North’s all-important sanctuaries and resupply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But LBJ’s advisers were reluctant—fearful, in part, of dragging China and the Soviet Union into a larger war. The military pressed—but not very hard. As Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster shows in Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, the top brass made the classic mistake of telling their political masters what they wanted to hear.

Johnson was horribly conflicted. One of his advisers, Douglass Cater, recalled the president’s angst: “I’d never seen the man in as dejected a mood—he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. If I send more boys in, there’s going to be killin’. If I take them out, there’s going to be more killin’ ‘ … And he never put a ‘g’ on the ‘killin’,’ it was Texas ‘killin’.’ Then he got up and walked out of the room, leaving us in a somewhat shattered state.” Despite these melodramas, Johnson’s heart was never in the Vietnam War. He was much more concerned with getting his Great Society legislation through Congress. To avoid a fractious public debate over Vietnam, he tried to slide by without leveling with the American people about the commitment required to win. Inevitably, he just got sucked in deeper, an agony he captured in his colorful way: “I knew from the start if I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to fight this bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home,” he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “All my programs. All my hopes … all my dreams.”

History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain said, it does have a tendency to rhyme. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK in September as his secret 66-page analysis of the mess in Afghanistan was leaking out, General McChrystal said it was his “duty,” his “sacred duty,” to tell the president exactly what the military required to win there. McChrystal was clearly mindful of the cautionary tale told by McMaster in Dereliction of Duty. But duty is not a simple notion, and it’s possible that the range of options presented to the president by McChrystal—to dispatch 40,000 more troops? Or 20,000? Or 80,000?—has been massaged for political effect. The formula used by General Petraeus’s own counterinsurgency manual—one soldier for every 50 square miles—suggests America would need far more troops, something like a half million all told, to pacify the whole country. An aide to McChrystal, who would not speak for attribution on this sensitive subject, told NEWSWEEK that there’s “a bit of a Goldilocks scenario—too hot, too cold, just right”—in the general’s recommendation. McChrystal is sensitive to the need to make do with whatever he gets, though if he gets “the lower number” (roughly 10,000 to 20,000 troops), says this aide, he will have to “rethink strategy.” (Article continued below)

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The Vietnam Wall: What We Left Behind

Just as Afghanistan is not Vietnam, President Obama is not President Johnson. LBJ’s heart truly did belong to his dream of a Great Society. It’s not clear what Obama’s heart belongs to—he is a much more dispassionate figure. Nonetheless, he is undoubtedly thinking about how history will judge him. He may want to show that he is decisive, that he did not just kick the problem down the road. If he decides that Afghanistan is winnable—i.e., that the Afghans can find some lasting measure of security against the Taliban—he will need to give the war his wholehearted backing. It may be true, as Sorley’s detractors suggest, that by 1972 Vietnam was already lost. But that does not mean it’s too late to win in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not the North-Vietnamese. When the Americans and Saigon finally found an effective counter-insurgency strategy and took control of the countryside from the Viet Cong, Hanoi responded by sending in whole divisions of battle-tested troops. The Taliban are much weaker and far less organized. They do not have waves of combat troops and armor.

Or Obama may decide that Afghanistan is too hard, that the country’s leadership is too corrupt; that too many Afghans will forever regard American soldiers as alien occupiers; that a big influx of troops will only fuel the insurgency and make the Afghan military more dependent; that America will not indefinitely tolerate a war that costs more than $40 billion a year and bleeds off hundreds or thousands of young American soldiers. But if that is the case, Obama needs to start preparing for an orderly withdrawal—and explaining to America and the world why it’s necessary.

Obama’s pronounced tendency is to try to find a middle ground, a compromise. He may try to find a way to send, say, 20,000 troops and ask McChrystal to make do. If so, he runs the real risk of repeating Johnson’s mistake of incrementalism—of doing just enough (or so he hoped) to get the enemy to the bargaining table and to keep the hawks at home off his back. Hoping to muddle through only got LBJ stuck deeper in the mud. Afghanistan may not be Vietnam, but Obama risks repeating Johnson’s mistake.

by David S. Broder
The Spokesman-Review

The more President Barack Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose – and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point.

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision – whether or not it is right.

The cost of indecision is growing every day. The United States and its people, the allies who have contributed their own troops to the struggle against al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the Afghans and their government are waiting impatiently, while the challenge is getting worse.

When Obama became commander in chief, his course of action seemed clear. He was bent on early withdrawal from Iraq and an increase in resources and emphasis on winning in Afghanistan – the struggle he repeatedly called “a war of necessity.”

He sent 21,000 more troops to hold it together through the Afghan election, and named two new generals: Stanley McChrystal to run the war and Karl Eikenberry to manage the politics and reconstruction from the ambassador’s office in Kabul.

McChrystal came up with a new plan of battle, emphasizing protection of population centers and requiring up to 40,000 more troops. Eikenberry, we now know, balked, giving voice to the widespread fear that Hamid Karzai, the carry-over winner of the election the ambassador helped arrange, was too weak and corrupt to govern the country effectively, even with an enlarged American force keeping order.

Their disagreement was echoed and amplified throughout the Obama administration. The secretaries of defense and state came down on McChrystal’s side; the vice president and many on the White House political staff with Eikenberry.

The president, notwithstanding his earlier rhetoric and actions, has hesitated to resolve the issue. Obama needs to remember what Clark Clifford said about the president he served, Harry Truman. Clifford, one of Truman’s closest advisers, said the president “believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”

While Obama deliberates, his party in Congress shows increasing reluctance to make an all-out commitment to the war effort. The chairmen of two key Senate committees, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, are arguing for retraining Afghan troops – if they can even be found – and turning over more of the burden of fighting to them.

Meanwhile, events in Afghanistan support McChrystal’s prediction that delay in expanding the American troop commitment will almost certainly lead to gains for the Taliban and greater risk for U.S. and allied troops.

In all this dithering, it’s easy to forget a few fundamentals. Why are we in Afghanistan? Not because of its own claim on us but because the Taliban rulers welcomed the al-Qaida plotters who hatched the destruction of 9/11. The Taliban also oppressed their own people, especially women, but we sent troops because Afghanistan was the hide-out for the terrorists that attacked our country.

We knew governing Afghanistan would never be easy. It had resisted outside forces through the ages, and its geography, its tribal structure, its absence of a democratic tradition and its poverty all argued that once we went in, it would be hard to get out.

But George W. Bush said – and Obama seemed to agree – that withdrawal was not and is not an option.

That imperative is reinforced by the presence of Pakistan, a shaky nuclear-armed power across a porous mountain border. If the Taliban comes back in Afghanistan, the al-Qaida cells already in Pakistan will operate even more freely – and nuclear weapons could fall into the most dangerous hands.

Given all of this, I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress – as it has done in Iraq.

Obama did not believe that could happen there. But given what he inherited, and given what he has done himself so far, I think he has no choice but to play out that hand. If we can’t afford to lose, then play to win.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

More than 30,000 troops would be deployed next year
Mcclatchy
The Spokesman-Review

Coalition forces in Afghanistan now total 67,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 troops from other countries.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is nearing a decision to send more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, but he may not announce it until after he consults with key allies and completes a trip to Asia later this month, administration and military officials have told McClatchy Newspapers.

As it now stands, the administration’s plan calls for sending three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., and a Marine brigade, for a total of as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

Another 7,000 troops would man and support a new division headquarters for the international force’s Regional Command South in Kandahar, the Taliban birthplace where the U.S. is due to take command in 2010. Some 4,000 additional U.S. trainers are likely to be sent as well, the officials said.

The first additional combat brigade probably would arrive in Afghanistan next March, the officials said, with the other three following at roughly three-month intervals, meaning that all the additional U.S. troops probably wouldn’t be deployed until the end of next year. Army brigades number 3,500 to 5,000 soldiers; a Marine brigade has about 8,000 troops.

The plan would fall well short of the 80,000 troops that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, suggested as a “low-risk option” that would offer the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan.

It splits the difference between two other McChrystal options: a “high-risk” one that called for 20,000 additional troops and a “medium-risk” one that would add 40,000 to 45,000 troops.

The officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal administration planning, cautioned that Obama’s decision isn’t final, and won’t be until after administration officials discuss it with NATO allies at a Nov. 23 meeting of the alliance’s North Atlantic Council and its Military Committee.

Coalition forces now total 67,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 troops from other countries. The Army’s counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan’s population would require about 600,000 troops.

Although the administration privately is holding out little hope of persuading Canada or the Netherlands to abandon their plans to withdraw combat troops, much less getting additional allied troops, it wants to avoid creating the impression – at home and abroad – that the U.S. “is going it alone” in Afghanistan, said one military official.

Administration officials also want time to launch a public relations offensive to convince an increasingly skeptical public and a wary Democratic Congress that the war, now in its ninth year and inflicting rising casualties, is one of “necessity,” as Obama said earlier this year.

Amy Goodman
The Spokesman-Review

“Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year. Just this week, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New York City, dismissed Arar’s case against the government officials (including FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Attorney General John Ashcroft) who allegedly conspired to have him kidnapped and tortured.

Arar is safe now, recovering in Canada with his family. But the decision sends a signal to the Obama administration that there will be no judicial intervention to halt the cruel excesses of the Bush-era “Global War on Terror,” including extraordinary rendition, torture and the use of the “state secrets privilege” to hide these crimes.

Arar’s life-altering odyssey is one of the best-known and best-investigated of those victimized by U.S. extraordinary rendition. After vacationing with his family in Tunisia, Arar attempted to fly home to Canada. On Sept. 26, 2002, while changing planes at JFK Airport, Arar was pulled aside for questioning. He was fingerprinted and searched by the FBI and the New York Police Department. He asked for a lawyer and was told he had no rights.

He was then taken to another location and subjected to two days of aggressive interrogations, with no access to phone, food or a lawyer. He was asked about his membership with various terrorist groups, about Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Palestine and more. Shackled, he was moved to a maximum-security federal detention center in Brooklyn, strip-searched and threatened with deportation to Syria.

Arar was born in Syria and told his captors that if he returned there, he would be tortured. As Arar’s lawyers would later argue, however, that is exactly what they hoped would happen. Arar was eventually allowed a call – he got through to his mother-in-law, who got him a lawyer – and a visit from a Canadian Consulate official.

For nearly two weeks, the U.S. authorities held the Syria threat over his head. Still, he denied any involvement with terrorism. So in the middle of the night, over a weekend, without normal immigration proceedings – without anyone telling his lawyer or the Canadian Consulate – he was dragged in chains to a private jet contracted by the CIA and flown to Jordan, where he was handed over to the Syrians.

For 10 months and 10 days, Maher was held in a dark, damp, cold cell, measuring 6 feet by 3 feet by 7 feet high, the size of a grave. He was beaten repeatedly with a thick electrical cable all over his body, punched, made to listen to the torture of others, denied food and threatened with electrical shock and an array of more horrors. To stop the torture, he falsely confessed to attending terrorist training in Afghanistan. Then, after nearly a year, he was abruptly released to Canada, 40 pounds lighter and emotionally destroyed.

The Canadian government, under conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, investigated, found its own culpability in relaying unreliable information to the FBI and settled with Arar, giving him an apology and $10 million. The U.S. government, on the other hand, has offered no apology and has kept Arar on a terrorist watch list. He is not allowed to enter the U.S. Two years ago, he had to testify before Congress via video conference.

He said: “These past few years have been a nightmare for me. Since my return to Canada, my physical pain has slowly healed, but the cognitive and psychological scars from my ordeal remain with me on a daily basis. I still have nightmares and recurring flashbacks. I am not the same person that I was. I also hope to convey how fragile our human rights have become and how easily they can be taken from us by the same governments that have sworn to protect them.”

Given the excesses of the Bush administration and Barack Obama’s promise of change, it has surprised many that these policies are continuing and that Congress and the courts have not closed this chapter of U.S. history. President Obama has never once condemned extraordinary rendition.

Arar’s lawyer, Maria LaHood, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, calls the court decision against Arar “an outrage.” In his dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, “I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.” Given the torture that Arar suffered, his own response was remarkably measured: “If anything, this decision is a loss to all Americans and to the rule of law.”

Amy Goodman hosts a daily international TV and radio news hour called “Democracy Now!” that airs on more than 800 stations in North America. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

By THOM SHANKER and MARK LANDLER

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Defense ministers from NATO on Friday endorsed the ambitious counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, giving new impetus to his recommendation to pour more troops into the eight-year-old war.

General McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, made an unannounced appearance here on Friday to brief the defense ministers on his strategic review of a war in which the American-led campaign has lost momentum to a tenacious Taliban insurgency.

“What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach,” said NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

The acceptance by NATO defense ministers of General McChrystal’s approach did not include a decision on new troops, and it was not clear that their judgment would translate into increased willingness by their governments, many of which have been seeking to reduce their military presence in Afghanistan, to contribute further forces to the war.

But it was another in a series of judgments that success there could not be achieved by a narrower effort that did not increase troop levels in Afghanistan substantially and focused more on capturing and killing terrorists linked to Al Qaeda — a counterterrorism strategy identified with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The NATO briefing, though held privately, thrusts General McChrystal back into the debate over what President Obama should do about Afghanistan — a role that has raised tensions between the general and the White House in the past, and even drawn a rebuke from his boss, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

NATO’s support got no official reaction from the White House. But an administration official noted that an endorsement by defense ministers was not the same as an endorsement by the alliance’s political leadership. Other officials were emphatic that Mr. Obama would not be stampeded in his deliberations and suggested that the NATO statement should not be taken as evidence that the White House had made a decision about how to proceed.

“In no way, shape or form are the president’s options constrained,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking to reporters at the State Department.

General McChrystal’s review calls for adopting a full-scale counterinsurgency strategy that would protect population centers and accelerate training of Afghan Army and police units — both of which would require significant numbers of fresh troops. NATO diplomats noted that it was difficult to see how an acceptance of this broad strategy could be viewed as anything but an endorsement of the need to increase both military and civilian contributions.

Mr. Gates, who has kept his views about additional troops close to his vest and has discouraged his commanders from lobbying too publicly for their positions, declined to be drawn out on this assessment.

“For this meeting, I am here mainly in listening mode,” Mr. Gates said in Bratislava after the NATO briefing, although he noted that “many allies spoke positively about General McChrystal’s assessment.”

Mr. Gates said the administration’s decision on Afghanistan was still two or three weeks away, and he cautioned that it was “vastly premature” to draw conclusions now about whether the president would deploy more troops. He said that allied defense ministers had not voiced concerns about the administration’s decision-making process.

Although NATO will not meet until next month to decide whether to commit more resources to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates did reveal that he had received indications that some allies were prepared to increase their contributions of civilian experts or troops, or both.

Britain and other NATO members have had their own fractious political debates over troop levels. A retired top general in Britain recently said that the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown had rebuffed his requests for more troops, a charge Mr. Brown denied.

Separate from his strategic review, General McChrystal has submitted a request for forces, which is now working its way through both the American and NATO chains of command.

The options submitted by General McChrystal range to a maximum of 85,000 more troops, although his leading option calls for increasing forces by about 40,000, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The pressure for more troops was a theme throughout the day at the NATO meeting, as other senior international representatives told defense ministers of the need to increase their commitments in order to succeed in Afghanistan.

The United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, who also flew to the Slovakian capital to meet the ministers, stressed that “additional international troops are required.” He also told the allies, “This cannot be a U.S.-only enterprise.”

Mr. Eide acknowledged that it might be difficult to rally public support for force contributions while allegations of election fraud continued to taint the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Senior American military officers have already endorsed General McChrystal’s overall strategy, including Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in the Middle East.

Senior NATO officials made clear that additional commitments should go beyond combat forces to include trainers for the Afghan Army and police force, as well as civilians to help rebuild the economy and restore confidence in the government.

“What we need is a much broader strategy, which stabilizes the whole of Afghan society, and this is the essence in the recommendations presented by General McChrystal,” said Mr. Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general. “This won’t happen just because of a good plan. It will also need resources — people and money.”

General McChrystal was not scheduled to make any public comments here. The general’s reticence was not unexpected, as some administration officials have criticized his recent statements as an attempt to press the White House to act.

The general and his aides have denied they were playing politics. General McChrystal said in a recent interview that success required a unified, government-wide strategy.

NATO officials assessing the potential for allied troop contributions said that delicate negotiations were under way, and that NATO capitals were watching the Obama administration for signals even while they sent signals of their own.

Thom Shanker reported from Bratislava, and Mark Landler from Washington.

by Charles Krauthammer

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award “premature,” as if the brilliance of Obama’s foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president’s various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration – excuse me, outreach and understanding – is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let’s review.

What’s come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What’s come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama’s shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told). China hasn’t moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed it’s pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What’s come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? “The settlement push backfired,” reports the Washington Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have “arguably regressed.”

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke – the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it’s too late?

Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

“Russia Not Budging On Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart.” Such was the Washington Post headline’s succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that “threats, sanctions and threats of pressure” are “counterproductive.” Note: It’s not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved – to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? “We are not at that point yet,” she averred. “That is not a conclusion we have reached … it is our preference that Iran work with the international community.”

But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naiveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com.

By Chris Jordan
October 14, 2009

“Tell me, Jimmy — what has Obama accomplished to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Heck — if he’s qualified, I think I could win it next year!”

Even if your name isn’t Jimmy, you’ve probably heard a version of this argument from friends, family or classmates in the wake of the president’s Nobel victory last Friday.

I agree with the skeptics (including the president himself), who say that Obama has probably not accomplished enough to deserve the prize. It is, however, ridiculous to claim that he’s “accomplished nothing,” or that he has not made great progress on major issues.

Before we start the Jimmy Carter comparisons, let’s not forget the guy is barely a sixth of the way through his first term. And before we judge success, let’s not forget the horrible mess that the last guy left for him to clean up.

Even in the most turbulent region on earth, the Middle East, the new president has made some important strides.

The administration is currently embroiled in an internal debate over the strategy in Afghanistan, with many of Obama’s key advisors split in their policy prescriptions.

The president has rightfully expressed concern over “mission creep,” the gradual shifting of objectives during a military campaign that often results in unwanted, long-term commitments. He’s also stated that the new strategy will focus on winning over civilians and the general population, a move that contributed to the success of the surge in Iraq.

Regardless of whether the Afghanistan strategy shift means more or less troops, we’ve gone from a “shock and awe” approach to genuine recognition that defeating extremists means more than simply killing all the terrorists you can hunt down. It means winning over the people and thus the source of future recruits.

Despite John McCain’s campaign warning that Obama’s Iran approach would be “naïve” and “dangerous,” talks between U.S. and Iranian diplomats began several weeks ago for the first time in 30 years. Aided by the recent revelation of Iran’s secret nuclear facility and strong internal opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, those talks are already beginning to bear fruit.

This is only a first step, and we should be alert that what Iran says and what Iran does might be two entirely different things.

But we’ve gone from merely shouting at Iran and threatening them to engaging in serious diplomatic talks that are, so far, getting results.

And the United States is finally realizing the importance of Pakistan as well. We have been spending $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 we spend in Pakistan, even though the latter has nuclear weapons and is the believed hiding spot of Al-Qaeda.

Congress just recently passed, and the president will soon sign, the Kerry-Lugar Bill, which increases annual economic aid to Pakistan significantly. This bill is an acknowledgment of the strategic centrality of Pakistan and the importance of undercutting conditions, such as poverty, upon which extremism thrives.

The conditional strings attached to this money have caused somewhat of a backlash in Pakistan. Despite the rough public relations rollout, this bill is a strategic step in the right direction for the United States.

We’ve gone from a Pakistan policy focused entirely on former President Musharraf to one that actually invests in the nation’s people and institutions and ties future aid to conditional goals.

So has Obama ended the violence and brought stability to Afghanistan? Has he prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Has he established a cooperative relationship with Pakistan? Not yet. But he is taking the necessary steps to move us closer to these goals.

Clearly, saving the world takes time.

If nothing else, perhaps every time the president glances up at that Nobel Prize hanging on the wall, he’ll be reminded of the hope so many have placed in him and find some additional will to rise to the challenge.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by Cal Thomas

“War will continue until the end …” (Daniel 9:26)

Like the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, along with the Oscar and Emmy for film and television, the Nobel Peace Prize is an inside job in which liberal, wishful-thinking humanists give awards to each other.

For all I care, the Nobel Committee could have given their useless (except for the money) prize to Homer Simpson. Like President Barack Obama, Homer has done nothing to earn it, though he may be the only character who has been on TV more than the president.

According to the Web site www.globalsecurity.org, there are currently “42 active conflicts and/or wars in the world today.” Not all are shooting wars at the moment and there are several civil wars and conflicts between Israel and various terrorist groups, but 42 wars is a lot of war.

Peace generally occurs when aggressive evil is defeated, which is why Germany and Japan no longer war with the United States. The Nobel Committee apparently believes that by diplomatically singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” evil people will study war no more and be so impressed by our intentions they will lay down their arms.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could win the Nobel Peace Prize in an instant if he announced his god had told him not to eradicate Israel, or usher in Armageddon. But Ahmadinejad won’t, because he is evil and must be defeated. Neither will he respond to negotiations or sanctions. Same with Osama bin Laden. The United Nations would welcome him as a speaker and the Nobel Committee would award him their top prize if he would announce he no longer believes in terrorism and has become a follower of the Dalai Lama or some other “acceptable” pseudo-deity. He also will do no such thing because he is evil and must be defeated.

The Nobel Committee believes George W. Bush is evil, but apparently not bin Laden or Ahmadinejad. It cringes at leaders who wish to overcome evil by force rather than have the forces of evil overcome them. The Nobel Committee hates Israel, too. And this is because its members, and like-minded male wimps around the world, idolize Michael J. Fox instead of John Wayne and find their role models in the liberal ladies of “The View,” not in muscular characters like Jack Bauer (and Chloe, who gets it) on “24.”

The peace prize concept is flawed because the problem of war does not lie with those who would make peace, but with those who would make war. If the Nobel Committee were realistic, it would stop handing out peace prizes and start issuing awards for those who have confronted evil and produced peace in nations that have only known oppression. Candidates for such prizes would include Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, who conspired to liberate Europe from the totalitarian hand of Soviet communism.

Bill Clinton would also be a legitimate candidate for his efforts that stabilized Bosnia. He could take some small credit for the peace in Northern Ireland, which, though worked on for decades, was finally brokered on his watch. President Obama was right when he acknowledged that he doesn’t deserve the prize. Neither did Yasser Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho or Al Gore.

The question should be: Why, despite man’s best efforts, including the League of Nations and United Nations, have we been unsuccessful in eradicating war? The answer lies in this ancient wisdom: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (James 4:1-3)

That’s why a peace prize is meaningless.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

by Charles Krauthammer

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious – particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

“I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as ‘the right war’ to conventional Democratic wisdom,” wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected.

“This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy.”

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq – while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the “Iraq war bad, Afghan war good” posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that’s exactly what Obama’s handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 – a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don’t commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.”

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama’s own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it’s McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Joe Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy – “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge – you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago – Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans – the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

by Robert Burns / Associated Press

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is considering a range of ideas for changing course in Afghanistan, from pulling back to staying put to sending thousands more troops to fight the insurgency.

A look at the options and their implications for achieving Obama’s stated goal of defeating al-Qaida.

Getting Out

A full, immediate withdrawal of American forces does not appear to be in the cards, not the least because U.S. allies in NATO share the view that abandoning Afghanistan now would hand a victory to Islamic extremist forces such as the Taliban that are aligned in some respects with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Some argue that because the al-Qaida figures who were run out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops invaded after the Sept. 11 attacks are now encamped across the border in Pakistan, there is no point to a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. A related school of thought holds that the very presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan adds to the country’s instability and fuels its insurgency. Obama has taken a different view. Less than two months ago he said, “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaida would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

Scaling Back

A less drastic alternative to a full-scale retreat is a partial pullback. A reduced U.S. force would stay mainly to train and advise the Afghan national army and police. U.S. special operations forces would continue their hunt for most-wanted extremist leaders in Afghanistan. Pilotless drones such as the armed Predator would take out al-Qaida figures on the Pakistan side of the border. This would essentially end the counterinsurgency mission of U.S. and NATO forces. The reasoning is that the fight is not worth the cost in blood and treasure, and al-Qaida is a more urgent priority. This counterterror option would amount to a reversal of the strategy Obama endorsed in March. In the view of military analysts Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, who favor an expanded counterinsurgency campaign, a shift to only training and counterterror operations would be a big mistake. They argue that it would empower the Taliban and al-Qaida, endanger remaining U.S. troops and diplomats and allow Islamic extremists to portray the U.S. pullback as a defeat for the forces of moderation.

Staying Put

One of those advocating no short-term change in the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan is Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He argues for putting greater emphasis on training the Afghan security forces and accelerating their growth. In this approach, the counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban would continue on course. Additional U.S. troops would be required for the training mission, but not for combat. The flow of equipment for the police and army would be expanded. More effort would be focused on persuading lower-level Taliban fighters to lay down their arms. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, is calling for accelerated training of Afghan forces. But in his view, more combat troops also are required to retake the initiative from the Taliban, which now control or contest large parts of the country. Earlier efforts to speed up Afghan training stalled in part because of a lack of NATO trainers.

Ramping Up

This is the McChrystal plan, which he calls “a fundamentally new way of doing business.” In military parlance, it would be a classic counterinsurgency campaign that could last for years. It would mean sending more U.S. troops – perhaps as many as 40,000. The general says it would mean redefining the fight in ways that enable Afghans to regain control of their own country. McChrystal spelled out his reasoning in a report weeks ago to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who asked for a comprehensive assessment of the war effort when he removed McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, in May in search of “fresh thinking, fresh eyes.” McChrystal says there is no guarantee his approach will work. Critics worry that this escalation would only lead to others, creating a quagmire. But McChrystal argues that if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or is unable to counter international terrorist networks – then Afghanistan could again become a base for al-Qaida to launch an attack on the U.S. That’s just what Obama says must be avoided.

THE nation is abuzz with praise for law enforcement. After months of careful investigation, involving extensive surveillance and international monitoring of travel and financial records, the authorities disrupt a major Qaeda cell operating domestically, arresting the primary conspirators. The conspirators are indicted and detained, and the nation breathes a sigh of relief.

Until the subway explodes.

The situation described above is not, thankfully, what has happened in the wake of the arrests this month of Najibullah Zazi, his father and several alleged confederates in Colorado and New York. Instead, it describes what happened in England in 2004 when the authorities, in Operation Crevice, arrested several terrorists (five of whom were eventually convicted) but had insufficient evidence to charge several other associates. Those other men went on to bomb the London subway on July 7, 2005.

Taken together, the Zazi and British cases illustrate a daunting challenge facing the criminal justice system in dealing with domestic terrorism attacks: law enforcement must constantly balance its need to develop evidence sufficient to convict the conspirators against the potentially devastating consequences of allowing the conspiracy to ripen into an attack.

To arrest the suspects prematurely is to run the risks of acquittal, of forcing prosecutors to advocate and courts to accept overly broad interpretations of existing criminal statutes, and perhaps of arresting innocent people. To decide to wait, however, continuing surveillance in the hope of developing better proof, is to risk losing the suspects and placing the public in mortal peril.

Police departments, prosecutors and the F.B.I. all face similar challenges in other criminal contexts. Anyone who has been involved at a senior level in serious investigations is aware of the suspected sexual predator or armed bank robber — or even the suspected serial killer — who must be left at large because of the lack of admissible evidence. Sometimes, proof is developed and the perpetrator is caught; sometimes, people get hurt.

As a society, we have weighed the risks to public safety in curtailing police power against the risks to public liberty of allowing too much police power. The balance we have struck is reflected in our constitutional protections. The question posed by terrorism, however, is whether the stakes — possibly tens of thousands of deaths — are sufficiently higher to alter that balance in favor of greater government power.

History shows that our decisions have yielded mixed results. During the mid-1990s, the authorities were able to develop strong evidence against Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik, and his fellow conspirators who were plotting to blow up New York City landmarks; they were convicted in 1995. In an earlier case, however, the unwillingness of a confidential informant to develop evidence that could be used in court led the F.B.I. to cut ties with him in 1992; the group on which he had been informing went on to bomb the World Trade Center the following February.

Prosecutors in the Zazi case to date have been unable to charge several other suspected co-conspirators — as many as 24, according to some reports. And while Mr. Zazi has now been accused by authorities of conspiring to make bombs, the other arrestees have been charged only with the relatively minor offense of lying to the authorities. Law enforcement is described in several news reports as “stretched thin” as it conducts surveillance of Mr. Zazi’s associates.

This has an ominous precedent: in the wake of the 2004 arrests, British authorities followed the other associates who had appeared on video surveillance with the conspirators, but eventually lost interest and moved on to other investigations. Those forgotten men proceeded to kill 52 people and wound 700 more.

Time will tell whether the decision to arrest Mr. Zazi and his associates was premature. If the case against them does not develop beyond what has been reported, and if no useable evidence is developed against the 24 other men, the decision to arrest will be second-guessed. That would be grossly unfair. From a public safety perspective, law enforcement officers and prosecutors cannot be faulted for acting when they believe that the public is in imminent peril, even if that means compromising an investigation.

The larger issue raised here is whether there is a viable alternative to the nerve-racking game of chicken that law enforcement must play in terrorism cases. The obvious — though extremely unpopular — alternative is the passage of a preventive detention statute.

Such statutes have been upheld in the context of people with a demonstrated proclivity toward violent conduct, like sexual predators; the concept could be adapted, in a way that withstands constitutional scrutiny, to cover people with a demonstrated proclivity toward terrorism. That approach would give law enforcement additional means to disrupt potential terrorist plots. It has the virtue of honesty, obviating the strained and sometimes disingenuous use of material-witness and false-statement statutes that are now frequently used to arrest and hold suspected terrorists, and would remove the temptation to criminalize conduct that borders on free speech.

Still, preventive detention is hardly a panacea. What should the burden of proof be in using “civil commitment” regarding terrorism? When should that burden be adjusted, if ever? How often would a subject’s status be reviewed? How long may someone be held? There is, moreover, something about detaining someone before he has committed an offense that runs counter to our core constitutional values.

The Zazi case may well end up providing more questions than answers. In the absence of some mechanism allowing for preventive detention, the F.B.I. and police must continue to make hair-trigger judgments in real time about whether and when to arrest and charge suspects. Those are decisions our law enforcement officials routinely make, and make well, in other contexts; in terrorism cases, however, we have to ask if the stakes are too high for the system we have in place.

John Farmer Jr., a former attorney general of New Jersey, is the dean of the Rutgers School of Law at Newark and the author of “The Ground Truth.”

WASHINGTON — The new plan that President Obama laid out for a missile shield against Iran on Thursday turns Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Star Wars system on its head: Rather than focusing first on protecting the continental United States, it shifts the immediate effort to defending Europe and the Middle East.

It is a long way from the impermeable shield that President Reagan described in glowing terms in 1983, an announcement that turned into a diplomatic triumph even while it was a technological flop. Ever since, missile defense has always been more about international politics than about new military technology.

In the last years of the cold war, it helped nudge the Soviets toward agreements that sharply reduced nuclear arsenals, a process that Mr. Obama hopes to revive at the end of the year. In the George W. Bush years, it was about expanding NATO and, under the cover of building antimissile bases to protect against North Korean attack, a subtle warning to China that its power in the Pacific would not go unchecked.

Now, in the age of Obama, the vision has descended from the stars to sea level. A president who was still in college during Reagan’s famous missile defense speech has turned a scaled-back version of the technology, which would first be based on ships, to a new mission: Convincing Israel and the Arab world that Washington is moving quickly to counter Iran’s influence, even as it opens direct negotiations with Tehran for the first time in 30 years.

For Mr. Obama, it is a step fraught with some risk. Within hours of his announcement, charges were flying that in his first major confrontation with the Russians, he had backed down, giving in to Moscow’s opposition to the Bush plan to place missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“The politics of this was driving him in the other direction, against appearing to back down,” said William Perry, who served as defense secretary in the Clinton administration. “But he went with where the technology is today — and where the threat is today.”

During last year’s presidential campaign, missile defense was tricky territory for Mr. Obama. His liberal base was allergic to the very words. Mr. Obama, eager to show that he was neither a neophyte nor soft on defense, talked about embracing those technologies that were “proven and cost-effective.”

Nine months into his presidency, Mr. Obama has begun to describe what that means. He is not abandoning the two antimissile bases built on American soil in the Bush years, one in Alaska and one in California. But his aides — led by the one veteran of the cold war in his cabinet, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — argued Thursday that Iran and North Korea were taking far longer to develop intercontinental missiles than many feared a decade ago.

The urgency, they argued, lies in addressing a more imminent threat: Iran’s short- and medium-range missiles.

First among those weapons is the Shahab III, the missile that can reach Israel and parts of Europe. It is also the missile that American, Israeli and European intelligence services have charged that Iran hopes to fit with a nuclear warhead. Iran denies that but has refused to answer questions from international inspectors about documents that appear to link the missile program to its nuclear efforts.

That standoff has fed the conviction inside the White House that the Iranian threat needs to be countered. But officials argued Thursday that the faster, and surer, way to accomplish that goal was to scrap Mr. Bush’s plan, which would have based antimissile batteries too far from Iran to be useful against short- and medium-range missiles, and put them closer to Tehran.

“One of the realities of life is the enemy gets a vote,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But Mr. Obama’s critics argue that while Iran is rightly a major focus of missile defense, it is not the only one, and that in dismantling the Bush plan, the new president is undercutting American allies.

“I fear the administration’s decision will do just that,” Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival in last year’s presidential election, said Thursday, adding that the decision came “at a time when Eastern European nations are increasingly wary of renewed Russian adventurism.”

But Mr. Obama is betting that over time he can assuage bruised feelings in Europe. And he is betting that his credibility will rise in the Middle East, where he can now argue that the American missile shield will defend both Israel and the Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia and Egypt. There are signs that all of them may be interested in nuclear capabilities of their own — especially if they believe that the United States will not stand up to Iran.

But Mr. Obama may also be vulnerable to charges that he could be leaving parts of the continental United States defenseless if Iran makes bigger strides with long-range missiles. His critics point to Iran’s launching of a satellite into space in February. The craft orbited the Earth for nearly three months, passing repeatedly over the United States.

“Iran has already demonstrated it has the capability to develop long-range missiles,” said Robert Joseph, one of the architects of Mr. Bush’s missile defense strategy, who was highly critical of Mr. Obama’s decision. “They have both the capability and intention to move forward.”

The Obama administration counters that Iran has no long-range rockets and that the threat has been slower to develop than expected.

Twenty-six years after Mr. Reagan’s famous speech, the most visible element of his strategy is a system of missile interceptors that sprawl across the wilds of Alaska and a sister base in California. The system’s “kill vehicles” are meant to zoom into space and destroy enemy warheads — presumably a single North Korean launching — by force of impact. Military and private experts say the West Coast interceptors could also smash an Iranian warhead, unless it was headed toward the East Coast of the United States. That is why the Bush administration wanted to erect additional interceptors in Poland. To advocates of the classic vision of missile defense, it is unconscionable to leave the East Coast unprotected.

But critics of the interceptor system say its flight tests have repeatedly fallen short, and call its supposed protection a mirage.

Now comes the next debate: Whether the Obama plan is any more technologically feasible than past efforts.

So Mr. Obama faces the same challenge as Mr. Reagan: Winning the argument that his version of missile defense is workable — or at least workable enough to be a potent political weapon.

Well, we survived August, which is good news. It was not a month that will be recorded in the Enlightened Discourse Hall of Fame. In fact, it was a national embarrassment — not just the steady stream of misinformation about the nature of President Obama’s health-care proposals, but the racism — both overt and opaque — the death threats, the imprecations (calling someone a Nazi is evidence of the evil of banality), the idiots bearing assault rifles at presidential events. As the lunatics took over the asylum, the President’s poll ratings dropped, and the chances for a truly bipartisan health-care-reform effort vanished, if they existed in the first place. Consequently, we have had a back-to-school fusillade of advice for the President from my columnizing peers — and an effusion of premature crowing from conservatives about the collapse of the Obama presidency.

The drop in the President’s poll numbers represents a natural political process. When politicians talk about spending their political capital, they are talking about their poll numbers — and the cliché is somewhat misleading. They are actually investing their political capital, hoping for a greater return if their gamble succeeds. George W. Bush invested his capital in privatizing Social Security, and the stock tanked. Barack Obama is investing in health-care reform. We are at the point of the legislative process where all seems hopeless, but Obama should be heartened by the fact that most of his Republican adversaries oppose the bill for crass political rather than ideological reasons. They assume that if it passes, his investment of political capital will result in higher poll numbers — which means they assume the public will like the changes he is proposing. (See TIME’s photo-essay “The Health-Care Debate Turns Angry.”)

And, I fearlessly predict, the public will. If insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, or drop people who get too sick, the public will love it. If health-care exchanges give individuals and small businesses the power to negotiate lower premiums from the insurance companies, people will love that too. Making health care available to everyone, even if some people — young, healthy people — who are not buying in now are told they have to join up, will also be well received. The odds are better than even that a bill containing those provisions will pass in Congress this fall.

But even if most of the noise about Obama is nonsense, there is one area of concern that could affect the ultimate success of his presidency. It is his tendency to overlearn the lessons of past presidencies, especially when those lessons enable him to avoid taking responsibility for tough decisions. It has been widely observed that Obama overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health-care effort by deferring to Congress to write the legislation. It has been less widely observed that the President overlearned the lesson of Bush’s hyperpoliticized Justice Department by leaving to Attorney General Eric Holder the decision about whether to investigate the CIA for torture abuses.

What should the President have done? Well, there’s a path between the 1,300-page Clinton health-care plan and the 1,000-page Henry Waxman plan that will be voted on in the House. The President could have laid out a set of principles and said, “I will veto any bill that doesn’t contain the following …” (Indeed, he still could do so.) They should be clear, simple, popular and achievable. My list would include insurance reform, health-care exchanges, near universal coverage and tort reform. (Obama’s position on tort reform is another abdication of responsibility: he says he’s open to it, knowing the congressional Democrats are closed to it.) (See “Understanding the Health-Care Debate: Your Indispensable Guide.”)

The President’s deferral of responsibility for the CIA investigation is more serious than his health-care meanderings. This is a matter of national security that will directly affect the morale and behavior of our clandestine services. The President can’t say he wants to look forward, not backward, then allow his Attorney General to look backward. The most egregious practices, like waterboarding, were (outrageously) declared legal by the Bush Justice Department. How can you prosecute one interrogator for threatening a prisoner with an electric drill and let others who waterboarded a prisoner 83 times off the hook? Is it right for the interrogators to be prosecuted and the real miscreants — people, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who ordered, and still approve of, the torture — to escape unpunished? Most legal experts believe that such cases would be difficult to prosecute. But whether you favor an investigation or not, this is a presidential decision the President avoided.

In the great sweep of history, this presidency has barely begun. The mistakes Obama has made are rookie mistakes that can be corrected. And the general tendency of his Administration — toward civility, as opposed to the ugliness we’ve seen in the past month — is the right one. But he can’t allow his desire for civility to neuter the requirements of leadership. He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting right now.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By Michael Barone

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Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Abdullah alleges ‘widespread rigging’ in election

Unclear which party will get first chance to form government

By WILLIAM GLABERSON and HELENE COOPER

President-elect Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order on his first full day in office directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, people briefed by Obama transition officials said Monday.

But experts say it is likely to take many months, perhaps as long as a year, to empty the prison that has drawn international criticism since it received its first prisoners seven years ago this week. One transition official said the new administration expected that it would take several months to transfer some of the remaining 248 prisoners to other countries, decide how to try suspects and deal with the many other legal challenges posed by closing the camp.

People who have discussed the issues with transition officials in recent weeks said it appeared that the broad outlines of plans for the detention camp were taking shape. They said transition officials appeared committed to ordering an immediate suspension of the Bush administration’s military commissions system for trying detainees.

In addition, people who have conferred with transition officials said the incoming administration appeared to have rejected a proposal to seek a new law authorizing indefinite detention inside the United States. The Bush administration has insisted that such a measure is necessary to close the Guantánamo camp and bring some detainees to the United States.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he wants to close the camp. But in an interview on Sunday on ABC, he indicated that the process could take time, saying, “It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize.” Closing it within the first 100 days of his administration, he said, would be “a challenge.”

The president-elect drew criticism from some human rights groups Monday who said his remarks suggested that closing Guantánamo was not among the new administration’s highest priorities. But even if the detention camp remains open for months, the decision to address Guantánamo on the day after his inauguration seemed intended to make a symbolic break with some of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration.

Several national security and legal analysts have argued in recent weeks that Mr. Obama is in a delicate political position after having committed himself to closing the prison. Sarah Mendelson, the author of a report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies on how to close the prison, said Mr. Obama’s remarks on Sunday appeared intended to indicate the difficulty of the task, which she said it could take a year to complete.

“I thought he was trying to manage expectations of how quickly those detainees who remain can be sorted into two categories: those who will be released and those who will be prosecuted,” Ms. Mendelson said.

Aside from analyzing intelligence and legal filings on each of the remaining detainees, diplomats and legal experts have said the new administration will need to begin an extensive new international effort to resettle as many as 150 or more of the remaining men. Portugal and other European countries have recently broken a long diplomatic standoff, saying they would work with the new administration and might accept some detainees who cannot be sent to their home countries because of concerns about their potential treatment.

The transition official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the plans, said the administration expected to announce its Guantánamo plans next Wednesday.

Brooke Anderson, a transition spokeswoman, declined to comment on any plans, saying only, “President-elect Obama has repeatedly said that he believes that the legal framework at Guantánamo has failed to successfully and swiftly prosecute terrorists, and he shares the broad bipartisan belief that Guantánamo should be closed.”

In formulating their policy in recent weeks, Obama transition officials have consulted with a variety of authorities on legal and human rights and with military experts. Several of those experts said the officials had expressed great interest in alternatives to the military commission system, like trying detainees in federal courts, and appeared to have grown hostile to proposals like an indefinite detention law.

They also said the transition officials were intensely focused on new international efforts to transfer many of the detainees to other countries.

Several said the officials appeared concerned that a proposal for a new law authorizing indefinite detention would bring the new administration much of the criticism that has been directed at the Bush administration over Guantánamo. A former military official who was part of a series of briefings at the transition headquarters in Washington said the officials had spoken about the indefinite detention proposal as a way of creating a “new Guantanámo someplace else.”

“That is very much not the desire of the Obama team,” said the former military official, who insisted on anonymity because of his concerns about how the transition officials would react to public discussion of their comments.

Catherine Powell, an associate professor of law at Fordham, said transition officials appeared most interested at a meeting last month in showing international critics that they were returning to what they see as traditional American legal values.

“They are really looking for tools that we have in our existing system short of creating an indefinite detention system,” Ms. Powell said.

Mark P. Denbeaux, a Seton Hall law professor who has been a prominent lawyer for Guantánamo detainees, said that at a briefing he attended with senior officials of the transition last month the officials seemed to have decided to suspend the military commissions immediately.

“Their position is they’re a complete and utter failure,” Mr. Denbeaux said.

The Pentagon has been pressing ahead with plans to begin a trial on Jan. 26 of one of its high-profile suspects, a Canadian detainee named Omar Khadr. Mr. Khadr’s case has drawn wide attention, partly because he was 15 when he was first detained on charges of killing an American soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002.

Some human rights groups said Monday that they were alarmed by Mr. Obama’s vague timetable and lack of specifics in his remarks Sunday. They said they worried that the administration might yield to pressure to display its toughness in dealing with terrorism in its detention policies.

“The devil is in the details,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who has been pressing the new administration to publicly commit to immediately close Guantánamo.

Mr. Romero said he had grown concerned because transition officials had provided details of their plans for dealing with the economic crisis, but had yet to provide details for how they will close Guantánamo, which has brought worldwide criticism.

“Just like we need specifics on an economic recovery package,” Mr. Romero said, “we need specifics on a ‘justice recovery package.’ ”

WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.

This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush administration’s efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence developed on Iran.

Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.

The interviews also suggest that while Mr. Bush was extensively briefed on options for an overt American attack on Iran’s facilities, he never instructed the Pentagon to move beyond contingency planning, even during the final year of his presidency, contrary to what some critics have suggested.

The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.

Instead, Mr. Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions aimed at Iran, the interviews show, having concluded that the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to slow the uranium enrichment efforts. Those covert operations, and the question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.

The covert American program, started in early 2008, includes renewed American efforts to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad, along with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies. It is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.

Knowledge of the program has been closely held, yet inside the Bush administration some officials are skeptical about its chances of success, arguing that past efforts to undermine Iran’s nuclear program have been detected by the Iranians and have only delayed, not derailed, their drive to unlock the secrets of uranium enrichment.

Late last year, international inspectors estimated that Iran had 3,800 centrifuges spinning, but American intelligence officials now estimate that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000, enough to produce about one weapon’s worth of uranium every eight months or so.

While declining to be specific, one American official dismissed the latest covert operations against Iran as “science experiments.” One senior intelligence official argued that as Mr. Bush prepared to leave office, the Iranians were already so close to achieving a weapons capacity that they were unlikely to be stopped.

Others disagreed, making the point that the Israelis would not have been dissuaded from conducting an attack if they believed that the American effort was unlikely to prove effective.

Since his election on Nov. 4, Mr. Obama has been extensively briefed on the American actions in Iran, though his transition aides have refused to comment on the issue.

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama must decide whether the covert actions begun by Mr. Bush are worth the risks of disrupting what he has pledged will be a more active diplomatic effort to engage with Iran.

Either course could carry risks for Mr. Obama. An inherited intelligence or military mission that went wrong could backfire, as happened to President Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. But a decision to pull back on operations aimed at Iran could leave Mr. Obama vulnerable to charges that he is allowing Iran to speed ahead toward a nuclear capacity, one that could change the contours of power in the Middle East.

An Intelligence Conflict

Israel’s effort to obtain the weapons, refueling capacity and permission to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran grew out of its disbelief and anger at an American intelligence assessment completed in late 2007 that concluded that Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear weapons four years earlier.

That conclusion also stunned Mr. Bush’s national security team — and Mr. Bush himself, who was deeply suspicious of the conclusion, according to officials who discussed it with him.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate, was based on a trove of Iranian reports obtained by penetrating Iran’s computer networks.

Those reports indicated that Iranian engineers had been ordered to halt development of a nuclear warhead in 2003, even while they continued to speed ahead in enriching uranium, the most difficult obstacle to building a weapon.

The “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate, which were publicly released, emphasized the suspension of the weapons work.

The public version made only glancing reference to evidence described at great length in the 140-page classified version of the assessment: the suspicion that Iran had 10 or 15 other nuclear-related facilities, never opened to international inspectors, where enrichment activity, weapons work or the manufacturing of centrifuges might be taking place.

The Israelis responded angrily and rebutted the American report, providing American intelligence officials and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with evidence that they said indicated that the Iranians were still working on a weapon.

While the Americans were not convinced that the Iranian weapons development was continuing, the Israelis were not the only ones highly critical of the United States report. Secretary Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the report had presented the evidence poorly, underemphasizing the importance of Iran’s enrichment activity and overemphasizing the suspension of a weapons-design effort that could easily be turned back on.

In an interview, Mr. Gates said that in his whole career he had never seen “an N.I.E. that had such an impact on U.S. diplomacy,” because “people figured, well, the military option is now off the table.”

Prime Minister Olmert came to the same conclusion. He had previously expected, according to several Americans and Israeli officials, that Mr. Bush would deal with Iran’s nuclear program before he left office. “Now,” said one American official who bore the brunt of Israel’s reaction, “they didn’t believe he would.”

Attack Planning

Early in 2008, the Israeli government signaled that it might be preparing to take matters into its own hands. In a series of meetings, Israeli officials asked Washington for a new generation of powerful bunker-busters, far more capable of blowing up a deep underground plant than anything in Israel’s arsenal of conventional weapons. They asked for refueling equipment that would allow their aircraft to reach Iran and return to Israel. And they asked for the right to fly over Iraq.

Mr. Bush deflected the first two requests, pushing the issue off, but “we said ‘hell no’ to the overflights,” one of his top aides said. At the White House and the Pentagon, there was widespread concern that a political uproar in Iraq about the use of its American-controlled airspace could result in the expulsion of American forces from the country.

The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor, declined several requests over the past four weeks to be interviewed about Israel’s efforts to obtain the weapons from Washington, saying through aides that he was too busy.

Last June, the Israelis conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean Sea that appeared to be a dry run for an attack on the enrichment plant at Natanz. When the exercise was analyzed at the Pentagon, officials concluded that the distances flown almost exactly equaled the distance between Israel and the Iranian nuclear site.

“This really spooked a lot of people,” one White House official said. White House officials discussed the possibility that the Israelis would fly over Iraq without American permission. In that case, would the American military be ordered to shoot them down? If the United States did not interfere to stop an Israeli attack, would the Bush administration be accused of being complicit in it?

Admiral Mullen, traveling to Israel in early July on a previously scheduled trip, questioned Israeli officials about their intentions. His Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, argued that an aerial attack could set Iran’s program back by two or three years, according to officials familiar with the exchange. The American estimates at the time were far more conservative.

Yet by the time Admiral Mullen made his visit, Israeli officials appear to have concluded that without American help, they were not yet capable of hitting the site effectively enough to strike a decisive blow against the Iranian program.

The United States did give Israel one item on its shopping list: high-powered radar, called the X-Band, to detect any Iranian missile launchings. It was the only element in the Israeli request that could be used solely for defense, not offense.

Mr. Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said last week that Mr. Gates — whom Mr. Obama is retaining as defense secretary — believed that “a potential strike on the Iranian facilities is not something that we or anyone else should be pursuing at this time.”

A New Covert Push

Throughout 2008, the Bush administration insisted that it had a plan to deal with the Iranians: applying overwhelming financial pressure that would persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, as foreign enterprises like the French company Total pulled out of Iranian oil projects, European banks cut financing, and trade credits were squeezed.

But the Iranians were making uranium faster than the sanctions were making progress. As Mr. Bush realized that the sanctions he had pressed for were inadequate and his military options untenable, he turned to the C.I.A. His hope, several people involved in the program said, was to create some leverage against the Iranians, by setting back their nuclear program while sanctions continued and, more recently, oil prices dropped precipitously.

There were two specific objectives: to slow progress at Natanz and other known and suspected nuclear facilities, and keep the pressure on a little-known Iranian professor named Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a scientist described in classified portions of American intelligence reports as deeply involved in an effort to design a nuclear warhead for Iran.

Past American-led efforts aimed at Natanz had yielded little result. Several years ago, foreign intelligence services tinkered with individual power units that Iran bought in Turkey to drive its centrifuges, the floor-to-ceiling silvery tubes that spin at the speed of sound, enriching uranium for use in power stations or, with additional enrichment, nuclear weapons.

A number of centrifuges blew up, prompting public declarations of sabotage by Iranian officials. An engineer in Switzerland, who worked with the Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer Abdul Qadeer Khan, had been “turned” by American intelligence officials and helped them slip faulty technology into parts bought by the Iranians.

What Mr. Bush authorized, and informed a narrow group of Congressional leaders about, was a far broader effort, aimed at the entire industrial infrastructure that supports the Iranian nuclear program. Some of the efforts focused on ways to destabilize the centrifuges. The details are closely held, for obvious reasons, by American officials. One official, however, said, “It was not until the last year that they got really imaginative about what one could do to screw up the system.”

Then, he cautioned, “none of these are game-changers,” meaning that the efforts would not necessarily cripple the Iranian program. Others in the administration strongly disagree.

In the end, success or failure may come down to how much pressure can be brought to bear on Mr. Fakrizadeh, whom the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate identifies, in its classified sections, as the manager of Project 110 and Project 111. According to a presentation by the chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency, those were the names for two Iranian efforts that appeared to be dedicated to designing a warhead and making it work with an Iranian missile. Iranian officials say the projects are a fiction, made up by the United States.

While the international agency readily concedes that the evidence about the two projects remains murky, one of the documents it briefly displayed at a meeting of the agency’s member countries in Vienna last year, from Mr. Fakrizadeh’s projects, showed the chronology of a missile launching, ending with a warhead exploding about 650 yards above ground — approximately the altitude from which the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was detonated.

The exact status of Mr. Fakrizadeh’s projects today is unclear. While the National Intelligence Estimate reported that activity on Projects 110 and 111 had been halted, the fear among intelligence agencies is that if the weapons design projects are turned back on, will they know?

David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. Reporting for this article was developed in the course of research for “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,” to be published Tuesday by Harmony Books.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

By MARK MAZZETTI and CARL HULSE

---

If the United States and Israel hope to ever truly come up with a successful strategy for fighting extreme militarism and threats to their security, they need bigger imaginations.

Pretend just for a minute that you are a mainstream Palestinian person living in Gaza. You, like 66 percent of your fellow Palestinians, support some sort of peace process with Israel. You are fairly moderate and generally prefer peace to violence, but in 2006 you voted for Hamas in the elections. You didn’t necessarily agree with Hamas’s more radical rhetoric, but at the same time you found the status quo unacceptable. You voted for change.

Now in 2008, you are under attack. Israel has launched air strikes that make you afraid to go outside. Then their troops invade. You may not like how things have gone under Hamas’s rule, but at least they are there vowing to fight back against Israeli attacks.

It is baffling that Israel is unable to use its imagination to put itself inside the shoes of Palestinians and understand how Israeli actions are driving Palestinians toward supporting Hamas.

Hamas is a political entity. After winning the elections in 2002, it still faces threats to its power from other political factions. Its periodic rocket attacks could not possibly destroy Israel, but were intended to annoy and provoke; Israel has fallen right into the trap and has taken the bait. Why would Hamas provoke Israel?  Because Hamas knows that if Israel responds with military force, threatens Palestinians, and kills civilians, it will further radicalize Muslim opinion worldwide against the Israelis and strengthen Hamas’s position domestically with the Palestinian people.

The Israelis would do much better for themselves, strategically, to take a different approach. In the past, Hamas has indicated its willingness to negotiate with Israel. The Israeli government should take them up on this offer and make a good faith effort to talk and compromise. If Hamas engages Israel honestly, then perhaps some sort of agreement will materialize. If not, it will be clear to moderate Muslims and the Palestinian people that Hamas is standing in the way of peace, and not the Israelis. Ultimately, Hamas must answer to the Palestinian people, and obstructing peaceful negotiation when it is the will of the people is not a good political strategy.

By choosing to attack instead of talk, Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds across the world. The anti-Israeli sentiment that follows breeds tolerance for extremism and an environment that anti-Semitic militants ultimately thrive on. Losing the masses is a mistake the United States made in Iraq, a mistake it made in Afghanistan and a mistake Israel is making with Muslims and mainstream Palestinians.

Clearly neither Hamas nor Israel has much moral high ground to stand on right now. Hamas provoked Israel with rocket attacks, and is operating in densely populated areas to intentionally drive up the number of civilians killed by Israeli bombs. Despite the fact that these latest Hamas attacks didn’t result in any deaths, Israeli retaliations resulted in the death of more than 400 Palestinians, and 60 civilians. I can understand both why Israel did what it did and the criticisms of its actions.

The question we should be asking ourselves is what can America do to bring peace and stability? Vast majorities of the populations in every major Muslim country have a negative view of the United States, and a lot of that ill will is a result of our policy, which has basically been to sit on the sidelines and condemn Hamas at every opportunity.

Israel is a strong ally, and America should not abandon her. At the same time, we need a change. We need a policy that takes the high ground and Israel needs one that won’t draw the fire of the Muslim world, and that’s in its strategic interest. America should press Israel to seek peace, not war. The only chance Israel has to undercut extremism is through reaching out with their voices, not their bombers.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.  Chris is a MSHS graduate and former AP GO PO Student.

BY BARRY RUBIN

Monday, January 5th 2009, 4:00 AM

The war in Gaza is the first chapter of a new era in the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli conflict is far from the region’s dominant dispute. The Arab-Islamist conflict now overwhelms it – by a large margin.

Increasingly, Arab regimes know Hamas isn’t their friend and, though they won’t say so publicly, don’t see Israel as an enemy. No wonder: Israel is politically stable and economically prosperous. It doesn’t threaten to take over their countries, overthrow their regimes and stand them in front of a firing squad.

Radical Islamism, Iran-style, does.

That’s right. Arab nations’ prime 21st century enemy is Iran and its allies: Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iraqi terrorists. After destroying their own countries, they want to do the same to everyone else.

Up on the Lebanese border, where I just visited, things are quiet. Hezbollah talks big about its 2006 “victory” but knows how hard Israel hit it then. It’s not looking for trouble with the Jewish state now.

At the same time, Egypt condemns Hamas and urges Israel to smash the radical Islamist group. Lebanese friends tell me they fear that unless Israel and the West stop the Islamists, their country will be taken over in this new year.

The editor of the important Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, himself a Saudi, warns that Iran and Hamas – effectively at war with Egypt and Saudi Arabia – are the real threat to Arab security.

And the meeting of Arab states last week, instead of producing a condemnation of Israel or America, did nothing.

What was the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war’s big lesson? That unless Israel wins a clear victory, Islamists will be more aggressive. It’s the same thing the U.S. surge in Iraq demonstrates: pulling punches on terrorists doesn’t make them love you or be peaceable.

Of course, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is far from over: It will probably continue for decades. But that’s precisely the point. It’s an Israel-Palestinian battle, smaller and less strategically significant than this other half-century-long conflict, which involves the whole region.

This is also a conflict among Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, is still full of radicals but has worked recently to stop terrorist attacks against Israel and to create a stable society. The PA can’t and won’t make full peace with Israel, but the two sides do cooperate in reducing violence.

In contrast, Hamas wants permanent war on Israel, constant terrorism, and openly preaches genocide.

This is what the Obama administration must understand. The Arab-Israeli conflict is relatively unimportant today in regional terms. It is overwhelmed by a dangerous mix of other nations and issues: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon (on the verge of an Iran-Syria takeover), Islamism, terrorism and oil.

Barack Obama must understand that Iran and radical Islamists are out to destroy U.S. interests in the Middle East, expand their own influence and escalate anti-Americanism to murderous proportions around the globe.

Moderate Arabs – and the nations in which they have the most influence – live in constant fear of that happening. America can allay those fears – if it follows a policy mixing intelligence and toughness.

Rather than obsessing over the Arab-Israeli conflict, as many want Obama to do, job one for the new administration in the Mideast should be uniting America’s Arab friends alongside Israel against their common enemies: the fanatical Islamists.

A broad moderate Arab coalition, strengthened to resist the likes of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, will not only put the region on far more solid footing. It will help the Israeli-Palestinian mess take care of itself.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center (GLORIA) and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. He is author of “The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East.”

By Saeed Shah and Jonathan S. Landay / McClatchy

Current wisdom has it that if there had been a few less hanging chads in Florida in November 2000, the world would be a different place.

Al Gore would have won the presidency, the Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, and several hundred thousand people who perished in that war would be alive today. That conclusion is based on the generally unchallenged belief that Iraq is George W. Bush’s war: that he and a cabal of like-minded right-wingers conceived and executed the invasion for their own ideological motives. Or, as Frank Harvey, a research professor of international relations at Dalhousie University, puts it: “A few powerful ideologues exploited public fears (and international goodwill) in the aftermath of 9/11 to amplify Iraq’s WMD threat as a primary justification for an unnecessary, preventive invasion.”

That view, notes Harvey, “has emerged as the dominant narrative for explaining the U.S. attack. It represents the prevailing consensus running through dozens of the most popular books on the Bush administration, and hundreds of frequently cited (and widely circulated) scholarly articles, media reports and blog entries on the invasion. In fact, casual observers engaged in a cursory review of the literature will find the same thesis repeated (and usually defended) by prominent scholars, journalists and Washington ‘insiders’ on the left and right of the political spectrum.”

Harvey believes the conclusion is dead wrong. In a new paper for the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, he deconstructs the thesis and finds it “overlooks almost all of the relevant historical facts.” More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have. (more…)

December 23, 2008

By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON — Understanding isn’t the same as forgiving. The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand why they acted with such contempt for our Constitution and our values — but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.

The basic argument that they’re making deserves to be taken seriously. I don’t think either man would object to my summing it up in one sentence: We did what we did to keep America safe.

That terse formulation of the Bush-Cheney apologia leaves out important details. Cheney came into office with preconceived ideas about restoring executive branch powers and prerogatives that he believed had been lost after Vietnam and Watergate; Bush either shared Cheney’s views or was willing to go along. But the main narrative of the Bush presidency began with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists — the worst such assault on American soil.

In a not-for-attribution chat with a member of the Bush Cabinet a couple of years ago, conversation turned to 9/11. I said something like, “I can imagine what that day must have felt like for you.” The response was immediate: “No, you can’t.”

The official went on to describe the chaos and anguish — the shock of seeing the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapse into rubble, the fear that other hijacked planes might still be in the air, the gut feeling that the president and those around him were personally under attack. The official talked of how administration officials racked their memories to think of anything they might have done differently to prevent the 9/11 attacks. I doubt that anyone in the Situation Room actually quoted Malcolm X, but essentially a vow was taken to protect the country from another assault “by any means necessary.”

These were human reactions, understandable and appropriate at the time. The truth is that the administration had missed signs that an attack was brewing — most famously, the president’s daily brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But these portents were lost amid the avalanche of information that buries every president every single day. Anyone in Bush’s position would have been filled with grief, anger and resolve.

Initial reactions are supposed to give way to reasoned analysis, however. For Bush and most of his top aides, this didn’t happen until far too late.

For Cheney, apparently it never happened at all. In an interview broadcast Sunday, he invited Fox News’ Chris Wallace to “go back and look at how eager the country was to have us work in the aftermath of 9/11 to make certain that that never happened again.” People have since become “complacent,” he said, but the administration’s actions have “produced a safe 7.5 years, and I think the record speaks for itself.”

That record, admirably, includes the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the dismantling of al-Qaeda’s infrastructure and the killing or capture of some of the terrorist organization’s most important operatives. Shamefully, however, it also includes the violation of international and U.S. legal norms by subjecting terrorist suspects to indefinite detention and cruel, painful interrogation; the creation of a mini-gulag of secret CIA-run prisons abroad; and unprecedented domestic surveillance without court supervision — all justified, Cheney maintains, by a state of “war” that has no foreseeable end.

The Bush-Cheney record also includes the invasion of a country — Iraq — that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. This misadventure has claimed more than 4,000 American lives, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and grievously damaged our strategic position in the Middle East. In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News earlier this month, Bush claimed credit for vanquishing al-Qaeda’s forces in Iraq. When Raddatz pointed out that there were no al-Qaeda forces in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion, the president answered, “Yeah, that’s right. So what?”

Here’s so what: Bush and Cheney, understandably shaken by an unprecedented act of terrorism, declared and prosecuted a “war” without specifying who the enemy is. Rather than focus on the architect and sponsor of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, they turned away to lash out at others in pre-emptive blows that dishonored our nation’s most precious ideals.

History will note that the point of the Constitution is that the ends don’t always justify the means — and that nowhere in the document can be found the phrase “so what?”

December 22, 2008

By Ed Gillespie

As the year draws to an end and President Bush enters his final month in office, there is much commentary about the Administration’s record over the past eight years. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories assail and distort the President’s record and recycle myths and unfounded allegations that have been leveled for the better part of his two terms. Historical accuracy requires a response to the litany of attacks leveled against President Bush, and while there’s not enough space to respond to all of them, here are five of the most egregious:

Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush’s deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.

Reality:

President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

This reflected six consecutive years of economic growth from the Fourth Quarter of 2001 until the Fourth Quarter of 2007. From 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a remarkable gain of nearly 2.1 trillion dollars. This growth was driven in part by increased labor productivity gains that have averaged 2.5 percent annually since 2001, a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the same period, real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent, and there was a 4.7 percent increase in the number of new businesses formed. The current economic challenges, which the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively, threaten to reverse some of these gains – but the gains cannot be denied.

As for the current crisis, the President and his economic team have taken unprecedented actions to stabilize the financial sector and avert a collapse. While there are a number of causes of the housing and credit crises that are at the root of our current economic troubles, deregulation by the Bush Administration is simply not one of them. In fact, one of the circumstances that contributed to the crisis was the failure of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Bush long tried to subject to greater regulation. In April 2001, three months after taking office, the President warned in his first budget that the size of the two GSEs were a “potential problem” that “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.” In 2003, the Administration began calling for a new GSE regulator, and over the next five years, the Administration continued to call for GSE reform only to be accused by Democrats in Congress of creating artificial fears and advocating for ill-advised proposals. By the time Congress finally acted in 2008 to provide the oversight the President requested, it was too late to prevent systemic consequences. Had the Administration’s initial reform proposals been adopted, some of today’s turmoil in our financial markets may have been averted.

Myth 2: President Bush’s tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.

Reality:

There are not 116 million “wealthy Americans,” but that’s how many taxpayers benefited from the President’s tax relief. The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.

The economic growth spurred by tax relief also spurred growth in Federal tax receipts. In fact, the Federal Treasury realized the largest three-year increase of revenue in 26 years, and tax receipts grew more than $542 billion between 2000 and 2007. And yes, much of that money went to investments in health care and education.

President Bush provided more than 40 million Americans with better access to prescription drugs by creating the market-based Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And it is one of the rare government programs that actually costs less than expected. Projected overall program spending between 2004 and 2013 is approximately $240 billion lower, nearly 38 percent, than originally estimated, thanks to the market-oriented principles included at President Bush’s insistence.

Despite the heated rhetoric over children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) legislation last year, estimates from a 2007 Federal survey show that the number of uninsured children under the age of 18 actually declined by 800,000 from 2001 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, the number of people covered by affordable and portable Health Savings Account-eligible plans increased 35 percent. Additionally, since President Bush took office, more than 1,200 community health centers have opened or expanded nationwide, which has helped provide treatment to nearly 17 million people.

Federal spending on education has increased nearly 40 percent under President Bush. Additionally, Pell Grant funding nearly doubled during the Administration, which is expected to help more than 5.5 million students attend college in the 2008-09 school year, 1.2 million more students than were assisted by Pell Grants in the 2001-02 school year. This financial aid assistance also helps account for the fact that 66 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2006 enrolled in colleges, compared to 63 percent in 2000.

Perhaps more importantly, the President’s No Child Left Behind Act has delivered tangible results to students. Since the law was enacted, fourth-grade students have achieved their highest reading and math scores on record, eighth-grade students have achieved their highest math scores on record, and African-American and Hispanic students have posted all-time high scores in a number of categories, narrowing the gap between minority students and white students.

Myth 3: The President’s “go it alone” foreign policy ruined America’s standing in the world.

Reality:

Rarely can one see revisionist history occurring in the present, but this charge is nothing short of that. The United States acted with a multilateral coalition of partner nations to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after he failed to comply with the will of the international community, including numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions. To ignore this fact is not only a distortion of history, but it is also an insult to the service members of our coalition partners who sacrificed their lives to contribute to the success we are now witnessing in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, approximately forty countries are currently deployed with American forces, including every one of our NATO allies.

The President also created a worldwide coalition of more than 90 nations to combat terrorist networks by sharing information, drying up their financing, and bringing their leaders to justice. To date, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives with the help of partner nations. Furthermore, the Administration established the Proliferation Security Initiative, which now includes more than 90 nations, and other multilateral coalitions to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The President successfully pushed for expanding NATO membership, generated international pressure on Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, and organized the Six-Party Talks, which have resulted in North Korea committing to give up its nuclear weapons and abandon its nuclear programs. Verifying North Korea’s commitment will be a challenge, but at the most recent Six-Party Talks meeting, there was strong consensus among the five parties that North Korea must submit to a comprehensive verification regime that accords with international standards.

U.S. ties in Asia have been strengthened over the past eight years, and the Administration has built strong relationships with China, Japan, and South Korea, among others. We have signed an historic civilian nuclear power agreement with India, reflecting a fundamental change in our relationship. Pro-American leaders have been elected in Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern European countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kosovo treasure their relationships with the United States, and no president has done more to improve health and security in the nations of Africa. We have also strengthened cooperation with Latin America, including initiatives with Brazil on biofuels and with Mexico and Central America on fighting organized crime. Finally, when the President took office, America had trade agreements in force with only three countries, versus 14 today – with three additional agreements approved by Congress but not yet in force and agreements with three countries that are awaiting Congressional approval.

Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.

Reality:

Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the same war, and while the success of the surge in Iraq has been visible, we have also had a quiet surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has continuously and aggressively fought side-by-side with Afghans and our allies to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States has provided nearly $32 billion for security, political, and economic development assistance and the international community has provided more than $55 billion to Afghanistan since 2001.

An additional U.S. Marine battalion deployed to Afghanistan in November and they will be followed by an Army combat brigade of about 3,400 troops in early 2009. U.S. forces now total approximately 31,000, and are joined by nearly as many coalition troops. The United States and our allies are working with Afghanistan to help it nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army over the next five years, from 79,000 now trained to 134,000 in 2014.

We have also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams to ensure security gains are followed by real improvements in daily life, and we have helped local communities strengthen their economies and create jobs, deliver basic services, improve governance and fight corruption, and build or repair key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. More than six million children, approximately two million of them girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.

In this Global War on Terror, we do not have the luxury to fight on one battlefront at a time. To defeat the terrorists, we must fight them overseas so we don’t have to fight them here at home. Since 9/11, we have successfully captured or killed dozens of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in two dozen countries, removed al-Qaeda’s safe-haven in Afghanistan and crippled al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disrupted numerous al Qaeda terrorist plots against the U.S., including a 2006 plot to blow up passenger planes traveling from London.

Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

Reality:

Given the liberal media’s failure to acknowledge this Administration’s true record on alternative energy, conservation, and climate change, it’s not surprising this charge has stuck. But here are some irrefutable data points: From 2001 to 2007, air pollution decreased by 12 percent, and fine particulate matter pollution is down 17 percent since 2001. Ethanol production quadrupled from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 6.5 billion gallons in 2007, wind energy production has increased by more than 400 percent, and solar energy capacity has doubled. In 2007, solar installations increased more than 32 percent and the U.S. produced 96 percent more biodiesel (490 million gallons) than in 2006. The Administration also provided nearly $18 billion to research, develop, and promote alternative and more efficient energy technologies such as biofuels, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, and hydrogen.

This Administration has improved and protected the health of more than 27 million acres of Federal forest and grasslands, protected, restored, and improved more than three million acres of wetlands, and established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world’s largest fully protected marine conservation area (nearly 140,000 square miles).

Much of the misperception about the President’s environmental record is born out of the President’s withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, which did not include the effective participation of major developing countries such as India and China. Instead, the President worked to address climate change by launching the Major Economies Process, which convened the leaders of the world’s major economies, both developed and developing, to work on ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy security without harming our economies or giving any nation a free ride. Finally, the President set the country on course to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions below projected levels by 2025 and invested more than $44 billion in climate change-related programs.

Some other items that are infrequently mentioned about the real record of the Bush Administration but are worth noting: Teenage drug use has declined 25 percent; in 2007, the violent crime rate was 43 percent lower than the rate in 1998; between 2005 and 2007, the chronically homeless population decreased approximately 30 percent; funding for veterans’ medical care has increased more than 115 percent; and as of 2005, the most recent abortion rate is at its lowest since 1974.

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

More on RCP: Gas Prices Shouldn’t Set Our Energy Policy

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/myths_and_facts_about_the_real.html at December 22, 2008 – 04:44:29 AM

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There’s a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.

To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can’t quite put your finger on it …

“It’s like the set of The Office,” someone offers.

Bingo.

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt’s — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch?

But he doesn’t seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. (”They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.”) Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room’s décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It’s a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk. (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)

“It is not clear that the economy’s bottomed out,” he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) “And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered.” That worries him. Also Afghanistan: “We’re going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.

“And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation,” Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. “And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago.”

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That’s just for starters; we’ll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It’s unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama’s face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn’t sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

But crisis has a way of ushering even great events into the past. As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That’s why he’s here and why he doesn’t care about the furniture. We’ve heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We’ve observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity. (See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.)

The real story of Obama’s year is the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously marginal voters, harnessing the new technologies of democratic engagement, shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of leadership. “We always did our best up on the high wire,” says his campaign manager, David Plouffe.

Obama’s competence fills him with a genuine self-confidence. “I’ve got a pretty healthy ego,” he allows. That’s clear when he offers a checklist for voters to use in judging his performance two years from now. It’s quite an agenda. Listen: “Have we helped this economy recover from what is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Have we instituted financial regulations and rules of the road that assure this kind of crisis doesn’t occur again? Have we created jobs that pay well and allow families to support themselves? Have we made significant progress on reducing the cost of health care and expanding coverage? Have we begun what will probably be a decade-long project to shift America to a new energy economy? Have we begun what may be an even longer project of revitalizing our public-school systems?”

There’s more: “Have we closed down Guantánamo in a responsible way, put a clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our security and our Constitution? Have we rebuilt alliances around the world effectively? Have I drawn down U.S. troops out of Iraq, and have we strengthened our approach in Afghanistan — not just militarily but also diplomatically and in terms of development? And have we been able to reinvigorate international institutions to deal with transnational threats, like climate change, that we can’t solve on our own?”

And: “Outside of specific policy measures, two years from now, I want the American people to be able to say, ‘Government’s not perfect; there are some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the government’s working for me. I feel like it’s accountable. I feel like it’s transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a President and an Administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information.’”

Can he really achieve all that? Plenty of voters will be happy if he aces only Item 1 on his list. But the essence of both Obama’s strength and his promise is that, according to a recent poll, a strong majority of Americans believe he will accomplish most of what he aims to do. For having the confidence to sketch that kind of future in this gloomy hour and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful that he will pull it off, Barack Obama is Time’s Person of the Year for 2008.

I. Simple Competence
In some tellings, Obama’s journey to the white house started with his little-noticed but carefully nuanced speech against the Iraq war in 2002. In other versions, it began with his electrifying address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. Those moments blazed with potential, true, but something more was necessary: a certain appetite among the electorate. The country had to be hungry for the menu he offered, and in that sense, his path’s true beginning lay in the drowned precincts of New Orleans in the sweltering, desperate late summer of 2005.

Hurricane Katrina blew away the last gauzy veil from an ugly specter of executive incompetence in American politics. When the people of New Orleans needed leadership, the Republican Administration in Washington proved useless. The Democratic governor and mayor were pitiful. At long last, our government was united — but under an appalling banner of fecklessness. The moral bankruptcy of the spin doctors was laid bare: no soul remained gullible enough to believe that Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

After Katrina, demand collapsed for the very qualities that Obama lacked as a candidate: empty boasts, finger-pointing, backstabbing and years of experience inside a government that couldn’t deliver bottled water to the stranded citizens of a major U.S. city. Spare us the dead-or-alive bravado, the gates-of-hell bluster, the melodrama of the 3 a.m. phone call. A door swung open for a candidate who would merely stand and deliver. Simple competence — although there’s nothing simple about it, not in today’s intricate, interdependent, interwoven, intensely dangerous world.

See pictures of Barack Obama’s campaign behind the scenes.

See pictures of Obama on Flickr.

His official theme was change, but a specific kind of change: the nuts-and-bolts kind you can see and measure. Voters were invited to believe because Obama kept delivering the goods. Certainly he made mistakes and gave up on some ideas while doubling back on others — his promise to stick to the existing campaign-finance system, for example. On the whole, though, he was a doer. Obama told people that a black man could win white votes. In Iowa he proved it. He said a broad-gauge campaign could win in GOP strongholds; along came Indiana and Virginia and North Carolina. He declared that a new approach to politics would topple the old Clinton-Bush seesaw, and topple it he did. He sank the three-pointer with the cameras rolling. Made a speech in a football stadium feel intimate. Some might say these are not exactly Churchillian achievements, but in the land of the hapless, the competent man is king. In the end, his campaign e-mail list numbered some 13 million people, of whom more than 3.5 million put actual skin in the game — money, volunteer hours or both. Obama’s most formidable opponent, Hillary Clinton, tried to convince voters that he was all talk and no action, a vessel empty but for intoxicating fumes. Yet he was the one whose campaign ran like clockwork, while hers was a fratricidal mess. And by Nov. 4, the strongest party in the U.S. was no longer the Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it was the Obama Party.

II. Filling the Vacuum
“A presidential campaign is like an MRI of the soul,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. “And one of the great revelations of this process, certainly the most thrilling revelation to me, was to learn what a great manager this guy is. We had no way of knowing that when we started. When he decided to run, we had no political infrastructure at all. There was just a handful of us, and we were setting off to challenge the greatest political operation in the Democratic Party.”

Keep in mind that Obama, as Rudy Giuliani put it at the Republican Convention in September, had “never led anything, nothing, nada” — certainly not a sprawling organization spread from coast to coast. But he did have a philosophy of leadership, which he explains like this: “I don’t think there’s some magic trick here. I think I’ve got a good nose for talent, so I hire really good people. And I’ve got a pretty healthy ego, so I’m not scared of hiring the smartest people, even when they’re smarter than me. And I have a low tolerance of nonsense and turf battles and game-playing, and I send that message very clearly. And so over time, I think, people start trusting each other, and they stay focused on mission, as opposed to personal ambition or grievance. If you’ve got really smart people who are all focused on the same mission, then usually you can get some things done.”

Stop and look back at those last few words, because they are a telltale sign of Obama’s pragmatism. A persistent question during the campaign — it became the heart of John McCain’s message in the closing weeks — was whether Obama was some kind of radical, a terrorist-befriending socialist masquerading as Steady Freddy. As he builds his Administration, though, he is emerging as a leader who just wants to “get some things done.” (Read “The New Liberal Order.”)

Obama is a businesslike boss. He prefers briefing papers tightly written and shows up for meetings fully prepared. He expects people to challenge him when they think he is wrong and to back up their ideas with facts. He’s not a shouter — “Hollering at people isn’t usually that effective,” he explains — but if he thinks you’ve let him down, you’ll know it. “What was always effective with me as a kid — and Michelle and I find it effective with our kids — is just making people feel really guilty,” he says. “Like ‘Boy, I am disappointed in you. I expected so much more.’ And I think people generally want to do the right thing, and if you’re clear to them about what that right thing is, and if they see you doing the right thing, then that gives you some leverage.”

Again, take a second to reread, this time the bit where he says “people generally want to do the right thing.” Trust of this kind has been in short supply for many years in American politics, where the dominant attitude is that every disagreement is a sign of bad faith and every opponent is assumed to be malevolent. Obama’s attitude was ridiculed as kumbaya naiveté during the campaign, but trust proved to be essential to his victory. His campaign entrusted millions of volunteers with unprecedented authority to download information about prospective voters, to assign themselves to make phone calls and canvass their own neighborhoods and apartment buildings, and to keep the campaign abreast of their progress. A typical presidential effort is top-down, intensely protective of its data and strategies. Obama’s approach seemed to court mischief or even chaos. “There was a lot of snickering among the political pros,” says Plouffe. “They couldn’t believe that we were giving people we didn’t know access to our data and trusting them to handle it honestly. But it was enormously important because it made people feel that much more accountable: ‘These are my three blocks, and everyone’s counting on me.’”

See pictures of Obama on Flickr.

See the Six Degrees of Barack Obama.

Yes, Obama could talk — like nobody’s business — but talk didn’t win the election. According to the daily tracking polls, the tumblers clicked into place precisely at the moment the financial hurricane hit, when the wizards of Wall Street proved as incompetent as Oz and neither the President nor the leaders of Congress nor the Treasury boss nor Senator McCain could deliver a rescue package. When this group failure provoked a stock-market crash in early October, Americans asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Astounding as it would have seemed scant months before, their gaze fell on the one fixed point in the widening gyre: a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. (See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

III. Fear Itself
As White House Chief of Staff during the final years of the Clinton Administration, John Podesta became accustomed to short nights and emotional roller coasters. Still, he found it a bit strange to be headed to the airport in the predawn darkness of Nov. 5 — just a few hours after the election of a Democratic President. Was Obama really going to chair a major strategy session the morning after winning the longest and most grueling campaign on record? How about a day off?

Long before Election Day, Obama decided that an ordinary transition wouldn’t do. Given the shaky economy and two wars, he knew that the winner of the election — whoever it turned out to be — would face instant and daunting challenges. He wanted to be ready. “What I was absolutely convinced of was that, whether it was me or John McCain, the next President-elect was going to have to move swiftly,” Obama recalls. He deployed Podesta in midsummer to lead an unusually elaborate preparation for a possible Obama presidency. McCain accused him of overconfidence and vanity, of measuring the Oval Office drapes. To Obama, it was simply a matter of prudence. (See pictures from the historic Election Day.)

Podesta had long been planning the return of a Democrat to the White House, and his think tank, the Center for American Progress, was already preparing detailed briefings on conditions in the various departments of government. As the financial system went into free fall in September, Podesta’s team pressed the FBI to work overtime on security screenings of potential Obama nominees. Now, as he boarded a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago, Podesta carried a list of more than 100 candidates who had passed their background investigations and were ready for confirmation on Day One. Instead of taking a day off, the new President-elect celebrated his victory with a five-hour meeting.

Obama had been pondering whether he should step to center stage or wait in the wings as the turbulent last months of the Bush Administration played out. His aides were all over the map. Some advised him to go quietly about his business in Chicago and insist that America has just one President at a time. For Obama to succeed, they argued, the country needed to see his Inauguration as a clean break, a new sunrise. Others floated the idea of immediately starting the First Hundred Days, perhaps asking George W. Bush to appoint Obama’s choices to key offices so that they could get to work by late November.

Obama was leery of appearing to shoulder responsibility for problems before he had any real authority to fix them. Bush’s bank of political capital was busted, and Obama wasn’t about to take ownership of the toxic assets. On the other hand, he didn’t want to repeat the dysfunctional transition of power from Herbert Hoover to Roosevelt in the dark hours of the Great Depression. F.D.R.’s silence between his election and his Inauguration may have deepened the crisis. By 5 p.m. on Nov. 5, when Podesta walked out of that meeting — not 24 hours after the polls closed — Obama was far ahead of the normal transition process, having homed in on finalists for many of his key staff and Cabinet positions. But he hadn’t yet decided how public to be about it.

Within two days, however, events forced his hand. On Friday, Nov. 7, Obama convened a meeting of his economic advisers in Chicago, and the tone of their comments was chilling. The stock market was plunging; credit remained tight; fresh unemployment numbers were shocking. “There was just a very dramatic deterioration” in the days after the election, says Timothy Geithner, Obama’s choice for Treasury Secretary. On previous occasions when the group had gathered, someone could always be counted on to find potential upsides in dismal forecasts, while Paul Volcker, the 81-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve, reliably closed each meeting with a gloomy soliloquy. On this day, though, there was no positive scenario for Volcker to deflate. Everyone in the room was grim.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

Obama opened the meeting by reflecting on his dilemma: act now or wait until January? By the end of the session, he had concluded that, like it or not, he must “accelerate all of our timetables,” as he put it, “in appointments not just on the Cabinet but also our White House team, in structuring economic plans so that we can start getting them to Congress and hopefully begin work — even before I’m sworn in — on some of our key priorities around the economy, on laying the groundwork for a national-security team that can take the baton in a wartime transition.” There was no time for the “traditional postelection holiday.” Vacations would have to wait until Christmas.

Transition is such a gentle word. We make the transition from youth to adulthood or from the dinner table to the den. For Obama, though, the concept was freighted with danger. “He was very focused on the basic perils of the gap between the election and the Inauguration, at a time when the economy was clearly deteriorating and the markets were very fragile,” Geithner explains. In certain powerful respects, Obama felt compelled to begin his presidency immediately. Markets needed to size up his economic team and hear what he planned to do. Congressional leaders, contemplating a colossal economic-stimulus package, needed to know where he was headed. Military leaders, key allies and opportunistic enemies were all keen to know just how dovish the anti-Iraq-war President intended to be. Obama concluded that hanging back would create a dangerous leadership void in the short-term and compound his troubles come January. And nothing that has happened since that Nov. 7 decision — the crisis at Citigroup, the drama of the automakers or the assault on Mumbai — has made the transfer of power look any less perilous.

He could not have predicted when he set out to become President that he would face such circumstances. The distance from the birth of his campaign to these first days of his fledgling presidency could be counted in months but measured in light-years. When he announced his candidacy on a frigid morning in Springfield, Ill., in 2007, Iraq was a disaster, and the Dow was still headed upward past 14,000. So this moment was a test not only of his speed but also of his flexibility. Obama proved lithe, indeed, persuading Robert Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, to remain in his post and asking Clinton, a constant critic of Obama’s foreign policy views during their primary battle, to be his Secretary of State. Priority 1 was the economic team, however. There his task was to find a mix of people familiar enough to signal stability but fresh enough to promise change, and to design a stimulus strategy dramatic enough to inspire markets to swallow their panic. (See pictures of Obama’s White House team.)

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Obama delivered. Having promised to govern from the middle, he rolled out a bright purple team of economic advisers, neither red nor blue. Geithner had served in various posts under both Bush and Bill Clinton. As president of the New York Fed, he was well known to Wall Street but relatively unknown on Main Street — just the blend of experience and newness that Obama was seeking. His budget director, Peter Orszag, had fans across the political spectrum, and his in-house oracle, Volcker, was a Democrat who fought inflation alongside Ronald Reagan. Larry Summers, named to run the economics team from the White House, was a Clinton stalwart.

Unveiling these and other picks at a series of daily press conferences, Obama assured the public that he wanted to move fast, so fast that trainloads of money might be ready for him to dispatch across the country with a stroke of his pen on Inauguration Day. The idea of another wave of spending horrifies America’s surviving conservatives, but most economists support it — some with enthusiasm, some with resignation. Obama realized that the stimulus package could be a vehicle for launching his broad domestic agenda. His ambitious campaign promises — to reform health care, cut taxes for low- and moderate-income earners and steer the U.S. toward a new energy economy — had seemed doomed by the yawning budget deficit (some $200 billion a month, according to the latest projections). But call these projects “stimulus,” and suddenly a ship headed for the reef of economic disaster might sail through Congress flying the flag of economic recovery. With even Republican economists talking about hundreds of billions in new spending, the sky’s the limit. A dream of health-care reformers — electronic medical records — is now economic stimulus because Obama will pour money into hospitals for computers and clerical workers. His tax cut is stimulus because it puts spending money in the pockets of working Americans. His pledge to repair the nation’s infrastructure is a stimulus plan for construction workers, while his energy strategy is stimulus for the people who will modernize government buildings, update public schools and improve the electrical grid.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

 

Of course, the bullet points are easy to list; far harder is the task of spending vast sums — perhaps $1 trillion over two years — efficiently, effectively and quickly enough to spur the economy. Washington’s three goblins — waste, fraud and abuse — are watching with hungry eyes. Obama has cast Orszag as a flinty keeper of the purse strings, but he has no intention of letting his opportunity go by. “I don’t think that Americans want hubris from their next President,” Obama says, noting that McCain received nearly 47% of the vote last month. However, “I do think that we received a strong mandate for change. And I know that people have said, ‘Well, what does this change word mean? You know that it’s sort of ill defined.’ Actually, we defined it pretty precisely during the campaign, and I’m trying to define it further for people during this transition,” he says. “It means a government that is not ideologically driven. It means a government that is competent. It means a government, most importantly, that is focused day in, day out on the needs and struggles, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.”

IV. Into the Breach
More than 75 years ago, a new president took the oath of office amid economic catastrophe and admonished the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Today generations of Americans are experiencing a harsh tutorial in the true meaning of that resonant diagnosis. Fear is kryptonite to the economy, which cannot operate efficiently without broad and well-founded confidence — that wise investments will gain value, that balance sheets mean what they say, that contracts will be honored and bills paid.

The events of the past autumn produced the sharpest drop in consumer confidence ever recorded, and a similar wave of fear cratered credit markets. Obama notes the very real structural flaws in the economy, but he is also aware of the role that fear plays. “Nobody trusts other people’s books anymore. And people decide, ‘Well, I’m just going to hold on to my cash for a while,’” he explains. “And that compounds the crisis. And all that results in a contraction in lending, in consumer spending, which then has a real impact on Main Street. And so what starts off as psychological is now very real.”

Just like our banks and our carmakers, America’s shattered confidence is in serious need of a bailout. And the thing about competence is that it nourishes fresh confidence. “Yes, we can” is both an affirmation of optimism and the essential claim of the competent. When the slogan is rooted in a record of accomplishment — when tomorrow’s yes-we-can is backed up by yesterday’s yes-we-did — confidence and competence begin to feed on each other. This virtuous cycle of possibility isn’t the whole of leadership, but it is an important part and perhaps the element most needed in today’s sea of troubles. (See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.)

After the election, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart convened one last focus group to ask Virginia voters why a state that gave Bush an 8-point victory four years ago chose Obama by 6 points this time. Their responses clustered around the crucial connection between competence and confidence. They told Hart they were drawn to Obama’s self-assured and calming personality. They felt he was “honest,” a “straight shooter” — in other words, a person who does what he says he will do. Their confidence in Obama wasn’t starry-eyed; they hadn’t been swept away by his stadium speeches. They saw a man who can get some things done, at a time when so many of their leaders, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street, cannot. He made moderates feel hopeful, and even among many core Republicans who did not ultimately vote for him, Obama inspired admiration. Viewing these comments through the results of his national surveys, Hart discerned a surge of good feeling that he had not seen in a generation: “a sense of real hope,” he says, “and the kind of broad bipartisan support that has not been in evidence since the 1980 Reagan election.”

Obama has begun to turn his thoughts to his Inaugural Address. According to strategist Axelrod, he is looking for the right mixture of bracing and boost in a speech that will be “both sober and hopeful.” He may signal a new day by announcing a plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which aides say is in the works. As the gray Chicago sky frowns outside his conference-room window, Obama rehearses his message. Americans “should anticipate that 2009 is going to be a tough year,” he says. Then he adds, “If we make some good choices, I’m confident that we can limit some of the damage in 2009. And that in 2010 we can start seeing an upward trajectory on the economy.”

A few days after this interview, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reminded the country that some aspects of politics will never change. Government is a human enterprise, after all, and Obama, like everyone else, is bound by its limits and subject to human frailty. Nevertheless, if he has shown anything this year, Obama has made it clear that he knows how to write new playbooks and do things in new ways. Which is a compelling quality right now. His arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century — his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic. Perhaps it takes a new face to see the promise in a future that now looks dark. What’s in store for Obama’s America? “I don’t have a crystal ball,” he says. But the measure of his success in menacing times can be found in the number and variety of people who consider the question with eagerness alongside their dread.

—David Von Drehle with reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy / Washington

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.

Trial judge postpones pleas

Mohammed

Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy
December 9, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Confessed al-Qaida kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four accused co-plotters offered Monday to plead guilty to orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a move that could leave President-elect Barack Obama to decide whether to execute them.

The surprise turnabout came in what was meant to be a routine pretrial hearing.

The Pentagon seeks the death penalty for all five men. And the trial judge postponed any pleas until lawyers sort out two key issues at the first U.S. war crimes tribunals since World War II: whether two of the five men are mentally competent to join the others in admitting to their roles in the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil; and whether the 2006 act of Congress that created the war court allows accused terrorists charged in a capital case to submit guilty pleas, without a jury of at least 12 U.S. military officers present to hear them and the evidence.

Victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, among five the Pentagon sponsored to observe the hearings, offered opposing views on the prospect of executions.

“If there ever was a case that warranted the death penalty, this is the one,” declared Hamilton Peterson, who lost his parents aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

“They do not deserve the glory of execution,” said Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham died on the same flight, struggling with the hijackers to crash the airliner in a Pennsylvania field.

“We should ensure that these dreadful people live out their lives in an American prison, totally under the control of the people they profess to hate,” she added.

The defendants made no explicit mention of the death penalty, or “martyrdom” as Mohammed calls it, in an appearance before the tribunal judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley.

Instead, the judge asked each man whether he wanted to waive his right to challenge the charges, and whether he believed prosecutors could prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“I understand,” Mohammed replied, going first. “I hope that you will assign a proceeding in the near future, as fast as possible, to get over with this play.”

Mohammed earlier had declared his distrust of the system and said he would not distinguish among any of the Americans staging the trial – from judge and defense attorney to President George W. Bush and “the CIA, who tortured me.”

The spy agency has confirmed it waterboarded Mohammed into confessing to plotting a worldwide string of terror, before his transfer to the prison camps here two years ago.

Added Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh, accused of helping the Hamburg, Germany, suicide squad: “We the brothers, all of us, we would like to submit our confession.”

Nothing will happen soon. The judge instructed prosecutors to research and write a brief on whether the legislation that created the war court envisioned letting an accused plead guilty in a death penalty case.

Moreover, the judge said he would not accept guilty pleas from co-defendants Binalshibh and Saudi Mustafa Hawsawi until the court resolves questions on their mental capacity to stand trial.

The prison camp has Binalshibh on psychotropic drugs. He allegedly helped a Hamburg al-Qaida cell, whose members became some of the hijackers. The health issue of Hawsawi, the plot’s alleged financier, is contained in a still-classified memorandum his Army defense attorney filed with the court.

Mohammed appeared as his own attorney on Monday, his fourth hearing meant to set conditions for the joint conspiracy trial alleging the five conspired to have suicide squads hijack airplanes and then strike the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Ultimately, the commander in chief has the last say on execution, and the case involving Mohammed and his four accused co-plotters is not likely to be settled before Bush leaves office Jan. 20.

Judge Henley disclosed the five men made their offer, signed by each alleged Sept. 11 conspirator on Nov. 4 – Election Day – after prison camp guards arranged for a rare joint meeting of the group.

It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama saw paths around many of the civil-liberty dilemmas that President Bush faced when he launched a war on al-Qaeda around the world. The freshman Senator from Illinois believed, and often claimed, that the White House could and should have avoided the shame of Guantánamo Bay, resisted the urge to engage in torture and shunned domestic eavesdropping.

Such easy exits may be harder to come by now that Obama is preparing to take over as Commander in Chief. Over the past eight years, the Bush Administration has erected a new array of military detention camps, interrogation methods and spy programs of questionable legality. During the presidential campaign, Obama promised to dismantle much of that apparatus, arguing that the Bush Administration’s walk on the dark side had eroded freedoms at home and damaged America’s reputation abroad. But doing so will take more time and prove more complicated than some of his supporters may realize.

In some ways, it makes political sense to go slowly. Ever since 9/11, Obama’s party has been squeamish about walking point on civil liberties out of fear that Republicans would wrap such a move around their necks at election time. And so, though civil libertarians may holler, the Obama team is likely to put the emphasis on national security as it begins to explore options for undoing the policies of the Bush-Cheney era. Here’s a look at what the new President may seek to change and what he may leave in place:

Torture

Once he is sworn in, Obama could simply order a government-wide halt to waterboarding and any other questionable interrogation techniques that have been judged legal during the past eight years. The Executive Order would have to be sweeping and reach deep into the government’s darker recesses. That’s because the Bush team has written so many legal memos okaying various techniques for interrogators working at a wide range of agencies. Some of those opinions have been disclosed publicly, but an unknown number remain classified. Obama will need to direct his Attorney General to issue new legal guidance that supersedes all those legal opinions, seen or unseen, if he hopes to prevent a return to such practices in the future. Former federal prosecutor and onetime trial judge Eric Holder, Obama’s pick to lead the effort as the top man in the Justice Department, earned a reputation as a relatively moderate legal thinker when serving there as a senior official in the Clinton Administration. That concerns some civil libertarians. “If you leave these on the books, you leave a bunch of loaded guns that future Presidents and agency heads can pull out and shoot when they want to,” says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Guantánamo

Obama could fulfill his campaign pledge to close Gitmo by simply issuing an Executive Order. But that would pose the question of what to do with the 225 suspected terrorists detained there who would suddenly have no home. If brought to the U.S. for trial, they would fall under constitutional guarantees of due process, which includes the right to confront their accuser and review all evidence against them. That may not fly with top terrorism hunters, who rely on informants and classified evidence. Because some of the evidence looks to have been gathered during harsh interrogations that may now be regarded as illegal and therefore inadmissible in court, building criminal cases against some detainees may be impossible. That raises the danger of avowed terrorists walking away from U.S. custody on a technicality. “These are enormously complicated problems,” says Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution fellow. “It’s very easy to say, ‘Put everybody on trial.’ But we still haven’t figured out what our trial system looks like for these terrorism cases.”

And even if Gitmo is shuttered, that still leaves the matter of those militants captured more recently in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere whom Obama says he intends to more fully prosecute. Such knotty questions have led some experts to bet that while he will scale Gitmo back as quickly as possible, Obama won’t fully close it in 2009. They point out that the Bush Administration has already quietly discharged some 500 of the 700 prisoners who have been held there.

Obama may opt to release dozens of others and insist that the remaining handful of high-profile cases be heard in either federal or military courts in the U.S. Already dozens of Guantánamo cases are moving through the federal court system following a pivotal Supreme Court ruling in June, and the Bush Administration is grappling with two separate rulings from federal judges ordering the release of 22 detainees.

Renditions and Secret Prisons

There is no doubt that the murkiest corner of the shadow war on terrorism has been the CIA’s kidnapping suspected terrorists and shipping them to secret prisons around the globe–where obeying the Geneva Conventions is more an exception than the rule–a practice known as rendition. Unfortunately, some of those snatched by CIA officers were innocent. German citizen Khaled el-Masri was one such victim. El-Masri was vacationing in Macedonia in December 2003 when authorities arrested him on wrongful suspicions that his passport was fake. A tragic case of mistaken identity then played out. El-Masri has the same name as an al-Qaeda operative being hunted at the time by CIA officials, and they took custody of el-Masri in Macedonia. Operatives from the agency beat and drugged el-Masri before whisking him to a secret prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit.” Eventually el-Masri’s captors realized they had the wrong man and let him go, dumping him on a mountain road in Albania.

No one knows how many suspected terrorists have been grabbed by the agency over the past eight years. Already, the CIA has transferred at least 14 detainees from secret prisons to Guantánamo. Dozens or even hundreds of others may still be imprisoned at secret CIA facilities around the world. As many as 20 may have been victims of mistaken identity, a study by the European Parliament found. As part of a broader pledge to end torture, Obama has vowed to halt the practice of rendition. But whether Obama plans to abandon the offshore facilities where interrogations have taken place remains unclear. If he does, any detainees remaining there would probably need to be relocated–possibly to Guantánamo, where their legal status would be examined anew.

Eavesdropping

Obama may leave intact, at least at the outset, one of the most controversial elements of Bush’s war on terrorism: a secret snooping program that spies on some Americans without benefit of a court order. Shortly after 9/11, the National Security Agency began intercepting communications to and from the U.S. by suspected terrorists and confederates in their network. The White House alerted key members of Congress about the program, in part because the Administration was skipping the long-standing practice of obtaining judicial approval in advance for surveillance, as prescribed by a 1974 law. When the program became public in 2005, Justice Department officials struggled to structure it to adhere more closely to existing law, but how much it was actually changed remains unclear. Not all civil libertarians were satisfied, and Obama vowed during the campaign to end warrantless wiretapping. But he is unlikely to halt the program outright; instead, he will probably ask a team of legal advisers to recommend a new approach.

Even after all these policies are modified or abandoned, Obama will face lingering questions about whether anyone should be punished for Bush-era excesses. The feds are now probing whether CIA officials knowingly destroyed tapes of illegal interrogations in 2005, and officials at Justice are looking into whether the department’s lawyers acted appropriately when they wrote legal opinions that approved waterboarding and other unconventional interrogation methods. A similar Justice Department review of attorney behavior regarding the domestic surveillance program is also under way.

Lawmakers from both parties have called for accountability in all these programs, but neither Obama nor top congressional Democrats have signaled much appetite for prosecuting Bush Administration figures once they are out of office. An incoming President will need every vote he can get on economic and energy matters, and is unlikely to spend political capital on a divisive effort to assess blame for the missteps of a previous Administration. But civil rights proponents say a full review may be the only way to ensure that such government abuses do not happen again. Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says, “Criminal prosecution of some of the people involved does have a restorative aspect, and not just symbolically.” Obama will probably cooperate with congressional probes of Bush-era behavior. But he may find it trickier politically to go after officials who were, most likely, just following orders.

MUMBAI, India — Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a Jewish center, a movie theater and a hospital.

Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.

The Mumbai police said Thursday that the attacks killed at least 101 people and wounded at least 250. Guests who had escaped the hotels told television stations that the attackers were taking hostages, singling out Americans and Britons.

A previously unknown group claimed responsibility, though that claim could not be confirmed. It remained unclear whether there was any link to outside terrorist groups.

Gunfire and explosions rang out into the morning.

Hours after the assaults began, the landmark Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, next to the famed waterfront monument the Gateway of India, was in flames.

Guests banged on the windows of the upper floors as firefighters worked to rescue them.

Fire also raged inside the luxurious Oberoi Hotel, according to the police. A militant hidden in the Oberoi told India TV on Thursday morning that seven attackers were holding hostages there.

“We want all mujahedeen held in India released, and only after that we will release the people,” he said.Some guests, including two members of the European Parliament who were visiting as part of a trade delegation, remained in hiding in the hotels, making desperate cellphone calls, some of them to television stations, describing their ordeal.

Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told Sky News television that a gunman had ushered 30 or 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered them to put up their hands.

“They were talking about British and Americans specifically,” he said. “There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said, ‘Where are you from?’ and he said he’s from Italy, and they said, ‘Fine,’ and they left him alone.”

Sajjad Karim, 38, a British member of the European Parliament, told Sky News: “A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me.”

Before his phone went dead, Mr. Karim added: “I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement. We are now in the dark in this room, and we have barricaded all the doors. It’s really bad.”

Attackers had also entered Cama and Albless Hospital, according to Indian television reports, and struck Nariman House, which is home to the city’s Chabad-Lubavitch center.

A spokesman for the Lubavitch movement in New York, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, told the Associated Press that attackers “stormed the Chabad house” in Mumbai.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was trying to locate an unspecified number of Israelis missing in Mumbai, according to Haaretz.com, the Web site of an Israeli newspaper.

Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were reported killed.

The military was quickly called in to assist the police.

Hospitals in Mumbai, a city of more than 12 million that was formerly called Bombay, have appealed for blood donations. As a sense of crisis gripped much of the city, schools, colleges and the stock exchange were closed Thursday.

Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister for Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is, told the CNN-IBN station that the attacks hit five to seven targets, concentrated in the southern tip of the city, known as Colaba and Nariman Point. But even hours after the attacks began, the full scope of the assaults was unclear.

Unlike previous attacks in India this year, which consisted of anonymously planted bombs, the assailants on Wednesday night were spectacularly well-armed and very confrontational. In some cases, said the state’s highest-ranking police official, A. N. Roy, the attackers opened fire and disappeared.

Indian officials said the police had killed six of the suspected attackers and captured nine.

A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen said it had carried out the attacks. It was not known who the group is or whether the claim was real.

Around midnight, more than two hours after the series of attacks began, television images from near the historic Metro Cinema showed journalists and bystanders ducking for cover as gunshots rang out. The charred shell of a car lay in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, the mammoth railway station. A nearby gas station was blown up.

The landmark Leopold Café, a favorite tourist spot, was also hit.

Reached by phone, some guests who had been trapped in the Taj said about 1 a.m. that they had heard an explosion and gunfire in the old wing of the hotel.

A 31-year-old man who was in the Taj attending a friend’s wedding reception said he was getting a drink around 9:45 p.m. when he heard something like firecrackers — “loud bursts” interspersed with what sounded like machine-gun fire.

A window of the banquet hall shattered, and guests scattered under tables and were quickly escorted to another room, he said. No one was allowed to leave.

Just before 1 a.m., another loud explosion rang out, and then another about a half-hour later, the man said.

At 6 a.m., he said that when the guests tried to leave the room early Thursday, gunmen opened fire. One person was shot.

The man’s friend, the groom, was two floors above, in the old wing of the hotel, trapped in a room with his bride. One explosion, he said, took the door off its hinges. He blocked it with a table.

Then came another blast, and gunfire rang out throughout the night. He did not want to be identified, for fear of being tracked down.

Rakesh Patel, a British businessman who escaped the Taj, told a television station that two young men armed with a rifle and a machine gun took 15 hostages, forcing them to the roof.

The gunmen, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, “were saying they wanted anyone with British or American passports,” Mr. Patel said.

He and four others managed to slip away in the confusion and smoke of the upper floors, he said. He said he did not know the fate of the remaining hostages.

Clarence Rich Diffenderffer, of Wilmington, Del., said after dinner at the hotel he headed to the business center on the fifth floor.

“A man in a hood with an AK-47 came running down the hall,” shooting and throwing four grenades, Mr. Diffenderffer said. “I, needless to say, beat it back to my room and locked it, and double-locked it, and put the bureau up against the door.”

Mr. Diffenderffer said he was rescued hours later, at 6:30 a.m., by a cherrypicker.

Among those apparently trapped at the Oberoi were executives and board members of Hindustan Unilever, part of the multinational corporate giant, The Times of India reported.

Indian military forces arrived outside the Oberoi at 2 a.m., and some 100 officers from the central government’s Rapid Action Force, an elite police unit, entered later.

CNN-IBN reported the sounds of gunfire from the hotel just after the police contingent went in.

The Bush administration condemned the attacks, as did President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. The White House said it was still “assessing the hostage situation.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Rubenstein and Prashanth Vishwanathan from Mumbai; Jeremy Kahn and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt, Germany; Sharon Otterman and Michael Moss from New York; and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

Indian forces hunt for missing

Government blames foreigners for attacks

The wife of Balasaheb Bhosale cries at his funeral in Mumbai, India, on Thursday. Balasaheb Bhosale was a police official who died in the antiterrorism operation at a railway station. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Mark Magnier and Sebastian Rotella
Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2008

MUMBAI, India – Indian commandos rooted through two smoldering luxury hotels here this morning, searching for survivors, the dead, and the last of the gunmen whose choreographed rampage of terror through this cosmopolitan city spawned a mystery about their identities and motive.

The brazen attacks that also targeted transportation centers, a hospital and a Jewish community center killed at least 125 people and wounded another 325. Sporadic gunfire and occasional explosions continued to be heard in parts of Mumbai early today, and an unknown number of people remained missing.

Eight foreigners were among the dead, and the U.S. State Department said three Americans had been wounded. But most of those killed and injured were Indian.

By midmorning today, officials estimated that possibly 10 militants remained at large – one in the Taj Motel and four others in the Oberoi hotel, with another five holed up in the Jewish center.

They said 15 hotel guests, mostly foreigners, remained trapped inside a 21-floor wing of the Oberoi.

Ten hostages believed to be Israeli citizens were held at the Jewish center, where Indian security forces launched a counterattack as the city awoke. Black-clad commandos descended from helicopters, and sharpshooters opened fire from surrounding buildings. The outcome of the firefight was not immediately clear.

“We watched 24 commandoes surround the building,” said Bharat Phulsunge, a 28-year-old insurance agent. “We can hear gunfire and explosions from inside. It’s still very tense.”

Even as troops moved floor to floor through the besieged hotels liberating trapped guests, the Indian government was blaming foreign elements for the mayhem. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on national television Thursday, asserting that the organizers of the attacks were “based outside the country.”

In what was seen as a thinly veiled indictment of Pakistan, he warned India’s neighbors “that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated.” Other government officials were quoted in Indian media alleging that the squads of gunmen had charged ashore from rubber boats that fanned out from an unidentified mother ship.

In response, Pakistan’s defense minister condemned the Mumbai attacks and warned India to refrain from accusing its longtime rival of involvement. And some security experts warned that India has plenty of homegrown extremists who could be behind the violence.

Whatever their origin, it was clear the squads of attackers were well-prepared. The militants struck after months of reconnaissance during which they set up “control rooms” in the targeted hotels, according to Indian officials and an owner of one of the targeted hotels.

“It’s the opening of a new front, a strike in a place that causes surprise,” said Louis Caprioli, a former French counterterrorism chief. “And it is unique because it’s a military operation that leaves the security forces confused and disorganized.

“For the first time in the long time, you see the use of combatants who take hostages, like the Palestinians in the 1970s,” he said. “They were ready to die, but they were not suicide attackers.”

Past attacks on Indian targets here and abroad have been the work of an evolving, interconnected array of murky Pakistani extremist groups tied to al-Qaida and, sometimes, current or former Pakistani security officials. They include Lashkar e Toiba, which took part in a bloody siege of the Indian Parliament in 2001 and seems a prime suspect in this case, according to officials and experts.

“This is a group affiliated with al-Qaida,” said Sajjan Gohel of the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation.

“There are eerie similarities to the Parliament attacks.”

But Lashkar e Toiba has reportedly denied involvement. And antiterrorism officials warned against speculation because the evidence is limited. India has a history of violence by Hindus and criminal mafias as well as Muslim extremists.

Most of Mumbai remained in shock Thursday. Once known as Bombay, the city is home to India’s commodities and stock exchanges, which remained closed Thursday despite fears about the effect of the terrorist attacks on foreign investment.

In many neighborhoods, 80 percent of the businesses remained closed as police warned residents to stay home, where many followed the unfolding drama on television.

Simone Ahuja, an Asia Society associate fellow and founder of a video production house in Mumbai, said the choice of targets favored by foreigners was clearly a blow aimed at dislodging closer U.S.-India ties. And she said the damage done to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, a waterfront landmark that suffered bomb damage and whose giant towers were licked by flames, may leave emotional scars on the city.

“People are in tears watching their city fall,” said Ahuja, who shares her time between Mumbai and Minneapolis.

“This is like what happened to the World Trade Center. This will fundamentally change the mental and visual landscape.”

Meanwhile the attacks appeared to be petering out. Although occasional explosions and gunfire were heard through the night Thursday, military officials said that most, if not all, of the hostages at the Taj Hotel had been freed.

Benjamin Wittes

November 23, 2008

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came into office wanting to close the American detention operation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly two years later, Guantanamo is still there. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she wants to close it. Guantanamo will outlast her. Yet, to watch the post-election Democratic triumphalism, you’d think that Guantanamo is as good as shuttered. President-elect Barack Obama has reiterated his campaign promise to close it, and some self-described advisers talk as though he’ll wave a magic wand on Jan. 20 and a problem that has bedeviled this country for seven years will evaporate.

Closing Guantanamo won’t be easy, at least not if Obama means to change the substance of American detention policy rather than merely altering its geography. Obama could, to be sure, fulfill his promise simply by moving detainees to a different facility while continuing to hold them as “enemy combatants.” The challenge of closing Guantanamo would then come down to a series of logistical and administrative questions.

Solving the Guantanamo problem means making important decisions about detention policy in combating terrorism more generally: When, if ever, should the United States engage in preventive detention of terrorism suspects? If and when it does, should it treat them as enemy combatants under the laws of war or under some other body of law, perhaps a new detention statute? What rights should they have? What should the government have to prove about them, to what standard of proof, and in what sort of forum?

Notwithstanding the idea projected by some members of his camp that closing Guantanamo is simply a matter of will, Obama cannot just wish these questions away. They defy answers in the absence of a systematic and rigorous review of the detainee population itself, including the classified information about each prisoner. This process, carried out properly, will not take place instantly.

There are three major groups of detainees at Guantanamo, each presenting distinct policy problems. For starters, there are detainees who could face trial. Most people regard criminal prosecution as the best means of neutralizing terrorism suspects and justifying their long-term detention, and some people regard trial as the only legitimate means of locking up America’s enemies. But how big is the group that might plausibly face charges? And to what extent does its size depend on which forum the government uses for prosecution? Is it a much smaller group if America tries these people in federal courts or courts-martial than if it continues using President Bush’s much-derided military commissions? Without knowing the answer to these questions, one cannot accurately assess the costs and benefits of America’s trial options.

Second, roughly 60 detainees have been cleared for release or transfer from Guantanamo but are stuck there because of fears of mistreatment at the hands of their own governments. Will Obama have an easier time than Bush in persuading third countries to accept these detainees, particularly if he accepts a few of them into the United States? That may well be the case, but without serious diplomatic engagement over the question, we simply can’t know how intractable this problem will prove to be. The ruling Thursday by a federal judge in Washington that five of six detainees in one case were held unlawfully raises the additional question of how many detainees should simply be released.

Third and most troublesome are the detainees too dangerous to be released but who cannot face criminal charges. How many this group contains, if any, will ultimately shape Obama’s policy. Detainees who pose a grave national security threat might be unprosecutable for a variety of reasons: because of deficiencies in the criminal law as it stood in 2001, because evidence against them would not stand up in court, because the government might not have enough evidence to convict or because it obtained key evidence under coercive conditions.

If there are only a few such detainees, and the danger they pose seems manageable, those of us who have advocated a preventive detention system should reconsider our position. On the other hand, some human rights advocates acknowledge privately that they may reconsider their categorical opposition to preventive detention if the group proves substantial and the danger it poses too significant to ignore. Right now, we can only guess at this group’s size.

It matters enormously, in short, who each detainee really is. Only a true ideologue – and Obama shows no sign of being that – would develop a policy concerning Guantanamo without studying the population carefully and thinking these questions through.

It’s reassuring simply to assert that these cases present no tension between America’s needs and her values. But that judgment is at least premature and may well prove dead wrong. In the short term, it does an injustice to the outgoing administration, many current and former members of which have struggled with these questions over seven long years. It also disserves the incoming administration, which will soon inherit detainees who defy such sloganeering and whose handling will require wrenching choices with no easy answers.

Assessment comes as Petraeus takes charge of U.S. forces in region

Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
McClatchy
October 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – A growing al-Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

A U.S. official who participated in drafting the top secret National Intelligence Estimate said it portrays the situation in Pakistan as “very bad.”

Another official called the draft “very bleak,” and said it describes Pakistan as being “on the edge.”

The first official summarized the estimate’s conclusions about the state of Pakistan as: “no money, no energy, no government.”

Six U.S. officials who helped draft or are aware of the document’s findings confirmed them to McClatchy Newspapers on the condition of anonymity. An NIE’s conclusions reflect the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

The NIE on Pakistan, along with others being prepared on Afghanistan and Iraq, will underpin a “strategic assessment” of the situation that Army Gen. David Petraeus, who is about to take command of all U.S. forces in the region, has requested. The aim of the assessment – seven years after the U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan – is to determine whether a U.S. presence in the region can be effective and if so what U.S. strategy should be.

The findings also are intended to support the Bush administration’s effort to recommend the resources the next president will need for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at a time the economic crisis is straining the Treasury and inflating the federal budget deficit.

The Afghanistan estimate warns that additional American troops are urgently needed there and that Islamic extremists who enjoy safe haven in Pakistan pose a growing threat to the U.S.-backed government of Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

The Iraq NIE is more cautious about the prospects for stability there than the Bush administration and either John McCain or Barack Obama have been, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. will be able to redeploy a significant number of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan anytime soon.

Together, the three NIEs suggest that without significant and swift progress on all three fronts – which they suggest is uncertain at best – the U.S. could find itself facing a growing threat from al-Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups, said one of the officials.

About the only good news in the Pakistan NIE is that it’s “relatively sanguine” about the prospects of a Pakistani nuclear weapon, materials or knowledge falling into the hands of terrorists, said one official.

However, the draft NIE paints a grim picture of the situation in the impoverished, nuclear-armed country of 160 million, according to the U.S. officials who spoke to McClatchy.

The estimate says that the Islamist insurgency based in the Federally Administered Tribal Area bordering Afghanistan, the suspected safe haven of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, is intensifying.

However, according to the officials, the draft also finds that the Pakistani military is reluctant to launch an all-out campaign against the Islamists in part because of popular opposition to continuing the cooperation with the United States that began under Pervez Musharraf, the U.S.-backed former president, after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Anti-U.S. and anti-government sentiments have grown recently, stoked by stepped-up cross-border U.S. missile strikes and at least one commando raid on suspected terrorist targets in the FATA that reportedly have resulted in civilian deaths.

The Pakistani military, which has lost hundreds of troops to battles and suicide bombings, is waging offensives against Islamist guerrillas in the Bajaur tribal agency and Swat, a picturesque region of the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan.

U.S. officials said insurgent attacks on Pakistani security forces provoked the Pakistani army operations.

Beth Fouhy
Associated Press
September 27, 2008

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., left, and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., face off at a presidential debate at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., Friday. (Associated Press)

OXFORD, Miss. — John McCain accused Barack Obama of compiling “the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate” tonight in their first debate of a close campaign for the White House. The Democrat shot back, “Mostly that’s just me opposing George Bush’s wrong-headed policies.”

Obama said his Republican rival has been a loyal supporter of the unpopular president across the past eight years, adding that the current economic crisis is “a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by President Bush and supported by Sen. McCain.”

The two men clashed over spending, taxes, energy and — at length — the war in Iraq during their 90-minute debate.

McCain accused his younger rival of an “incredible thing of voting to cut off funds for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” a reference to legislation that cleared the Senate more than a year ago.

Obama disputed that, saying he had opposed funding in a bill that presented a “blank check” to the Pentagon while McCain had opposed money in legislation that included a timetable for troop withdrawal.

In 2002, befoere he was a member of Congress, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq, while McCain voted to authorize the war as a member of the Senate.

“You were wrong” on Iraq, Obama repeated three times in succession. “John, you like to pretend the war began in 2007.”

McCain replied that Obama has refused to acknowledge the success of the troop buildup in Iraq that McCain recommended and Bush announced more than a year ago.

The two presidential candidates stood behind identical wooden lecterns on stage at the performing arts center at the University of Mississippi for the first of three scheduled debates with less than six weeks remaining until Election Day. The two vice presidential candidates will meet next week for their only debate.

The 47-year-old Obama is seeking to become the nation’s first black president. McCain, 72, is hoping to become the oldest first-term chief executive in history — and he made a few jokes at his own expense.

“I’ve been around a while,” he said at one point. “Were you afraid I couldn’t hear you?” he said at another after Obama repeated a comment.

It was a debate that almost didn’t happen. McCain decided at the last minute to attend, two days after announcing he would try to have the event rescheduled if Congress had not reached an agreement on an economic bailout to deal with the crisis now gripping Wall Street.

The two men were pointed but polite as they covered most issues, although at least once, McCain sought to depict his rival as naive on foreign policy. That was particularly true when it came to Obama’s statement that it might become necessary to send U.S. troops across the Pakistani border to pursue terrorists.

“You don’t say that out loud,” retorted McCain. “If you have to do things, you do things.”

McCain also seemed eager to demonstrate his knowledge of foreign policy, recalling the names of three former leaders of the Soviet Union in one sentence.

Moderator Jim Lehrer’s opening question concerned the economic crisis gripping Wall Street. While neither man committed to supporting bailout legislation taking shape in Congress, they readily agreed lawmakers must take action to prevent millions of Americans from losing their jobs and their homes.

Both also said they were pleased that lawmakers in both parties were negotiating on a compromise.

McCain made a point of declaring his independence from Bush.

“I have opposed the president on spending, on climate change, on torture of prisoners, on Guantanamo Bay, on a long — on the way that the Iraq War was conducted. I have a long record and the American people know me very well … a maverick of the Senate.”

He jabbed at Obama, who he said has requested millions of dollars in pork barrel spending, including some after he began running for president.

As he does frequently while campaigning, the Republican vowed to veto any lawmaker’s pork barrel project that reaches his desk in the White House. “You will know their names and I will make them famous,” he said.

The stakes were high as the two rivals walked on stage. The polls gave Obama a modest lead and indicated he was viewed more favorably than his rival when it came to dealing with the economy. But the same surveys show McCain favored by far on foreign policy.

Both candidates had rehearsed extensively, Obama prepping with advisers at a resort in Clearwater, Fla., and McCain putting in debate work at his home outside Washington.

The two presidential hopefuls are scheduled to debate twice more, at Belmont University in Nashville on Oct. 7 and at Hofstra University in Hempsted, N.Y., on Oct. 15. Vice presidential contenders Sarah Palin and Joe Biden are to square off in a single debate Oct. 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.

Now for the Important Part:  Who Won?

Opinion #1:  McCain

 

Oxford, Mississippi — A few minutes after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama ended here on the campus of the University of Mississippi, I asked close McCain adviser Charlie Black whether Obama had performed as McCain’s debate team had anticipated.

“No, no,” Black said emphatically. “I never expected Sen. Obama to spend the entire debate on the defensive, and he did. He did.”

“John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are high in this country, and he’s absolutely right…”

“John is right we have to make cuts…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families…”

“John — you’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran…”

Add it all up, and Obama was undeniably, and surprisingly, deferential to a man who in the past Obama has said “doesn’t get it.” Moments after the debate ended, I asked David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, whether Obama had simply been too nice (not a question one often gets to ask in these situations). “The bottom line is, I don’t think the American people want us to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable,” Axelrod told me. “I think he made a very strong case, absolutely.”

Well, you wouldn’t expect Axelrod to admit that his guy messed up. But here’s a prediction: The next time McCain and Obama meet in debate, on October 7 in Nashville, start a drinking game in which you take a big swig every time Obama says, “John is absolutely right.” I’ll bet you get to the end of the debate without ever lifting a glass – Disclaimer from Kautzman  DO NOT DO THIS – JUST IN CASE HE IS WRONG, I DO NOT WANT TO ADVOCATE UNDERAGE DRINKING.

But Obama’s problem wasn’t just saying “John is right” too many times. He also let McCain control the discussion even when — especially when — the conversation turned to issues that play to Obama’s strength. The debate was scheduled to focus entirely on foreign policy and national security, but for obvious reasons moderator Jim Lehrer devoted the first half-hour to the current financial crisis. Polls show Obama with a pretty big lead on economic issues, and yet McCain was able to turn the discussion — ostensibly about the $700 billion bailout proposal — into an extended examination of federal spending and earmarks, two issues about which McCain has strong feelings and a good record. When McCain pointed out that Obama had asked for $932 million in earmarks — “nearly a million dollars a day for every day that he’s been in the United States Senate” — Obama answered weakly that yes, the process has been abused, “which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up.” Not his best moment.

When the debate came around to the topic of the evening, McCain outshone Obama on topics like Russia and Pakistan while hitting him over and over for his comments, made in earlier Democratic debates, that he would meet Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without precondition.” On Iraq, the two men fought to a draw, with McCain arguing that Obama was wrong on the surge and Obama arguing that McCain was wrong on the war. It seems unlikely they will change anyone’s mind about that.

The bottom line was that Obama did well enough, but McCain did better. A number of post-debate observers suggested that Obama might emerge the winner on these topics because he was able to stand alongside McCain and argue as an equal despite McCain’s greater experience. Maybe viewers will handicap the contest that way, but if they judge it straight, McCain will come out on top.

One odd thing about the debate was that it never touched on the fact that it almost didn’t happen. McCain’s go-to-Washington-to-fix-the-bailout-and-postpone-the-debate gambit was the talk of political insiders before the debate, but once the discussion began onstage, it nearly disappeared altogether. “Yes, I went back to Washington, and I met with my Republicans in the House of Representatives,” McCain said at one point. (How surprised those House Republicans will be to learn that they are McCain’s Republicans.) But after that brief remark, McCain never mentioned it again, nor did Obama.

Perhaps that’s because the fact that the debate was held, and the world didn’t end, showed that there was no need to postpone it, but the fact that progress had been made in Washington showed that McCain was right to abandon his debate prep to play a role in the bailout talks. Both McCain and Obama turned out to be half right and half wrong.

And in the end, what a mistake it would have been for McCain to have stayed away from this debate. Several hours before it began, when it was finally clear that there was going to be a debate at all, the Obama campaign sent an e-mail to reporters attempting to lower expectations for their man’s performance. Nobody paid much attention; it was, after all, an entirely unremarkable bit of pre-spin. But in this case, it turned out to be right.

 

Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Opinion #2:  Obama

Obama Wins Debate On Tactics and Strategies

Related stories War on Terrorism

Lee Keath
Associated Press
September 20, 2008

CAIRO, Egypt – Al-Qaida threatened major new attacks in Afghanistan and dismissed setbacks in Iraq, vowing to continue its fight in a video marking the Sept. 11 attacks, released Friday more than a week after the anniversary.

The lag in release, apparently due to problems in militant Web sites where al-Qaida posts its videos, raised questions among counterterror specialists over whether the terror network’s propaganda machine was faltering.

The delay deflated what is usually a media splash for al-Qaida. In previous years, it released a string of videos on the attacks’ anniversary, featuring leaders trumpeting triumphs. Osama bin Laden spoke in one last year, making his first appearance in nearly three years.

Al-Qaida had promised a similar event this year, announcing in a Sept. 8 Web advertisement that it would release a video that would bring joy to its followers.

But soon after, the Islamic militant Web forums traditionally used by al-Qaida to post such videos went down and have remained off. The reason is not known.

The 90-minute video, titled “The Results of Seven Years of Crusades,” was finally released Friday, according to two U.S. groups that monitor militant messages.

It features speeches by bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and other top figures in the terror network, as well as the final testament of Ahmed al-Ghamdi, one of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 attack.

The problems in posting the anniversary video, usually the most eagerly awaited among al-Qaida’s sympathizers, raised eyebrows.

“The late timing is certainly curious since they made such a big deal of the announcement,” said Evan F. Kohlman, director of Globalterroralert.com, a private terrorism research group.

“They made it seem this was something big, but in the end it turned out to be all bark and no bite,” he told the Associated Press. “They could be having problems in the production line.”

Analysts have long seen al-Qaida’s media arm, Al-Sahab, as a key tool for rallying the network’s followers and sympathizers, churning out videos and audios even though top leaders are in hiding, apparently in the mountainous border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

David Heyman, at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed to recent Pakistani military sweeps in the border region. “It’s possible some of those (personnel or facilities) associated with video production have been damaged or destroyed,” he said.

New technology used in Iraq and Afghanistan to hunt down and kill terrorists may inject itself into the presidential race.

Tim Rutten

September 13, 2008

Friday, The Times’ Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes reported that the United States has escalated its war against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies by “deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq.”

It’s a story whose significance may extend well beyond the benighted hills and valleys of Pakistan’s violent Pashtun hinterlands and onto the hustings of our current presidential campaign. Coupled with Thursday’s report in the New York Times that President Bush has signed a secret order permitting Afghanistan-based U.S. special operations forces to cross into Pakistan without Islamabad’s permission, the odds of an “October surprise” that could influence the general election have risen appreciably.

U.S. officials also told The Times that the new surveillance systems allow the operators of the unmanned Predators to locate and identify individual human targets “even when they are inside buildings. … The technology gives remote pilots a means beyond images from the Predator’s lens of confirming a target’s identity and precise location.”

The Times’ story confirms the most sensational revelation contained in Bob Woodward’s new book, “The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2007,” which was published this week. Woodward revealed the technology’s existence but, heeding requests from intelligence officials, declined to describe its operations except to say that it had allowed U.S. forces to locate and kill decisive numbers of senior Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi insurgents. In what may be the book’s most controversial claim, Woodward argues that the secret technology and the so-called Anbar Awakening — in which counterinsurgency techniques developed by the Marines won over tribal leaders in that crucial Sunni-dominated province — had as much or more to do with stabilizing Iraq as the “surge” in U.S. troop numbers.

Beyond the purely military considerations, there are potentially significant political implications. First and most obvious is the question of the surge’s efficacy. The answer matters, particularly to John McCain, who has been one of the surge’s most resolute supporters. If it turns out that it was only one — and, perhaps, the least consequential — in a confluence of successful American initiatives, then McCain could go from steadfast to stubborn in voters’ minds.

The real wild card pops up if this new surveillance technology allows U.S. forces to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Bush wouldn’t be human if he didn’t desperately want to see the Al Qaeda warlord dealt with before inauguration day 2009. Moreover, as Woodward writes, the president frequently relishes the death of individual extremists and insurgents in a way that even our professional soldiers find striking. Then-American commander in Iraq Gen. George W. Casey Jr. “told a colleague in private that he had the impression that Bush reflected the ‘radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, “Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed.” ‘ Since the beginning, the president had viewed the war in conventional terms, repeatedly asking how many of the various enemies had been captured or killed.”

If U.S. special operations forces capture or kill Bin Laden, or if a CIA technician pushes a button and puts a Hellfire missile between his eyes, Bush will have made good on the vows he made seven years ago to bring the Al Qaeda leader to some sort of justice. In the eyes of many who supported him over the years, that would allow the president to leave office with at least part of his historical reputation intact.

There also are many Republican activists who must hope that an October surprise involving Bin Laden would give McCain — unswerving supporter of the war and advocate of a muscular, hard-line foreign policy — a boost by association. At the very least, anything that makes his connection to his party’s now dismally unpopular president less of a stigma helps the GOP candidate.

Still, it’s also possible that this particular October surprise might also help Barack Obama, at least at the margins, which is where this election increasingly looks to be decided. The Democratic nominee, after all, opposed going to war in Iraq, in part because it was a distraction from the conflict with the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda, which had, after all, committed the 9/11 atrocities. If a military technology heretofore monopolized by operations in Iraq finally brings Bin Laden to answer for his crimes, Obama and his supporters can argue that the war in Iraq delayed the day of reckoning in Afghanistan.

That’s the thing about surprises, no matter what the month: The consequences frequently are as unlooked-for as the event.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

 

Jamie Barnett
The Washington Post
July 28, 2008

Did you know that your safety and security depend on gay men and lesbians?

An estimated 65,000 gay men and lesbians serve in the U.S. armed forces, though by law they cannot be open about their sexuality. As we fight two wars, our military is stretched thin. Those gay and lesbian soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and members of the Coast Guard are essential.

Without them, we would stretch to a dangerous point the length of time troops must spend in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without them, we would lose crucial military leadership, expertise and skills. Without them, we would have a hard time meeting our military commitments worldwide.

A hearing of a House Armed Services subcommittee this week offered a critical opportunity to break the silence surrounding how military preparedness has been hurt by the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay men and lesbians from serving openly. The military has spent more than $363 million since 1994 to throw out gay men and lesbians whose expertise we desperately need, including expensively trained and hard-to-recruit linguists, jet pilots, cyber-warriors, doctors and combat-tested master sergeants. This purging of talent takes place at the same time the military, in order to meet its manpower quotas, feels compelled to increase the number of waivers it grants to people who have had problems with the law – in some instances almost twice as many as in years past.

These patriotic gay and lesbian warriors want to serve. Yes, some “out” themselves to leave the service, usually because they have been made to feel unwelcome, unappreciated or even unsafe in their units. An estimated 3,000 gay service members depart each year rather than continue to serve under a policy that forces them to deceive their fellow warriors and to contradict the honor and integrity that are core values in our services. Those members who stay make an incredibly difficult personal sacrifice.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” also damages our nation’s ability to recruit the best and the brightest. Competing with industry is hard enough already. The military estimates that only three in 10 high school graduates are qualified to serve; the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy further reduces the pool of eligible recruits. And would you want to serve when you have to hide an essential part of yourself or would be unable to tell the chain of command about discrimination or harassment without risking your career?

Some fear a backlash from heterosexual service members, but I don’t. I grew up in Mississippi and attended segregated schools until I was a sophomore in high school. Integration was tumultuous, but it led to respect, understanding and, ultimately, a greater opportunity for blacks and whites alike to succeed. I believe integration of lesbians and gay men in the military will be easier: It has already taken place. Sadly, we just don’t recognize the gay service members among us for who they are.

It is up to Congress and the president to craft policy on gay men and lesbians serving in the military, but it is the responsibility of senior military commanders to advise our nation’s leaders on how law and policy affect military readiness. I raised this issue in 2003 when a task force I served on worked on the Navy’s diversity strategy. Senior leaders must state plainly how “don’t ask, don’t tell” affects recruiting, retention and our ability to develop essential military skills. They should speak up about how it affects military honor and integrity. It is our duty, something military leaders understand well, to speak openly of how “don’t ask, don’t tell” injures our military and weakens our preparedness.

Larry Eichel
Philadelphia Inquirer
July 18, 2008

What Barack Obama is to do in the coming days sounds like a no-brainer for a presumptive nominee with limited foreign-policy experience.

Go overseas. Visit the troops. Drop by the Middle East. Hobnob with major European leaders. Try to avoid gaffes. Look presidential.

Except that historians say no one in his position has done it before.

Not Jimmy Carter in 1976. Or Ronald Reagan in 1980. Or Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000.

Then again, none of them was trying to get elected president in a time of war.

“If Obama says he represents a new politics, he’s certainly smashing an old paradigm by going,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, of Rice University. “And for 10 days, he’ll own the media. It’s gigantic for him.”

The Democratic candidate, in his continuing attempt to establish his national-security credentials in a post-Sept. 11 world, is embarking on an expedition that reportedly will take him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and Britain.

Exactly when he’s going and where isn’t altogether clear. For reasons of security, official details have been closely guarded. It is known that the three main network news anchors will be with him next week.

Many analysts have described the journey as a savvy move in Obama’s campaign against Republican John McCain – even though it comes with risks attached.
“This is a high-stakes trip,” said veteran Democratic political consultant Robert Shrum. “But voters understand that for America to be strong in the world it’s important to have a president who handles himself well and is liked and admired overseas. And I think that’s what we’ll see with Obama.”

Republican strategist John Feehery highlighted the potential downsides.

“It diverts people from the big issue in the campaign, which is the economy, and it elevates the issues of experience and credentials and whom Americans trust on Iraq, which are strengths for McCain and not Obama,” Feehery said. “This is fraught with peril for him.”

By traveling overseas and visiting the war zones – that part is considered official Senate business, the rest a campaign trip – Obama is trying to address the reservations some voters have about his limited national security resume.

In a Washington Post/ABC News poll out this week, McCain outscored Obama 63 percent to 26 percent on which candidate has better knowledge of world affairs.

Almost three-quarters of respondents said McCain would be a good commander in chief; fewer than half said the same of Obama.

Such voter concerns are among the most significant drags on candidacy of Obama, even though he leads in the polls, and the trip is one way to quiet them.

This assumes, of course, that his performance abroad is seen as appropriate – not acting as if he already were president, or being overly critical of U.S. policy on foreign soil, or getting embroiled in local disputes – and free of mistakes.

The latter is not a given, as McCain demonstrated in March. The presumptive Republican nominee, in Iraq on a Senate trip, made a widely reported misstatement, saying that Iran was helping al-Qaida operatives in Iraq rather than Shiite extremists.

McCain’s error, which he corrected after a helpful whisper from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., had little lasting impact. But that trip didn’t get the attention this one will.

“If all goes well for Obama, he’ll be able to start chipping away at McCain’s advantages on foreign policy and national security experience,” said Bruce Buchanan, an expert on presidential politics at the University of Texas. “It’s also a way to get the attention of a somnambulant (American) public in the middle of the summer.”  (On a side note:  “somnambulant” is such a cool word that I will give the first person to use it correctly in class discussions on the first day 20 pts. extra credit – Kautzman)

In another time, Obama might have reason to worry about getting a too-enthusiastic response overseas. Foreign support, particularly from Europeans, has not always been seen as a plus for U.S. presidential candidates. In 2004, Democrat John Kerry was ridiculed for having French relatives and roots.

But now the image of the U.S. in the world is not good, and analysts say Americans are eager to see it improve. So pictures of adoring crowds abroad, should they materialize, might be a political asset at home.

In the Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Obama beat McCain 2-1 when voters were asked which candidate would do more for the U.S. image internationally.

Republicans say Obama was goaded into this trip, at least part of it.

Two months ago, the McCain campaign started providing a count, updated daily, of how long it had been since Obama had been to Iraq (now more than 920 days) as well as constant reminders that he’d never been to Afghanistan. McCain even offered to accompany Obama to Iraq.

Beyond that, McCain’s supporters claim that the visit to Iraq is pure show for Obama; he pledged again this week to withdraw the bulk of U.S. troops within 16 months of taking office.

“Let’s drop the pretense that this is a fact-finding trip and call it what it is: the first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas,” Jill Hazelbaker, McCain’s spokeswoman, said on Fox News on Thursday.

McCain, who said Thursday that he welcomes Obama’s travels, has made several foreign trips since announcing presidential candidacy 15 months ago, most of them on Senate business.

In the last month, he’s made campaign visits to Canada, Colombia and Mexico, trying to highlight his ability to deal with foreign leaders and concerns.

He hasn’t, however, done anything as big as what Obama is about to do.

“It’s a huge event and probably a net plus for Obama,” said Allan Lichtman, a political historian at American University. “McCain couldn’t duplicate it because he wouldn’t get the same kind of reception abroad.”

“It is a gamble, but one worth the risk,” Buchanan said. “To shoot for the job of president is the biggest gamble in American politics.”

David S. Broder
The Washington Post
July 10, 2008

Just shy of eight years after they squared off in the Florida recount battle, James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher have joined forces to clean up one of the ugly legacies of the Vietnam War: the misguided piece of legislation called the War Powers Act.

Passed in 1973 when Congress was mightily frustrated with the undeclared war in Southeast Asia, that statute is proof of the adage that hard cases make bad law. Cases don’t come any harder than Vietnam, and the War Powers Act has turned out to be one of the worst bills ever to reach the president’s desk and be signed into law.

Its constitutionality is suspect, but no one has ever found a way to test it in court. Now Baker and Christopher, both former secretaries of state before they became lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore, respectively, in the 2000 struggle over Florida’s decisive electoral votes, have found common cause as co-chairmen of a National War Powers Commission created by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

When I went to see the two men during their visit to Washington, D.C., this week, I found no lingering sense of the partisan animosities that marked their Florida encounter. Instead, they communicated a shared passion to help the next president and Congress find a way to solve a problem that has vexed the capital since the early days of the Republic.

The Founders left a ton of confusion about a pretty important question: Who has the authority to make war? Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to declare war, but Article II makes the president the commander in chief. Nowhere does it say where the authority of one stops and the other begins.

The War Powers Act tried to resolve the question by putting a time limit on the president’s ability to deploy troops into a combat zone, but no president has accepted as legitimate that limitation on his authority, and Congress has never tried to enforce it.

Baker and Christopher told me that as they dug into the issue, they and their fellow commission members quickly concluded there was no way to nudge the Supreme Court into settling the issue. The court has an aversion to arbitrating a “political question” arising from a conflict between the elected branches.

But Baker and Christopher were reluctant to accept the status quo, in part because, as lawyers, it offends them to have a law that no one takes seriously governing a vital area of public policy.

Instead, they focused on the question of how to encourage substantive discussions between the branches before the weighty decision is made to put troops into combat. Their proposed substitute is called “The War Powers Consultation Act.”

It calls on the president to consult with key legislators before sending troops into “significant armed conflict,” defined as a situation in which fighting could last more than a week. It creates a Joint Congressional Consultation Committee, composed of leaders of both parties and senior members of six key committees, and it guarantees that the committee and its staff have access to all the relevant intelligence the president sees.

It requires Congress to vote up or down on a deployment within 30 days, and it permits a cutoff of funds for deployments disapproved by two-thirds of the House and Senate.

That complex procedure, Baker said, is designed to preserve the constitutional authority of both the president and Congress. It avoids some of the practical and legal infirmities of the current War Powers Act. But as he readily conceded, “You can’t legislate trust,” and without trust, no set of procedures can be guaranteed to work.

It could be argued that if there were trust between the leaders of the elected branches – as there has been for substantial periods of our history but not in recent years – you would need no statute to replace the War Powers Act.

But Baker and Christopher argue that with a new president and a new Congress arriving in January, agreement on a workable substitute for the War Powers Act could, in itself, be a confidence-building step.

I have trouble seeing this as a high priority on the 2009 agenda. But I do think the Florida antagonists have devised a clever way to signal a healthy change toward bipartisanship in foreign policy.

April 20, 2008

Message Machine

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

 [What was it that Eisenhower said about the "Military Industrial Complex"?  Kautzman]

Ex-president’s plans to meet with Hamas leaders controversial

Joel Greenberg
Chicago Tribune
April 14, 2008

JERUSALEM – Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is getting a cool reception in Israel, where he arrived Sunday at the start of a nine-day Middle East tour that he said would likely include a meeting with Hamas leaders in Syria.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace accord, is being shunned by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. However, Carter met on Sunday with President Shimon Peres, whose position is ceremonial.

Carter also plans to travel to the West Bank and to meet the leaders of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan on what the Atlanta-based Carter Center called a “study mission” to support Middle East peace efforts.

A spokesman for Olmert declined to comment on the Carter trip, but other Israeli officials said the reason for the cold shoulder here was Carter’s plan to meet Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Damascus, a move that has been criticized by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The United States and Israel consider Hamas a terrorist organization and are boycotting the militant Islamic group, which has carried out dozens of suicide bombings and whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction. U.S. and Israeli policy is to isolate Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and pursue peace efforts with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who favors a negotiated settlement with Israel.

One Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that high-level meetings here with Carter before he goes on to meet Hamas leaders would have “sounded like we are sending a message,” when “we don’t want anything to do with them.”

Carter, who met Sunday with the parents of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas militants in Gaza, told the ABC News program “This Week” that “it’s likely that I will be meeting with the Hamas leaders” in Syria, where he is to see President Bashar Assad.

“I think there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that if Israel is ever going to find peace with justice concerning the relationship with their next-door neighbors, the Palestinians, that Hamas will have to be included in the process,” Carter said. “I think someone should be meeting with Hamas to see what we can do to encourage them to be cooperative.”

Mohammed Nazzal, a Hamas official in Syria, said the group “welcomes the request” from Carter to see Mashaal, and that the meeting would take place Friday. It would be the first public contact between a prominent American and Hamas officials since the Rev. Jesse Jackson met Mashaal in Syria in 2006.

President Supports Suspending Pullout Of Forces in Iraq
By Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 10, 2008; A01

President Bush plans to announce today that he will cut Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, returning rotations to where they were before last year’s troop buildup in an effort to alleviate the tremendous stress on the military, administration officials said.

The move is in response to intense pressure from service commanders who have expressed anxiety about the toll of long deployments on their soldiers and, more broadly, about the U.S. military’s ability to confront unanticipated threats. Bush will announce the decision during a national speech, in which aides said he will also embrace Army Gen. David H. Petraeus’s plan to indefinitely suspend a drawdown of forces.

The twin decisions may set the course for U.S. policy in Iraq through the fall and perhaps for the rest of Bush’s presidency. Frustrated by their inability to force Bush to shift direction since they took over Capitol Hill more than a year ago, congressional Democrats began coalescing behind a strategy of trying to force the Iraqis to shoulder more of the costs of the war and reconstruction. Key Republicans signaled support for the approach.

The political maneuvering came as Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker completed two days of lengthy congressional hearings in search of continued support for the war effort. Their conclusion that Iraq has begun making significant but fragile progress on both security and political fronts changed few minds and left lawmakers in both parties impatient for a clear path to resolution.

The bottom line seems to be that after pulling out the extra forces Bush sent last year, the United States will keep about 140,000 troops in Iraq at least through the November presidential election. In the short term, the debate in Washington instead will focus more intently on trade-offs at home, including the strain on the armed forces and the Treasury.

The elimination of 15-month tours will restore deployments to an equal balance of one year in the war zone followed by one year at home. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates extended the tours almost exactly a year ago to provide enough forces for Bush’s “surge” of 20,000 additional combat troops and 8,000 support troops. But Army leaders have complained about the strain.

Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army’s outgoing vice chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that the Army is “out of balance” and that the current demand for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan “exceeds the sustainable supply.” He added that “soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed by the demands of lengthy and repeated deployments, with insufficient recovery time.”

Petraeus said he favors scaling back the combat tours. “I have certainly given my support to 12-month deployments,” he said. “Operationally, we would welcome that, both because of the strain and the stress, and really just a general recognition of the value in that. And hopefully, this reduction can allow that over time.”

But Bush’s decision will affect only those troops sent to Iraq as of Aug. 1 or later, meaning that those already there still have to complete 15-month tours. Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, an advocacy group, said that nearly half of the Army’s active-duty frontline units are currently deployed for 15 months, and that Bush’s decision leaves them out.

“In short, this is a hollow announcement; it has no immediate effect,” Muller said. “It is nothing more than political posturing at the expense of our troops. Our soldiers are unraveling and they need their commander in chief to provide immediate relief.”

House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) applauded Bush’s move. “But it only resets us to where we were last winter,” he added. “This pace will still wear our troops out.” Ilan Goldenberg, a scholar at the National Security Network, said on a conference call organized by antiwar activists that Bush cannot portray the move as a sign of progress. “The military is so strained, the president really didn’t have a choice,” he said.

Democrats moved to press Bush on another front, linking the sagging U.S. economy to escalating war costs. On a day when oil hit $112 a barrel for the first time, lawmakers said that energy-rich Iraq should be footing more of its own bills. “We’ve put about $45 billion into Iraq’s reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.). “They have got to have some skin in the game.”

Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) met yesterday to craft a bipartisan bill to make Iraq take on a greater share of the financial burden. Under their plan, any future U.S. money for reconstruction would take the form of a loan to be repaid, and Baghdad would have to pay for fuel used by U.S. troops and for the training of its own security forces, and make payments to the predominantly Sunni fighters in the Awakening movement taking on al-Qaeda.

“It’s time, in fact long past time, the Iraqis start bearing a larger portion of the costs for this war,” Collins said. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) echoed the sentiment. “Doesn’t it just make sense that record-high gas prices pay for the reconstruction of Iraq, rather than the American taxpayer?” he asked.

Even Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the staunchest war supporters and a key ally of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, agreed that Bush made a mistake by not making Iraqis repay U.S. costs from the start. “The best thing we can do for the people of Iraq is to make them a stakeholder in their own country,” he said.

As Congress prepares to take up a new war spending bill, House Democratic defense appropriators agreed this week on three policy prescriptions: a government-wide ban on torture, a mandate that soldiers and Marines be given at least a month at home for every month in combat, and a withdrawal timetable that would be longer than past failed efforts and that would explicitly leave the details of withdrawal to military commanders.

That would force a new showdown with Bush, who has opposed all three ideas. During a meeting with congressional leaders at the White House yesterday, Bush also urged lawmakers not to pack domestic spending into the war-funding bill. But Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), an Appropriations defense subcommittee member, said war funding is likely to total $108 billion, with as much as $30 billion in domestic spending.

A White House budget document indicates that the administration is expecting Democrats to request $5.8 billion for continuing Gulf Coast hurricane relief, up to $400 million for Western wildfires, as much as $2 billion for the 2010 Census, $1 billion for nutrition for women and infants, $1 billion for food stamps and $500 million for Head Start. As much as $15 billion is expected for unemployment insurance.

Republicans quickly charged Democrats with loading pork-barrel spending onto the backs of soldiers. “The buffet is open,” the House Republican Conference said.

But Democrats said the economic downturn has changed the political equation. “There is a connection between the state of our economy and Iraq and what we’re spending over there,” said Rep. Baron P. Hill (D-Ind.). “We need to spend more money on infrastructure, on roads and bridges that would have a stimulative effect on the economy, and we’re not doing those things because of all the money we’re spending in Iraq.”

Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.

By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 9, 2008; A01

Asked repeatedly yesterday what “conditions” he is looking for to begin substantial U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after this summer’s scheduled drawdown, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said he will know them when he sees them. For frustrated lawmakers, it was not enough.

“A year ago, the president said we couldn’t withdraw because there was too much violence,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). “Now he says we can’t afford to withdraw because violence is down.” Asked Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.): “Where do we go from here?”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said: “I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like.”

But the bottom line was that there was no bottom line. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker echoed what they said seven months ago in their last update to Congress — often using similar words. Iraq’s armed forces continue to improve, overall levels of violence are lower than they were last year, and political reconciliation is happening, albeit still more slowly than they would like.

“Iraq is hard, and reconciliation is hard,” Crocker said in September. Yesterday, he added: “Almost everything about Iraq is hard.”

In eight hours of testimony, the two men danced around the question of what constitutes success in Iraq. “As I’ve explained, again, from a military perspective,” Petraeus said wearily as the day drew to a close, “. . . what we want to do is to look at conditions and determine where it is without taking undue risks. This is all about risk.”

“We’ll look at the circumstances and assess,” Crocker said, as he and Petraeus spoke of “battlefield geometry” and “political-military calculus.”

What worked in September — an overall sense of progress that gave the Bush administration additional time to pursue its “surge” policy of sending nearly 30,000 more troops to Iraq — sparked little enthusiasm this time among lawmakers who had hoped for a brighter light at the end of the tunnel. Much of their frustration appeared to stem from a realization that there was little they could do to affect policy in the administration’s final nine months.

Petraeus said he has recommended to President Bush that the planned withdrawal of the five “surge” combat brigades by the end of July be followed by a 45-day hiatus for “consolidation and evaluation.” Then, Petraeus said, he would begin “a process of assessment to examine the conditions on the ground” and determine whether to recommend “further reductions as conditions permit.”

The scheduled withdrawals, Armed Services Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said dismissively, are “just the next page in a war plan with no exit strategy.”

Several Republicans were effusive in their praise for Petraeus, Crocker and the administration’s policy. “We are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat,” said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Instead, the presumed GOP presidential nominee said that “success is within reach.”

McCain hedged his bets with other tough questions, but he left it to others to throw their support behind administration policy. “According to some, we should fire you,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told the witnesses. “It sounds like . . . really nothing good has happened in the last year and this is a hopeless endeavor. Well, I beg to differ.”

Graham and others opened the door for Petraeus and Crocker to match White House rhetoric on the ongoing threat from al-Qaeda in Iraq and the rising menace of Iran. But while Petraeus noted that the recent Iraqi government offensive in Basra against the Iranian-backed Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr illustrated Tehran’s malign influence, Crocker repeated something he said in September: Persian Iran is up to no good in Iraq, but its role there is limited by deep Arab Iraqi antipathy.

Both Petraeus and Crocker described the Basra operation as a positive demonstration of Iraqi sovereignty and military determination, though one with operational flaws.

Petraeus confirmed that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had rejected his advice to delay the offensive until Iraqi troops were better prepared.

“There is no question that it could have been better planned,” Petraeus said. He agreed that the 1,000 Iraqi army troops and police who either deserted or refused to fight were “a disappointment.” But, he added, thousands of others had fought well, particularly in other areas of southern Iraq where simultaneous violence also broke out.

The witnesses also held firm on an issue raised on both sides of the aisle: whether the administration would submit a security agreement it is negotiating with Iraq to the Senate for ratification. Crocker said that the Iraqis intend to submit the accord to their own parliament, but he added that he does not know whether it would require a vote there. “It is our intention,” he said, that the pact will be an “executive agreement” not requiring U.S. congressional approval.

But many Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in decrying the days of open-ended war and an open U.S. checkbook, and in demanding to know what the administration is doing to pressure the Iraqi government and military to take responsibility for its own fate. “We’re a generous people,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), “but our patience is not unlimited.”

Petraeus and Crocker repeated warnings that al-Qaeda in Iraq, while weakened, remains a threat. But they described an ongoing U.S. troop presence as necessary largely because no one is certain that security gains will endure if U.S. forces leave. The consequences of withdrawal, Crocker said, “could be grave.”

But after hours of questions, they acknowledged that they had gotten at least part of the message. The United States was still funding the roughly 90,000 Sunni security volunteers who Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government is reluctant to put on its payroll, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told Petraeus. “I’m just asking you why you would object to asking [Iraq] to pay for that entire program, given all we are giving them in blood and everything else.”

“It is a very fair question,” Petraeus responded, “and I think that if there’s anything that the ambassador and I will take back to Iraq candidly after this morning’s session and this afternoon’s is, in fact, to ask those kinds of questions more directly.”

Memorandum released An 81-page memo released Tuesday undergirded some of the highly coercive interrogation techniques employed by the Bush Administration, including extreme temperatures, head-slapping and a type of simulated drowning called waterboarding.

Dan Eggen and Josh White
Washington Post
April 2, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaida captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly Tuesday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”

Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents have not been previously disclosed. Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department’s use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq.

Sent to the Pentagon’s general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president’s inherent wartime powers.

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations – that it must “shock the conscience” – that the Bush administration advocated for years.

“Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification,” Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.

The declassified memo was sent by the Defense and Justice departments late Tuesday to Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Carl Levin, of Michigan, and Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, who had seen the document in classified form and pushed for its public release.

The document is similar, though much broader, than a notorious memo primarily written by Yoo in August 2002 that narrowly defined what constitutes illegal torture. That document was also later withdrawn.

In his 2007 book, “The Terror Presidency,” Jack Goldsmith, who took over the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo departed, writes that the two memos stood out” for “the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis.”

Among many other problems, Goldsmith wrote, both memos “were wildly broader than was necessary to support what was actually being done.”

The documents are among the Justice Department legal memoranda that undergirded some of the highly coercive interrogation techniques employed by the Bush administration, including extreme temperatures, head-slapping and a type of simulated drowning called waterboarding.

In 2005, in the wake of public controversy over such methods, Congress limited Defense Department officials to interrogation methods listed in the Army’s field manual, which was rewritten to forbid many of the aggressive methods. The CIA was exempted, however, and President Bush vetoed recent legislation that would have applied the same requirements to that agency.

Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, defended the memo in an e-mail Tuesday, saying the Justice Department altered its legal opinions “for appearances’ sake.” He said his successors “ignored the Department’s long tradition in defending the President’s authority in wartime.”

“Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution,” Yoo wrote, “our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate.”

Yoo’s 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to legal action.

After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner was subjected to stress positions, nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive techniques.

Largely because of Yoo’s memo, however, a Pentagon working group in April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics. The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo’s March memo and did not know about the group’s final report for more than a year, officials said.

Thomas Romig, who was then the Army’s judge advocate general, said Tuesday after reading the memo that it appears to argue that there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found “downright offensive.”

Offensive raises serious questions

Al-Sadr reigns in militia In a possible turning point in the recent upsurge in violence, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Shiite militiamen off the streets Sunday, but called on the government to stop its raids against his followers. The government welcomed the move, which followed intense negotiations by Shiite officials, including two lawmakers who reportedly traveled to Iran to ask religious authorities there to intervene. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called al-Sadr’s statement “a step in the right direction.” But fighting continued in the Basra area after the announcement. Seven people also were killed when a mortar struck a residential district in Baghdad’s Karradah district, and witnesses reported clashes in the Shula area in a northern section of the capital. A U.S. airstrike killed 25 suspected militants after American ground forces came under heavy fire during a combat patrol in predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad, where the fiercest clashes in the capital have occurred. Associated Press

Robert H. Reid
Associated Press
March 31, 2008

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi capital locked down by curfew. U.S. diplomats holed up in their workplaces, fearing rocket attacks. Nearly every major southern city racked by turmoil. Hundreds killed in less than a week.

A declaration Sunday by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to pull his Mahdi Army fighters off the streets may help bring an end to the wave of violence that swept Baghdad and Shiite areas after the government launched a crackdown against militias in Basra.

That will ease the violence which has killed more than 300 people. But it won’t bring an end to the power struggle between Shiite parties that triggered the confrontation.

Nor will it ensure government control of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and headquarters of the vital oil industry.

And it could leave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki politically weakened because he put his prestige on the line with promises to crush Basra’s “criminal gangs,” some of which he said were “worse than al-Qaida.”

The crackdown has dragged the United States into a bloody inner-Shiite fight at a time when the Bush administration would prefer to talk about success against Sunni extremists and argue that Iraq is finally on the road to stability.

Instead, the bloody confrontation serves as a reality check – even as top U.S. officials in Baghdad prepare to brief a skeptical Congress starting April 8 about prospects for bringing home troops. President Bush called the Basra crisis “a defining moment” because the government was finally taking on the Shiite militias.

But the crisis speaks volumes about the reality of Iraqi society and raises new questions about the effectiveness of the country’s leadership as America debates whether continuing the mission here is worth the sacrifice.

Iraqi and American officials portrayed the crackdown as a move to crush outlaw militias – some with close ties to Iran – that have effectively ruled the streets of the country’s second-largest city for nearly three years.

Many of those armed groups are without question deep into oil smuggling, extortion, murder and robbery.

But the picture is more complex. It involves deep-seated rivalries within the majority Shiite community.

Numerous other militias and armed groups operate in Basra and elsewhere in the south – some with close ties to political parties in the national and provincial governments.

All signs indicate the crackdown was directed primarily at the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of al-Sadr’s political movement. The Sadrists believe the goal was to weaken their movement before provincial elections this fall. Al-Sadr’s followers expect to make major gains in the regional voting at the expense of al-Maliki’s Shiite partners in the government.

That points to a significant difference between the Shiite crisis and the war against Sunni insurgents. Al-Qaida has been severely weakened because it lost much of its support within the Sunni community.

By contrast, al-Sadr’s movement commands a wide following, especially among impoverished Shiites who feel estranged from Shiite parties that appeal more to better-educated urban classes.

For months, al-Sadr and other Shiite parties have been locked in a power struggle for control of the Shiite south – which contains the bulk of the country’s oil reserves as well as major religious shrines.

In August, al-Sadr proclaimed a unilateral cease-fire nationwide in an effort to reorganize the force and rein in factions that had branched out into crime.

U.S. commanders acknowledge that truce helped bring down violence in Baghdad.

Nonetheless, U.S. and Iraqi forces continued to chip away at the Sadrists with raids and arrests in Baghdad and elsewhere. American officials insist the target was not al-Sadr’s movement, but Iranian-backed renegades.

Al-Sadr’s followers didn’t see it that way.

Once the crackdown began in Basra, they rose up all over the Shiite heartland, launching rockets into the Green Zone in Baghdad, firing on American patrols and burning offices of al-Maliki’s political party.

The fact that al-Maliki apparently miscalculated the response casts doubt on his judgment and raises serious questions about his commitment to national reconciliation.

Despite the Mahdi Army’s unsavory image, a number of key U.S. commanders have long maintained that it is a mistake to demonize the entire Sadrist movement, which enjoys a substantial following among millions of Iraqi Shiites.

The Basra confrontation also served as a test for U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, which are majority Shiite and include many al-Sadr supporters.

In the campaign’s first days, Iraqi forces made little headway against Mahdi fighters, who unleashed rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire every time government troops tried to enter their neighborhoods.

The headquarters of the Iraqi army’s Basra operation has come under fire regularly since the fighting began. Iraqi commanders have had to turn to the British and American warplanes to take out militia fighters blocking their advance.

At least a dozen police, including some elite commandos, defected to the Sadrists in Baghdad. AP Television News video showed Mahdi fighters in Basra unloading weapons from an Iraqi army vehicle.

The vehicle didn’t have a scratch on it, suggesting it was either abandoned by the Iraqi soldiers or delivered to the Mahdi Army.

By JAMES GLANZ and STEVEN LEE MYERS

BAGHDAD — American-trained Iraqi security forces failed for a third straight day to oust Shiite militias from the southern city of Basra on Thursday, even as President Bush hailed the operation as a sign of the growing strength of Iraq’s federal government.

The fighting in Basra against the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of the political movement led by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, set off clashes in cities throughout Iraq. Major demonstrations were staged in a number of Shiite areas of Baghdad, including Sadr City, the huge neighborhood that is Mr. Sadr’s base of power.

Although Mr. Bush praised the Iraqi government for leading the fighting, it also appeared that the Iraqi government was pursuing its own agenda, calling the battles a fight against “criminal” elements but seeking to marginalize the Mahdi Army.

The Americans share the Iraqi government’s hostility toward what they call rogue elements of the Mahdi Army but will also be faced with the consequences if the battles among Shiite factions erupt into more widespread unrest.

The violence underscored the fragile nature of the security improvements partly credited to the American troop increase that began last year. Officials have acknowledged that a cease-fire called by Mr. Sadr last August has contributed to the improvements. Should the cease-fire collapse entirely, those gains could be in serious jeopardy, making it far more difficult to begin bringing substantial numbers of American troops home.

Although Sadr officials insisted on Thursday that the cease-fire was still in effect, Mr. Sadr has authorized his forces to fight in self-defense, and the battles in Basra appear to be eroding the cease-fire.

During a lengthy speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Bush praised Iraq’s government for ordering the assault in Basra and portrayed the battle as evidence that his strategy of increasing troop strength was bearing fruit.

“This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge and demonstrates to the Iraqi people that their government is committed to protecting them,” he said.

“There’s a strong commitment by the central government of Iraq to say that no one is above the law.”

Mr. Bush also accused Iran of arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces.

Mr. Bush spoke after three days of briefings with senior advisers and military commanders on the situation in Iraq and the options for reducing the number of American troops there beyond the withdrawals already announced. It was one in a series of speeches he has been giving to build support for his policy before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Iraq, testifies before Congress next month.

In a videoconference with the president on Monday, General Petraeus recommended taking up to two months to evaluate security in Iraq before considering additional withdrawals, officials said Monday.

On Thursday, medical officials in Basra said the toll in the fighting there had risen to about 100 dead and 500 wounded, including civilians, militiamen and members of the security forces. An Iraqi employee of The New York Times, driving on the main road between Basra and Nasiriya, observed numerous civilian cars with coffins strapped to the roofs, apparently heading to Shiite cemeteries to the north.

Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities. In Baghdad, where explosions shook the city throughout the day, American officials said 11 rockets struck the Green Zone, killing an unidentified American government worker, the second this week.

Another American, Paul Converse of Corvallis, Ore., an analyst with a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, died of wounds suffered in a rocket attack on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the agency said Thursday.

The Iraqi government imposed a citywide curfew in Baghdad until Sunday.

Thousands of demonstrators in Sadr City on Thursday denounced Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has personally directed the Basra operation, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who leads the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a political party that is a crucial member of the coalition keeping Mr. Maliki in power.

The Supreme Council’s armed wing, the Badr Organization, is one of the most powerful rivals of the Mahdi Army in Basra, where Shiite militias have been fighting among themselves for years to control neighborhoods, oil revenues, electricity access, the ports and even the local universities.

The third powerful element in the city is the Fadhila Party, which split from the Sadrists years ago and has its own militia. The three parties are expected to be rivals in the next round of provincial council elections, now scheduled for October. Many Sadr supporters pointed to those elections, and the possibility that their party might gain a majority of the seats, as a motivation for the Basra assault.

That assertion was rejected by Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, who said that the deteriorating security situation in Basra had left Mr. Maliki no choice but to act.

Witnesses in Basra said there was little evidence that security forces had moved the Mahdi Army out of neighborhoods they had long controlled. In the western Hayaniya neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army has fought with security forces, only gunmen and a few residents were seen on Thursday. Mahdi checkpoints were highly visible, often consisting of at least half a dozen fighters armed with weapons like rocket-propelled grenades.

“The gunmen are not allowing any military convoys to pass near the area,” said Ameen Ali Sakran, a Hayaniya resident.

Alaa Abdul Samad, an educational supervisor who lives in the Mahdi-controlled Kibla neighborhood a couple of miles south of the city center, said he had not seen any official army vehicles during the assault.

“The gunmen have controlled even the Kibla police station and taken all its weapons,” Mr. Samad said. “The area is now in the hands of the militias, and there is no army except some of the helicopters that fly around.”

Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Mohammed, the director of military operations in Iraq, echoed other Iraqi and American officials on Thursday by saying that the operation was not specifically aimed at the Mahdi Army but at any “criminals” who would not lay down their weapons. But witnesses said there was little fighting in neighborhoods that had been controlled by the Badr and Fadhila militias.

Estimates by Basra residents of how much of the city is in the Mahdi Army’s hands ranged from 50 percent to much higher. “We have soldiers in Basra, and they are doing fine,” said a militiaman in Baghdad named Abu Ali, who identified himself as a division commander for the Mahdi Army. “They are in full control.”

Those estimates of how much of the city was under Mahdi control were disputed by Mr. Rikabi. “No, this is not true, this is not true,” he said, though he offered no specific estimate.

But in another indication that parts of the south were slipping from the government’s hands, a major oil pipeline near Basra was struck with a bomb around 10 a.m. on Friday, igniting a huge fire, said Sameer al-Magsosi, a spokesman for the Southern Oil Company. Before the recent security gains, the southern pipelines had been frequent targets of insurgents, smugglers and militias, but few strikes had been recorded in the past year.

Mr. Bush, speaking at the National Air Force Museum, said he would not announce any decisions on the future in Iraq until after General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker briefed Congress on April 8 and 9.

As before, however, he made it clear that he intended to maintain the maximum force needed to achieve what he called “a strategic victory.”

“As I consider the way forward, I will always remember that the progress in Iraq is real, it’s substantive, but it is reversible,” he said. “And so the principle behind my decision on our troop levels will be ensuring that we succeed in Iraq.”

One protester in Sadr City, Wissam Abdul Zahra, 27, made it clear that despite the wider implications of the Basra assault, he viewed it as a simple matter of local politics and power.

“We are expressing our freedom to defend the rights of our brothers in Basra under the pressure of Maliki and the Badr brigades.” he said. “They want to knock down the Sadrists before the provincial elections.”

Even the youngest participants in the protest seemed to have absorbed some of the reasons for the criticism.

“I watch the news with my family, and I see that Maliki is fighting the innocent people in Basra,” said Muhammad, 12. “I don’t understand it all, but it looks bad to me.”

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and Steven Lee Myers from Ohio. Reporting was contributed by Qais Mizher, Ahmad Fadam, Mudhafer al-Husaini, Hosham Hussein, Erica Goode and Karim al-Hilmi, and employees of The New York Times from Basra, Kut, Baghdad, Hilla, Kirkuk and Diyala Province.

Troop strain increasing, Joint Chiefs tell Bush

Robert Gates, left, and U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen stand with President Bush Wednesday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Robert Burns
Associated Press
March 27, 2008

WASHINGTON – Behind the Pentagon’s closed doors, U.S. military leaders told President Bush Wednesday they are worried about the Iraq war’s mounting strain on troops and their families. But they indicated they’d go along with a brief halt in pulling out troops this summer.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff did say senior commanders in Iraq should make more frequent assessments of security conditions, an idea that appeared aimed at increasing pressure for more rapid troop reductions.

The chiefs’ concern is that U.S. forces are being worn thin, compromising the Pentagon’s ability to handle crises elsewhere in the world.

Wednesday’s 90-minute Pentagon session, held in a secure conference room known as “the Tank,” was arranged by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to provide Bush an additional set of military views as he prepares to decide how to proceed in Iraq once his troop buildup, which began in 2007, runs its course by July.

“Armed with all that, the president must now decide the way ahead in Iraq,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. The discussion covered not only Iraq but Afghanistan, where violence has spiked, and broader military matters, said Morrell, who briefed reporters without giving details of the discussion. Some specifics were provided by defense officials, commenting on condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.

The Joint Chiefs are particularly concerned about Afghanistan and an increasingly active Taliban insurgency.

The United States has about 31,000 troops in Afghanistan and 156,000 in Iraq.

U.S. forces in Iraq peaked at 20 brigades last year and are to be cut to 15 brigades, with a total of about 140,000 combat and support troops, by the end of July. A key question facing Bush is whether security conditions will have improved sufficiently by then to justify more reductions.

Gates has said he would like to see the total drop to 10 brigades by the end of this year, but that now looks unlikely.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has proposed what is commonly called a “pause” to assess the impact of having withdrawn five combat brigades since December. He has argued that it would be reckless to shrink the American force so rapidly that the gains achieved over the past year are compromised or lost entirely.

Bush is expected to endorse Petraeus’ approach. If, as expected, Petraeus is given until August or September to weigh the effects of the current round of reductions, then it is unlikely that the force would get much below 15 brigades by the time Bush leaves office in January.

In their session with Bush, the chiefs laid out their concerns about the health of the U.S. force, several defense officials said.

“The conversations today with the Joint Chiefs were much broader than just Iraq,” Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, said later. “It was a step-back look of what are the challenges we face here in the next decade.”

The president is to give a speech today in Ohio on the political and economic situation in Iraq.

Related news Kidnapped contractors’ bodies found » DALLAS – The remains of two U.S. contractors kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago have been recovered, the FBI said Monday, weeks after families of several long-missing men gained hope that they might be found alive. » Ronald Withrow, of Roaring Springs, Texas, and John Roy Young, of Kansas City, Mo., were among six Western contractors kidnapped separately. The disappearances received new attention this month when the severed fingers of several men were sent to the U.S. military in Iraq. » The men still missing are Jonathan Cote, of Getzville, N.Y.; Paul Reuben, of Minneapolis; Joshua Munns, of Redding, Calif.; and Bert Nussbaumer, of Vienna, Austria. A finger from each was received by the military recently. Associated Press Related stories Iraq conflict

Ben Feller
Associated Press
March 25, 2008

WASHINGTON – Marking a grim milestone, a determined President Bush declared Monday the lives of 4,000 U.S. military men and women who have died in Iraq “were not lost in vain.” The White House signaled anew that additional troops won’t be pulled out soon.

A roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four U.S. soldiers Sunday night, pushing the death toll to 4,000.

That number pales compared with those of other lengthy U.S. wars, but it is much higher than many Americans, including Bush, ever expected after the swift U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago.

Bush proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq in May 2003. Almost all of the U.S. deaths there have happened since then.

“One day people will look back at this moment in history and say, ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come,’ ” Bush said after a State Department briefing about long-term diplomacy efforts.

“I have vowed in the past, and I will vow so long as I’m president, to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain – that, in fact, there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice,” Bush said.

The news of 4,000 dead in Iraq came the week after the war rolled into its sixth year, dominating most of Bush’s presidency. Almost 30,000 U.S. service members have been wounded in the war.

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars.

In Vietnam, the U.S. lost more than 58,000 troops, passing the 4,000 mark in 1966 as deaths rose quickly along with escalating American involvement.

Early in April, Bush is expected to announce the next steps in the war, and he is likely to embrace a pause in any troop withdrawals beyond those scheduled to end this July.

Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail continue to push for a faster end to the war. But Bush still has the upper hand for 10 months.

“Americans are asking how much longer must our troops continue to sacrifice for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She said the cost to the U.S. reputation is immense, and the threat to the economy at home is unacceptable.

Meanwhile, both Democratic presidential contenders made note of the 4,000 deaths.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told a campaign audience in Pennsylvania that she would honor the fallen by ending the war and bringing home U.S. troops “as quickly and responsibly as possible.”

Her rival for the nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, said, “It is past time to end this war that should never have been waged by bringing our troops home, and finally pushing Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future.”

The Associated Press count of 4,000 deaths is based on U.S. military reports and includes eight civilians who worked for the Department of Defense.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed.

March 26, 2008

By MICHAEL KAMBER and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD — Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in two of Iraq’s largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra, and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war.

The battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric, could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals.

There were also serious clashes in the southern cities of Kut and Hilla.

In Basra, American and British jets roared through the skies, providing air support for the Iraqi military. A British Army spokesman for southern Iraq, Maj. Tom Holloway, said that while Western forces had not entered Basra, the operation already involved nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and police forces, with more arriving. “They are clearing the city block by block,” Major Holloway said.

The scale and intensity of the clashes in Baghdad kept many residents home. Schools and shops were closed in many neighborhoods and hundreds of checkpoints appeared; in some neighborhoods they were controlled by the government and in others by militia members.

Barrages of rockets and mortar shells pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. An American military spokesman said there were two minor injuries to civilians in the Green Zone.

Even before the crackdown on militias began on Tuesday, Pentagon statistics on the frequency of militia and insurgent attacks suggested that after major security gains last fall, the conflict had drifted into something of a stalemate. Over all, violence has remained fairly steady over the past several months, but the streets have become tense and much more dangerous again after a period of calm.

It is not clear how responsible the restive Mahdi militia commanders are for stalling progress in the effort to reduce violence. In recent weeks, commanders have protested continuing American and Iraqi raids and detentions of militia members.

If the cease-fire were to unravel, there is little doubt about the mayhem that could be stirred up by Mr. Sadr, who forced the United States military to mount two bloody offensives against his fighters in 2004 as much of the country exploded in violence.

Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, and other Iraqi officials said that just how the unrest in Baghdad was related to the crackdown in Basra was unknown.

Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood that is the center of the Mahdi Army’s power, was sealed off by a cordon of Iraqi troops and what appeared to be several American units. A New York Times photographer who was able to get through the cordon found more layers of checkpoints, each one run by about two dozen heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters clad in tracksuits and T-shirts. Tires burned in the city center, gunfire echoed against shuttered stores, and teams of fighters in pickup trucks moved about brandishing machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army,” said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. “The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us,” he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization.

“They are trying to finish us,” the commander said. “They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri.”

Basra, which until 2005 enjoyed relative peace, has since been riven by power struggles among the Mahdi Army and local Shiite rivals, like the Badr Organization and a militia controlled by the Fadhila political party, a group that split from the Sadr party.

In the weeks leading up to the operation, Iraqi officials indicated that part of the operation would be aimed at the Fadhila groups, which are widely believed to be in control of Basra’s lucrative port operations and other parts of the city. The ports have been plagued by corruption, draining revenue that could flow to the central and local governments. But the operation also threatens the Mahdi Army’s strongholds in Basra.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government depends on support from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq but is less dependent now on coalitions with the Mahdi Army.

In Basra, Iraq’s most important oil-exporting center, thousands of Iraqi government soldiers and police officers moved into the city around 5 a.m. and engaged in pitched battles with Shiite militia members who have taken over big areas of that city.

The Basra operation, which senior Iraqi officials had been signaling for weeks, is considered so important by the Iraqi government that Mr. Maliki traveled to the city to direct the fighting, several officials said.

Although Sadr officials said the cease-fire was still in effect, on Monday Mr. Sadr called for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in response to what his followers said was an unwarranted crackdown. Some Mahdi commanders referred to an edict by Mr. Sadr saying their militias had the right of self-defense.

A member of Mr. Sadr’s political party in Basra, Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Bahadli, complained bitterly about the enormous operation, claiming that it was aimed at innocent people in Basra.

“We never witnessed such attacks even under the regime of Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Bahadli said. “Maliki gave orders and said, ‘Erase them.’ ”

But Mr. Maliki said in a statement that the operation was intended to root out “outlaws” who, he said, were working with local confederates inside and outside the government.

“The federal government, pressed by its obligations to support the local government in Basra and support its officials, has decided to restore security and stability and impose the law,” the statement said

An American military official said the American-led coalition forces had provided air transportation for the operation and were keeping “quick reaction forces” on standby.

The official said coalition forces had supported Iraqi security forces in clashes around Sadr City with “special groups” — a term reserved for what American commanders say are Iranian-backed Shiite splinter groups, which include portions of the Mahdi Army.

“A coalition forces helicopter also engaged targets north of Sadr City in support of this operation,” the official said, asserting that despite the fighting, most of Baghdad had been peaceful and that there were still signs of progress on security in most areas of Iraq and its capital.

“We feel that the cease-fire is being honored” by those loyal to Mr. Sadr, the official said. The cease-fire, he said, “is in the best interest of all Iraqis.”

Many places in Baghdad were tense. At a checkpoint downtown, a policeman’s radio crackled with the news of the sniper shooting of a police officer in a nearby neighborhood. “We’ve heard that Sadr has canceled the cease-fire, is this true?” he asked motorists whose car he was searching.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, the military said an American soldier was killed in Baghdad about 5 p.m. No other details were provided.

Witnesses in Basra said jets flew overhead as armored vehicles raced through the city and machine gun and canon fire reverberated through the streets. Civilians took refuge in their homes. Iraqi television showed images of civilian gunmen with grenade launchers taking up positions and ambulances ferrying the wounded to hospitals.

On Tuesday night, after about six hours of silence, armored vehicles and helicopters could again be heard moving through the city, witnesses said. Gunfire and shelling could be heard to the north.

In Baghdad, some areas were deserted as clashes broke out across the city. In downtown Baghdad, checkpoints blocked sparse traffic every 100 yards.

Saeed Ammar, a government employee, said he was standing near policemen in the Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday morning when he was approached by Mahdi Army members. “They told me not to stand near checkpoints. They said, ‘We are waiting for the word from Moktada Sadr to attack the checkpoints — it may come at any moment.’ ”

Despite the armed actions by many Sadr followers, members of Mr. Sadr’s party said the cease-fire was still in effect and called for peaceful civil disobedience. In Najaf, hundreds of followers carrying Korans and olive branches mounted a sit-in, chanting, “No to occupation, no to terrorism.”

Sahar Gani, a teacher, was taking students home along a nearly deserted Baghdad sidewalk. “The security situation is getting worse day by day,” she said. “The city is getting very bad now. We’ve been through this before, so we find it natural. But we don’t know what to do.”

Reporting was contributed by Joao Silva, Anwar J. Ali and Hosham Hussein from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Diwaniya and Kut.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Carl P. Leubsdorf
Dallas Morning News
March 24, 2008

WASHINGTON – For the third time since World War II, Americans are picking a new president amid sharp national divisions over a bloody, financially draining war in Asia.

In 1952 and 1968, the opposition party won the White House by capitalizing on anti-war frustration over stalemates in Korea and Vietnam and promising to end those involvements.

Now, as the nation enters its sixth year of the fighting in Iraq that began with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Democrats hope to repeat that pattern. But while there is considerable evidence they can do so, polls also show that attitudes are not clear-cut about the war that has killed and wounded thousands and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

A majority of Americans think the war was a mistake. And while one poll shows an even split over whether to stay or leave, others show that the main division is over how quick U.S. withdrawal should be.

“People want this resolved, and they want troops coming home,” says GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

At the same time, the public thinks the yearlong military “surge” is making progress in curbing violence. Two surveys showed that the public thinks the candidate best equipped to handle Iraq is the one who strongly backed the surge and has echoed the Bush administration’s warnings against an early troop withdrawal, Republican John McCain.

That may explain why McCain showed no hesitation in heading to Baghdad this week at almost the same time that Vice President Dick Cheney was there and echoing the administration’s optimism over the situation in Iraq.

“The surge is working,” McCain said. “We are succeeding.” But he warned that al-Qaida is not yet defeated and that a continuing U.S. military effort is necessary.

McCain’s rivals continue to draw sharp rhetorical lines between their calls for a phased withdrawal and his adherence to the administration’s more cautious approach on U.S. troop levels.

Declaring that the surge has not achieved its goal of prompting political progress, Hillary Clinton says she would begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops within 60 days of taking office. Barack Obama has promised to withdraw all U.S. combat troops within 16 months of becoming president.

Both candidates stop short of advocating total withdrawal of all American forces and concede that a pullout will take some time. Still, there is a clear contrast between their view and McCain’s.

So far, the Arizona senator is benefiting from his long identification with the issue and his military background. But the political impact of Iraq next fall is likely to reflect what Americans want to happen in the future.

Given that, it’s hard to see more voters favoring a slower rather than a faster pullout, especially independents whose anti-Iraq stance was a major reason they voted Democratic in last year’s midterm elections.

Ironically, many both in and out of the current administration believe next year’s reality will be different from this year’s rhetoric.

They think McCain will have to cut the U.S. role faster than he says and that events and military advice will force the Democrats to move more slowly.

It’s hard to see a President McCain moving faster than either Democrat, in part because Obama and Clinton will want to cut war costs to finance domestic measures such as health care.

Meanwhile, a related issue this fall could be the administration’s effort to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government on a legal basis to ensure the continued presence of U.S. forces. The administration sees it as a way to preserve options, but many Democrats think it’s an effort to tie the hands of the next administration.

Even if the country votes Democratic this November, concedes Sen. James Webb of Virginia, “it will be much harder to turn this thing around” than to continue the current policy. But the lesson of 1952 and 1968 is that a vote to change parties will be the best way to force an eventual policy shift.

March 20, 2008

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush used the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq on Wednesday to make the case for persevering in a conflict that could have many more anniversaries. Democrats accused him of lacking a strategy to win and withdraw.

Mr. Bush, speaking before members of the armed forces and defense officials at the Pentagon, said in his frankest acknowledgment yet that the costs of the war, in lives and money, had been higher and longer lasting than he had anticipated.

But he remained unwavering in his insistence that the invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003, had made the world better and the United States safer.

“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,” he said. “The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win.”

The anniversary starkly illustrated the divide between Mr. Bush and Democrats, who control Congress — and between the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, and the two senators seeking the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At a community college in Fayetteville, a military town in North Carolina, Mr. Obama noted that the war in Iraq had now lasted longer than the Civil War, World War I and World War II, though it has been fought on a scale far below those conflicts.

“Where are we for all of this sacrifice?” he said. “We are less safe and less able to shape events abroad. We are divided at home, and our alliances around the world have been strained.”

Mrs. Clinton, appearing at an American Legion post in Huntington, W.Va., argued for a cautious withdrawal of troops that would begin within 60 days of her taking office. “Every one of you who has served knows with drawing troops can be as dangerous as inserting them,” she said.

By contrast, Mr. McCain, who visited Iraq this week, issued a statement saying that the United States and its allies in Iraq stood “on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism.”

The anniversary, as it has in the past, galvanized the war’s critics and, to a lesser degree, its supporters. Mr. Bush gave his speech as sporadic, relatively small but raucous protests erupted in Washington and in other cities, leading to dozens of arrests.

“How much longer?” read a banner along the president’s route to the Pentagon across the Potomac.

Iraq has receded somewhat as an issue in the campaign. And the scale and fury of antiwar protests appeared to have diminished from just a year ago, before Mr. Bush ordered “a surge” of still more American troops to Iraq that has resulted in a decline in overall violence there.

Still, the war stirs intense emotions on both sides. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said the war had damaged the country’s reputation, strained its military and now threatened its economy.

“With the war in Iraq entering its sixth year,” she said in a statement, “Americans are rightly concerned about how much longer our nation must continue to sacrifice our security for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future.”

Mr. Obama criticized his rivals for their initial votes for the war. “Here is the stark reality,” he said. “There is a security gap in this country — a gap between the rhetoric of those who claim to be tough on national security, and the reality of growing insecurity caused by their decisions.”

He also seized on a gaffe Mr. McCain made Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when he confused the main sects of Islam and the support for each from Al Qaeda, a Sunni dominated group, and Iran, a majority Shiite nation. Mr. McCain corrected his statement after Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who is traveling with him in the region, whispered in his ear.

“Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades,” Mr. Obama said.

He said that as commander in chief he would begin withdrawing a brigade or two each month starting immediately. His plan, he said, would reduce the American force to only the number required to secure the American Embassy and maintain a counterterrorist force.

Even that, he acknowledged, would take until 2010.

The number of troops in Iraq is at the center of the administration’s attention. The top American commander there, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is scheduled to appear before Congress in April to present his recommendations on what to do after a withdrawal of the 30,000 troops ordered to Iraq by Mr. Bush last year.

Those troops brought the total to a peak of more than 160,000; by summer, roughly 140,000 are expected to remain. Military and administration officials have indicated that there should be a pause in any further reductions to see if security in Baghdad and other cities deteriorates.

One administration official said Wednesday that the outstanding question was how long a pause would last.

Mr. Bush said he had made no decision but indicated that he would be reluctant to hasten withdrawals. “Any further drawdown will be based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders,” he said, “and they must not jeopardize the hard-fought gains our troops and civilians have made over the past year.”

Mr. Bush announced the war’s start from the Oval Office on the night of March 19, 2003, declaring that the United States would “not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” (It later became clear that those weapons did not exist.)

His remarks each March 19 since have paralleled the ups and downs of the war.

In 2004, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with dozens of foreign diplomats and cast the war as “the inescapable calling of our generation.” By 2006, with the insurgency worsening along with ethnic and sectarian violence, he spoke for two minutes on the South Lawn and spent most of that time talking of soldiers’ sacrifices. “It’s a time to reflect,” he said.

Mr. Bush’s speech will be his last address as president on the anniversary, and he reflected at length on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the rise of the insurgency, the lurch toward civil war, and the decision to send more troops. The latter he declared a success, saying that it led the way to the decision by many Sunni Arabs to switch allegiances and join American forces against extremists that American officials say are foreign led. He called that the “the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden.”

“The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists’ defeat,” he added.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who declared in June 2005 that the insurgency was in “its last throes,” also acknowledged that the war had “lasted longer than I would have anticipated,” but he, too, defended the effort and brushed aside antiwar sentiment.

When told in an interview with ABC News that two-thirds of Americans said the war was not worth fighting, Mr. Cheney replied, “So?” When pressed, he added, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fayetteville, N.C., and Patrick D. Healy from Huntington, W.Va.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fayetteville, N.C., and Patrick D. Healy from Huntington, W.Va.

March 18, 2008

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — In the days immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, members of President Bush’s war cabinet declared that it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out even more deadly terrorist missions with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Since then, however, administration, military and intelligence officials assigned to counterterrorism have begun to change their view. After piecing together a more nuanced portrait of terrorist organizations, they say there is reason to believe that a combination of efforts could in fact establish something akin to the posture of deterrence, the strategy that helped protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack during the cold war.

Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials involved in the effort provided the outlines of previously unreported missions to mute Al Qaeda’s message, turn the jihadi movement’s own weaknesses against it and illuminate Al Qaeda’s errors whenever possible.

A primary focus has become cyberspace, which is the global safe haven of terrorist networks. To counter efforts by terrorists to plot attacks, raise money and recruit new members on the Internet, the government has mounted a secret campaign to plant bogus e-mail messages and Web site postings, with the intent to sow confusion, dissent and distrust among militant organizations, officials confirm.

At the same time, American diplomats are quietly working behind the scenes with Middle Eastern partners to amplify the speeches and writings of prominent Islamic clerics who are renouncing terrorist violence.

At the local level, the authorities are experimenting with new ways to keep potential terrorists off guard.

In New York City, as many as 100 police officers in squad cars from every precinct converge twice daily at randomly selected times and at randomly selected sites, like Times Square or the financial district, to rehearse their response to a terrorist attack. City police officials say the operations are believed to be a crucial tactic to keep extremists guessing as to when and where a large police presence may materialize at any hour. “What we’ve developed since 9/11, in six or seven years, is a better understanding of the support that is necessary for terrorists, the network which provides that support, whether it’s financial or material or expertise,” said Michael E. Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

“We’ve now begun to develop more sophisticated thoughts about deterrence looking at each one of those individually,” Mr. Leiter said in an interview. “Terrorists don’t operate in a vacuum.”

In some ways, government officials acknowledge, the effort represents a second-best solution. Their preferred way to combat terrorism remains to capture or kill extremists, and the new emphasis on deterrence in some ways amounts to attaching a new label to old tools.

“There is one key question that no one can answer: How much disruption does it take to give you the effect of deterrence?” said Michael Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a new book, “On Nuclear Terrorism.”

The New Deterrence

The emerging belief that terrorists may be subject to a new form of deterrence is reflected in two of the nation’s central strategy documents.

The 2002 National Security Strategy, signed by the president one year after the Sept. 11 attacks, stated flatly that “traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents.”

Four years later, however, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism concluded: “A new deterrence calculus combines the need to deter terrorists and supporters from contemplating a W.M.D. attack and, failing that, to dissuade them from actually conducting an attack.”

For obvious reasons, it is harder to deter terrorists than it was to deter a Soviet attack.

Terrorists hold no obvious targets for American retaliation as Soviet cities, factories, military bases and silos were under the cold-war deterrence doctrine. And it is far harder to pinpoint the location of a terrorist group’s leaders than it was to identify the Kremlin offices of the Politburo bosses, making it all but impossible to deter attacks by credibly threatening a retaliatory attack.

But over the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks, many terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have successfully evaded capture, and American officials say they now recognize that threats to kill terrorist leaders may never be enough to keep America safe.

So American officials have spent the last several years trying to identify other types of “territory” that extremists hold dear, and they say they believe that one important aspect may be the terrorists’ reputation and credibility with Muslims.

Under this theory, if the seeds of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda’s strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents — or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure — then the order may not be given, according to this new analysis.

Senior officials acknowledge that it is difficult to prove what role these new tactics and strategies have played in thwarting plots or deterring Al Qaeda from attacking. Senior officials say there have been several successes using the new approaches, but many involve highly classified technical programs, including the cyberoperations, that they declined to detail.

They did point to some older and now publicized examples that suggest that their efforts are moving in the right direction.

George J. Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in his autobiography that the authorities were concerned that Qaeda operatives had made plans in 2003 to attack the New York City subway using cyanide devices.

Mr. Zawahri reportedly called off the plot because he feared that it “was not sufficiently inspiring to serve Al Qaeda’s ambitions,” and would be viewed as a pale, even humiliating, follow-up to the 9/11 attacks.

And in 2002, Iyman Faris, a naturalized American citizen from Kashmir, began casing the Brooklyn Bridge to plan an attack and communicated with Qaeda leaders in Pakistan via coded messages about using a blowtorch to sever the suspension cables.

But by early 2003, Mr. Faris sent a message to his confederates saying that “the weather is too hot.” American officials said that meant Mr. Faris feared that the plot was unlikely to succeed — apparently because of increased security.

“We made a very visible presence there and that may have contributed to it,” said Paul J. Browne, the New York City Police Department’s chief spokesman. “Deterrence is part and parcel of our entire effort.”

Disrupting Cyberprojects

Terrorists hold little or no terrain, except on the Web. “Al Qaeda and other terrorists’ center of gravity lies in the information domain, and it is there that we must engage it,” said Dell L. Dailey, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief.

Some of the government’s most secretive counterterrorism efforts involve disrupting terrorists’ cyberoperations. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, specially trained teams have recovered computer hard drives used by terrorists and are turning the terrorists’ tools against them.

“If you can learn something about whatever is on those hard drives, whatever that information might be, you could instill doubt on their part by just countermessaging whatever it is they said they wanted to do or planned to do,” said Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, director of cyberoperations for the Air Force and a former deputy director of the antiterrorism office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since terrorists feel safe using the Internet to spread ideology and gather recruits, General Schissler added, “you may be able to interfere with some of that, interrupt some of that.”

“You can also post messages to the opposite of that,” he added.

Other American efforts are aimed at discrediting Qaeda operations, including the decision to release seized videotapes showing members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leaders, training children to kidnap and kill, as well as a lengthy letter said to have been written by another terrorist leader that describes the organization as weak and plagued by poor morale.

Dissuading Militants

Even as security and intelligence forces seek to disrupt terrorist operations, counterterrorism specialists are examining ways to dissuade insurgents from even considering an attack with unconventional weapons. They are looking at aspects of the militants’ culture, families or religion, to undermine the rhetoric of terrorist leaders.

For example, the government is seeking ways to amplify the voices of respected religious leaders who warn that suicide bombers will not enjoy the heavenly delights promised by terrorist literature, and that their families will be dishonored by such attacks. Those efforts are aimed at undermining a terrorist’s will.

“I’ve got to figure out what does dissuade you,” said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the Joint Chiefs’ director of strategic plans and policy. “What is your center of gravity that we can go at? The goal you set won’t be achieved, or you will be discredited and lose face with the rest of the Muslim world or radical extremism that you signed up for.”

Efforts are also under way to persuade Muslims not to support terrorists. It is a delicate campaign that American officials are trying to promote and amplify — but without leaving telltale American fingerprints that could undermine the effort in the Muslim world. Senior Bush administration officials point to several promising developments.

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Asheik, gave a speech last October warning Saudis not to join unauthorized jihadist activities, a statement directed mainly at those considering going to Iraq to fight the American-led forces.

And Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, a top leader of the armed Egyptian movement Islamic Jihad and a longtime associate of Mr. Zawahri, the second-ranking Qaeda official, has just completed a book that renounces violent jihad on legal and religious grounds.

Such dissents are serving to widen rifts between Qaeda leaders and some former loyal backers, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats say.

“Many terrorists value the perception of popular or theological legitimacy for their actions,” said Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. “By encouraging debate about the moral legitimacy of using weapons of mass destruction, we can try to affect the strategic calculus of the terrorists.”

Denying Support

As the top Pentagon policy maker for special operations, Michael G. Vickers creates strategies for combating terrorism with specialized military forces, as well as for countering the proliferation of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Much of his planning is old school: how should the military’s most elite combat teams capture and kill terrorists? But with each passing day, more of his time is spent in the new world of terrorist deterrence theory, trying to figure out how to prevent attacks by persuading terrorist support networks — those who enable terrorists to operate — to refuse any kind of assistance to stateless agents of extremism.

“Obviously, hard-core terrorists will be the hardest to deter,” Mr. Vickers said. “But if we can deter the support network — recruiters, financial supporters, local security providers and states who provide sanctuary — then we can start achieving a deterrent effect on the whole terrorist network and constrain terrorists’ ability to operate.

“We have not deterred terrorists from their intention to do us great harm,” Mr. Vickers said, “but by constraining their means and taking away various tools, we approach the overall deterrent effect we want.”

Much effort is being spent on perfecting technical systems that can identify the source of unconventional weapons or their components regardless of where they are found — and letting nations around the world know the United States has this ability.

President Bush has declared that the United States will hold “fully accountable” any nation that shares nuclear weapons with another state or terrorists.

Rear Adm. William P. Loeffler, deputy director of the Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction at the military’s Strategic Command, said Mr. Bush’s declaration meant that those who might supply arms or components to terrorists were just as accountable as those who ordered and carried out an attack.

It is, the admiral said, a system of “attribution as deterrence.”

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
March 15, 2008

The abrupt resignation of Adm. William Fallon as the head of Central Command almost got lost amid the breaking news of Barack Obama’s victory in the Mississippi primary and Eliot Spitzer’s resignation as governor of New York. But it’s a much more consequential development – in the foreign and military policy of the Bush administration in its final year in office and in the relations between civilian commanders and military officers in the long run of American history.

Though everyone involved denies it, Fallon was kicked out for insubordination, or something very close to it. His conduct became impossible to overlook after the publication of a jauntily written article in Esquire by Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of “The Pentagon’s New Map.”

Barnett paints Fallon as a seasoned officer who coolly and wisely has been frustrating President Bush’s desire to invade Iran. He points out that Fallon opposed the surge in Iraq ordered by Bush in January 2007 and that he has tried to rein in Gen. David Petraeus, whose leadership of the surge has produced such impressive results. He seems to take it for granted that readers will applaud Fallon for opposing a move that converted likely defeat to a high chance of success.

Fallon also made it plain that he wants to withdraw troops from Iraq, as soon as possible – even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved Petraeus’ request for a pause after currently scheduled troop withdrawals end in July.

Fallon is not the first subordinate to work openly to undercut the commander in chief. The authors of the National Intelligence Estimate headlined a conclusion that Iran had abandoned part of its nuclear program, while underplaying the more important news that the mullahs were continuing the critical parts of the nuclear program and retained the capacity to rev up the rest quickly at any time. Leaks from the State Department and CIA have been clearly designed to frustrate administration policy.

Civilian and military, those who have been undercutting administration policy do so in the belief that their views are more in the nation’s interests than the conclusion of the Texas cowboy whom the voters somehow elected president. State and CIA are filled with professionals educated in elite universities dominated by the left and, while not as wacky as their professors, have come away with the default assumption that liberals are always right. Many military officers, who increasingly have graduate degrees from such universities, seem to have imbibed similar habits of mind.

In addition, officers assigned to regional commands seem, like diplomats assigned to one area, inclined to go native. As head of Pacific Command, Fallon (at least as Barnett paints him) seemed transfixed on cooperating with China; at Central Command, he came to believe that pressuring Israel toward a settlement with Palestinians was the way to solve every problem in the region. After all, those are the things the Chinese and Arab military officers he’s been interfacing with have told him.

In my view, Bush has been unduly tolerant of the efforts of civilian career professionals to undercut his policies. But Fallon’s abrupt resignation suggests that he and-or Gates decided that things had gone too far when a commanding military officer was lionized for opposing the president’s policies in the pages of Esquire.

One of the firmest principles of American public life, established with great deliberateness by George Washington, is civilian control of the military. The vast majority of American military officers over our history have honored and cherished that principle. Fallon, as portrayed by Barnett, seemed to relish brushing it aside.

My guess is that Gates, who was a career professional and whose memoir stresses the continuity of U.S. government policy in different administrations, decided that enough was enough.

Tough questions remain about how civilian commanders should choose and interact with military professionals. Bush’s record, in my view, has been far from ideal. He has seemed content with letting others choose military commanders and then accepting their advice with little of the abrasive interaction recommended by Eliot Cohen in his 2002 book “Supreme Command.” Only after the debacle of the 2006 elections did he call on David Petraeus.

One wonders how much he pondered the installation at Central Command of Petraeus’ critic Fallon. It is surely a difficult thing for civilian presidents to choose able and apt military commanders – looking back in our history Franklin Roosevelt seems to have been the only commander in chief who had a consistent record of doing so early on. But at least Bush – and Gates – have rectified what they must now consider a mistake. And they have reaffirmed the ancient principle of civilian control.

Trudy Rubin
March 12, 2008

Americans are beginning to understand that the struggle against Islamic extremists hinges heavily on the fate of Afghanistan.

That country got shortchanged by our focus on Iraq and is slipping back under Taliban control. But Afghans can push back if they get the right kind of aid from the United States and the international community.

That’s the message I got from Suraya Pakzad, a brave Afghan activist for women’s rights. She was on her way to Washington to receive the State Department’s International Women of Courage award from Secretary Condoleezza Rice and to meet President Bush.

Pakzad, a university graduate and mother of six, started helping Afghan women in 1998, when the Taliban had shut all girls schools and confined women to their homes. She and her friends set up 10 underground girls schools in Kabul, at great risk. Then they started at-home income-generating projects for the girls’ mothers.

After the Taliban fell, Pakzad established the Voice of Women Organization and moved it to Herat in western Afghanistan, where services for women lagged far behind those in Kabul.

Women’s gains since the Taliban’s fall have been mainly symbolic, she says, especially in rural areas. Poverty is rising, and few jobs are available. She recalled seeing women working 11 hours a day for $2 in terrible conditions cleaning goat hair for pashmina scarves.

Although girls schools are now permitted, many families are afraid to send their children because security is deteriorating. In some areas, girls are being killed to discourage female education.

So Pakzad’s organization is trying to provide job training for women and help them market products they make themselves. “If you help the mother find work, then the child can go to school and the woman can find her own position in the family,” she says.

Her group also works to provide legal and social protections for women. They run a safe house in Herat – one of only five in the country – that takes in victims of domestic violence, enforced marriage, and those released from jail whose families have rejected them.

In a traditional society, such women are often rejected by their families, and are at risk of being murdered by family members. VWO aims to provide them with job skills, which may make it possible for some to be reaccepted by relatives.

But the demand for such services far outstrips capacity. Pakzad’s group can shelter only 25 women on a long-term basis and has reintegrated 235 with their families in Herat since 2006.

NGO staff are also putting themselves at risk. The family of one woman who escaped a brutal husband threatened by cell phone to kidnap Pakzad’s 11-year-old son. City police protection was available for only a day, she said, if she herself paid the police.

I asked Pakzad what kind of U.S. aid she thought could best address Afghanistan’s problems. Her answer was swift.

First, she said money to create new job opportunities should go through Afghan nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). “Money that goes through the (central Afghan) government goes through a long bureaucratic process. Afghan NGOs know the priorities in each province.”

Such funds could help, for example, to create small factories, open small businesses or help Afghans build capacity in areas such as animal husbandry, rather than import food. Micro-credit loans to rural women would also help, allowing them to buy a cow or chickens that could produce income.

Right now, she says, villagers help the Taliban, and grow poppy, “because they think they will get security and food.” The Taliban pays better than the Afghan government pays the police.

That could change if jobs were created in rural areas. “The community will not support the Taliban if they have alternatives,” she says flatly.

When it comes to security, she goes on, economic aid is much more effective than bombing raids on Taliban sites that kill many innocent victims: “When bombs hit civilians they create a wall between the government and the people, and the people start helping the Taliban.”

Pakzad would also like to see more money go to Afghan NGOs to educate men about women’s rights. She says that when she goes to villages and explains that educating women can increase family income and improve life for children, many elders are convinced.

The type of high-impact help Pakzad proposes would go directly to village people, rather than via foreign contractors or corrupt Afghan officials. As Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., points out, what we’ve spent on six years of Afghan reconstruction equals “what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq.”

Let’s hope Rice and Bush get the message: It’s time to start helping courageous Afghans help themselves.

President’s aide says CIA needs ‘valuable tool in the war on terror’

Dan Eggen
Washington Post
March 8, 2008

WASHINGTON – President Bush today will veto legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics and will argue that the agency needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects, administration officials said.

Bush’s decision to veto an intelligence authorization bill that contains the waterboarding provision is the subject of his weekly presidential radio address, to be broadcast today, the White House said.

“The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror: the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Friday.

Although long expected, Bush’s formal move to veto the bill reignites the Washington debate over the proper limits of U.S. interrogation policies and whether the CIA has engaged in torture by subjecting prisoners to severe tactics, including waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning.

The issue also has potential ramifications for GOP presidential nominee John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of coercive interrogation tactics who nonetheless backed the Bush administration in opposing the CIA waterboarding ban. The Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, both support the ban, though neither was present for last month’s Senate vote for the bill that Bush is to veto.

The legislation would have limited the CIA to using 19 less-aggressive tactics outlined in a U.S. Army field manual on interrogations. Besides ruling out waterboarding, that restriction would effectively ban temperature extremes, extended forced standing and other harsh methods that the CIA used on al-Qaida prisoners after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush and his aides have argued that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program” was crucial in uncovering terrorist plans and averting deadly plots. CIA Director Michael Hayden has also spoken out against the Senate bill and defended the methods as lawful and effective.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Hayden said the Army manual guidelines were intended for “a different population of detainees, a different group of interrogators, and for different intelligence needs” than those of the nation’s chief spy agency. The CIA has not specified all the tactics it wants to keep using but says it no longer uses waterboarding. Administration officials have not ruled out using the tactic again.

Many Democrats and human-rights groups say the tactics are often counterproductive and that, regardless, they constitute illegal torture under U.S. and international law. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday that Bush has “compromised the moral leadership of our nation,” and said the administration is ignoring the advice of military experts who oppose harsh techniques.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested that those who support harsh methods simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about.

“If they think these methods work, they’re woefully misinformed,” Soyster said at a news briefing called in anticipation of the veto. “Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.”

In two separate forums earlier this week, FBI Director Robert Mueller III and Navy Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, commander of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, defended the efficacy of less-coercive, “rapport-building” interrogation tactics.

“We get so much dependable information from just sitting down and having a conversation and treating them like human beings in a businesslike manner,” Buzby told reporters in a conference call Thursday.

Economist’s calculation subject of congressional hearing today

Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy
February 28, 2008

WASHINGTON – When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Coming up on the five-year anniversary of the invasion, a new estimate from a Nobel laureate puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at more than $3 trillion.

That estimate from Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also serves as the title of his new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” which hits store shelves Friday.

The book, co-authored with Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, builds on previous research published in January 2006. The two argued then and now that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

When other factors are added – such as interest on debt, future borrowing for war expenses, continued military presence in Iraq and lifetime health care and counseling for veterans – they think that the wars’ costs range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

“I think we really have learned that the long-term costs of taking care of the wounded and injured in this war and the long-term costs of rebuilding the military to its previous strength is going to far eclipse the cost of waging this war,” Bilmes said in an interview.

The book and its estimates are the subject of a hearing today by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The White House doesn’t care for the estimates by Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who’s now a professor at Columbia University.

“People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, conceding that the costs of the war on terrorism are high while questioning the premise of Stiglitz’s research.

“It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?”

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine Corp colonel and Vietnam War veteran, welcomed the effort by Stiglitz and Bilmes to quantify the ways in which the wars will cost taxpayers.

“It’s astounding that here we are about to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and this administration still refuses to acknowledge the long-term costs of the war in Iraq,” he said.

By any estimate, the Bush administration’s predictions in March 2003 of a self-financing war have proved wildly inaccurate. Stiglitz cites operational spending to date of $646 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, working off estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, presumes that spending on these wars over the next decade probably will amount to another $913 billion.

Pentagon officials had no immediate comment on Stiglitz’s book or his estimates.

Stiglitz and Bilmes first estimated war costs of $1 trillion in January 2006. Their research proved controversial and sparked debate about the costs of replacing equipment used by the armed forces and National Guard units. In the new book, they offer a figure of $404 billion for replacing equipment, planes and tanks and bringing military hardware back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an interview, Stiglitz said that too much of the public debate had been over the wars’ operational costs while the real budget strains would show up only years from now.

“The peak expenditures are way out,” he said, noting that the peak expenditures for World War II vets came in 1993.

The pair estimated that future medical, disability and Social Security costs for veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan range from a best-case $422 billion to what they call a more probable long-term expense of $717 billion.

It’s why the two call in the book for creating a Veterans Benefits Trust Fund to set aside money in a “lock box” to pay for future health-care needs of Iraq and Afghanistan vets. Although veterans’ health care amounts to a future promise, they said, it isn’t an entitlement and instead is funded through discretionary spending. In the future, funding for vets will compete with other government programs.

“We should not have an unfunded entitlement program like this,” Stiglitz said. “This is more like deferred compensation. … We require corporations to put money away but we don’t require the government to put money away, and we should be doing that … so when the focus turns away to some other problem, veterans aren’t given the shaft.”

February 20, 2008

By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The winners of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections said Tuesday that they would take a new approach to fighting Islamic militants by pursuing more dialogue than military confrontation, and that they would undo the crackdown on the media and restore independence to the judiciary.

With nearly complete returns from Monday’s vote giving it the most seats, the party of the assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, led by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, made clear that a new political order prevailed in Pakistan.

Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, said the new Parliament would reverse many of the unpopular policies that fueled the strong protest vote against President Pervez Musharraf and his party.

Bush administration officials said the United States would still like to see Pakistan’s opposition leaders find a way to work with Mr. Musharraf, a staunch ally for more than six years, but conceded that the notion appeared increasingly unlikely.

Though Mr. Zardari said he wanted a government of national consensus, he ruled out working with anyone from the previous government under Mr. Musharraf.

Instead he said he was talking to the leader of the other main opposition party, Nawaz Sharif, whose party finished second, about forming a coalition.

Although the resounding victory of the two parties was broadly welcomed in Pakistan, there were immediate memories of the failings of civilian governments here in the 1990s. American officials were particularly skeptical of Mr. Zardari, who has faced corruption charges in Pakistan and abroad and has come to his current position of leadership only through his wife’s death.

Mr. Sharif was twice prime minister in the 1990s and faced numerous corruption charges himself after being ousted by Mr. Musharraf in a coup.

Mr. Sharif quickly announced several conditions for joining a coalition. They included the impeachment of Mr. Musharraf and the restoration of the chief justice and other Supreme Court judges suspended by the president in November.

Mr. Zardari was less categorical, not calling for Mr. Musharraf’s impeachment, for instance. The struggle to end military rule and bring a return to democracy is a long, uphill battle, he said.

“We might have to take soft, small steps,” he said at a news briefing at his home in the capital after a meeting of 50 senior members of the party.

Still, the first order of business will be to undo restrictions on the media and restore the independence of the judiciary, he said.

But Mr. Zardari did not specifically call for the reinstatement of the chief justice and his colleagues; there are corruption charges still pending against him.

Though he has little experience in such matters, Mr. Zardari criticized the antiterrorism policies of Mr. Musharraf, saying that he had played a double game that had led to an increase in militancy. “We feel they in the government are running with the hare and hunting with the hounds,” he said.

The two opposition parties share similar views of how to tackle the terrorism problem. The new approach is more likely to be responsive to the consensus of the Pakistani public than was Mr. Musharraf’s and is more likely to shun a heavy hand by the military and rely on dialogue with the militants.

Mr. Zardari said his party would seek talks with the militants in the tribal areas along the Afghan border, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have carved out a stronghold, as well as with the nationalist militants who have battled the Pakistani Army in Baluchistan Province.

Many in Pakistan, including several parties that boycotted the elections, have been strongly opposed to Mr. Musharraf’s use of the army to battle tribesmen in the name of the campaign against terrorism, which is seen as an American agenda.

“We will have a dialogue with those who are up in the mountains and those who are not in Parliament,” Mr. Zardari said. “We want to take all those along who are against Pakistan and working against Pakistan.”

Some analysts saw opportunities for the United States if a new civilian government could persuade Pakistanis to get behind the fight against the militants. But past attempts to deal with the militants have left them stronger, and any policy too accommodating is likely to raise concern in Washington.

A former chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, said the election of a new government should help the United States if it was looking to work with moderate forces.

“It’s an opportunity to rejuvenate this whole relationship,” General Karamat said. “What we are seeing through these elections is moderate and liberal forces, which is absolutely great.”

Other analysts agreed. The emergence of a moderate Parliament should be good news for the United States, said Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani military analyst based in Washington.

“If Parliament will now have a stronger hand than before in national decision-making, then the United States should be pleased, since it will not have to beg and cajole Pakistan to act in its own interests against the terrorists,” Mr. Nawaz said.

But the results left the Bush administration, which has leaned heavily on Mr. Musharraf, scrambling to find new partners in the campaign against Islamic militants in the region. The election of a hostile Parliament is expected to further marginalize the president, or even push him out, in a country where power traditionally lies with elected prime ministers or the military chiefs who have overthrown them.

Mr. Musharraf was re-elected to another five-year term by national and provincial assemblies in October, but the constitutionality of his standing for office was vigorously contested. The new Parliament could revive that challenge and even impeach him.

Election returns, which were nearly complete, showed the Pakistan Peoples Party led by Mr. Zardari earning 87 of the 268 contested seats in the National Assembly, while Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, got 66 seats.

The former governing party that had supported Mr. Musharraf, what is known as the Q faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, won only 38 seats. It was a crashing fall for the party. At least 10 of its ministers and senior leaders lost seats.

The remaining seats were divided among seven smaller parties and factions and 27 independent candidates. Ten seats remain uncounted, according to the Election Commission.

Mr. Zardari hailed the results as proof of the national appeal of his Pakistan Peoples Party. It won seats in all four provincial assemblies and is in a position to participate in governments in three of them. “We believe that no other party has the leadership and the ability to get Pakistan out of this difficulty,” he said.

Mr. Musharraf told visiting United States senators that he had accepted the election results and the defeat of his party, and would work with any coalition government that was formed.

But Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif have reasons to bear grudges. Mr. Zardari, who returned from exile only after Ms. Bhutto’s death, spent eight years in prison on murder and corruption charges under the government of Mr. Sharif. Mr. Musharraf was army chief at the time.

Mr. Sharif was thrown out of the government in 1999 by Mr. Musharraf, who mounted a coup and arrested and then exiled him. Many Pakistanis agree that the governments of Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif did not distinguish themselves. Both were ridden with corruption.

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif ran for parliamentary seats themselves and so cannot immediately serve as prime minister. Mr. Zardari is expected to run for a seat to qualify, though, and Mr. Sharif could do the same.

For now, the deputy leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, is one candidate for prime minister. The choice would clearly depend on the coalition forged, however.

Mr. Zardari faces rumblings and distrust in his party, and it was not clear how well the negotiations between him and Mr. Sharif would proceed. The talks, which are expected to begin soon, are likely to be protracted.

Mr. Zardari discussed Pakistan’s options with the militants in an interview last week. He said the campaign against terrorism needed to be redefined in Pakistan. He said it needed to be better explained to the people so they understood it was not America’s war they were fighting, but a threat to their own nation.

Mr. Zardari said that Mr. Musharraf had lost popular support for the campaign and that the morale of the army had plummeted, asserting that only a popularly elected government with the backing of Parliament could reverse that.

He added that a counterinsurgency should be waged by the police in the tribal areas, and that Pakistan had to train and equip its police forces to curb much of the lawlessness. The army is a blunt instrument and should be used selectively so that militants are awed by its power, he said.

Jane Perlez reported from Lahore, Pakistan, and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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February 19, 2008

By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers.

Official results are expected Tuesday, but early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a Parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him.

Early results showed equal gains for the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose leader, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated on Dec. 27, and the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the faction led by Nawaz Sharif, like Ms. Bhutto a former prime minister. Each party may be in a position to form the next government.

The results were interpreted here as a repudiation of Mr. Musharraf as well as the Bush administration, which has staunchly backed him for more than six years as its best bet in the campaign against the Islamic militants in Pakistan. American officials will have little choice now but to seek alternative allies from among the new political forces emerging from the vote.

Politicians and party workers from Mr. Musharraf’s party said the vote was a protest against government policies and the rise in terrorism here, in particular against Mr. Musharraf’s heavy-handed way of dealing with militancy and his use of the army against tribesmen in the border areas, and against militants in a siege at the Red Mosque here in the capital last summer that left more than 100 people dead.

Others said Mr. Musharraf’s dismissal last year of the Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who remains under house arrest, was deeply unpopular with the voters.

Mr. Musharraf, who stepped down as army chief last November after being re-elected to another five-year term as president, has seen his standing plummet as the country has faced a determined insurgency by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and a deteriorating economy.

By association, his party suffered badly. The two main opposition parties — the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-N — surged into the gap.

By early Monday night, crowds of Sharif supporters had already begun celebrating as they paraded through the streets of Rawalpindi, the garrison town just outside the capital, Islamabad. Riding on motorbikes and clinging to the backs of minivans, they played music and waved the green flags of Mr. Sharif’s party decorated with the party symbol, a tiger.

From unofficial results the private news channel, Aaj Television, forecast that the Pakistan Peoples Party would win 110 seats in the 272-seat National Assembly, with Mr. Sharif’s party taking 100 seats.

Mr. Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, was crushed, holding on to just 20 to 30 seats. Early results released by the state news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan, also showed the Pakistan Peoples Party to be leading in the number of seats won.

The Election Commission of Pakistan declared the elections free and fair and said the polling passed relatively peacefully, despite some irregularities and scattered violence. Ten people were killed and 70 injured around the country, including one candidate who was shot in Lahore on the night before the vote, Pakistani news channels reported.

Fearful of violence and deterred by confusion at polling stations, voters did not turn out in large numbers. Yet fears from opposition parties that the government would try to rig the elections did not materialize, as the early losses showed.

Official results were not expected until Tuesday morning, but all the parties were already coming to terms with the anti-Musharraf trend in the voting.

At the headquarters of Sheik Rashid Ahmed, the minister of railways and a close friend of the president, his supporters sat gloomily in chairs under an awning, listening to the cheers of their opponents. “Q is finished,” said Tahir Khan, 21, one of the party workers, referring to the pro-Musharraf party.

The party workers said Mr. Ahmed, who was among the ministers who lost their seats, was popular but had suffered from the overwhelming protest vote against Mr. Musharraf and his governing faction.

The results opened a host of new challenges for the Bush administration, which has been criticized in Congress and by Pakistan analysts for relying too heavily on Mr. Musharraf. Even as Mr. Musharraf’s standing plummeted and the insurgency gained strength, senior Bush administration officials praised Mr. Musharraf as a valued partner in the effort against terrorism.

With Mr. Musharraf as both president and head of the Pakistani military — a post he relinquished last November — the administration poured about $1 billion a year in military assistance into Pakistan after 9/11.

After Mr. Musharraf stepped down from the army, the Bush administration still gave him unequivocal support. Last month, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Richard A. Boucher, told Congress he considered the Pakistani leader indispensable to American interests.

Such fidelity to Mr. Musharraf often raised the hackles of Pakistanis, and the newspapers here were filled with editorials that expressed despair about Washington’s close relationship with the unpopular leader.

Many educated Pakistanis said they were irritated that the Bush administration chose to ignore Mr. Musharraf’s dismissal in November of the Supreme Court chief justice.

The big swing against the Pakistan Muslim League-Q party that supported Mr. Musharraf appeared to bear out the position of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, who has been a critic of the administration’s Pakistan policy.

On his arrival on Sunday to observe the elections, Mr. Biden said: “I don’t buy into the argument that Musharraf is the only one. We have to have more than just a Musharraf policy.”

As a starting point for a new policy, Mr. Biden said the United States needed to show Pakistanis that Washington was interested in more than the campaign against terrorism. He suggested that economic development aid be tripled to $1.5 billion annually.

But Washington could take some comfort in the losses of the Islamic religious parties in the North-West Frontier Province that abut the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have carved out bases.

The greatest blow for Mr. Musharraf came in the strong wave of support in Punjab Province, the country’s most populous, for Mr. Sharif, who has been a bitter rival since his government was overthrown by Mr. Musharraf in a military coup in 1999 and he was arrested and sent into exile.

He returned last November, and although banned from running for Parliament himself, he has campaigned for his party on an openly anti-Musharraf agenda, calling for the president’s resignation and for the reinstatement of Mr. Chaudhry and other Supreme Court judges.

Underscoring the reversal for Mr. Musharraf was the downfall of the powerful Chaudhry family of Punjab Province, who had underwritten his political career by creating the Pakistan Muslim League-Q party for him.

“The myth is broken; it was a huge wave against Musharraf,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer involved in the anti-Musharraf lawyers’ movement. “Right across the board his party was defeated, in the urban and rural areas. The margins are so big they couldn’t have rigged it even if they tried.”

A few hours after the size of the defeat became clear, the government eased up on the restrictions against Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement that has opposed the president. Mr. Ahsan, who has been under house arrest since last November, when Mr. Musharraf imposed emergency rule for six weeks, found the phones in his house were suddenly reconnected.

“Musharraf should be preparing a C-130 for Turkey,” Mr. Ahsan said, referring to Mr. Musharraf’s statements that he might retire to Turkey, where he spent part of his childhood.

Two politicians close to Mr. Musharraf have said in the past week that the president was well aware of the drift in the country against him and they suggested that he would not remain in office if the new government was in direct opposition to him. “He does not have the fire in the belly for another fight,” said one member of his party. He added that Mr. Musharraf was building a house for himself in Islamabad and would be ready soon to move.

Jane Perlez reported from Lahore, Pakistan, and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad. David Rohde contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Rawalpindi.

Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Jane Perlez from Lahore. David Rohde contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Rawalpindi.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Agency spent millions setting up agents with non-official cover

Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON – The CIA set up a network of front companies in Europe and elsewhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as part of a constellation of “black stations” for a new generation of spies, according to current and former agency officials.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA’s principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.

The closures were a blow to two of the CIA’s most pressing priorities after Sept. 11 – expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.

The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as “non-official cover,” meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government.

But the plan became the source of significant dispute within the agency and was plagued with problems, officials said. The bogus companies were located far from Muslim enclaves in Europe and other targets. Their size raised concern that one mistake would blow the cover of many agents. And because business travelers don’t ordinarily come into contact with al-Qaida or other high-priority adversaries, officials said, the cover did not work.

Summing up what many considered the fatal flaw of the program, one former high-ranking CIA official said, “They were built on the theory of the ‘Field of Dreams’: Build them, and the targets will come.”

Officials said the experience reflects an ongoing struggle at the CIA to adapt to a new environment in espionage. The agency has sought to regroup by designing covers that would provide pretexts for spies to get close to radical Muslim groups, nuclear equipment manufacturers and other high-priority targets.

But current and former officials said progress has been painfully slow, and that the agency’s efforts to alter its use of personal and corporate disguises have yet to produce a significant penetration of a terrorist or weapons proliferation network.

“I don’t believe the intelligence community has made the fundamental shift in how it operates to adapt to the different targets that are out there,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. The cover arrangements most commonly employed by the CIA “don’t get you near radical Islam,” Hoekstra said, adding that six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, “We don’t have nearly the kind of penetrations I would have expected against hard targets.”

Whatever their cover, the CIA’s spies are unlikely to single-handedly penetrate terrorist or proliferation groups, officials said. Instead, the agency stalks informants around the edges of such quarry – moderate Muslims troubled by the radical message at their mosques, mercenary shipping companies that might accept illicit nuclear components as cargo; chemists whose colleagues have suspicious contacts with extremist groups.

Agency officials declined to respond to questions about the front companies. “Cover is designed to protect the officers and operations that protect America,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. “The CIA does not, for that very compelling reason, publicly discuss cover in detail.”

But senior CIA officials publicly have acknowledged that the agency has devoted considerable energy to creating new ways for its case officers – the CIA’s term for its overseas spies – to operate under false identities.

The vast majority of the CIA’s spies traditionally have operated under what is known as official cover, meaning they pose as U.S. diplomats or employees of another government agency.

The approach has advantages, including diplomatic immunity, which means that an operative under official cover might be kicked out of a country if he is caught spying, but won’t be imprisoned or executed.

Official cover is also cheaper and easier. Front companies can take a year or more to set up. They require renting office space, having staff to answer phones and paying for cars and other props. They also involve creating fictitious client lists and resumes that can withstand sustained scrutiny.

One of the CIA’s commercial cover platforms was exposed in 2003 when undercover officer Valerie Plame was outed in a newspaper column. Public records quickly led to the unraveling of the company that served as her cover during overseas trips, a fictitious CIA firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Official cover worked well for the duration of the Cold War, when holding a job at a U.S. Embassy enabled American spies to make contact with Soviet officials and other communist targets.

But many intelligence officials are convinced that embassy posts are not useful against a new breed of adversaries. “Terrorists and weapons proliferators aren’t going to be on the diplomatic cocktail circuit,” said one government official familiar with the CIA’s cover operations.

After the terrorist strikes, the Bush administration ordered the agency to expand its overseas operation by 50 percent. The agency came under pressure from Congress to alter its approach and got a major boost in funding to expand the non-official cover program.

Kevin O’Brien

February 15, 2008

More than six years after Americans watched Muslim terrorists destroy the World Trade Center, damage the Pentagon and kill more than 3,000 innocents, the Bush administration is about to attempt justice for some of the high-ranking alleged perpetrators.

Six al-Qaida members, a cast headlined by Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are headed for trial by a U.S. military tribunal.

The questions before the court will involve 169 charges, including conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, and terrorism.

The question before the nation is broader: Are we more interested in defending ourselves from terrorists or defending terrorists against intrusions upon their “rights”?

For the last five or six years, the defendants have lived at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The key word in that sentence isn’t “defendants,” “detention” or “Guantanamo.” The key word is “lived.” That’s the thing they got to do that their victims didn’t.

I can’t help but feel a little apprehension about seeing them go before a court – even a military court. We haven’t done very well at justice in this war.

In fact, lawyers have provided some of the finest aid and comfort to the enemy that money can buy. In doing so, they’ve worked hard to sow confusion in Westerners’ minds about what constitutes justice.

War isn’t a courtroom drama. The calculations of the people who must save their own lives by pulling a trigger shouldn’t have to include, “What would a lawyer say about this?” Yet those calculations are made every day. But only by our side.

We ought to be ashamed that our own good men have been wounded and killed because hesitation is built into their rules of engagement.

We ought to be ashamed that American lives have been sacrificed to fears that some terrorist might file a lawsuit against his interrogators.

What we don’t need to be ashamed about – not for one second – is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got water up his nose before he cracked. By the standards of his own organization, which has a penchant for cutting off the heads of its captives and gleefully packing the videotapes off to Al-Jazeera – Mohammed says he himself wielded the knife that killed journalist Daniel Pearl – he’s gotten off pretty light, so far.

The people we’re fighting have never shown the slightest inclination toward playing by the rules of the Geneva Convention, or anything else that might pass for “civilized” warfare.

They do not wear uniforms, nor do they act under the auspices of any nation or government. They target civilians. They don’t mistakenly commit the occasional atrocity in the heat of battle. Rather, they strive for atrocities, planning them carefully for maximum loss of life and shock value.

Their most effective weapons are terror, stealth, propaganda and our own civilized sensibilities, which they understand perfectly, sneer at, and use against us at every opportunity.

And some of their most effective propagandists, unwitting and otherwise, are people who demand that Americans focus on the legal niceties of this war and the legal rights of enemies who find our laws quaint, silly and useful.

So, although there were worse ideas than leaving Mohammed and his boys to rot in the warm Cuban breeze, the complaints of the I-dotters and T-crossers have won them a day in court. It isn’t the court they would have preferred – a civilian trial court where the whole legal circus could have come to town. But with the military promising all kinds of openness and transparency, the defendants and their advocates probably will have ample opportunity to spew their venom and insult our intelligence.

With the legal strategizing and handicapping already well under way, the Telegraph of London offered this bit of odd phrasing: “Legal experts said the willingness of Mohammed, known as ‘KSM’ in intelligence circles, to take credit for terrorism could complicate the tribunal process.”

Complicate? Killers who brag about their murderous exploits usually simplify the process.

Then again, maybe those legal experts are hoping for an acquittal.

Waterboarding, tribunals test prosecution

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, is seen shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan. The Pentagon plans to seek the death penalty for Mohammed and five other detainees at Guantanamo Bay in connection with the 2001 attacks. Associated Press (FILE Associated Press) The suspects •Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. •Mohammed al-Qahtani, who the military said could have been the 20th hijacker had he not been turned down for a visa. •Ramzi Binalshibh, considered a top al-Qaida detainee in Guantanamo. The military called Binalshibh a main intermediary between the hijackers and bin Laden. He also was named Mohammed’s main assistant for “Planes Operations.” •Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. •Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who helped move money among the hijackers. •Waleed bin Attash, who’s charged with training some of the hijackers. For example, the military alleges that he prepared reports for al-Qaida on how to get knives onto flights. McClatchy Related stories 9-11

Aamer Madhani and James Oliphant
Chicago Tribune
February 12, 2008

WASHINGTON – The plan announced by the Pentagon Monday to seek the death penalty against six suspects accused of planning and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks could be complicated by the recent acknowledgment that one of the accused was the subject of waterboarding, as well as the legal and international communities’ antipathy toward the Bush administration’s military tribunals.

The charges filed against the six, including alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, outline a litany of war crimes and include conspiracy, murder, attacking civilians, terrorism and supporting terrorism. All six suspects are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the military plans to try the six together.

Monday’s announcement takes the Pentagon, and the country, into largely uncharted legal territory. The procedures of the military commissions have been repeatedly challenged in court, with some success, and legal precedents that have been developed by courts over decades or longer hold less sway than in the civilian criminal justice system.

But the administration argues that ordinary courts are not equipped to handle the sensitive national security considerations involved in trying top terrorists.

“These charges allege a long-term, highly sophisticated, organized plan by al-Qaida to attack the United States of America,” Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the tribunal system, told a Pentagon news conference Monday.

Besides Mohammed, the other men facing charges for the Sept. 11 plot are Walid Muhammad bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Mohammed al-Qahtani. Mohammed, bin Attash, Binalshibh, and Ali are also charged with “hijacking or hazarding a vessel” in connection with the four commercial airplanes that were crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.

As the commissions’ procedures dictate, Judge Susan Crawford, the convening authority over the military tribunals, still needs to certify the charges against all six of the suspects as capital offenses to make them eligible for the death penalty if convicted.

Since its opening, the Guantanamo prison has been criticized by human rights activists and some foreign leaders as a secretive facility operating outside U.S. law. The military commissions have also been criticized by many in the legal community, and federal courts have repeatedly questioned the Bush administration’s overall system for handling enemy combatants in the war on terror.

In 2006, the Supreme Court decision struck down the first version of the military tribunal, or commission, system as unconstitutional. Since then, only four defendants had been formally charged by the military commission.

Despite the notoriety of the new defendants, nothing is likely to come easily – or quickly. Hartmann said it could be months before the defendants even make an appearance before a commission, the first step toward an ultimate trial.

The prospect of capital punishment is likely to throw the already muddy process into further uncertainty, since courts demand a higher degree of due process when the death penalty is involved. And lawyers for each of the detainees will undoubtedly file motions to sever their clients’ case from the other five.

Another potential wrinkle: The Supreme Court is considering a case that concerns whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal court outside the commission process. If it sides with the detainees, that litigation would proceed on a wholly separate, and elongated, track.

Kevin Lanigan, the director for the Human Rights First law and security program, said the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other suspects was long overdue, but the allegations of torture will complicate a military system that has been problematic from the start.

“The administration still refuses to acknowledge its two greatest self-imposed obstacles to achieving justice for the families and victims of 9-11: the absence of a credible and truly independent system for trying these defendants, and problems caused by the use of official cruelty in interrogating them,” Lanigan said.

Last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the attacks, was one of three terror suspects in CIA custody who had been subjected to the interrogation technique known as waterboarding.

Waterboarding makes a prisoner believe he is in imminent danger of drowning. The suspect is tied to a board and water is poured through a cloth that covers his face. The practice is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual, and most of the international community considers the technique torture.

In addition, al-Qahtani, who Pentagon officials say was supposed to have been the 20th hijacker, has alleged he was tortured and last fall recanted a confession he said he made after he was abused by interrogators.

Jim Cohen, a professor at Fordham Law School who represents two Guantanamo Bay detainees who are not among the six charged Monday, said the government’s case “smells of utter and complete unreliability.”

“What is the basis for the charges?” Cohen said “The meaty basis of this case is the statements made by KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and others. And (most of) those statements, if not all of them, were made under harsh interrogations.”

When asked if Hayden’s admission could complicate the case, Hartmann said it would be up to the military judge to determine what evidence can be admitted.

Along with the interrogations, a recurring problem facing defense attorneys who have tried to defend detainees before commission has been access to other detainees as witnesses and to classified material. The Pentagon has continually objected to such access because of concerns over national security. Those will also be issues confronting Judge Crawford.

But Hartmann said the six accused men would be given the same rights as U.S. troops tried under a military justice system.

The suspects, for example, will be allowed to call witnesses and will be appointed military attorneys as well as have the right to hire civilian attorneys. They will also be allowed to review any evidence presented against them, Hartmann said. If convicted, appeals can ultimately go to the Supreme Court.

While the trial will not be televised, journalists will be allowed to attend, and arrangements will be made to allow the family of the Sept. 11 victims to view recordings of the proceedings in private, Hartmann said.

“There will be no secret trials,” Hartmann said.

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing the first sweeping case against suspected conspirators in the plot that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and drew the United States into war, people who have been briefed on the case said.

The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would involve as many as six detainees held at the detention camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who has said he was the principal planner of the plot.

The case could begin to fulfill a longtime goal of the Bush administration: establishing culpability for the terrorist attacks of 2001. It could also help the administration make its case that some detainees at Guantánamo, where 275 men remain, would pose a threat if they are not held at Guantánamo or elsewhere. Officials have long said that a half-dozen men held at Guantánamo played essential roles in the plot directed by Mr. Mohammed, from would-be hijackers to financiers.

But the case would also bring new scrutiny to the military commission system, which has a troubled history and has been criticized as a system designed to win convictions but that does not provide the legal protections of American civilian courts.

War-crimes charges against the men would almost certainly place the prosecutors in a battle over the treatment of inmates because at least two detainees tied to the 2001 terror attacks were subject to aggressive interrogation techniques that critics say amounted to torture.

One official who has been briefed on the case said the military prosecutors were considering seeking the death penalty for Mr. Mohammed, although no final decision appears to have been made. The official added that the military prosecutors had decided to focus on the Sept. 11 attacks in part as an effort to try to establish credibility for the military commission system before a new administration takes the White House next January.

“The thinking was 9/11 is the heart and soul of the whole thing. The thinking was: go for that,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case. Even if the charges are released soon, it would be many months before a trial could be held, lawyers said.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to comment specifically. But he added that the government was preparing a case against “individuals who have been involved in some of the most grievous acts of violence and terror against the United States and our allies.”

“The prosecution team is close to moving forward on referring charges on a number of individuals,” Mr. Whitman said.

Ever since President Bush announced in 2006 that he had transferred 14 “high value” detainees to Guantánamo from a secret C.I.A. detention program, it has been expected that the Pentagon would eventually lodge charges involving several of the numerous terror plots to which officials say several of those men were tied.

Officials have said detainees now held at Guantánamo are responsible for attacks that killed thousands of people, including the United States Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000, and the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002.

But it has always been clear that a case involving the Sept. 11 plot would be the centerpiece of the military commissions system and its most stringent test. After the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration’s first system for military commission trials in 2006, Congress enacted a new law.

Among other things, the Military Commissions Act provides that detainees charged with war crimes are entitled to military lawyers to defend them, a presumption of innocence and a right of appeal. But detainees’ lawyers and other critics have said that many flaws remain, including the fact that the system is under Pentagon control and even the judges are military officers.

Told of the possible charges, Carie Lemack, whose mother was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, said such a trial would be a grueling process for the families. But, Ms. Lemack said, “It is important that justice be brought to those who killed my mother and nearly 3,000 others.”

It was not clear Friday whether final decisions had been made about precise charges and which detainees are to be included.

But it is known that the prosecutors have considered charges of murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism because of the Sept. 11 deaths. It is also known that a joint team of military and Department of Justice lawyers working on the case have considered charging six of the best-known Guantánamo detainees.

Lawyers have said that two of those are men whose treatment in American hands would inevitably be a focus of defense lawyers in their cases.

One of them, Mr. Mohammed, known as KSM, was subject to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding while in secret C.I.A. custody, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed this week.

The American-educated Mr. Mohammed was described by the Sept. 11 commission as the “self-cast star, the superterrorist,” with plans for destruction on a vast scale. At a Pentagon hearing last year, he claimed responsibility for more than 30 terrorist attacks and plots.

He was explicit about his role in the 2001 attacks. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said.

The other detainee whose treatment could become a focus of any trial is Mohammed al-Qahtani, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. Pentagon officials have said he may have been the so-called “20th hijacker.” A month before the attacks, he flew from Dubai to Orlando, Fla., but was denied entry into the United States by an immigration official.

Pentagon investigators concluded in 2005 that he had been subject to abusive treatment at Guantánamo, including sleep deprivation, being forced to wear a bra and being led around on a leash.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, one of Mr. al-Qahtani’s lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said she had no information about whether he would be charged. “But if he is,” Ms. Gutierrez said, “I can assure you that his well-documented torture and the controversy over secret trials will be the focus.”

Zacarias Moussaoui, who at one point was identified by prosecutors as a potential “20th hijacker” pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2005, and is serving a life term. He is the only person who has been tried in a United States court for involvement in the Sept. 11 plot.

Defense lawyers are also expected to use any commission cases to challenge the prosecutors over the C.I.A.’s destruction of tapes of interrogations of two detainees, which has been acknowledged by the agency.

Among the other four potential defendants are Guantánamo detainees who intelligence officials have said played critical support roles for the hijackers.

Officials say Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had been a roommate of the lead hijacker Mohamed Atta in Hamburg, Germany, was the main intermediary between the hijackers and Al Qaeda leaders in the months before Sept. 11.

The Pentagon has described another detainee, Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, as “a key lieutenant for KSM during the operation on 11 September” who wired $114,500 to the hijackers.

Mr. al-Baluchi’s assistant was Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, according to various accounts. The September 11 commission said that Mr. al-Hawsawi had been assigned by Mr. Mohammed to help coordinate hijackers’ travel and was so centrally involved that he was their contact for unused money to be returned in the days before the attacks.

Finally, the detainee known as Khallad, who is missing part of his right leg as a result of what officials say is a long jihadist history, is believed to have had long ties to Mr. bin Laden. Officials have said Khallad helped select and train some of the hijackers and was originally slated to have been one of them himself.

Trudy Rubin
The Philadelphia Inquirer
February 6, 2008

There’s another election happening this month that may be as important to Americans as Super Tuesday. I refer to parliamentary elections on Feb. 18 in Pakistan.

Pakistani elections will play a crucial role in that country’s ability to combat a growing threat from jihadis. Even as progress has been made in combating al-Qaida in Iraq, the organization has been sinking deeper roots in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghanistan border.

Thousands of Taliban, and other militants, are also based there and are setting off suicide bombs in Pakistan’s cities. Jihadis probably killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the civilian leader most committed to fighting them if her party won the elections. And unlike Iraq, Pakistan is a country with nukes.

The country has become further destabilized by the political machinations of President Pervez Musharraf. He’s been stumping Europe’s capitals and the Davos World Economic Forum trying to convince the world’s leaders he will permit free and fair elections. His message: Elections don’t really matter, because only he can secure Pakistan.

Don’t believe it. The elections do matter, and the White House had better be prepared for a post-Musharraf Pakistan.

I say that even though Musharraf put on a strong show at Davos, appearing on two panels and giving one very long and impassioned breakfast presentation. With his British accent and crisp military bearing, he made a strong impression on rooms packed with CEOs from America, Europe and Asia, especially because Pakistan’s economy has improved during his tenure.

Musharraf admitted no mistakes, not in permitting the jihadi insurgency to grow on his watch, nor in sacking his Supreme Court when it was about to rule his re-election unconstitutional. “There is a degree of misperception about Pakistan,” he insisted at the Davos breakfast. “We are the victims since 1979.”

He blamed the growth of the jihadi threat, with some justification, on U.S. and Saudi funding in the 1980s for Islamic militants in Afghanistan. The militants were fighting against Soviet occupation. After Soviet troops left, those militants morphed into al-Qaida; the chaos in Afghanistan also spawned the growth of the Taliban.

“After 1989, everyone left the scene,” Musharraf said, “including the United States. We were used and we were ditched.” He never mentioned that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies helped the Taliban and other radical groups, as a hedge against India.

Pakistan is now suffering the blowback from its own actions, as these militants align themselves with al-Qaida. Critics also charge that the jihadis still have sympathizers within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. Musharraf denied this.

“The deliberate nurturing of jihadism by the state,” says well-known Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, “has … produced extremism inside parts of the military and intelligence.” Hoodbhoy worries such penetration could compromise Pakistan’s protection for its nukes.

Musharraf also denied he had violated the constitution by sacking the judges. And he insisted that Pakistan’s elections would be free and fair. He was asked whether he might reinstate the judges to restore confidence in the electoral system (since any violations will be appealed to the courts). He retorted sharply: “Don’t impose Western human-rights considerations and standards on the whole world. Pakistan has a different environment.”

What Musharraf did not convey is the anger that the sacking of the court has aroused across Pakistan. This adds to the host of grievances, some contradictory, that a broad majority of the public now holds against him: that economic gains don’t benefit the poor, that he is too pro-American, that he may have conspired in Bhutto’s murder. (This is highly unlikely, but many of her supporters think it is so.)

So Pakistan’s elections have become a litmus test for an increasingly unpopular leader. No one will believe the elections aren’t rigged. If opposition parties don’t receive a majority, their followers are likely to go to the streets. Musharraf will try to carry on and divide the opposition. Political instability will make it harder to fight the jihadis. Some Pakistanis tell me the army, at some point, will have to tell Musharraf he must go. This is not something the United States can, or should, push for, but it seems likely.

So Americans should be watching the Pakistani elections, and the post-election, for signs of what will come after Musharraf. The central fight against al-Qaida will depend on the results.

State of the Union Reflects New Focus on Money Matters
By Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 29, 2008; A01

President Bush told the American people last night that his strategy to stabilize Iraq is achieving results “few of us could have imagined just one year ago,” even as he sought to reassure the public that his new stimulus plan will stave off a recession that threatens to hobble the nation’s economy during the final year of his presidency.

Appearing before Congress for his seventh and last State of the Union address, Bush claimed vindication for his controversial decision a year ago to send a “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. “The enemy is still dangerous, and more work remains,” Bush acknowledged, but with a decline in the number of high-profile attacks, sectarian violence and civilian deaths, he said, progress is unmistakable.

“Some may deny the surge is working,” Bush said, “but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated.”

Bush’s address highlighted the shifting priorities of an administration that had planned to focus its final year on the war and other international challenges but has found itself moving quickly in the past month to address the growing crisis in the economy. The past year has brought an increasing tide of bad economic news, culminating in last week’s global stock market panic over a collapsing housing market and other financial woes in the United States.

The president called on Congress to finish work quickly on a $150 billion stimulus package, urging lawmakers not to “load up” the initiative with measures beyond the tax rebates and business incentives he agreed to last week with House leaders. “That would delay it or derail it, and neither option is acceptable,” said Bush, who also repeated his long-ignored call to make permanent his early-term tax cuts.

The president avoided grim economic talk and instead described conditions as mixed. “In the short run, we can all see that growth is slowing,” he said. “America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months, but jobs are now growing at a slower pace. Wages are up, but so are prices for food and gas. Exports are rising, but the housing market has declined.”

Bush appeared in a cheery mood during his valedictory State of the Union. He chuckled at the partisan rites of the annual speech, in which Democrats and Republicans roared at different junctures, interrupting him with applause more than 70 times in the 53-minute address. His remarks, however, came amid a fierce political campaign season in which many voters are looking beyond the Bush presidency to his potential successors.

In a nod to the political realities, the president did not revive the kind of ambitious reforms on Social Security and immigration that animated his past State of the Union addresses. He offered instead a menu of familiar initiatives, mixed in with modest new proposals on education, social services and assistance for military families, that his aides said stand a reasonable chance of congressional passage before the political conventions start in late August.

One new plan would devote $300 million to new grants for low-income children to attend private schools. The president also proposed writing into law rules that require federal agencies to give equal consideration to religious-based groups providing social services to the poor.

Bush, whose administration has come under fire in recent years over the poor treatment of injured soldiers, also unveiled several initiatives aimed at boosting federal assistance to families of veterans and active service members. One proposal would give hiring preferences throughout the federal government to military spouses; another would allow troops and veterans to transfer unused GI education benefits to spouses and children.

Bush’s approach suggested that he remains undaunted by the low approval ratings that have characterized his presidency in recent years. “We have unfinished business before us,” the president said, “and the American people expect us to get it done.”

Democrats chose a centrist red-state governor, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, to respond to Bush’s address. She described the stimulus package as only a “temporary fix” and blasted Bush’s foreign policy for leaving the nation with “fewer allies and more enemies.” But her message also struck a conciliatory tone: “There is a chance, Mr. President, in the next 357 days, to get real results and give the American people renewed optimism that their challenges are the top priority.”

The top two congressional leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) offered faint praise for Bush. “We agree with the President that we must work together to make progress on our most pressing challenges,” they said in a statement. “Yet, tonight, the President offered little more than the status quo. At a time when our economy is on shaky ground and our leadership around the world is eroding, the status quo won’t do.”

Bush made clear to Democrats that he intends to employ fully the powers of the presidency until his final hours in office. He reiterated his demand that they approve new surveillance legislation by Friday, when a temporary wiretapping law is set to expire. He also said he will use his veto pen and administrative powers to try to rein in the proliferation of “earmarks,” the projects inserted by lawmakers into annual spending bills and totaling roughly $17 billion in the last budget.

Bush warned he would veto any spending bill that does not cut in half the number and cost of earmarks from the year before. He also said he will sign an executive order requiring agencies to ignore any earmark not included in the language of legislation. “The people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks,” Bush said.

Bush’s pledge was met with skepticism from many Democrats and even some in the GOP, who noted that the practice increased dramatically while Republicans controlled Congress. “The number of earmarks exploded under Republican leadership in the House, and for six years President Bush did nothing to slow their growth,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

In keeping with the traditional civility of the occasion, Bush was greeted warmly as he entered the House chamber. Among the lawmakers present were two of his would-be Democratic successors, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

The White House invited a customary mix of prominent and ordinary citizens to sit with first lady Laura Bush as a way of humanizing some of the broader themes of the president’s speech. Last night, the guests included a single mother from Tanzania who benefited from the U.S. global AIDS initiative; the co-chairs of his commission on health care for veterans; and several troops who served with valor in Iraq and elsewhere. Bush did not introduce any of the guests, as he and past presidents have done.

Bush devoted special attention to the two main issues that could shape long-term perspectives on his presidency: the souring economy and the war in Iraq.

On Iraq, Bush made clear he is not ready to accelerate a drawdown of U.S. forces, which are scheduled to return to pre-”surge” levels of 130,000 by mid-summer. He cited a warning from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that pulling troops out too quickly risks the recovery of al-Qaeda in Iraq and an increase in violence.

“Members of Congress,” he said, “having come so far and achieved so much, we must not allow this to happen.”

Democrats challenged Bush’s upbeat portrait of conditions in Iraq. While even critics concede violence has ebbed because of the troop increase, many military experts are unsure whether this is a temporary phenomenon. And even senior U.S. military commanders are concerned that the military progress has not been matched by steps to forge a more lasting political accord.

Bush renewed his call to strengthen the No Child Left Behind Act, which set up a system of testing and other benchmarks for the nation’s schools, and urged Congress to ratify trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. He also promised that the United States will do “everything we can” to achieve a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis, which has become a major goal in his final year in office.

Bush also proposed to contribute $2 billion over three years to an international clean-energy fund. He will seek additional funds from countries such as Britain and Japan, and a donors’ committee will dole the money out in the form of grants, loans and loan guarantees. The money would probably go to firms selling such things as energy-efficient coal plants and would help make those less expensive for buyers from developing countries.

Staff writers Paul Kane, Lyndsey Layton and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Associated Press
December 27, 2007

WASHINGTON — One week before the Iowa caucuses, the assassination of former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto pushed terrorism to the forefront in voters’ minds and highlighted the candidacies of presidential hopefuls with long records on national security.

Bhutto’s assassination today rippled through the presidential race as candidates scrambled to respond and adjusted campaign plans on a day overshadowed by the terrorist attack in Rawalpindi.

The deadly incident at an election rally in Pakistan could help presidential candidates such as Republican Rudy Giuliani, who was in charge of New York City when terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, and Vietnam War veteran John McCain, a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Rodham Clinton has argued that her experience makes her prepared to lead the nation in troubled times. Rival Barack Obama has pushed a hard line in dealing with Pakistan and the search for Osama bin Laden.

Clinton said she had come to know Bhutto during the former prime minister’s years in office and her time in exile and was “profoundly saddened and outraged” by the assassination.

“She returned to Pakistan to fight for democracy despite threats and previous attempts on her life, and now she has made the ultimate sacrifice. Her death is a tragedy for her country and a terrible reminder of the work that remains to bring peace, stability and hope to regions of the globe too often paralyzed by fear, hatred, and violence,” Clinton said in a statement.

Giuliani said the assassination underscored a need for the U.S. to increase its efforts to combat terrorism.

“Her murderers must be brought to justice, and Pakistan must continue the path back to democracy and the rule of law,” Giuliani said in a statement. “Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere — whether in New York, London, Tel-Aviv or Rawalpindi — is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our efforts to win the terrorists’ war on us.”

McCain, in a statement, said the death of Bhutto “underscores yet again the grave dangers we face in the world today and particularly in countries like Pakistan, where the forces of moderation are arrayed in a fierce battle against those who embrace violent Islamic extremism.

“Given Pakistan’s strategic location, the international terrorist groups that operate from its soil, and its nuclear arsenal, the future of that country has deep implications for the security of the United States and its allies. America must stand on the right side of this ongoing struggle,” he said, noting that he has made numerous visits to Pakistan.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney focused on the threat of “global, violent radical jihadism.”

“This type of loss of life points out again the need for our nation and other civilized nations of the West and Muslim world to come together to support moderate Islamic leaders and moderate Islamic people to help them in their effort to reject the violence and the extreme,” Romney told reporters after his first campaign event at Norton’s Classic Cafe, in Hudson, N.H. “The world is very much at risk by virtue of these radical, violent extremists and we must come together, in great haste and great earnestness, to help overcome the threat of the spread of radical, violent jihad.”

On Wednesday night, Romney had criticized Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for imposing martial law. Romney was asked if he had more sympathy for such action given the attack on Bhutto.

“I believe it was a mistake. I believe as well that martial law was principally imposed by him to protect himself from political challenge, a challenge from the Supreme Court and others, and believe that it was not a productive course for his nation,” Romney said.

Obama said he was shocked and saddened by Bhutto’s death.

“She was a respected and resilient advocate for the democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people. We join with them in mourning her loss, and stand with them in their quest for democracy and against the terrorists who threaten the common security of the world,” he said.

Republican candidate Mike Huckabee said the assassination was “devastating news for the people of Pakistan, and my prayers go out to them.”

“The terrible violence surrounding Pakistan’s upcoming election stands in stark contrast to the peaceful transition of power that we embrace in our country through our Constitution,” Huckabee said in a statement.

Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called on President Bush to force Musharraf to step down. Until then, Richardson said the U.S. must suspend military aid to the Pakistani government.

“A leader has died, but democracy must live. The United States government cannot stand by and allow Pakistan’s return to democracy to be derailed or delayed by violence,” Richardson said.

The Bush administration has pushed hard for peaceful elections in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation led by Musharraf, a U.S. ally in the anti-terror war.

Bhutto was killed in an attack on an election rally in Rawalpindi. Many others were killed in a blast that took place as Bhutto left the rally where she had addressed thousands of supporters in her campaign for Jan. 8 parliamentary elections.

Bhutto served twice as Pakistan’s prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile Oct. 18. Her homecoming parade in Karachi was also targeted by a suicide attacker, and more than 140 people were killed. On that occasion she narrowly escaped injury.

David Sarasohn
Portland Oregonian
December 10, 2007

This is what passes, these days, for good news in the massive constitutional and international public relations fiasco that is the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Shane Kadidal, of the Guantanamo project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing prisoners, recently told the Financial Times: “The medieval physical brutality has more or less been cleared up in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal.”

On that reassuring note, last week the Supreme Court heard arguments on the legal morass of Guantanamo and the position of the Bush administration and the previous Congress that it is none of the business of the U.S. court system. The government maintains that the current system for resolving the cases of the inmates – a military tribunal structure that was invented on the spot and regularly breaks down like a ‘56 Studebaker – works just fine and that it shouldn’t matter to the Supreme Court if it doesn’t.

Currently, there are 305 prisoners at Guantanamo, with 15 defined as “high-value detainees.” Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously defined all the prisoners as “the worst of the worst,” but we keep releasing them by the dozen and the population is now about half what it once was.

Originally, the administration maintained that no judicial processes were required, that it could hold prisoners for as long as it wanted. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t work that way, that the prisoners had to have some legal recourse.

In response, the administration set up the military commissions, and Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, seeking to bar U.S. courts from the cases. So far, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has agreed, but nobody bars the Supreme Court when it doesn’t want to be barred. So the court, or at least five members of it, could consider the workings of the system set up in the court’s place. In the government’s brief, U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement assured the justices: “The detainees now enjoy greater procedural protections and statutory rights to challenge their wartime detentions than any other captured enemy combatants in the history of war.”

But even without the “medieval physical brutality,” prisoners can have limited or no access to the charges, evidence or witnesses against them; evidence gathered from torture is admitted; and military authorities have been known to make it clear what verdict they expect. Besides, as Rumsfeld once explained, “Even in a case where an enemy combatant might be acquitted, the United States would be irresponsible not to continue to detain them until the conflict is over.”

Aside from all that, it’s a model system.

“I have one client who was held down there on the basis of an allegation that, two years after he went to Guantanamo, an alias of his name appeared on a computer’s hard drive of somebody who might have been associated with al-Qaida,” Tom Wilner, a partner at a Wall Street law firm, told National Public Radio.

“He asked, ‘Well, I don’t have any aliases. What’s the alias?’ They said, ‘We can’t tell you. It’s classified.’ He said, ‘Where was the computer, whose was it?’ ‘Can’t tell you. It’s classified.’ ‘When was this?’ ‘Can’t tell you. It’s classified.’ ”

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles D. Swift, assigned as a defense attorney, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, “The few rules that did exist to govern commission proceedings were subject to constant revision.” Swift quoted a prosecutor, Air Force Capt. John Carr, as saying the system was “a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged.”

Still, the government maintains, this is no concern of the Supreme Court because Guantanamo is not on U.S. territory. It’s under Cuban sovereignty – although if Fidel Castro showed up one day and asked for the keys, we’d have to tell him he misunderstood.

Still, Seth Waxman, attorney for the prisoners, told the justices, “the United States exercises – quote – ‘complete jurisdiction and control over this base.’ No other law applies. If our law doesn’t apply, it’s a law-free zone.”

Attempting to recover its considerable lost ground in the world’s opinion, the United States might be looking for a new public image.

The one it wants probably isn’t “law-free zone.”

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
November 25, 2007

Clausewitz is the name and war is my game. You’ll forgive a little levity from a dead Prussian, won’t you?

I, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote the book on war. It’s called “Vom Kriege” (”On War”), and I’m proud to say it’s been required reading at military academies for two centuries.

So when Herr Pinkerton told me he was writing a column about American military strategy in the Middle East, I told him to take the day off.

Ironically, my biggest single point about war was actually a point about peace: winning the peace. As I wrote, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” That is, if Country A can’t get Country B to do what it wants through diplomacy, well, then, Country A might have to attack. War may or may not be just or glorious; that’s not my concern. I am practical-minded, albeit maybe a little cold-blooded.

So let’s think practically about your various wars, the ones America is fighting, or might be fighting – even the one it’s winning, even if most Americans don’t know about it.

Let’s start with Iraq. A recent front-page headline from the Washington Post – I keep up! – was revealing for its substandard Clausewitzian thinking: “Iraqis Wasting an Opportunity, U.S. Officers Say.” The gist of the story, reflecting the Pentagon’s “spin,” was that the American military had prevailed on the Iraq battlefield, but that squabbling Iraqi politicians, along with incompetent State Department diplomats, were squandering the victory.

Such a newspaper story is good for blame-shifting, but it’s not good for actual war-winning. Smart strategists know – because they read it in my book – that politics and war are a continuum. They are not separate. If you win a war and then lose the politics, well, you have lost the war.

If you don’t believe me, ask the Israelis. They’ve won all their fights against the Arabs, but they haven’t won the politics of the Middle East. And that’s why Israel is still at great risk. This coming week, the Americans are summoning the Israelis to “peace talks” in your town of Annapolis, Md., with foes that don’t really want peace. Why is the Bush administration doing this? Because the Arabs that America is relying on for help in Iraq – and against Iran – have insisted that the United States “do something” about Israel. All of which is a reminder that your country hasn’t won much in Iraq, to say nothing of Iran.

From your point of view, it’s great that the Americans and Israelis can defeat the Arabs. But until you have altered Arab/Muslim political thinking – by breaking or otherwise changing their political will – then peace conferences are mere mirage-castles in the air.

As for Afghanistan and Pakistan, let’s just say this: America sends lots of lawyers, guns and money, but you don’t seem to have true influence on the destiny of 200 million Muslims – including Osama bin Laden, lurking there somewhere.

But it’s not all bleak for America in the region. A bright spot is Sudan, which has long been a haven for Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Yes, I’ll admit, in the western province of Darfur, Muslims are massacring Muslims.

But in the southern part, the Christians have achieved many of their political objectives. How? By fighting! Give war a chance: It works sometimes.

In fact, the Christians – under the charismatic leadership of Salva Kiir, in Washington recently meeting with President Bush at the White House – are inching toward independence from the Khartoum regime.

Breaking up a hostile Muslim country? Carving out a new nation? Liberating millions of African Christians, along with substantial oil deposits, to seek new alignment with the West?

That’s a full politico-military victory, in the Clausewitzian sense, if you can keep it. You Americans should savor that success and, more to the point, study it.

By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials.

But with the future of that country’s leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying about whether Washington has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Pakistan’s reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort.

The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training of Pakistani personnel in the United States and the construction of a nuclear security training center in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this year.

A raft of equipment — from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment — was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material, its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of nuclear proliferation in the atomic age.

While American officials say that they believe the arsenal is safe at the moment, and that they take at face value Pakistani assurances that security is vastly improved, in many cases the Pakistani government has been reluctant to show American officials how or where the gear is actually used.

That is because the Pakistanis do not want to reveal the locations of their weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel the country is now producing.

The American program was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration debated whether to share with Pakistan one of the crown jewels of American nuclear protection technology, known as “permissive action links,” or PALS, a system used to keep a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorizations.

In the end, despite past federal aid to France and Russia on delicate points of nuclear security, the administration decided that it could not share the system with the Pakistanis because of legal restrictions.

In addition, the Pakistanis were suspicious that any American-made technology in their warheads could include a secret “kill switch,” enabling the Americans to turn off their weapons.

While many nuclear experts in the federal government favored offering the PALS system because they considered Pakistan’s arsenal among the world’s most vulnerable to terrorist groups, some administration officials feared that sharing the technology would teach Pakistan too much about American weaponry. The same concern kept the Clinton administration from sharing the technology with China in the early 1990s.

The New York Times has known details of the secret program for more than three years, based on interviews with a range of American officials and nuclear experts, some of whom were concerned that Pakistan’s arsenal remained vulnerable. The newspaper agreed to delay publication of the article after considering a request from the Bush administration, which argued that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.

Since then, some elements of the program have been discussed in the Pakistani news media and in a presentation late last year by the leader of Pakistan’s nuclear safety effort, Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who acknowledged receiving “international” help as he sought to assure Washington that all of the holes in Pakistan’s nuclear security infrastructure had been sealed.

The Times told the administration last week that it was reopening its examination of the program in light of those disclosures and the current instability in Pakistan. Early this week, the White House withdrew its request that publication be withheld, though it was unwilling to discuss details of the program.

In recent days, American officials have expressed confidence that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is well secured. “I don’t see any indication right now that security of those weapons is in jeopardy, but clearly we are very watchful, as we should be,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday.

Admiral Mullen’s carefully chosen words, a senior administration official said, were based on two separate intelligence assessments issued this month that had been summarized in briefings to Mr. Bush. Both concluded that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was safe under current conditions, and one also looked at laboratories and came to the same conclusion.

Still, the Pakistani government’s reluctance to provide access has limited efforts to assess the situation. In particular, some American experts say they have less ability to look into the nuclear laboratories where highly enriched uranium is produced — including the laboratory named for Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Pakistan’s nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The secret program was designed by the Energy Department and the State Department, and it drew heavily from the effort over the past decade to secure nuclear weapons, stockpiles and materials in Russia and other former Soviet states. Much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if it left secure areas.

But while Pakistan is formally considered a “major non-NATO ally,” the program has been hindered by a deep suspicion among Pakistan’s military that the secret goal of the United States was to gather intelligence about how to locate and, if necessary, disable Pakistan’s arsenal, which is the pride of the country.

“Everything has taken far longer than it should,” a former official involved in the program said in a recent interview, “and you are never sure what you really accomplished.”

So far, the amount the United States has spent on the classified nuclear security program, less than $100 million, amounts to slightly less than one percent of the roughly $10 billion in known American aid to Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of that money has gone for assistance in counterterrorism activities against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The debate over sharing nuclear security technology began just before then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was sent to Islamabad after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan.

“There were a lot of people who feared that once we headed into Afghanistan, the Taliban would be looking for these weapons,” said a senior official who was involved. But a legal analysis found that aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — even if it was just with protective gear — would violate both international and American law.

General Musharraf, in his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” published last year, did not discuss any equipment, training or technology offered then, but wrote: “We were put under immense pressure by the United States regarding our nuclear and missile arsenal. The Americans’ concerns were based on two grounds. First, at this time they were not very sure of my job security, and they dreaded the possibility that an extremist successor government might get its hands on our strategic nuclear arsenal. Second, they doubted our ability to safeguard our assets.”

General Musharraf was more specific in an interview two years ago for a Times documentary, “Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” Asked about the equipment and training provided by Washington, he said, “Frankly, I really don’t know the details.” But he added: “This is an extremely sensitive matter in Pakistan. We don’t allow any foreign intrusion in our facilities. But, at the same time, we guarantee that the custodial arrangements that we brought about and implemented are already the best in the world.”

Now that concern about General Musharraf’s ability to remain in power has been rekindled, so has the debate inside and outside the Bush administration about how much the program accomplished, and what it left unaccomplished. A second phase of the program, which would provide more equipment, helicopters and safety devices, is already being discussed in the administration, but its dimensions have not been determined.

Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the United States’ nuclear arms, argued that recent federal reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more dangerous.

“Lawyers say it’s classified,” Dr. Agnew said in an interview. “That’s nonsense. We should share this technology. Anybody who joins the club should be helped to get this.”

“Whether it’s India or Pakistan or China or Iran,” he added, “the most important thing is that you want to make sure there is no unauthorized use. You want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can’t use them without proper authorization.”

In the past, officials say, the United States has shared ideas — but not technologies — about how to make the safeguards that lie at the heart of American weapons security. The system hinges on what is essentially a switch in the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code that starts a timer for the weapon’s arming and detonation.

Most switches disable themselves if the sequence of numbers entered turns out to be incorrect in a fixed number of tries, much like a bank ATM does. In some cases, the disabled link sets off a small explosion in the warhead to render it useless. Delicate design details involve how to bury the link deep inside a weapon to keep terrorists or enemies from disabling the safeguard.

The most famous case of nuclear idea sharing involves France. Starting in the early 1970s, the United States government began a series of highly secretive discussions with French scientists to help them improve the country’s warheads.

A potential impediment to such sharing was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars cooperation between nations on weapons technology.

To get around such legal prohibitions, Washington came up with a system of “negative guidance,” sometimes called “20 questions,” as detailed in a 1989 article in Foreign Policy. The system let United States scientists listen to French descriptions of warhead approaches and give guidance about whether the French were on the right track.

Nuclear experts say sharing also took place after the cold war when the United States worried about the security of Russian nuclear arms and facilities. In that case, both countries declassified warhead information to expedite the transfer of safety and security information, according to federal nuclear scientists.

But in the case of China, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s and is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Clinton administration decided that sharing PALS would be too risky. Experts inside the administration feared the technology would improve the Chinese warheads, and could give the Chinese insights into how American systems worked.

Officials said Washington debated sharing security techniques with Pakistan on at least two occasions — right after it detonated its first nuclear arms in 1998, and after the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001.

The debates pitted atomic scientists who favored technical sharing against federal officials at such places as the State Department who ruled that the transfers were illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and under United States law.

In the 1998 case, the Clinton administration still hoped it could roll back Pakistan’s nuclear program, forcing it to give up the weapons it had developed. That hope, never seen as very realistic, has been entirely given up by the Bush administration.

The nuclear proliferation conducted by Mr. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who built a huge network to spread Pakistani technology, convinced the Pakistanis that they needed better protections.

“Among the places in the world that we have to make sure we have done the maximum we can do, Pakistan is at the top of the list,” said John E. McLaughlin, who served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, and played a crucial role in the intelligence collection that led to Mr. Khan’s downfall.

“I am confident of two things,” he added. “That the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it.”